How Climate Change Likely Contributed To Libya’s Devastating Flooding

The Mediterranean storm that dumped torrential rain on the Libyan coast, setting off flooding that’s believed to have killed thousands of people, is the latest extreme weather event to carry some of the hallmarks of climate change, scientists say.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Daniel — dubbed a “medicane” for its hurricane-like characteristics – drew enormous energy from extremely warm sea water. And a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor that can fall as rain, experts said.

It’s difficult to attribute a single weather event to climate change, “but we know there are factors that could be at play” with storms like Daniel that make it more likely, said Kristen Corbosiero, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany.

Medicanes form once or twice a year in the Mediterranean, and are most common from September to January. They’re not generally true hurricanes, but can reach hurricane strength on rare occasions, said Simon Mason, chief climate scientist at the Columbia Climate School’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society.

Daniel formed as a low-pressure weather system more than a week ago and became blocked by a high-pressure system, dumping extreme amounts of rain on Greece and surrounding areas before inundating Libya.

Warming waters also are causing cyclones to move more slowly, which allows them to dump much more rain, said Raghu Murtugudde, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and emeritus professor at University of Maryland.

What’s more, he said, human activity and climate change together “are producing compound effects of storms and land use.” Flooding in Greece was worsened by wildfires, loss of vegetation, and loose soils and the catastrophic flooding in Libya was made worse by poorly maintained infrastructure.

Dams that collapsed outside Libya’s eastern city of Derna unleashed flash floods that may have killed thousands. Hundreds of bodies were found Tuesday and 10,000 people reported still missing after floodwaters smashed through dams and washed away entire neighborhoods of the city.

But the warm water that allowed Daniel to intensify and and fed the exceptional rainfall are a phenomenon being observed around the globe, said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center.

“Nowhere is immune from devastating storms like Daniel, as demonstrated by recent flooding in Massachusetts, Greece, Hong Kong, Duluth, and elsewhere,” said Francis.

Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist and meteorologist at Leipzig University in Germany, cautioned that scientists haven’t had time yet to study Daniel, but noted that the Mediterranean has been 2 to 3 degrees Celsius warmer this year than in the past. And while weather patterns that formed Daniel would have occurred even without climate change, the consequences probably wouldn’t have been as severe.

In a cooler world, Daniel probably “wouldn’t have developed as quickly and rapidly as it did,” Haustein said. “And it wouldn’t have hit Libya with such ferocious strength.”

source https://time.com/6313665/libya-storm-flooding-climate-change/

New E.U. Law Requires 70% of Aviation Fuel To Be Sustainable By 2050

(BRUSSELS) — EU lawmakers approved Wednesday new rules requiring airlines to use more sustainable fuels across the bloc in a bid to help decarbonize the sector.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Under the new standards adopted during a European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg, France, 2% of jet fuel must be sustainable as of 2025, with this share increasing every five years to reach 70% by 2050.

The Parliament said that sustainable fuels will include “synthetic fuels, certain biofuels produced from agricultural or forestry residues, algae, bio-waste, used cooking oil or certain animal fats.”

Recycled jet fuels produced from waste gases and waste plastic, as well as renewable hydrogen, will be considered green, while food crop-based fuels and fuels derived from palm and soy materials won’t.

The aviation sector accounts for 13.9% of transportation emissions in the EU, making it the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the sector after road transport, the European Commission said. If global aviation were a country, it would rank in the top 10 emitters.

Read more: Rival Airlines Team Up To Boost Sustainable Aviation Fuel

The legislation is part of the EU ’s “Fit for 55” package, which sets a goal of cutting emissions of the gases that cause global warming by at least 55% by 2030. The EU has also set a goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. It says it needs to cut transport emissions by 90% compared to 1990 levels to achieve this.

The new rules were adopted by 518 votes in favor, 97 votes against and eight abstentions. Once endorsed by EU member countries, they will enter into force as of January 2024.

The European Commission said earlier this year that the move is expected to reduce aircraft carbon emissions by two-thirds by 2050 compared to “a ‘no action’ scenario.”

However, stocks of sustainable aviation fuel remain low. The EU Aviation Safety Agency says supply accounts for less than 0.05% of total EU aviation fuel use.

Aviation also faces competition from other sectors. On Sept. 5, the head of the German airline Lufthansa warned automakers to keep their hands off synthetic aviation fuels. Carsten Spohr said sustainable fuels represented the only workable way to decarbonize aviation, and there wouldn’t be enough for the car industry as well.

source https://time.com/6313656/eu-sustainable-aviation-fuel-2050-target/

Facing Pressure from Hard Right, McCarthy Directs House to Open Biden Impeachment Inquiry

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is directing a House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over his family’s business dealings, escalating a Republican investigation that started in January amid mounting pressure from the party’s right flank.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The inquiry will center on whether Biden played a role in, or benefited from, his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business affairs, McCarthy announced in brief remarks at the Capitol on Tuesday. He said that the House investigation has found a “culture of corruption” around the Biden family and accused the President of lying about his knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption and warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said. “That’s why today I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.”

The House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation has yet to find evidence that the President profited from his son’s business dealings, though some House Republicans have argued that there is enough information to warrant more investigation. 

McCarthy skipped a vote from the full House on whether to move forward with an impeachment inquiry—a significant change in his strategy after previously saying he would not launch an inquiry without a vote. In 2019, McCarthy criticized then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for opening the first impeachment inquiry into former President Donald Trump without a full House vote.

The move to launch a formal impeachment inquiry gives congressional investigators more power to dig into Biden’s family finances. Investigators could, for example, issue subpoenas for the bank records of Biden and his family members.

The House inquiry comes at a sensitive time for McCarthy, who has been trying to appease far-right lawmakers threatening to oust him while also struggling to pass legislation needed to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month.

For weeks, McCarthy had been signaling that he wanted to pursue an impeachment inquiry of Biden, but he lacked the numbers to do so amid GOP divisions. Some House Republicans indicated that the congressional investigations have failed to prove that Biden committed a high crime or misdemeanor, and that they would not support an inquiry unless investigators could tie Hunter Biden’s business dealings to his father.

White House Spokesman Ian Sams responded to the impeachment inquiry by calling it “extreme politics at its worst.”

“House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing,” Sams wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “His own GOP members have said so. He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn’t have support.”

The inquiry will be led by Republican Reps. James Comer of the Oversight Committee, Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee, and Jason Smith of Ways and Means. “We are committed to getting the answers for the American public—nothing more, nothing less,” McCarthy said. “We will go wherever the evidence takes us.”

source https://time.com/6313320/mccarthy-launches-house-impeachment-inquiry-biden/

How to Help Flood Victims in Libya

At least 2,300 people have died and more than 10,000 are believed missing after Tropical Storm Daniel broke through two dams that protected Libya’s eastern coastal city of Derna from flooding. Experts estimate that the floods unleashed approximately 30 million cubic meters of water onto the city—the hardest hit part of Libya—washing away entire neighborhoods. Other cities in the northeast of the country have also been affected.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“The death toll is huge,” Tamer Ramadan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) delegation in Libya, said at a press conference in Geneva. 

Derna is home to approximately 90,000 people and sits on the Mediterranean coast. 

The natural disaster comes just days after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Morocco, another country in North Africa, killing at least 3,000 people and destroying entire villages.

Read More: How to Help Earthquake Victims in Morocco

But aid workers and Libya observers fear that political fractures in the country will hamper relief efforts. The epicenter of the flood disaster in Libya falls in areas under the control of commander Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army.

Libya was the site of protracted fighting and a six-year civil war from 2014 to 2020 and the country is split by rival administrations, with Haftar dominating the east, and the U.N.-backed Government of National Unity, led by Abdulhamid Dbeibeh, controlling the west.

Haftar laid siege to Derna in 2017, capturing the city in 2019. “Derna is still devastated by the war, which destroyed many areas of the city,” Abdulkader Assad, a political editor at the Libya Observer, told the Times of London. “I am really concerned about aid getting through since nothing like this has happened before and the eastern government does not have the necessary relief teams. It will all depend on the international response.”

Despite these difficulties, humanitarian workers have pointed to ways to help victims of the flooding in Libya. Below, some of the charities working in Libya right now.

Islamic Relief Worldwide

Islamic Relief Worldwide has launched an appeal seeking financial support to help Libyans impacted by the floods. They are working with local partners on the ground to provide food, blankets, mattresses, and other aid to families. They have already committed an initial  £100,000 ($125,000) to providing emergency assistance. You can find out more about how to donate here. 

Libya in the UK

Libya in the UK is a charity run by Libyan young people living in Britain. The organization is collaborating directly with the Libyan Red Crescent, which is operating in the country. You can donate via their gofundme page here or learn more about the organization here. 

CARE International

CARE is an international organization that provides humanitarian relief during crises. They have been operating in Libya since 2021. You can learn more about their donation options here. 

International Medical Corps

The international medical corps has an in-country team in Libya that is providing shelter, mobile health systems, water, sanitation, and hygiene resources to those affected by the flooding. They are working in partnership with Libya’s Ministry of Health and local organizations to conduct assessments to determine if further assistance is needed from the International Medical Corps’ Emergency Response Unit. You can donate here.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

The international Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies has been operating in Tripoli, Misrata, and Benghazi in the aftermath of the Libyan civil war, assisting with rehabilitation and economic support. 

“#Libya is facing large-scale devastating disaster,efforts are huge but yet challenges and needs are way more beyond what current efforts can do. Support from all international actors to @LibyaRC and Libyan people is strongly needed now @ifrc stands ready to coordinate,” the IFRC’s Ramadan wrote in a post on X.

You can donate to the IFRC’s work in Libya here. 

source https://time.com/6313307/help-flood-victims-libya/

Shakira’s 15 Best Music Videos, Ranked

Anyone who thinks “Hips Don’t Lie” is Shakira’s best song probably hasn’t heard the artist’s expansive and eclectic back catalog. She is a musical pioneer, an artist who helped bridge the gap between two disparate markets—Latin America and the United States—at a time when Latin music was seen as niche. After finding success with four Spanish-language albums, she charged into the American market with her single “Whenever, Wherever” in 2001, proving her crossover appeal immediately as her first English-language album, Laundry Service, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and was certified triple platinum. The album gave American audiences a taste of what was to come, showcasing her signature, distinct vocals as the song catapulted her to mainstream fame.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The songs to come, from “Hips Don’t Lie” to “She Wolf,” were accompanied by equally memorable music videos. It’s a body of work for which the 46-year-old singer will be recognized at MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sept. 12 with the Video Vanguard Award.

Shakira has sustained a career for over two decades thanks to her chameleonic nature. She’s managed to mold her sound to whatever is current without forcing it, platforming up-and-coming artists along the way. Across those decades, she’s worked with everyone from Latin superstars like Nicky Jam and Karol G to pop stars like Rihanna and Beyoncé. Few artists today can pull off killer vocals and a well-choreographed dance, but Shakira can do both and then some, showing off her talents as an accomplished belly dancer and offering glimpses of her Lebanese heritage. At Tuesday night’s VMAs, Shakira will perform a medley of her hits. The crowd will be in for a treat if the performance is anything like what she’s done in her videos.

To honor the legacy of a trailblazing vanguard, here are Shakira’s 15 best music videos—including videos where she serves as the featured artist—ranked.

15. “Que Me Quedes Tú” (2001)

Even as Shakira’s star began to rise, she made it known to her fans that she was not ready to conform to the standards set by the entertainment industry. This was evidenced by the music video for the single “Que Me Quedes Tú,” in which she sheds the pristine look she dons at the start of the video. She sings about finding a love so pure that it makes her not care about the noise surrounding her fame. This is rendered literally, in a moment in which she’s being chased by the workers on the set of the music video as she runs to find the man she loves. The video spoke to her commitment to never becoming a version of herself that’s unrecognizable to her fans.

14. “Inevitable” (1998)

“Inevitable” illustrates just how much of a superstar Shakira already was in Latin America before crossing over. The video features an arena full of fans, screaming for her, and she just commands the stage like a rock star—something she had already been doing for several years. Her presence in the video shows how comfortable she is in her musical element, early evidence that her rise to international stardom was, to borrow from the song, inevitable.

13. “Hips Don’t Lie” feat. Wyclef Jean (2005)

“Hips Don’t Lie” became Shakira’s first No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, helping solidify her as a mainstay in the American music marketplace. The horns at the beginning of the song become a siren call to dancers everywhere who can’t help but shake their hips to the incredibly catchy song. In collaboration with Wyclef Jean of Fugees fame, Shakira created an unforgettable anthem to dancing. In the video, we see her showing off her belly-dancing skills, asserting that her hips are, in fact, one crucial part of a cultural phenomenon.

12. “TQG” Karol G feat. Shakira (2023)

Shakira has her finger on the pulse of popular music, especially when it comes to discerning which popular artists she can make magic with. Earlier this year, Karol G’s critically acclaimed album Mañana Será Bonito became the first all-Spanish-language album by a female artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Shakira had a part in this major milestone with her feature on “TQG.”

The two powerhouses teamed up to sing about leaving exes who are no good for them—a fitting theme, given that both had recently gone through very public breakups. This song came a month after Shakira addressed rumors of her ex-husband cheating in “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” her collaboration with the Argentinian producer Bizarrap. Karol also went through a public breakup with reggaeton artist Anuel AA, who had a child with another woman after their split. The video features each of the women giving her own testimonial about moving on, before coming together in front of a maze of flames, with standout choreography and a clear message to their exes that they’re not worth thinking about.

11. “Te Aviso, Te Anuncio” (2001)

Although Laundry Service was Shakira’s first album in English, this song just sounds more natural in Spanish. The video, one of Shakira’s more fun, campy music videos, starts off with a steamy tango, but as the man throws her down and leaves her high and dry, she takes center stage, newly on a quest for vengeance. There’s a cartoon sequence in which she fights her cheating man, deflates the breasts of his mistress, and receives assistance from various superhero characters. In summary: I support women’s rights, but I also support women’s wrongs.

10. “Underneath Your Clothes” (2001)

This video is important to Shakira’s repertoire mainly for its first 20 seconds, in which a (fake) reporter asks, “Shakira, what’s it like to cross over and sing in English?” Instead of responding in English, she responds in Spanish and says that making music is about forming a connection with your audience through your music. It was an important statement to make to her fans as she entered not only a new phase in her career but also began to reach a new, broader audience. The video starts with her on her own in a tour bus while her band chats behind her, a way to show how touring can be lonely, before cutting to her passionately embracing her boyfriend, whom she sings about having unconditional love for. 

9. “Ojos Así” (1998)

Shakira’s Lebanese heritage is on full display in this Arabic Latin rock fusion track. She’s sporting cherry red locks, a metallic crop top, black leather pants, and a belly-dancing hip scarf. The dynamic song gives her an opportunity to show off her powerful vocals and features a young Shak essentially leading an eclectic band on-stage. The song became a springboard for her as it won the “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” at the inaugural Latin Grammy Awards in 2000 and was nominated for Best Short Form Music Video that same year.

8. “Can’t Remember to Forget You” feat. Rihanna (2014)

Shakira knows how to pick a collaborator to make waves with, and in 2014, she chose global superstar Rihanna to assist her on “Can’t Remember to Forget You,” a cut from her self-titled album. Rihanna was two years out from releasing her previous project, Unapologetic, marking the end of her run of yearly album releases. Fans were hungry for any new feature, song, or video, which contributed to a rapturous response when the two announced their collaboration. Since the video was released almost a decade ago, it’s racked up 1.2 billion views. The song is a fun, tropical-tinged collaboration about trying to get over an ex who is clearly not good enough when you can’t help but remember only the good parts of the relationship. Shakira and Rihanna’s moves assert sexual prowess against the backdrop of a technicolored oasis. Shakira takes center stage in the video, but when Rihanna saunters in halfway through, the two combine forces and feed off of one another’s energies.

7. “Chantaje” feat. Maluma (2016)

This video is yet another example of Shakira knowing how to pick the right collaborators. The year before this collaboration, Maluma had found success with his second album, Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy, debuting atop the Billboard Top Latin Albums chart. She plucked him out of the sea of up-and-coming artists to create a kick drum-heavy reggaeton song equating their lovers to “blackmail.” The collaboration proved successful: the video became Vevo Certified on YouTube, reaching 100 million views in 19 days, eclipsing the previous record of 21 days. It later became the fastest Spanish video to reach a billion views.

6. “BZRP Music Sessions Vol. 53” (2023)

Before this music video came out, reports of Shakira’s husband cheating on her flooded headlines. There were jam jars involved, a woman named Clara, and Shakira’s now ex-husband, Gerard Piqué. The singer wisely decided to wait a beat before strategically crafting a song with the biggest producer in Latin music that addressed all the swirling rumors. She name-drops Clara and Piqué, cleverly using their names to hoist herself on a pedestal above them. Shakira also made a callback to her 2009 hit, “She Wolf” or “Loba” in Spanish with the lyric: “Una loba como yo no estás por tipos como tú,” or, “a she-wolf like me is not for a man like you.”

The song resonated with her fans, as evidenced by the reaction to her performance on The Tonight Show with Bizarrap. The audience gleefully sang along to every single word, and the song went viral on social media. The success of the song and video is a testament to Shakira’s savvy paired with the viral simplicity of Bizarrap’s three-camera setup.

5. “Beautiful Liar,” Beyoncé feat. Shakira (2006)

“Beautiful Liar” is an underrated track in Beyoncé’s catalog. At this point in her career, she had already wowed fans with her 2003 debut solo album, Dangerously in Love, and was on her way to becoming a superstar with a string of hits from her sophomore record, B’Day. This sultry banger featuring Shakira appeared on the deluxe version of that album. It offered each artist a chance to play off of one another’s stardom and combine each of their musical styles—Beyoncé’s hip hop and R&B swagger with Shakira’s Latin and Arabic flare. The symmetrical dance break at the two-minute mark shoots this video to the No. 5 spot on this list thanks to the synchronization alone. It’s a staggering, electric performance.

4. “She Wolf” (2009)

2009’s She Wolf was a sonic departure for Shakira. On the track, she flexes her chameleonic muscle, veering from her signature Latin rock lane toward more synth and electropop elements. Her dancing is always a spectacle to behold, but in this video, it’s her flexibility and bodily contortion that stands out. An especially mind-boggling moment comes when she has her feet firmly planted on the ground while leaning at a 45-degree angle, a true feat of core strength. To personify this insatiable she-wolf, she puts herself in a cage, throwing her leg over her shoulder, hanging from the roof of the cage. It’s just an all-around exciting watch.

3. “Whenever, Wherever” (2001)

The Colombian singer is a talented songwriter, imbuing her songs with a natural Bohemian quality, in particular on the albums Pies Descalzos and Donde Estan Los Landrones. Her first Spanish-language album, 2001’s Laundry Service, includes her crossover hit “Whenever, Wherever.” This was many listeners’ first time hearing her quirky songwriting style, which on this song includes the unforgettably iconic line, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble, so you don’t confuse them with mountains.” In the music video, she is a force of nature as she battles the elements, presenting herself as a wonder of the world. The video played a major part in cementing the success of her crossover.

2. “Lo Hecho Está Hecho” (2009)

Shakira is fluent in a language that is famously hard to get a handle on: body language. Throughout this seductive video, she and her partner (the talented Daniel “Cloud” Campos) tell a story through a captivating interpretative dance on a bed. Anyone who has watched her dance knows how well she can move her hips, but in this video, she annihilates challenging, fluid choreography not just on her own but with a partner. Whether you know Spanish or not, the story of these two lovers going through relationship woes is obvious, transcending the spoken word.

1 . “La Tortura” feat. Alejandro Sanz (2005)

This is not only Shakira’s best music video, but it’s Shakira’s best song—period. Alejandro Sanz and Shakira croon to an irresistable pop-regaeton beat about longing for someone so much that it feels like torture not being with them, needing them so desperately that they would do and say anything to make it happen. The video conveys this message visually, Shakira radiating sensuality with her hips and her eyes (and in some parts, covered in some sort of black liquid). It’s a fitting reminder that Shakira’s expansive catalog of music videos are more than a showcase for her music, but a platform for some of the most hypnotizing dance moves of our time.

source https://time.com/6313045/shakira-best-music-videos-mtv-vmas/

Too Many Mothers Are Dying in Childbirth. Here’s How They Can Be Saved

With recent reports of difficult pregnancies and births from celebrities like Beyonce, Serena Williams, and Alyson Felix, and the death of Olympian Tori Bowie during childbirth, the long-overlooked dangers of maternal and child mortality have become increasingly prominent.

In a new report published by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the global health philanthropic group highlights lagging progress in achieving United Nations (UN) goals for lowering mother and child deaths, along with innovative ways of addressing the problems with relatively inexpensive and easy to implement solutions that the group projects could cut such deaths by as much as half, saving 2 million lives

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“Every death matters,” says Bill Gates, of the group’s decision to draw attention to maternal and child mortality. Under current circumstances, the world will not reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100,000 live births and neonatal mortality to lower than 12 per 1,000 live births by 2030. Currently, maternal mortality has plateaued at 150 to 160 per 100,000 live births since 2015, and child mortality ranged from 16 to 18 per 1,000 live births in the same period. “Global health does not get the attention it deserves, and we want to remind people that the UN did pick these goals, and we are off track,” says Gates.

Each day, 800 mothers around the world die giving birth, and the chance that their babies survive past their first year is less than 37%.

That sobering reality is more concerning when considering previous success in lowering maternal and child mortality rates. Thanks to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which set ambitious targets for lowering deaths by improving access to basic health care including childhood vaccines, contraceptives, and bed nets to ward off malaria-carrying mosquitoes, mortality among mothers giving birth dropped 3% annually from 2000 to 2015, and child mortality declined 2% yearly in the same period. “We’ve never seen a reduction like that and 2000 to 2015 was a magical period,” says Gates. “We achieved something miraculous.”

Those encouraging trends, however, have stalled. The MDGs were replaced with SDGs, a set of 17 global sustainability goals that extended the MDG targets, including eliminating poverty and hunger, improving access to quality education, achieving gender equality, and moving to affordable and clean energy. They also include health goals of reducing maternal and child mortality, addressing HIV, expanding prevention and treatment programs for substance abuse, and implementing stricter tobacco control regulations. Continued political and civil unrest, as well as unstable economies, not to mention the emergence of climate priorities, have created a more competitive space for achieving health targets, says Gates.

Goalkeepers, a Gates Foundation initiative begun in 2017 to support and accelerate achieving the SDGs, tracks progress toward the targets, and this year, documents that at current rates, targets for lowering maternal and child mortality won’t be met by 2030. 

One reason for the slowdown may be an artifact of the remarkable success of the MDGs. “There comes a point when you start to see plateaus [in your outcomes],” Laura Lamberti, deputy director of maternal, newborn, and child health discovery and tools at the Gates Foundation said during a briefing. “Even if you are delivering high quality interventions and have high coverage of them, those interventions are addressing some of the leading causes of mortality, and you reach a point where the existing package of care is not addressing what is causing the residual deaths that continue to occur.”

Read more: Column: If We Want to Save Black Mothers and Babies, Our Approach to Birthing Care Must Change

That’s why the current report highlights solutions that focus more on expectant mothers, and their health before delivery, as well as on the delivery itself. One major cause of maternal mortality in childbirth is the excessive loss of blood, but in many busy birthing centers, it’s hard for doctors, nurses, or midwives to gauge how much blood a woman is losing, and how much is too much. A simple cup device hung on the bed allows nurses and doctors at a glance to see which women are bleeding excessively and prioritize treating them.

There are five ways to stop postpartum bleeding—uterine massage, examining the genital tract, administering IV fluids, and two drugs—which health professionals traditionally tried one at a time. But a study involving 200,000 women in Africa showed that using all five at once could lower risk of postpartum bleeding by 60%, and the Foundation is working with local health facilities to train people to optimize their use simultaneously.

Even simpler ways to address such bleeding, which is more common among women who have low iron levels or are anemic, is to provide them with iron supplements. While pills are common, women need to take them for about six months to build up adequate levels in their blood, and the pills can cause side effects. The Goalkeepers report includes the example of a Nigerian obstetrician who found that giving women a single 15-minute intravenous infusion of iron during a prenatal visit, could treat anemia and significantly lower the chance of bleeding after giving birth.

Infections are another common cause of complicated delivery and mortality, but a trial conducted in sub-Saharan Africa found that treatment with a common antibiotic, azithromycin, can cut risk of sepsis infections, a danger during childbirth, by a third. Broader use of azithromycin could also help in the U.S., where 23% of maternal deaths are due to sepsis.

Read more: U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate Soared 40% During the Pandemic

Gates says the Foundation is continuing to research ways to drive down mortality rates by supporting several large trials around the world that focus on understanding, for example, the major drivers behind diarrhea and pneumonia among children, two of the major causes of death in the first few years of life.“ Getting the information about deaths, particularly very young deaths, guides our work in a pretty profound way,” says Gates of the continued effort to broaden the database. For example, that knowledge is underscoring the importance of basic needs such as good nutrition for babies and young children, which is critical for good development.

But even inexpensive and simple solutions won’t be effective if they aren’t in the hands of midwives, doctors, and nurses at delivery centers. Gates is optimistic this can happen, though. “We can start accumulating lives saved very quickly. We show that 2 million lives can be saved by the end of the decade, if we implement some of these measures, which is a mind-blowing number,” he says. “That could be well over 6 million by the end of the next decade. And that’s taking into account difficulties in delivering some of these solutions. If we have perfect delivery of them, the lives saved would be more than double that.”

source https://time.com/6312835/maternal-mortality-gates-foundation-2023-report/

The Real Story of the Outrageous Pharma Scandal that Inspired Pain Hustlers

Pain Hustlers, the new Netflix film that premiered on Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival, uses a structure like a documentary, featuring characters being interviewed by an unseen person and directly addressing the camera—but it isn’t one. Instead, the movie starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, from director David Yates, is a heavily dramatized account of the rise and fall of a small opioid company that hawked a pain relief spray for cancer pain with fentanyl as the highly addictive main ingredient.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In condensing a sprawling story into about two hours, the filmmakers aimed to paint a picture of capitalistic corruption along the outskirts of the pharma industry, where beautiful sales representatives provided doctors with financial incentive, bribing them into writing as many prescriptions as they could despite the risks to their patients.

From Dopesick to Painkiller, a number of stories about the drug crisis have been told on-screen recently, but Yates wanted Pain Hustlers, which lands on Netflix Oct. 27, to have an edge that he felt other stories lacked. His goal was to both acknowledge the hurt and death this broken system caused, but also take viewers on a wild ride. “We always felt we wanted it to be as subversive and as naughty and as different as we could compared to those,” Yates explained to TIME during an interview at TIFF. “Primarily we wanted to bring an audience into the issues and the opioid crisis overall.”

Read more: Netflix’s Opioid Crisis Miniseries Painkiller Is Another Frustrating Explainer Drama

An outrageous tale, in more than one way

Pain Hustlers began as a 2018 article for the New York Times Magazine by Evan Hughes, chronicling the travails of Insys, founded by billionaire John Kapoor. Insys produced Subsys, the spray described above, which thrived through a “speaker program,” in which doctors were paid to spread the gospel of their product to colleagues, essentially giving them money for prescribing a potentially very dangerous drug. Ultimately, in 2020, Kapoor would be sentenced to 66 months in prison for bribing medical practitioners.

“This was this kind of scrappy startup and they had this wild rags to riches tale,” Hughes said. “I would use the word ‘outrageous’ to describe both the story and the film—and you could say outrageous in two senses of the word. There’s outrageous in terms of wild, larger than life, chaotic, funny, but then there’s the moral outrage of the story—all of that was taking place and all of that was being achieved against the backdrop of patients that were being hurt.” 

Hughes’ article caught the eye of the British director Yates who had spent decades working in the world of the Harry Potter films and was looking to do something grounded. “We have a national health service in the UK,” he said. “Health is publicly funded and the idea is you don’t profit out of fixing people, you fix people for the greater good, and in that sense reading an article about the fringes of the medical system whereby huge profits were being made with dubious practices made me intrigued.”

Read more: The 25 Best Shows to Watch on Netflix

Taking dramatic license

At the time screenwriter Wells Tower started adapting the article into a screenplay, Hughes was working on his book, The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, an account that tackles the scope of Insys’ misdeeds. “My role was to be a sounding board and a consultant and help them ground the story in the truth,” Hughes said. 

But Tower’s script takes big dramatic license. For example, none of the characters on screen are strict one-to-one representations of Insys employees. “This isn’t the Insys story in detail at all,” Yates said. “It’s inspired by that—the fringes of that industry and how they exploit one very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and make a fortune out of it.” 

Emily Blunt plays Liza Drake, a composite of a number of figures that appear in Hughes’ book. She’s a single mother living in Florida and working as a stripper when she meets Pete Brenner, a sales rep portrayed by Chris Evans, leaning into his Boston accent, who drunkenly offers her a job while flirting at the bar of the strip club that is soon to be her former place of employment. 

Desperate for something else, she shows up at his office and, after Pete fudges her resume, she’s hired by the eccentric John Kapoor-type figurehead (Andy Garcia) at the pharma company Zanna. Liza turns out to be a natural. She lures one slimy doctor (Brian D’Arcy James) into a speaker program and it spirals from there—she eventually has an army of beautiful young women marching into offices, and the company grows. That is, until Liza begins to develop a conscience. 

Anarchic fun, with a conscience

Yates explained he specifically wanted to tell a story about a single mother, which led to the creation of Liza. Even though Liza is an amalgamation, Hughes said she’s representative of a swath of people. “It was made up of young people who were often in over their head and they were hungry for success and a lot of that is embodied in her. Even if the details come from hither and yon, they’re real,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Evans’ Pete takes on some of the qualities of Alec Burlakoff, who is at the center of Hughes’ original article. And even though Insys was operating all around the country, the movie bases the action in Florida. Yates said the trick was to have fun with the material, while still respecting the people who lost their lives because of Subsys and the opioid crisis at large. To that end, Yates and Blunt spoke to victims’ family members and showed the film to Jim Langford of the Georgia Prevention Project. 

“We wanted it to be crazy and anarchic and fun,” the director said. But to truly honor the victims, it had to be more than a lighthearted jaunt. “By the end of the story, we wanted it to have a real heft emotionally.” 

source https://time.com/6312890/pain-hustlers-true-story/