Belarus charges independent journalists with tax evasion
Four independent journalists who have been critical of President Alexander Lukashenko face seven years in prison on charges of "large-scale tax evasion." Journalists have been detained 477 times this year in Belarus.
Protesters have taken to the streets of Belarus since the election in August 2020 they say was rigged
Four staff at an independent Belarusian press association have been charged with tax evasion, a lawyer for the group's founder said Thursday.
Yulia Slutskaya, a journalist who founded the Belarusian Press Club in 2016, has been charged with "large-scale tax evasion," her lawyer Anton Gashinsky told AFP news agency. She will remain in pretrial detention until February 23.
Slutskaya is also a member of the board of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ). She was detained last week when she returned to Belarus from holiday abroad.
The press club's director Sergei Olshevsky, program director Alla Sharko and Slutskaya's son Pyotr Slutsky have all been charged as co-conspirators. They face up to seven years in prison.
Months of protests
The former Soviet state has been gripped with protests since August. Opposition protesters say Alexander Lukashenko, who claimed victory in the presidential election and who has held power for 26 years, rigged the election.
Journalists have been detained 477 times this year according to the BAJ, including a DW correspondent, and many foreign journalists have had their accreditation revoked.
Mogens Blicher Bjerregard of the European Federation of Journalists called on the European Union to "react vigorously" and help secure the release of Slutskaya and her colleagues.
The EU sanctioned Lukashenko' regime earlier in the year. The UK and Canada bestowed a Media Freedom Award on the BAJ in November for its "perseverance and self-sacrifice in the face of increased targeted crackdowns on media" in Belarus.
Friday, January 01, 2021
Egypt's public prosecutor has rejected Italy's claims that five Egyptian police officers were tied to the killing of student Giulio Regeni. The real perpetrator was "unknown," officials said.
Cambridge University graduate Giulio Regeni was in Egypt researching trade unions when he was killed in January 2016
Egypt's top prosecutor on Wednesday cleared five policemen of responsibility in the torture and killing of Italian student Giulio Regeni in 2016.
State prosecutor Hamada al-Sawy said that Egypt has no intention of "pursuing a criminal case in the murder, abduction and torture of Giulio Regeni because the perpetrator is unknown."
While investigators will continue to search for the murderer, the prosecution has "ruled out" any charges against the five in connection with the case, he added.
The prosecution did not offer an alternative suspect.
Egypt-Italy relations strained
The 28-year-old Cambridge University graduate was in Egypt researching trade unions when he was kidnapped in January 2016. His mutilated body was later found on the outskirts of Cairo. Regeni had also written articles critical of the Egyptian government under a pen name.
The prosecution said Regeni's parents had immediately collected their son's belongings from his Cairo residence after the announcement of his death, including his laptop. It added that the Italian side had rejected requests to hand over Regeni's laptop for inspection.
The statement also suggested that the unknown perpetrator had deliberately chosen January 25 — the anniversary of Egypt's 2011 Arab Spring uprising — for the killing, in an attempt to frame police for the crime.
The decision came nearly three weeks after Italian prosecutors had said they planned to charge four Egyptian officers over the murder of Regeni.
On December 10, Italian public prosecutor Michele Prestipino told a parliamentary commission in Rome there were "elements of significant proof" implicating Egyptian authorities.
"We are going to ask to begin a criminal action concerning certain members of the Egyptian security services," he said. "We owe it to the memory of Giulio Regeni," he added.
Regeni's death has strained diplomatic relations between Egypt and Italy, with Rome accusing Egyptian authorities of non-cooperation.
Italy has rejected multiple theories from Egypt, including that Regeni had been working as a spy, or that he was the victim of a criminal gang.
mvb/aw (dpa, AFP)
Issued on: 31/12/2020 -
United Nations (United States) (AFP)
President Donald Trump's outgoing administration on Thursday fired a late salvo against the United Nations by voting against its budget, citing disagreements on Israel and Iran, but it found virtually no international support.
Only Israel voted with the United States, with 167 nations in favor, as the General Assembly closed the year by approving the $3.231 billion UN budget for 2021.
Kelly Craft, the US ambassador to the United Nations, voiced objections that the budget would fund a 20th anniversary event for the 2001 UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, where the United States walked out in solidarity with Israel over what it said was a fixation by Muslim-majority countries against the Jewish state.
The United States, the biggest funder of the UN, "called for this vote to make clear that we stand by our principles, stand up for what is right and never accept consensus for consensus's sake," Craft said on the General Assembly floor.
"Twenty years on, there remains nothing about the Durban Declaration to celebrate or to endorse. It is poisoned by anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias," she said.
Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said that the Durban conference "will become another meeting demonizing the Jewish state -- it will be used once again to slander us and to launch false accusations of racism against Jewish self-determination."
The General Assembly separately approved a resolution backing follow-up efforts on the Durban conference.
That resolution passed 106-14 with 44 abstentions. The United States and Israel were joined in voting no by Western powers including Britain, France and Germany.
Craft also complained about how the United States received almost no support in the world body in September when it declared that UN sanctions against Iran had come back into force.
The Trump administration said it was triggering UN sanctions due to alleged Iranian violations of a nuclear deal negotiated by former president Barack Obama, but even US allies scoffed at the argument that Washington remained a participant in an accord that Trump had loudly rejected.
"The US doesn't need a cheering section to validate its moral compass," Craft said.
"We don't find comfort based on the number of nations voting with us, particularly when the majority have found themselves in an uncomfortable position of underwriting terrorism, chaos and conflict."
Craft said that the US vote would not change its UN contribution, including 25 percent of peacekeeping expenditures and some $9 billion a year in UN-channelled humanitarian relief.
President-elect Joe Biden is expected to seek a more cooperative relationship with the UN including stopping a US exit from the World Health Organization, which Trump blamed for not doing more to stop Covid-19.
© 2020 AFP
POSTMODERN ALCHEMY
Microfabricated elastic diamonds improve material's electronic properties
Overcoming a key obstacle in achieving diamond-based electronic and optoelectronic devices, researchers have presented a new way to fabricate micrometer-sized diamonds that can elastically stretch. Elastic diamonds could pave the way for advanced electronics, including semiconductors and quantum information technologies. In addition to being the hardest materials in nature, diamonds have exceptional electronic and photonic properties, featuring both ultrahigh thermal and electric conductivity. Not only would diamond-based electronics dissipate heat more quickly, reducing the need for cooling, they can handle high voltages and do so with greater efficiency than most other materials. Because of a diamond's rigid crystalline structure, practical use of the material in electronic devices has remained a limiting challenge. Subjecting diamond to large amounts of strain, which should alter the material's electronic properties, is one way to potentially overcome these obstacles. However, precisely controlling the strain across amounts of diamond needed for device applications has yet to be fully achieved. Here, Chaoqun Dang and colleagues present an approach for engineering diamond that exhibits uniform elastic strain. In a series of experiments, Dang et al. show how their microfabricated, micrometer-sized, single-crystalline diamond plates can elastically stretch - upwards of 10% - along several different crystallographic directions at room temperature. They could recover their length and shape, following these experiments. What's more, the authors show that this highly controllable elasticity can fundamentally change the diamond's electronic properties, including a near 2 electron volt bandgap reduction.
Stretching diamond for next-generation microelectronics
IMAGE: STRETCHING OF MICROFABRICATED DIAMONDS PAVE WAYS FOR APPLICATIONS IN NEXT-GENERATION MICROELECTRONICS. view more
CREDIT: DANG CHAOQUN / CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Diamond is the hardest material in nature. But out of many expectations, it also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their findings have shown the potential of strained diamonds as prime candidates for advanced functional devices in microelectronics, photonics, and quantum information technologies.
The research was co-led by Dr Lu Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE) at CityU and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Their findings have been recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, titled "Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond".
"This is the first time showing the extremely large, uniform elasticity of diamond by tensile experiments. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of developing electronic devices through 'deep elastic strain engineering' of microfabricated diamond structures," said Dr Lu.
Diamond: "Mount Everest" of electronic materials
Well known for its hardness, industrial applications of diamonds are usually cutting, drilling, or grinding. But diamond is also considered as a high-performance electronic and photonic material due to its ultra-high thermal conductivity, exceptional electric charge carrier mobility, high breakdown strength and ultra-wide bandgap. Bandgap is a key property in semi-conductor, and wide bandgap allows operation of high-power or high-frequency devices. "That's why diamond can be considered as 'Mount Everest' of electronic materials, possessing all these excellent properties," Dr Lu said.
However, the large bandgap and tight crystal structure of diamond make it difficult to "dope", a common way to modulate the semi-conductors' electronic properties during production, hence hampering the diamond's industrial application in electronic and optoelectronic devices. A potential alternative is by "strain engineering", that is to apply very large lattice strain, to change the electronic band structure and associated functional properties. But it was considered as "impossible" for diamond due to its extremely high hardness.
Then in 2018, Dr Lu and his collaborators discovered that, surprisingly, nanoscale diamond can be elastically bent with unexpected large local strain. This discovery suggests the change of physical properties in diamond through elastic strain engineering can be possible. Based on this, the latest study showed how this phenomenon can be utilized for developing functional diamond devices.
Uniform tensile straining across the sample
The team firstly microfabricated single-crystalline diamond samples from a solid diamond single crystals. The samples were in bridge-like shape - about one micrometre long and 300 nanometres wide, with both ends wider for gripping (See image: Tensile straining of diamond bridges). The diamond bridges were then uniaxially stretched in a well-controlled manner within an electron microscope. Under cycles of continuous and controllable loading-unloading of quantitative tensile tests, the diamond bridges demonstrated a highly uniform, large elastic deformation of about 7.5% strain across the whole gauge section of the specimen, rather than deforming at a localized area in bending. And they recovered their original shape after unloading.
By further optimizing the sample geometry using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard, they achieved a maximum uniform tensile strain of up to 9.7%, which even surpassed the maximum local value in the 2018 study, and was close to the theoretical elastic limit of diamond. More importantly, to demonstrate the strained diamond device concept, the team also realized elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays.
Tuning the bandgap by elastic strains
The team then performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations to estimate the impact of elastic straining from 0 to 12% on the diamond's electronic properties. The simulation results indicated that the bandgap of diamond generally decreased as the tensile strain increased, with the largest bandgap reduction rate down from about 5 eV to 3 eV at around 9% strain along a specific crystalline orientation. The team performed an electron energy-loss spectroscopy analysis on a pre-strained diamond sample and verified this bandgap decreasing trend.
Their calculation results also showed that, interestingly, the bandgap could change from indirect to direct with the tensile strains larger than 9% along another crystalline orientation. Direct bandgap in semi-conductor means an electron can directly emit a photon, allowing many optoelectronic applications with higher efficiency.
These findings are an early step in achieving deep elastic strain engineering of microfabricated diamonds. By nanomechanical approach, the team demonstrated that the diamond's band structure can be changed, and more importantly, these changes can be continuous and reversible, allowing different applications, from micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), strain-engineered transistors, to novel optoelectronic and quantum technologies. "I believe a new era for diamond is ahead of us," said Dr Lu.
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Dr Lu, Dr Alice Hu, who is also from MNE at CityU, Professor Li Ju from MIT and Professor Zhu Jiaqi from HIT are the corresponding authors of the paper. The co-first authors are Dang Chaoqun, PhD graduate, and Dr Chou Jyh-Pin, former postdoctoral fellow from MNE at CityU, Dr Dai Bing from HIT, and Chou Chang-Ti from National Chiao Tung University. Dr Fan Rong and Lin Weitong from CityU are also part of the team. Other collaborating researchers are from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and Southern University of Science and Technology.
The research at CityU was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
DOI number: 10.1126/science.abc4174
Desalination breakthrough could lead to cheaper water filtration
Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now.
Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.
The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.
"Reverse osmosis membranes are widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, who co-led the research. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the past 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."
CAPTION
Paper co-author Kaitlin Brickey, a Penn State graduate student in chemical engineering, stands in front of the scanning electron microscope that allowed researchers to examine how dense pockets in membranes could hinder efficient water filtration efforts.
CREDIT
Tyler Henderson/Penn State
The findings were published today in Science.
The paper documents an increase in efficiency in the membranes tested by 30%-40%, meaning they can clean more water while using significantly less energy. That could lead to increased access to clean water and lower water bills for individual homes and large users alike.
Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure to the salty feed solution on one side. The minerals stay there while the water passes through. Although more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, it still takes a large amount of energy, the researchers said, and improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.
"Fresh water management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," said Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering at Penn State who co-led the research. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water availability, especially in low-resource areas."
The National Science Foundation and DuPont, which makes numerous desalination products, funded the research. The seeds were planted when DuPont researchers found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable. This came as a surprise because the conventional knowledge was that thickness reduces how much water could flow through the membranes.
The team connected with Dow Water Solutions, which is now a part of DuPont, in 2015 at a "water summit" Kumar organized, and they were eager to solve this mystery. The research team, which also includes researchers from Iowa State University, developed 3D reconstructions of the nanoscale membrane structure using state-of-the-art electron microscopes at the Materials Characterization Lab of Penn State. They modeled the path water takes through these membranes to predict how efficiently water could be cleaned based on structure. Greg Foss of the Texas Advanced Computing Center helped visualize these simulations, and most of the calculations were performed on Stampede2, TACC's supercomputer.
CAPTION
The density of filtration membranes, even at the atomic scale, can greatly affect how much clean water can be produced.
CREDIT
Enrique Gomez/Penn State
CAPTION
Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now. Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand. The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.
COVID-19's impact on cancer prevention and control in Africa
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Africa, the continent was already struggling to deal with another public health crisis - a growing cancer epidemic characterized by more than one million new cancer cases and nearly 700,000 deaths per year. In a Perspective, Beatrice Wiafe Addai and Wilfred Ngwa discuss the significant challenges COVID-19 imposed on cancer prevention and control in Africa and how the efforts to address these challenges highlight key opportunities where greater investment could improve cancer care globally. At the start of the pandemic, many African governments were forced to rapidly divert already limited medical and healthcare resources away from cancer patients to treat those infected with SARS-CoV-2 and slow the spread of COVID-19. According to the authors, many African countries curtailed or cut cancer prevention activities, including awareness education and outreach, early detection screening, and vaccination, gaps that are likely to persist beyond the COVID-19 era. In addition, closed borders have made the international sharing of hospital-based resources and specialized lab diagnostics nearly impossible. Wiafa and Ngwa argue that, while necessary, this reallocation of critical health resources could lead to an increase in the number of late-stage cancer diagnoses and, thus, mortality across the continent. However, as many African nations have adapted to rise to these challenges, opportunities have also been created, such as cloud-based education and telemedicine, expansion of localized diagnostic capabilities and more efficient radiotherapy administration. The authors suggest that greater investment or policy in these areas could substantially increase access to cancer care worldwide.
For reporters interested in trends, a June 2020 Science Editorial by Norman E. Sharpless, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, addressed the likely impact of the pandemic on cancer mortality in the United States.
https:/
Countries led by women haven't fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic
NEWS RELEASE
IMAGE: DIFFERENCES IN CULTURAL TRAITS BY WOMEN-LED AND MEN-LED COUNTRIES ALONG THE DIMENSIONS EXAMINED IN THE PAPER. view more
CREDIT: WINDSOR ET AL, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0)
Countries led by women have not fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic than those led by men- it may be just our Western media bias that makes us think they have!
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Article Title: "Gender in the time of COVID-19: Evaluating national leadership and COVID-19 fatalities"
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Article URL: https:/
New proposal for how aerosols drive increased atmospheric convection in thunderstorm clouds
High in the clouds, atmospheric aerosols, including anthropogenic air pollutants, increase updraft speeds in storm clouds by making the surrounding air more humid, a new study finds. The results offer a new mechanism explaining the widely observed - but poorly understood - atmospheric phenomenon and provide a physical basis for predicting increasing thunderstorm intensity, particularly in the high-aerosol regions of the tropics. Observations worldwide have highlighted aerosols' impact on weather, including their ability to strengthen convection in deep convective clouds, like those that form during thunderstorms, resulting in larger and more severe storms. Previous studies have suggested two mechanisms by which aerosol concentrations could affect the intensity of convection - both involving the release of latent heat into the atmosphere as moisture within clouds condenses (the "warm-phase") or freezes ("cold-phase") to airborne particles. However, the link between aerosols and increased convection remains unclear and represents a major obstacle to understanding current and future severe weather risks - a particularly salient topic as human activities have become a significant source of atmospheric aerosols. To address this, Tristan Abbot and Timothy Cronin use the System for Atmospheric Modeling (SAM), an atmospheric model that can simulate detailed cloud processes, to study cloud-aerosol interactions. While the results show that the high-resolution simulations could reproduce the observed link between aerosols and convection, Abbott and Cronin found that neither of the previously proposed mechanisms can fully explain this invigoration. The authors offer a third possibility: high aerosol concentrations increase environmental humidity by producing more clouds, which can mix more condensed water into the surrounding air. Because humid air favors stronger updrafts, atmospheric convection can intensify, producing invigorated thunderstorms.
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