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On average five people are killed in rip currents each year. Of approximately 700 rescue missions, surf lifeguards attribute around 85 to these fast offshore flows of water. University of Canterbury Coastal Geomorphologist Dr Seb Pitman is developing a way of mapping these rip tides on Muriwai beach and joined Kathryn Ryan to discuss how his GPS ‘drifters’ could predict rips and make sea swimming safer.

The GPS drifters are designed to mimic a human body treading water on the beach. Pitman is currently in a two to three-week campaign to drop these into surf zones and see at which point currents turn on and off. The GPS pings every second giving

them information about what conditions, in terms of wind, waves, and tides are making the current speeds more hazardous and quicker. They’re also looking at the conditions that create rips which exit far offshore, compared to ones which return back to shore.

“Really crucially it’s the flow pattern: does the rip current take someone far offshore, or are we in a circulation pattern where people are retained within the first 50 -100 meters off the shore – which is obviously a lot better if they’re looking to escape or get back to the beach,” Pitman says.

Pitman says once they’ve got the base information on the currents, they can begin to investigate more thoroughly what the best escape strategy might be.

Rips are driven by waves which, as they start to come onto the beach, interact with sandbanks and shallow water – where they break. In between the sandbanks are deeper channels where the breaking water on the beach re-routes back to the sea. It’s these channels, which are narrow and constrained, which are hazardous to people.

“We can narrow it down quite nicely into a hazard window. Tide is really one thing, the lower the tide level, the more the waves are interacting with the sea bed morphology, and we can pick that out really clearly. There are also controls on rips by wave height or wave periods, but that’s a little bit harder to get a range of conditions.”

In addition to the GPS drifters, Pitman and his team have access to eight or nine years-worth of lifeguard incident reports. Every time they’re involved in a rescue, lifeguards fill out detailed incident reports which log a wide range of data including time, place, and whether they think an accident could be attributed to a rip current.

“We can pull all of these logs where, if the lifeguard feels this was a rip current incident, we can look at what the wind, wave, and tide conditions were doing at the time. So, beyond this two or three-week data collection we’ve got going on now, we’ve got eight or nine years leading up to this. With that data, we’re able to really accurately pick out when that rip current might turn on or off.”

Pitman says one of the big problems with a beach like Muriwai is that the visitors are transient and often don’t know the risks associated with swimming there.

“They perhaps don’t get that information, or don’t have that knowledge. Locals generally aren’t the people that this will be targeted at so much. It’s more for people who are going to a new beach and perhaps don’t understand the hazards. It’s to give them that real-time indication of what the beach might be like on their chosen day and time.”

A long-term plan for the study is to incorporate real-time data about rips, currents, and strong offshore winds into the Safeswim website, which currently focuses on water quality with only generic warnings about rips.

Pitman says if you happen to be caught in a rip this summer, there are three pieces of advice to follow: relax, raise and ride.

“Stay calm and take stock of what’s going on. It’s a misconception that rip currents pull you under the water, it’s only going to move you laterally. Raise your hand and signal a lifeguard or someone on the beach that you’re in trouble. And finally, ride the rip. Rather than fight against it, just stay in it and see what happens.”

This advice is a departure from what many Kiwis were told growing up, which was to stay calm and swim sideways. Pitman says this is because new data has shown rip tides often move parallel to the shore.

“If you were to chose the wrong direction when you swim sideways, you’re still fighting against that current. If you were just to ride it, wait until the rip current weakens, and then swim toward the breaking waves, you’ll be able to get back in far easier.

“What we really don’t want people doing is panicking and fighting against the rip."

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/53581

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Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>> On average five people are killed in rip currents each year. Of approximately 700 rescue missions, surf lifeguards attribute around 85 to these fast offshore flows of water. University of Canterbury Coastal Geomorphologist Dr Seb Pitman is developing a way of mapping these rip tides on Muriwai beach and joined Kathryn Ryan to discuss how his GPS ‘drifters’ could predict rips and make sea swimming safer.

The GPS drifters are designed to mimic a human body treading water on the beach. Pitman is currently in a two to three-week campaign to drop these into surf zones and see at which point currents turn on and off. The GPS pings every second giving

them information about what conditions, in terms of wind, waves, and tides are making the current speeds more hazardous and quicker. They’re also looking at the conditions that create rips which exit far offshore, compared to ones which return back to shore.

“Really crucially it’s the flow pattern: does the rip current take someone far offshore, or are we in a circulation pattern where people are retained within the first 50 -100 meters off the shore – which is obviously a lot better if they’re looking to escape or get back to the beach,” Pitman says.

Pitman says once they’ve got the base information on the currents, they can begin to investigate more thoroughly what the best escape strategy might be.

Rips are driven by waves which, as they start to come onto the beach, interact with sandbanks and shallow water – where they break. In between the sandbanks are deeper channels where the breaking water on the beach re-routes back to the sea. It’s these channels, which are narrow and constrained, which are hazardous to people.

“We can narrow it down quite nicely into a hazard window. Tide is really one thing, the lower the tide level, the more the waves are interacting with the sea bed morphology, and we can pick that out really clearly. There are also controls on rips by wave height or wave periods, but that’s a little bit harder to get a range of conditions.”

In addition to the GPS drifters, Pitman and his team have access to eight or nine years-worth of lifeguard incident reports. Every time they’re involved in a rescue, lifeguards fill out detailed incident reports which log a wide range of data including time, place, and whether they think an accident could be attributed to a rip current.

“We can pull all of these logs where, if the lifeguard feels this was a rip current incident, we can look at what the wind, wave, and tide conditions were doing at the time. So, beyond this two or three-week data collection we’ve got going on now, we’ve got eight or nine years leading up to this. With that data, we’re able to really accurately pick out when that rip current might turn on or off.”

Pitman says one of the big problems with a beach like Muriwai is that the visitors are transient and often don’t know the risks associated with swimming there.

“They perhaps don’t get that information, or don’t have that knowledge. Locals generally aren’t the people that this will be targeted at so much. It’s more for people who are going to a new beach and perhaps don’t understand the hazards. It’s to give them that real-time indication of what the beach might be like on their chosen day and time.”

A long-term plan for the study is to incorporate real-time data about rips, currents, and strong offshore winds into the Safeswim website, which currently focuses on water quality with only generic warnings about rips.

Pitman says if you happen to be caught in a rip this summer, there are three pieces of advice to follow: relax, raise and ride.

“Stay calm and take stock of what’s going on. It’s a misconception that rip currents pull you under the water, it’s only going to move you laterally. Raise your hand and signal a lifeguard or someone on the beach that you’re in trouble. And finally, ride the rip. Rather than fight against it, just stay in it and see what happens.”

This advice is a departure from what many Kiwis were told growing up, which was to stay calm and swim sideways. Pitman says this is because new data has shown rip tides often move parallel to the shore.

“If you were to chose the wrong direction when you swim sideways, you’re still fighting against that current. If you were just to ride it, wait until the rip current weakens, and then swim toward the breaking waves, you’ll be able to get back in far easier.

“What we really don’t want people doing is panicking and fighting against the rip."

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/53581

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Both ended up in the natural wine in New Zealand partly by accident. Wong had been a law student but discovered during a summer clerkship he was terrible at it. He’s now one of only 13 Masters of Wine in the country while Perlman, originally from California, had been in New Zealand for a vintage when she met a man and fell in love.

Wong says we’re currently in the second wave of a natural wine movement. The first, in the early 2010s, petered out after a few years only to re-emerge in 2015.

Indigenous yeast was responsible for all wine making until scientific and technological advances altered the practice.

Wong says most wine is produced cleanly and carefully with inoculated yeasts which are selected from a catalogue, and are grown to enhance certain flavour profiles.

Oak, another factor eschewed by natural wine makers, is also used to extract certain characteristics. Perlman says many reds, and often chardonnays, are often manipulated to a more central flavour profile by the use of oak and oak chips.

“Natural wine is a little more bare bones, this rawness from the land, of the grape and of the tradition,” she says.

The modern natural wine movement started out of France. A small number of people are allergic to sulphur, which is used to clean wine, and one of these people had the misfortune of being married to a wine-maker so he opted to make wine the natural way, without sulphur, that she would be able to drink. Since then the scope of the movement has widened hugely.

“It’ about trying to get back to the roots of wine making and wine growing,” says Wong. “Quite a bit of it is a rebellion against industrial wine making which has been growing since about the 1980s and 90s.”

However, he says, industrial wine making isn’t all bad: “A lot of the clean, beautiful and fruity wine you find on retail and supermarket shelves is due to these advances in wine making technology that allow us to make wine reliably, cleanly, and that tastes like a variety, that tastes like a certain place.”

“But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it became to homogenous, with global critics applying a very standardised palate to these wines.”

Perlman says it also grew out of a frustration with industrial farming practices.

“Regions that have become hotbeds of natural wine like Beaujolais, it was a backlash to bringing in a lot of chemicals that more or less turned the region into an unusable place. A lot of it started with farming there.”

Finally, there was an appeal for consumers: “from the drinker's point of view, its about transparency. You have everything you need to know about this wine very quickly, which is a very romantic idea for us. You can look at this wine and you can understand this person who made it, their passion, their respect for the soil, their respect for the land and the wine.”

Wong says a good analogy is music: “There’s a massive industry around the creation of pop music, there’s a lot of technology that goes into things lot auto-tuning and that sort of stuff. But there’s always going to be a group of people that rail against that and like something raw and unplugged. A lot of natural wines is like going to a live performance. It’s not going to be the same every time, but it’s going to be an experience.”

For consumers ready to dip their toes into natural wine, Perlman says they can start with a variety they already know.

“It’s not going to be much of a departure, you can still shop for the kind of wine you want. It’s not all orange wines… There are ways of easing in that are not shocks to the system, they’re just delicious red wines from the regions we’re familiar with and grapes we’re familiar with.”

Natural wine makers, in New Zealand and abroad, tend to be ones who were already in the organic or biodynamic space, they say.

Wong says that, while natural wine making doesn’t have to result in a specific flavour profile, it can if it’s done badly. “It can lead into that amorphous group of faulty tasting, cloudy, fizzy, mead/cider tasting like wine.”

However, he says that there is an archetype for natural wine.

“Something that doesn’t have sulphur, or very little sulphur, is going to taste brighter, more stark, and probably a lot more forward than wine that has had sulphur. Switching to wine without sulphur is like realising you’ve had sunglasses on the whole time and you take them off and everything’s really bright and in your eyes and it takes a while to adjust, but it’s up to you how you view the world.”

For people interested in giving it a go, both say Wellington has a strong scene with some wine bars that showcase natural wines.

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Arguably NZ's greatest guitarist, Peter Posa died on 3rd February 2019, aged 78. In this interview from 2016, Posa looks back at his 53 years of professional music making with Grant Walker.

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A winter storm in California caused heavy wind and rain that resulted in at least one death and thousands of power outages on Saturday as the state braces for more stormy weather.

Ventura County search-and-rescue team member Jeff Dye was struck and killed by an out-of-control vehicle while responding to another car crash on Saturday, the Ventura County sheriff's department announced.

Three other search-and-rescue team members were involved in the crash, including one who was discharged from the hospital and two more that were in critical condition.

Seven other people were involved in the wreck on the rain-covered roads on the northbound 5 Freeway at Vista Del Lago Road, but their conditions were unknown California's ABC 7 reported.

California Highway Patrol said that rain caused a debris flow that washed boulders and rocks onto northbound Interstate 5 and mudflows that closed all of U.S. 101. Some major roadways reopened Sunday, but the California Department of Transportation was still working to remove mudslides from others.

More than 40,000 customers were without electricity at some points on Saturday and about 16,243 outages persisted in the state through Sunday, according to PowerOutage.US.

The storm also caused flooding in Malibu, on the Los Angeles River in Glendale and along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Evacuations were ordered in Riverside County and Santa Barbara County on Friday and Sunday. Some residents were allowed to return Sunday, but other incoming systems were expected to bring more wind and rain.

Heavy rains impacted San Francisco and Los Angeles Sunday morning and winter storm warnings, watches and advisories were in effect for much of the western United States along with flood and wind alerts.

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/53491

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The Bruce Willis-Samuel L. Jackson thriller Glass is the No. 1 movie at the North American box office for a third weekend, earning an additional $9.5 million in receipts, BoxOfficeMojo.com announced Sunday.

Coming in at No. 2 is The Upside with $8.9 million, followed by Miss Bala at No. 3 with $6.7 million, Aquaman at No. 4 with $4.8 million and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at No. 5 with $4.4 million.

Rounding out the top tier are Green Book at No. 6 with $4.3 million, The Kid Who Would Be King at No. 7 with $4.2 million, A Dog's Way Home at No. 8 with $3.5 million, Escape Room at No. 9 with $2.9 million and They Shall Not Grow Old at No. 10 with $2.4 million.
By Karen Butler

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/53488

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The wreckage of the plane carrying footballer Emiliano Sala was located on Sunday, two weeks after it disappeared from radar over the English Channel, according to the marine scientist leading a privately funded search for the Argentine’s family.

David Mearns, an American-born shipwreck-hunting specialist, made the announcement on Twitter after returning to the island of Guernsey from the search and police informed the families of the two men on board.
Sala and David Ibbotson, the pilot of the small aircraft, are presumed dead by authorities.
“This is about the best result we could have hoped for the families,” Mearns told British broadcaster Sky News.
Sala was being flown on the evening of Jan. 21 from the French city of Nantes to Cardiff after being signed by the Welsh capital’s Premier League team. The main search for the plane was called off after three days, but Sala’s family launched a fund-raising initiative that led to Mearns bringing his expertise to the mission.
Mearns did a search in conjunction with Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which also deployed a vessel for a search of the seabed on Sunday.
“Wreckage of the plane carrying Emiliano Sala and piloted by David Ibbotson was located early this morning by the FPV MORVEN,” Mearns wrote on a Twitter account, referencing the survey vessel.
“As agreed with the AAIB they moved the GEO OCEAN III over the position we provided them to visually identify the plane by ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle).”
Mearns said a statement from the AAIB is expected on Monday.
“Tonight our sole thoughts are with the families and friends of Emiliano and David,” Mearns said.
Cardiff signed the 28-year-old Sala from Nantes for a club-record fee, reported to be 15 million pounds ($19 million), on Jan. 19. The striker left Cardiff after signing his deal and returned to Nantes to collect his belongings and say goodbye to teammates and staff of the French topflight club. He never made it back to Cardiff to start playing in the Premier League.
At its first home game since the plane disappeared, Cardiff paid tribute to Sala before a 2-0 victory over Bournemouth on Saturday.
There was a series of tributes before kickoff, with Sala’s photograph appearing on the front cover of the matchday program and the two captains laying floral tributes on the halfway line.
Sala’s name, in the colors of his native Argentina, was also spelled out behind one of the goals as supporters held cards aloft.
Cardiff’s players, who sported daffodils embroidered on their shirts in Sala’s honor, celebrated a goal by racing to the home dugout and holding up a blue shirt bearing Sala’s photograph.
Program notes, penned by Cardiff owner Vincent Tan and the rest of the Bluebirds’ board, said events shook “Cardiff City to its very core” and they were now playing for Sala and Ibbotson.

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The Rocket Man will be following the yellow brick road back to Dunedin for a farewell concert before he lets the sun go down on his career.

Sir Elton John, a Grammy Award-winning artist who has sold more than 300 million albums, will perform at Dunedin's Forsyth Barr Stadium on February 4 in 2020, his southern-most concert location.

The music icon is giving up life on the road to focus on his family, but before he does he's on one final tour to say goodbye to fans in person.

The Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour will see John deliver his greatest hits to audiences around the world.

The tour kicked off in September 2018 and will last a full three years, comprising more than 300 shows across five continents.

It's already being lauded as one of the star's most "energetic, dazzlingly-original and joyful celebrations", and a "reflective and stunning tribute to a great artist's career".

Not only will fans get to hear the hits live, the tour promises a "rare glimpse" into John's life and the personal meaning behind some of his greatest hits through never-before-seen images and videos which will play throughout the show.

John said it was 48 years since his first concert here. His first was at Western Springs in Auckland in 1971.

"New Zealand, I can't wait to be with you again.

"This tour will see my 12th concert in Auckland, my 2nd concert in Dunedin at the Forsyth Barr Stadium, which I opened many years ago, and my first performance at Hawke's Bay. I am thrilled that this final tour will see me and the band playing somewhere new in your great country."

Dunedin Venues Management Ltd chief executive Terry Davies said it was "a fantastic result for the stadium, city and fans, that they will get the opportunity again to see this super star of his farewell tour.

"We’re so pleased that he’s coming back to Dunedin as his only South Island concert. His music is timeless and adored by so many, we’ll be looking forward to another sell-out crowd.”

John last played in New Zealand in November 2015, when he performed for some 30,000 fans at Wellington's Westpac Stadium.

He also made headlines for becoming a real-life rocket man when it was revealed he arrived in New Zealand by private jet just hours before taking the stage, and headed back to the airport before his backing band had even closed the show.

The promoter at the time, Phil Sprey said: "Sir Elton doesn't hang about. He will arrive mid-afternoon and ... shoots straight back to the airport as soon as he's finished."

When he returns this time, things will likely be just as much of a whirlwind as he comes to us from a 15-show run throughout Australia and leaves us to continue the global tour for another year.

He'll be joined on the road by longstanding band members Nigel Olsson on drums, esteemed musical director Davey Johnstone on guitar, Ray Cooper on percussion, Matt Bissonette on bass, John Mahon on percussion and Kim Bullard on keyboards.

"I'm ecstatic and humbled to continue to play for audiences across the globe," he says.

"I plan to bring to my final tour the passion and creativity that has entertained my fans for decades ... It's the most produced and fantastic show I've ever done. I want to go out with a bang."

John will play Dunedin's Forsyth Barr Stadium on February 4, Hawke's Bay's Mission Estate Winery on February 8 and Auckland's Mt Smart Stadium on February 9 in 2020.

Tickets go on sale at 9am, February 15 via Ticketmaster for Dunedin and Auckland, and missionconcert.co.nz for Hawke's Bay. For more information, see oznz.eltonjohn.com.

https://www.geezgo.com/sps/53472

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UNITED NATIONS: The United States is moving quickly to lift a freeze at the United Nations on humanitarian aid to North Korea, just weeks before a planned second US-North Korean summit, according to diplomats and documents obtained by AFP.

At Washington's request, several applications from aid groups for exemptions to tough UN sanctions imposed on North Korea have been put on hold at a UN sanctions committee, some for as long as a year.

But in a shift, the US has over the past weeks allowed eight requests to get the green light from the committee for such items as solar pumps, plumbing parts, milk cans, tractor tyres and children's trampolines.

The approvals could significantly ramp up humanitarian aid to North Korea, where the UN estimates that 10.5 million people, or 41 per cent of the population, are undernourished, diplomats and aid groups said.

North Korea's food crisis combined with a high incidence of tuberculosis has alarmed relief groups at a time when Washington is hoping for action from Pyongyang on scrapping its weapons programs.

President Donald Trump is planning a second summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, possibly in Vietnam, to agree on concrete steps for denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

UN sanctions resolutions specify that humanitarian aid should not be disrupted by the tough economic measures slapped on North Korea for its nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches.

'MAXIMUM PRESSURE'

Aid groups however say they have been hit hard by restrictions that make imports of material for their relief projects almost impossible and create major headaches with banking.

The eight requests approved in January concern projects run by groups from Switzerland, the United States, Britain, France, Canada and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

On Wednesday, the sanctions committee gave the green light to the IFRC's request for hospital kits, medical supplies and water filters among other items needed for life-saving work.

The IFRC also won approval for 500 bicycles to be shipped from China for its volunteers who visit households in remote North Korean villages.

"The people of DPRK are enduring another harsh winter," said Richard Blewitt, who represents the IFRC at the United Nations.

Scaling up deliveries of medicine, health care items and goods to ensure access for clean water "are badly needed to support very vulnerable people," he said.

The United States, which insists on maintaining "maximum pressure" on North Korea until it fully gives up its weapons programmes, has taken time to carefully review every aid request.

Washington has raised concerns that the goods could be diverted by Pyongyang's leaders, possibly for use in the country's weapons programmes.

But in December, the US agreed to ease its grip on humanitarian aid.

TRACTORS, WHEELCHAIRS, TRAMPOLINES

US envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun announced in Seoul that conditions were right for Washington to review its approach and expedite requests from aid organisations.

Two requests from US groups - the Eugene Bell Foundation and the Christian Friends of Korea - received the green light for equipment and medicines needed for their anti-TB programs.

A Canadian NGO, First Steps Health Society, won approval for deliveries of 300 stainless-steel milk cans used for its nutrition project. The Swiss Humanitarian Aid agency will be able to bring in a solar pump system for drinking water.

Handicap International will send 93 paediatric wheelchairs, 18 trampolines and a range of other items to help detect and prevent disabilities in North Korean children.

The sanctions committee is considering seven more requests for equipment including from Ireland's biggest aid organisation, Concern Worldwide, which runs nutrition and clean water projects.

An Italian firm, Agrotec Spa, is awaiting approval to send tractors and trailers as part of an EU food aid project while Germany's Agro Action has asked for permission to ship equipment and seed storages to North Korea.

Finland's FIDA development agency has asked to bring a tractor, iron plates and steel bars for its seed potato project.

Diplomats said they expected the sanctions committee to reach a decision on these requests in the coming weeks.

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Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave - the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The BBC's Ed Butler asks why.

At a halfway house in Hiroshima - for criminals who are being released from jail back into the community - 69-year-old Toshio Takata tells me he broke the law because he was poor. He wanted somewhere to live free of charge, even if it was behind bars.

"I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me - perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail," he says.

"So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: 'Look, I took this.'"

The plan worked. This was Toshio's first offence, committed when he was 62, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence.

Small, slender, and with a tendency to giggle, Toshio looks nothing like a habitual criminal, much less someone who'd threaten women with knives. But after he was released from his first sentence, that's exactly what he did.

"I went to a park and just threatened them. I wasn't intending to do any harm. I just showed the knife to them hoping one of them would call the police. One did."
Image caption Toshio displays his own drawings in his cell

Altogether, Toshio has spent half of the last eight years in jail.

I ask him if he likes being in prison, and he points out an additional financial upside - his pension continues to be paid even while he's inside.

"It's not that I like it but I can stay there for free," he says. "And when I get out I have saved some money. So it is not that painful."

Toshio represents a striking trend in Japanese crime. In a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crimes is carried about by over-65s. In 1997 this age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions but 20 years later the figure had grown to more than one in five - a rate that far outstrips the growth of the over-65s as a proportion of the population (though they now make up more than a quarter of the total).

And like Toshio, many of these elderly lawbreakers are repeat offenders. Of the 2,500 over-65s convicted in 2016, more than a third had more than five previous convictions.

Another example is Keiko (not her real name). Seventy years old, small, and neatly presented, she also tells me that it was poverty that was her undoing.

"I couldn't get along with my husband. I had nowhere to live and no place to stay. So it became my only choice: to steal," she says. "Even women in their 80s who can't properly walk are committing crime. It's because they can't find food, money."

We spoke some months ago in an ex-offender's hostel. I've been told she's since been re-arrested, and is now serving another jail-term for shoplifting.
Find out more

Japan's Elderly Crime Wave can be heard on Assignment on the BBC World Service from Thursday 31 January - click here for transmission times

Or listen now online

Theft, principally shoplifting, is overwhelmingly the biggest crime committed by elderly offenders. They mostly steal food worth less than 3,000 yen (£20) from a shop they visit regularly.

Michael Newman, an Australian-born demographer with the Tokyo-based research house, Custom Products Research Group points out that the "measly" basic state pension in Japan is very hard to live on.

In a paper published in 2016 he calculates that the costs of rent, food and healthcare alone will leave recipients in debt if they have no other income - and that's before they've paid for heating or clothes. In the past it was traditional for children to look after their parents, but in the provinces a lack of economic opportunities has led many younger people to move away, leaving their parents to fend for themselves.

"The pensioners don't want to be a burden to their children, and feel that if they can't survive on the state pension then pretty much the only way not to be a burden is to shuffle themselves away into prison," he says.

The repeat offending is a way "to get back into prison" where there are three square meals a day and no bills, he says.

"It's almost as though you're rolled out, so you roll yourself back in."

Newman points out that suicide is also becoming more common among the elderly - another way for them to fulfil what he they may regard as "their duty to bow out".

The director of "With Hiroshima", the rehabilitation centre where I met Toshio Takata, also thinks changes in Japanese families have contributed to the elderly crime wave, but he emphasises the psychological consequences not the financial ones.

"Ultimately the relationship among people has changed. People have become more isolated. They don't find a place to be in this society. They cannot put up with their loneliness," says Kanichi Yamada, an 85-year-old who as a child was pulled out of the rubble of his home when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

"Among the elderly who commit crimes a number have this turning point in their middle life. There is some trigger. They lose a wife or children and they just can't cope with that... Usually people don't commit crime if they have people to look after them and provide them with support."

Toshio's story about being driven to crime as a result of poverty is just an "excuse", Kanichi Yamada suggests. The core of the problem is his loneliness. And one factor that may have prompted him to reoffend, he speculates, was the promise of company in jail.

It's true that Toshio is alone in the world. His parents are dead, and he has lost contact with two older brothers, who don't answer his calls. He has also lost contact with his two ex-wives, both of whom he divorced, and his three children.
Image caption Toshio is a keen painter

I ask him if he thinks things would have turned out differently if he'd had a wife and family. He says they would.

"If they had been around to support me I wouldn't have done this," he says.

Michael Newman has watched as the Japanese government has expanded prison capacity, and recruited additional female prison guards (the number of elderly women criminals is rising particularly fast, though from a low base). He's also noted the steeply rising bill for medical treatment of people in prison.

There have been other changes too, as I see for myself at a prison in Fuchu, outside Tokyo, where nearly a third of the inmates are now over 60.

There's a lot of marching inside Japanese prisons - marching and shouting. But here the military drill seems to be getting harder to enforce. I see a couple of grey-haired inmates at the back of one platoon struggling to keep up. One is on crutches.

"We have had to improve the facilities here," Masatsugu Yazawa, the prison's head of education tells me. "We've put in handrails, special toilets. There are classes for older offenders."

He takes me to watch one of them. It begins with a karaoke rendition of a popular song, The Reason I was Born, all about the meaning of life. The inmates are encouraged to sing along. Some look quite moved.

"We sing to show them that the real life is outside prison, and that happiness is there," Yazawa says. "But still they think the life in prison is better and many come back."

Michael Newman argues that it would be far better - and much cheaper - to look after the elderly without the expense of court proceedings and incarceration.

"We actually costed a model to build an industrial complex retirement village where people would forfeit half their pension but get free food, free board and healthcare and so on, and get to play karaoke or gate-ball with the other residents and have a relative amount of freedom. It would cost way less than what the government's spending at the moment," he says.

But he also suggests that the tendency for Japanese courts to hand down custodial sentences for petty theft "is slightly bizarre, in terms of the punishment actually fitting the crime".

"The theft of a 200-yen (£1.40) sandwich could lead to an 8.4m-yen (£580,000) tax bill to provide for a two-year sentence," he writes in his 2016 report.

That may be a hypothetical example, but I met one elderly jailbird whose experience was almost identical. He'd been given a two-year jail term for only his second offence: stealing a bottle of peppers worth £2.50.

And I heard from Morio Mochizuki, who provides security for some 3,000 retail outlets in Japan, that if anything the courts are getting tougher on shoplifters.

"Even if they only stole one piece of bread," says Masayuki Sho of Japan's Prison Service, "it was decided at trial that it is appropriate for them to go to prison, therefore we need to teach them the way: how to live in society without committing crime."

I don't know whether the prison service has taught Toshio Takata this lesson, but when I ask him if he is already planning his next crime, he denies it.

"No, actually this is it," he says.

"I don't want to do this again, and I will soon be 70 and I will be old and frail the next time. I won't do that again."

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CHICAGO: Brutally cold temperatures gripped the US Midwest on Thursday (Jan 31), freezing water mains, causing power outages, canceling flights and straining natural gas supplies.

Tens of millions of Americans shivered for a second day as the mercury dipped to record lows in several states.

More than a dozen deaths have been attributed to the sub-zero weather and a weekend snowstorm that blanketed the same region. Many of the cold-related fatalities were in Michigan, where the governor said the death toll was still being confirmed.

Schools and businesses remained closed in several midwestern states, people were encouraged to stay home, and travelers were stranded by grounded flights and halted trains.

In Michigan and Minnesota, natural gas supplies were under threat. Authorities asked residents to reduce heat consumption wherever possible and decreased heating in government buildings.

Water mains froze in Detroit, Chicago and parts of Canada, and power outages were reported in Iowa and Wisconsin.

Nearly 1,700 flights had been canceled in Chicago by Thursday afternoon. Airport crews worked in 15-minute increments on the tarmac to avoid frostbite.

Rail service Amtrak planned to begin partially restoring service after canceling all lines Wednesday in and out of Chicago.

The deadly, sub-zero temperatures were expected to lift Friday, but the misery would not end quickly in the roughly dozen states most affected.

"We are not done yet. We've got another 24 hours where the weather will be at dangerous levels," Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer told a news conference.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said temperatures would slowly moderate, but the agency forecast wind chills Thursday would remain between -29 to -46 degrees Celsius over parts of the Upper Midwest.

The cold has frozen sections of Niagara Falls and sent blocks of ice floating down the river winding through downtown Chicago.
Polar vortex in Massachusetts
Ice covers the shore of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts due to the polar vortex on Jan 31, 2019. (Photo: AFP/Joseph Prezioso)

MORE SNOW TO COME

The Arctic air mass that descended from its usual northern rotation on Wednesday caused the second coldest day ever recorded in the Windy City, where residents reported hearing "frost quakes."

Local television station WGN said booms heard by residents were likely from the frozen, water-saturated ground cracking under their feet.

The NWS said a low temperature of -29 degrees Celsius was recorded in Chicago on Thursday morning. The record low of -33 degrees Celsius was on Jan 20, 1985.

It said a historic low temperature for Illinois of -39 degrees Celsius had been reported in the town of Mt Carroll and was being reviewed before being declared a state record.

Record low temperatures were also reported in some towns in Iowa and Wisconsin.
Polar Vortex in US
Ice covers the shore of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts on Jan 31, 2019. (Photo: AFP/ Joseph PREZIOSO)

Officials in multiple states warned that the extreme weather should be taken seriously, with the risk of hypothermia and frostbite setting in within minutes of exposure.

There were also concerns over another round of snow late Thursday, after a weekend snowstorm inundated the areas now frozen by Arctic cold.

"We've gone from snow to freezing temperatures, wind chill," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said at a news conference. "With more snow on the way, we're not out of the woods yet."

Hundreds of warming centers were opened for vulnerable residents such as seniors, and shelter capacities increased for the homeless.

Among the dead was an 18-year-old University of Iowa student.

He was found unresponsive behind a campus building Wednesday morning, when wind chill temperatures in Iowa City were -46 degrees Celsius, according to local TV station KCCI.
Polar vortex in Chicago
Snow and ice covers the rooftops of homes in Chicago on Jan 31, 2019. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Scott Olson)

CALLS FOR CONSERVATION

While officials warned residents to remain on guard as long as the sub-zero weather persisted, authorities in Michigan and Minnesota were also asking them to turn down their thermostats to conserve natural gas.

Supplies were strained due to high demand from home heaters and from a fire at a natural gas compressor station in Michigan, officials said.

"This is not over until noon tomorrow. And we are asking people to continue to keep the thermostat down," Michigan Governor Whitmer said.

General Motors and Fiat Chrysler suspended or curtailed operations at more than a dozen facilities in Michigan to conserve natural gas, the companies said.

City crews braved sub-zero weather to repair a number of frozen water main breaks that plagued Motor City neighbourhoods.

Chicago reported 22 broken water mains, 16 of which had already been repaired.

America's northern neighbour Canada was also contending with extreme cold, with frozen water pipes, snarled travel on a major waterway, and temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius on Wednesday.

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WASHINGTON: If you see a video of a politician speaking words he never would utter, or a Hollywood star improbably appearing in a cheap adult movie, don’t adjust your television set — you may just be witnessing the future of “fake news.”

“Deepfake” videos that manipulate reality are becoming more sophisticated due to advances in artificial intelligence, creating the potential for new kinds of misinformation with devastating consequences.
As the technology advances, worries are growing about how deepfakes can be used for nefarious purposes by hackers or state actors.
“We’re not quite to the stage where we are seeing deepfakes weaponized, but that moment is coming,” Robert Chesney, a University of Texas law professor who has researched the topic, told AFP.
Chesney argues that deepfakes could add to the current turmoil over disinformation and influence operations.
“A well-timed and thoughtfully scripted deepfake or series of deepfakes could tip an election, spark violence in a city primed for civil unrest, bolster insurgent narratives about an enemy’s supposed atrocities, or exacerbate political divisions in a society,” Chesney and University of Maryland professor Danielle Citron said in a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Paul Scharre, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank specializing in AI and security issues, said it was almost inevitable that deepfakes would be used in upcoming elections.
A fake video could be deployed to smear a candidate, Scharre said, or to enable people to deny actual events captured on authentic video.
With believable fake videos in circulation, he added, “people can choose to believe whatever version or narrative that they want, and that’s a real concern.”

Video manipulation has been around for decades and can be innocuous or even entertaining — as in the digitally-aided appearance of Peter Cushing in 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” 22 years after his death.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers last year revealed techniques that make it easier to produce deepfakes via machine learning to infer missing data.
In the movie industry, “the hope is we can have old movie stars like Charlie Chaplin come back,” said Aayush Bansal.
The popularization of apps which make realistic fake videos threatens to undermine the notion of truth in news media, criminal trials and many other areas, researchers point out.
“If we can put any words in anyone’s mouth, that is quite scary,” says Siwei Lyu, a professor of computer science at the State University of New York at Albany, who is researching deepfake detection.
“It blurs the line between what is true and what is false. If we cannot really trust information to be authentic it’s no better than to have no information at all.”
Representative Adam Schiff and two other lawmakers recently sent a letter to National Intelligence Director Dan Coats asking for information about what the government is doing to combat deepfakes.
“Forged videos, images or audio could be used to target individuals for blackmail or for other nefarious purposes,” the lawmakers wrote.
“Of greater concern for national security, they could also be used by foreign or domestic actors to spread misinformation.”

Researchers have been working on better detection methods for some time, with support from private firms such as Google and government entities like the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA), which began a media forensics initiative in 2015.
Lyu’s research has focused on detecting fakes, in part by analyzing the rate of blinking of an individual’s eyes.
But he acknowledges that even detecting fakes may not be enough, if a video goes viral and leads to chaos.
“It’s more important to disrupt the process than to analyze the videos,” Lyu said.
While deepfakes have been evolving for several years, the topic came into focus with the creation last April of video appearing to show former president Barack Obama using a curse word to describe his successor Donald Trump — a coordinated stunt from filmmaker Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed.
Also in 2018, a proliferation of “face swap” porn videos that used images of Emma Watson, Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities prompted bans on deepfakes by Reddit, Twitter and Pornhub, though it remained unclear if they could enforce the policies.
Scharre said there is “an arms race between those who are creating these videos and security researchers who are trying to build effective tools of detection.”
But he said an important way to deal with deepfakes is to increase public awareness, making people more skeptical of what used to be considered incontrovertible proof.
“After a video has gone viral it may be too late for the social harm it has caused,” he said.


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Harvard University, jeans giant Levi Strauss and U.S. think-tank New America are investigating blockchain as a means to improve labor welfare.

New America announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of State has granted $800,000 for a pilot project that will develop a blockchain-based system to track the working conditions of factory workers.

The first phase of the project will be launched in the second quarter of this year to “anonymously and securely” track three factories in Mexico producing goods for Levi Strauss and employing a combined 5,000 workers. The scheme will monitor the workforce across the factories, tracking conditions and individuals’ health and well-being.

The blockchain system will be developed by ethereum development studio ConsenSys based on a well-being index from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s – the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE).

SHINE director Dr. Eileen McNeely said that most blockchain uses cases for the supply chain industry revolve around tracking materials, so building a solution for tracking human conditions is an “exciting innovation with broad potential for positive impact on worker well-being worldwide.”

Basing the pilot on ethereum will create a “transparent environment for workers to securely and anonymously share critical information,” according to ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin.

“Our goal is to develop, test, and scale a system that could empower employees, suppliers, and consumers to make informed decisions about factories, products, and brands,” he said.

The participants are already planning a second phase of the pilot – slated for launch in 2020.

Last week, in a similar development, IBM announced two separate supply chain projects, built on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform, aimed to spot illegal activity like child labor in the metals industry. One is designed to track cobalt traveling from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Ford plant, while the other seeks to monitor metal shipments from a mine in Mexico.

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Reuters is reporting that private military contractors working on behalf of Russia are in Venezuela to help embattled socialist President Nicolas Maduro strengthen security amid opposition protests and a competing claim to leadership.

The report on January 25 cites two people close to the contractors. A third source close to the contractors confirmed that they had arrived in Venezuela but did not specify their role, Reuters added.

One source said the contractors flew to Venezuela from third countries where they had been conducting operations.

The news agency reported that the Russian Defense Ministry and Venezuela's Information Ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the contractors.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “we have no such information."

Yevgeny Shabayev, head of the All-Russia Officers Assembly with ties to Russian military contractors, said he had heard the number of Russian contractors in Venezuela could be around 400, although other sources spoke of smaller numbers.

Reuters quoted sources as saying the contractors are associated with the so-called Wagner group of mostly former Russian service personnel who have been involved in clandestine operations in foreign countries.

Private Russian military contractors have been reported in other countries, including Syria, Ukraine, and in African nations.

On January 23, Russia Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that military contractors were operating in Sudan after British press reports stated that they were helping to crack down on protesters in that country, which is an ally of Moscow.

“According to our information, representatives of Russian private security companies, who have nothing to do with Russian state bodies, are operating in Sudan," she said.

Zakharova denied the British press reports and said the task of the private security firms “is limited to training staff for the military and law-enforcement agencies of the Republic of Sudan."

The reports of possible Russia-linked military contractors in Venezuela come as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he will urge UN Security Council members to recognize Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president during a January 26 emergency meeting.

The meeting of the 15-member council was requested by the United States after the U.S. and a number of countries in the region said they recognized Guaido as head of state and urged Maduro to step down.

Guaido, the president of the opposition-led National Assembly, on January 23 declared himself acting president in Caracas, as tens of thousands of people marched across the country against Maduro. Dozens of protesters have been killed in the unrest.

Maduro, who took office in 2013 after the death of Hugo Chavez, has been criticized for alleged human rights abuses and for his handling of Venezuela's economy.

Maduro was sworn in for a second term two weeks ago but has been met by international condemnation.

An estimated 3 million people have fled the country amid shortages of items like medicine and food.

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Foundation is the lowest part of the building or the civil structure that is in direct contact with the soil which transfers loads from the structure to the soil safely. Generally, the foundation can be classified into two, namely shallow foundation and deep foundation.

A shallow foundation transfers the load to a stratum present in a shallow depth. The deep foundation transfers the load to a deeper depth below the ground surface.

A tall building like a skyscraper or a building constructed on very weak soil requires deep foundation. If the constructed building has the plan to extend vertically in future, then a deep foundation must be suggested.

To construct a foundation, trenches are dig deeper into the soil till a hard stratum is reached. To get stronger base foundation concrete is poured into this trench. These trenches are incorporated with reinforcement cage to increase the strength of the foundation.

The projected steel rods that are projected outwards act as the bones and must be connected with the substructure above. Once the foundation has been packed correctly the construction of the building can be started.

The construction of the foundation can be done with concrete, steel, stones, bricks etc. The material and the type of foundation selected for the desired structure depends on the design loads and the type of underlying soil.

The design of the foundation must incorporate different effects of construction on the environment. For example, the digging and piling works done for deep foundation may result in adverse disturbance to the nearby soil and structural foundation. These can sometimes cause the settlement issues of the nearby structure.

Such effects have to be studied and taken care before undergoing such operations. Disposal of the waste material from the operations must be disposed properly. The construction of foundation has to be done to resist the external attack of harmful substances.

The foundation for each structure is designed such that:

The underlying soil below the foundation structure does not undergo shear failure
The settlement caused during the first service load or have to be within the limit
Allowable bearing pressure can be defined as the pressure the soil can withstand without failure.

What is the Purpose of Foundation?

Foundations are provided for all load carrying structure for following purposes:

Foundation are the main reason behind the stability of any structure. The stronger is the foundation, more stable is the structure.
The proper design and construction of foundations provide a proper surface for the development of the substructure in a proper level and over a firm bed.
Specially designed foundation helps in avoiding the lateral movements of the supporting material.
A proper foundation distributes load on to the surface of the bed uniformly. This uniform transfer helps in avoiding unequal settlement of the building. Differential settlement is an undesirable building effect.
The foundation serves the purpose of completely distributing the load from the structure over a large base area and then to the soil underneath. This load transferred to the soil should be within the allowable bearing capacity of the soil.

Functions of Foundation in Construction

Based on the purposes of foundation in construction, the main functions of the foundation can be enlisted as below:

Provide overall lateral stability for the structure
Foundation serve the function of providing a level surface for the construction of substructure
Load Distribution is carried out evenly
The load intensity is reduced to be within the safe bearing capacity of the soil
The soil movement effect is resisted and prevented
Scouring and the undermining issues are solved by the construction of foundation

Requirements of a Good Foundation

The design and the construction of a well-performing foundation must possess some basic requirements that must not be ignored. They are:

The design and the construction of the foundation is done such that it can sustain as well as transmit the dead and the imposed loads to the soil. This transfer has to be carried out without resulting in any form of settlement that can result in any form of stability issues for the structure.
Differential settlements can be avoided by having a rigid base for the foundation. These issues are more pronounced in areas where the superimposed loads are not uniform in nature.
Based on the soil and area it is recommended to have a deeper foundation so that it can guard any form of damage or distress. These are mainly caused due to the problem of shrinkage and swelling because of temperature changes.
The location of the foundation chosen must be an area that is not affected or influenced by future works or factors.

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