Rio Olympics Near Cancellation

There is a rapidly increasing chance that this years Summer Olympics in Rio will be cancelled.  The banning of the Russian Track and Field Team for doping is a side issue, and were that the only problem the Olympics would go on quite happily. The massive pollution, disease, crime, and bacterial infection issues are quite another story,

Sponsoring the Olympics was supposed to force the city to clean up the polluted waterways. Waterways filled with raw sewage, hospital waste, and trash. That, quite simply hasn’t happened.

‘Super Bacteria’ Found At Brazil Olympic Venues, Beaches

The diseases can cause infections, meningitis and lead to death.

Scientists have found dangerous drug-resistant “super bacteria” off beaches in Rio de Janeiro that will host Olympic swimming events and in a lagoon where rowing and canoe athletes will compete when the Games start on Aug. 5.

The findings from two unpublished academic studies seen by Reuters concern Rio’s most popular spots for tourists and greatly increase the areas known to be infected by the microbes normally found only in hospitals.

They also heighten concerns that Rio’s sewage-infested waterways are unsafe.

A study published in late 2014 had shown the presence of the super bacteria – classified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an urgent public health threat – off one of the beaches in Guanabara Bay, where sailing and wind-surfing events will be held during the Games.

The first of the two new studies, reviewed in September by scientists at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Diego, showed the presence of the microbes at five of Rio’s showcase beaches, including the ocean-front Copacabana, where open-water and triathlon swimming will take place.

The other four were Ipanema, Leblon, Botafogo and Flamengo.

The super bacteria can cause hard-to-treat urinary, gastrointestinal, pulmonary and bloodstream infections, along with meningitis. The CDC says studies show that these bacteria contribute to death in up to half of patients infected.

The second new study, by the Brazilian federal government’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation lab, which will be published next month by the American Society for Microbiology, found the genes of super bacteria in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon in the heart of Rio and in a river that empties into Guanabara Bay.

Waste from countless hospitals, in addition to hundreds of thousands of households, pours into storm drains, rivers and streams crisscrossing Rio, allowing the super bacteria to spread outside the city’s hospitals in recent years.

Renata Picao, a professor at Rio’s federal university and lead researcher of the first study, said the contamination of Rio’s famous beaches was the result of a lack of basic sanitation in the metropolitan area of 12 million people.

“These bacteria should not be present in these waters. They should not be present in the sea,” said Picao from her lab in northern Rio, itself enveloped by stench from Guanabara Bay.

Cleaning the city’s waterways was meant to be one of the Games’ greatest legacies and a high-profile promise in the official 2009 bid document Rio used to win the right to host South America’s first Olympics.

That goal has instead transformed into an embarrassing failure, with athletes lamenting the stench of sewage and complaining about debris that bangs into and clings to boats in Guanabara Bay, potential hazards for a fair competition.

Cancel the Olympics

The potential threat Zika virus poses is just too great to take the risk.

…If you ask me, I say cancel the Olympics. Here are five reasons why:

1. The numbers don’t lie. The World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee on Zika convened June 14 to consider new data and review previous recommendations, including those regarding the Rio Olympics. By August 5, more than 10,500 athletes, coaches and trainers will have descended on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In addition, more than 500,000 foreign spectators are expected to fly into the city. In doing so, they will be exposing themselves to the Zika-carrying mosquitos before returning to their home country. If you were a bioterrorist trying to expose as many of the world’s population as possible, I doubt you could come up with a better plan than this.

In a paper to be published shortly, the probable number of Zika cases during the Olympics was calculated using dengue transmission during the 2008 outbreak as a model. It found that, on the low end, there would be 1.8 cases per one million tourists, and on the high end, 3.2 cases per 100,000 tourists.

2. Brazil is not equipped to handle this crisis. The concern is not that tourists will fall ill while they’re at the games – though everyone seems to agree that pregnant women, at least, should stay away. The fear is that travelers will bring the virus home, either in their bodies or in the bodies of mosquito stowaways, and it will spread further. And there can be little doubt that holding the Olympics in Brazil as scheduled will greatly accelerate the spread of Zika.

Brazil is already having historic turbulence in their governance, economy and society. This is one developing country that is ill prepared to solve this problem, let alone do it in less than two months. While some have suggested concerns about Zika spreading are overwrought, let’s consider Brazil’s history with this virus. Nuno Faria of Oxford University suggested that a single individual carried Zika to Brazil in late 2013. By early 2016, as many as 1.5 million Brazilians are estimated to have been infected.

3. The WHO may have a conflict of interest here. Concerns have been raised about the WHO’s impartiality in this dialogue. It has been previously reported that the WHO entered into an official partnership with the International Olympic Committee, in a memorandum of understanding that remains secret to this day. There is no good reason for the WHO not to disclose this memorandum of understanding. It is standard scientific practice for potential conflicts of interest to be revealed – look at any scientific publication.

4. Clearly Brazil has a conflict of interest as well. Brazil has an obvious political and financial interest that the Rio Olympics going ahead as scheduled. It is doubtful that if the games would ever return to Brazil in the future if they don’t go on as scheduled. But changing the venue or postponing the games isn’t practical either. It has taken years for Brazil, like any other host, to gear up for these Olympics. If they don’t start as planned, they won’t proceed at all this year.

5. The stakes are just too high to risk it. There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes infants to be born with abnormally small heads and damaged brains. But there are still many key questions left to be answered. What is the degree of risk Zika infections might pose to pregnant women? That is, after an infection, how often will a fetus develop birth defects? Current studies suggest that somewhere between 1 percent and 29 percent of babies born to infected mothers have microcephaly. That is a pretty wide range. Researchers would also like to know when a developing infant is most vulnerable to the virus, and whether Zika may cause a spectrum of related problems, ranging from stillbirth and miscarriages on the severe end to learning disabilities on the milder end. They just don’t know at this time.

Bottom line – there is much we don’t know about the Zika risk. While expects can legitimately argue about the magnitude of the risk, nobody denies risk exists. David Hackworth once said, “It is human nature to start taking things for granted when danger isn’t banging loudly on the door.” The risk is potentially catastrophic – the Rio Olympics should be cancelled now.

 

The Less Than Spartan Olympics

Summer Olympics is supposed to happen in Rio this year. It may not.

Issues include an unstable and volatile political situation, with the current President having been impeached, pollution issues making the events dangerous for competitors, the Zika virus running rampant, and whether the event facilities will actually be ready. In other words, it’s a rolling disaster.

Add to that as significant portion of the Russian Olympic team will be banned for use of steroids, and at least 31 athletes have been banned for illegal substance use so far…

And things are looking a lot less than “Golden”.

Olympics now digging into past winners, issuing bans

The IOC issued a stern statement on Tuesday promising to step up the fight against sports doping after a series of damning reports exposed systematic and mass cheating by Russian athletes.

The Olympics organizers said 31 athletes in six sports have tested positive inreanalysis of their doping samples from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee said it has opened disciplinary proceedings against the unidentified athletes from 12 countries.

The samples had been stored at the IOC laboratory in Lausanne. They were retested using enhanced methods on athletes who were expecting to compete at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August.

The IOC said “all those athletes infringing anti-doping rules will be banned from competing” in Rio.

The committee said the results of 250 retests from the 2012 London Olympics will “come shortly.” There will also undertake a “wider retesting” of medalists from Beijing and London.

“The re-tests from Beijing and London and the measures we are taking following the worrying allegations against the Laboratory in Sochi are another major step to protect the clean athletes irrespective of any sport or any nation. We keep samples for ten years so that the cheats know that they can never rest,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in the statement.

Over the weekend, Russia’s sports minister said his country has a “problem” with doping and is “very sorry” that its cheating athletes were not caught sooner.

“Serious mistakes have been made by the federation management, along with athletes and coaches who have broken anti-doping rules and neglected the principle of fair play,” said Vitaly Mutko, writing in British newspaper The Sunday Times. “Let us be clear. We are ashamed of them.”

Russia will discover on June 17 whether its athletics federation has met the reform criteria to return to competition in time for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

Russia was plunged into another doping scandal last week after a series of exposes by “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, and others.

A former Russian anti-doping official allowed “60 Minutes” to listen to 15 hours of conversations he secretly recorded with a prominent doctor involved in the country’s testing regime.

Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov shared details of a systematic cover-up in Sochi during Skype conversations with Vitaly Stepanov, a former Russian anti-doping official turned key whistleblower. The doping program reportedly involved at least 15 Russian medal winners.

“He had the ability to help to get the necessary results,” Stepanov told CBS News — referring to gold medals.

In the recordings, Rodchenkov named Russian gold medalists in three sports — bobsled, skeleton and cross country skiing — whose dirty drugs tests he helped cover up.

It was all part, he said, of an elaborate scheme to protect Russia’s Olympic medal winners, with the help of his country’s intelligence service, known as the FSB.

“FSB tried to control every single step of the anti-doping process in Sochi,” Stepanov said Rodchenkov told him.

The FSB figured out a way to open bottles considered to be tamper-proof containing urine from drug-tainted athletes. Then they filled the bottles with clean urine collected from athletes before they started doping.

Former Olympic Cycling Champion Tammy Thomas before and after stopping steroid use

 

 

Exposing Online Bigots

I think just about everyone who has participated in any public online discussion on the internet has seen the work of racist trolls. Believing they are anonymous, such racist trolls regularly attack black forums. It would seem in Brazil, they have developed a partial solution…

Your Next Racist Tweet Could Go on a Billboard Outside Your House

Spend a little time on Twitter and you’ll quickly find out that for every empowering Black Lives Matter or Hispanic Girls United message posted, anonymous users of the social media platform also churn out plenty of hate—without any repercussions for their name-calling or threats. Back in October, author and economist Umair Haque wrote over at Medium that Twitter is becoming a ghost town owing to the amount of abuse on the platform, “and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.”

But perhaps the people who make racist comments on social media could be put on blast through the magic of geotagging. That’s the idea at the heart of “Virtual Racism, Real Consequences,” a Brazilian campaign that posts billboards with offensive online comments in the neighborhood where they were published—potentially squashing the idea that social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook are an anonymous Wild West of bigoted name-calling.

The campaign was launched this summer by Criola, an Afro-Brazilian civil rights organization, after a black weather reporter in Brazil was the object of severe racial harassment on Facebook. The effort tracks down the geotagged locations of the authors of anonymous comments posted on social media; Criola then purchases space on billboards or on buses nearby. Although the campaign blurs out names and profile pictures, the bigoted postings are exposed for everyone to see.

“Those people think they can sit in the comfort of their homes and do whatever they want on the Internet. We don’t let that happen. They can’t hide from us; we will find them,” Criola’s founder, Jurema Werneck, told BBC Trending.

A 2014 analysis by the U.K.-based think tank Demos of nearly 127,000 English-language tweets written over a nine-day period found that 10,000 tweets with a racial slur are posted daily. While the report’s authors noted that “the overwhelming majority of them are not used in an obviously prejudicial or hateful way,” it’s one thing for black folks to tweet each other the lyrics of a popular rap song that contains the n-word and quite another to be on the receiving end of the hate that some people of color experience on social media (particularly if they are active in social justice work). Shaun King, an activist who is the senior justice writer at the New York Daily News, wroteearlier this month that racial abuse on Twitter is so bad that “I almost need to pray before I use it.”

King wrote that he’s blocked 20,000 people on the platform so far this year owing to the bigoted hate that comes his way. “Racists now post messages on every single hashtag of interest to black folk. Almost always without their real names or faces, racists will use racial slurs in messages to or about people thousands of times per day on Twitter,” he wrote. “It’s so prevalent, so pervasive, that it’s basically impossible to use the service as a person of color and not have to face it down every single day.”

When a person’s identity is known, the consequences for posting offensive comments online can be severe. In 2013, former public relations executive Justine Sacco was axedafter her tweet “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” went viral. And in October, 20-year-old Erika Escalante was fired from her internship at a health and wellness company in Arizona after she posted an image on Twitter of herself in a cotton field. The caption for the photo: “Our inner n—– came out today.”

Meanwhile, Werneck told BBC Trending that although Brazil has laws against hate speech, they are not always enforced, and some people may be afraid of speaking up. To that end, she hopes the campaign will empower people to expose the abuse they encounter online. And perhaps with their anonymity in doubt, some folks might choose to keep their prejudiced thoughts to themselves.

WOuld work in the US in my view – if the billboards did full exposure.

 

 

Don’t Argue With This Ref!

Argue with this Ref, you are not just out of the Park…

You are in the hospital or morgue!

A soccer referee in Brazil is facing serious disciplinary action after pulling out a gun on the field during the middle of an amateur regional league match. 

The shocking incident occurred over the weekend in the city of Brumadinho, according to The Telegraph. The referee, Gabriel Murta, was allegedly assaulted by members of visiting team Amantes de Bola before he went and got his gun.

Murta, who reportedly works as a police officer during the day, claims to have been kicked and slapped by the Amantes manager and his substitutes after they demanded a red card for a player on Brumadinho. Murta reacted to the attack by going to the locker rooms and returning with a gun, according to The Mirror.

When confronted, Murta wasted no time in pulling out the gun, keeping it down and to his side, but visible for all involved to see.

 

What Happens When You Skip the Oil Change and 60k Mile Maintenance

Another postcard for preventative maintenance…Or why you shouldn’t let conservatives be in charge of your country.

This “rescue” helicopter in Brazil fell apart on landing.

 

Getting Hot! Brazils New Emerging Venture-Tech Capital

Something that seems sadly missing in the US of late, Brazil is on it’s way to becoming a tech destination.

Amazing what a little investment capital will do.

Seems to me we’ve lost our way – focusing entirely on productivity improvements, and almost noting on core product which creates industries.

Walter Silva, Marcelo Marzola and Phillip Klein of Predicta.net

Brazil’s Start-Up Generation

Marcelo Marzola, the 33-year-old co-founder of Predicta.net, is a perfect example of how hot Brazil’s $1.6 trillion economy has become — and why its entrepreneurs are now getting their phone calls returned by venture capitalists after a decade of “You’re from where?”

Marzola was invited to present his company’s free online behavioral-targeting tool, BTBuckets, at the Google I/O Web-developer conference in San Francisco in May. To get ogled at the Google conference is the goal of any Web developer. Marzola earned rave reviews for creating what has become a de facto standard, used on more than 2,000 websites in 90 countries by such corporate titans as Pfizer, Motorola and Unilever. The product fills an overlooked niche in the industry by allowing websites to segment their users according to their online habits and then direct targeted content and advertising to them in real time. “It has turned the industry on its head, and it’s gaining mass recognition,” says Daniel Waisberg, an industry consultant and a former chair of marketing of the Web Analytics Association.

The spotlight has attracted about 10 VC firms to Marzola over the past six months. His track record will impress them: the company has been growing at a compound rate of 40% annually since 2005 and has a profit margin of more than 20% on $12 million in revenue. Now he is in the midst of closing a deal with DFJ FIR Capital, a local venture firm with $160 million under management, to raise $15 million to $20 million in exchange for a 35% equity stake to fund his company’s expansion efforts. BTBuckets plans to open offices in major markets in Latin America and the U.S.