Rihanna Rihanna not welcome in Senegal, religious group says Religious collective reheats conspiracy theories about Illuminati and Barbadian singer, who is due to visit on Friday Rihanna is scheduled to attend a conference in Senegal in her role as an ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education. Photograph: Epsilon/Getty Images
Rihanna has been declared persona non grata by a group of religious organisations in Senegal, who accused the singer of intending to promote homosexuality in collusion with the Freemasons.
The Barbadian pop star is scheduled to attend a conference on eduction in the west African country on Friday alongside the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in her role as an ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education.
But an association of about 30 Islamic associations called No to Freemasonry and Homosexuality have asked the government to cancel her visit.
“Rihanna doesn’t hide it: she’s part of the Illuminati, a branch of Freemasons,” Cheikh Oumar Diagne, a spokesman, told Jeune Afrique, seeming to have picked up on online conspiracy theories about Rihanna’s beliefs.
The singer, Diagne said, was secretly attending a Freemasons’ conference that had been planned for exactly the same dates as the education one but was subsequently cancelled.
Religious organisations are powerful in Senegal, which is over 90% Muslim but is well known for being a tolerant country, where Muslims and Christians celebrate their festivals together.
The Global Partnership for Educationis trying to raise funds for the education of the poorest, most vulnerable children in 65 countries. The GPE has an ambition to reach $2bn a year by 2020 and replicate the successes achieved in global health.
“We’re hoping that the conference marks the moment that momentum shifts globally on education and education financing,” Julia Gillard, the chair of the GPE board and Australia’s former prime minister, said before the meeting. “Over the last few years, there’s been growing global interest in education, particularly girls’ education, but financing hasn’t as yet followed. We need a step change.”
The Senegalese president, Macky Sall, is hosting the conference along with Macron, for whom the trip will be the sixth to Africa of his nine-month presidency. The interior minister, Aly Ngouille Ndiaye, told Jeune Afrique he would ensure the safety of all conference attendees.
Bitcoin Bitcoin's January fall wipes off $44bn in value US investigation into boom stokes fears of impending bust as cryptocurrency records steepest monthly slide in its history Bitcoin’s gains in 2017 have gone into sharp reverse in January. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
Bitcoin plummeted in value by more than $44bn (£30.9bn) in January, marking the steepest monthly fall in its short history.
The slide extended further on Thursday after the Indian government said it would ban all cryptocurrency trading and Facebook announced a ban on digital currency adverts. Bitcoin fell by more than 10%, dropping below $9,000, marking a sharp reverse from its peak of almost $20,000 just before Christmas.
Economists have repeatedly warned of a bitcoin bubble after the price of the cryptocurrency surged last year by more than 900%.
The latest fall comes after news that one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges is being investigated by US regulators over its links to a digital asset which, detractors fear, could be inflating the price of bitcoin by billions of dollars.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been investigating the Bitfinex exchange and digital asset Tether since at least early December, when it subpoenaed both companies, according to a Bloomberg report published on Wednesday.
Tether is a cryptocurrency which is supposed to be pegged one to one with the US dollar. The idea behind it is to allow the flexibility of cryptocurrency trading, while still maintaining the stability of holding money in dollars rather than rapidly fluctuating digital currencies. Bitfinex allows users to sell bitcoins for dollars, and then “withdraw” the money using Tether tokens.
However, multiple critics, including one anonymous author writing under the name “Bitfinex’ed”, have suggested that Tether’s reserves are under-capitalised, and then when it creates new tokens, it does not deposit into reserves a corresponding amount of US dollars.
Since the majority of Tether tokens are used to purchase bitcoin, if they are not underpinned by equivalent US dollar reserves then a significant amount of the value of bitcoin would be based on shaky foundations.
Tether has said that all its coins are backed by dollars that it holds in reserve. Given there are more than 2bn Tether tokens outstanding, that means that the company should have billions of dollars in its bank account.
But it has yet to provide compelling evidence that it actually does have the reserves and, on Monday, fired its auditors saying that “it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame”.
“As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency,” it said in a statement, “there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.”
The relationship between Bitfinex and Tether is unclear. They share the same chief executive officer, and Bitfinex has been one of the exchanges pushing Tether hardest, but they are separate institutions with distinct finances.
Bitfinex is registered in the Caribbean, but its executives are European and the majority of its staff are based in Asia, resulting in a complex corporate structure.
Tether already raised concerns in November, when it was hit by a hack that led to $31m of its tokens being stolen. The company said it would not redeem any of the stolen tokens for US dollars, essentially exempting the hacked funds from its promise of 1:1 parity.
House of Commons Opinion The Guardian view on parliament’s move: be bold, leave London With Westminster in need of refurbishment, parliamentarians should seize the opportunity to strengthen links with the rest of the UK ‘Parliament will return to a restored Westminster in the end. In the interim, this overcentralised country should think local.’ Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Parliament’s decision to move out of the Palace of Westminster is an opportunity that should be seized; it is also a risk that could be mishandled. MPs voted this week to quit the hallowed Westminster site for at least six years, probably from 2025, to enable major refurbishment of what has become a dangerous and inadequate set of buildings. The plan is to build a temporary replica chamber and to find alternative offices for MPs and peers while the work is carried out.
The cost of the refurbishment and the temporary arrangements is put at £4bn. Yet such figures have a way of rising, especially if contracts are not ruthlessly audited and controlled, as recent scandals have shown. MPs from Theresa May down are understandably anxious that the refurbishment costs could become politically toxic. If the public feels that MPs consider money no object for their own needs while cuts and privations are necessary for everyone else, the already fragile standing of politics risks further damage.
MPs are right to take the decision they made this week. The Palace of Westminster should be refurbished and brought up to modern standards. Parliament’s duty of care to the 7,500 or so people who work there, and the more than one million annual visitors, leaves it little choice. Yet the political risks are self-evident and serious. That is why parliamentarians should also grasp the opportunity to think in radical new ways about how to use the six-year absence for the benefit of British politics more generally.
Resentment of Britain’s elites takes many political forms. The EU referendum was partly a revolt against Westminster. So was the big yes vote in the Scottish referendum. Anger against London and its perceived neglect of Britain beyond the M25 is widespread. The “northern powerhouse” project, to which George Osborne returned in a project launch in Darlington on Thursday, is one attempt to level the national playing field. The north-south divide on skills and education on which the former chancellor spoke is one of many.
Parliament should take this opportunity to reconnect with Britain. If money was no object, it could spend its six years away from Westminster in other British cities – Manchester, York, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff could all make a case, as could others. The transformative effect of cities of culture is well known. Why not cities of politics too? A readiness to reach out might help draw a divided country together. Taking MPs out of their comfort zone might challenge their own prejudices too.
Too ambitious? There are more modest options worth considering. The House of Lords could move, while the Commons stayed in London – or vice versa. Prime minister’s questions could rotate to different cities. The budget could be given in Birmingham or Belfast. Select committees could relocate to new centres. The Commons could sometimes meet in a big top that moves from town to town, county to county.
Parliament will return to a restored Westminster in the end. In the interim, this overcentralised country should think local. Go north. Go west. Be ambitious. Use the imagination. Embrace this richly varied country – and the country may return the favour.
Animals Polar bears could become extinct faster than was feared, study says The animals facing an increasing struggle to find enough food to survive as climate change steadily transforms their environment Play Video 0:45 GPS wearing polar bears reveal new insights – video
Polar bears could be sliding towards extinction faster than previously feared, with the animals facing an increasing struggle to find enough food to survive as climate change steadily transforms their environment.
New research has unearthed fresh insights into polar bear habits, revealing that the Arctic predators have far higher metabolisms than previously thought. This means they need more prey, primarily seals, to meet their energy demands at a time when receding sea ice is making hunting increasingly difficult for the animals.
A study of nine polar bears over a three-year period by the US Geological Survey and UC Santa Cruz found that the animals require at least one adult, or three juvenile, ringed seals every 10 days to sustain them. Five of the nine bears were unable to achieve this during the research, resulting in plummeting body weight – as much as 20kg during a 10-day study period.
“We found a feast and famine lifestyle – if they missed out on seals it had a pretty dramatic effect on them,” said Anthony Pagano, a USGS biologist who led the research, published in Science.
Polar bears losing crucial sea ice: study Read more
“We were surprised to see such big changes in body masses, at a time when they should be putting on bulk to sustain them during the year. This and other studies suggest that polar bears aren’t able to meet their bodily demands like they once were.”
Pagano’s team studied the bears in a period during April over the course of three years, from 2014 to 2016, in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska. They fitted the bears with GPS collars with video cameras to measure activity levels. Blood chemistry was also taken from the bears.
Previously, polar bears were thought to expend relatively little energy during days where they often wait for hours beside holes in the ice, which seals emerge from in order to breathe. But the researchers found that they actually have an average metabolism 50% higher than prior estimates.
With previous studies showing recent drops in polar bear numbers, survival rates and body condition, scientists said the new research suggests the species is facing an even worse predicament than was feared.
The Arctic is warming twice as rapidly as the global average, diminishing the sea ice that polar bears rely upon for food and forcing many to embark from water on to land where they desperately forage for goose eggs or rubbish from bins in far-flung towns.
Play Video 0:59 Footage of starving polar bear exposes climate change impact – video
A recent widely-shared video of an emaciated polar bear is a “horrible scene that we will see more of in the future and more quickly than we thought,” according to Dr Steven Amstrup, who led polar bear research for 30 years in Alaska.
“This is an excellent paper that fills in a lot of missing information about polar bears,” said Amstrup, who was not involved in the USGS research. “Every piece of evidence shows that polar bears are dependent on sea ice and if we don’t change the trajectory of sea ice decline, polar bears will ultimately disappear.
“They face the choice of coming on to land or floating off with the ice as it recedes, out to the deep ocean where there is little food. We will see more bears starving and more of them on land, where they will get into trouble by interacting with humans.”
Polar bears are listed by the US government as a threatened species but the Trump administration has reversed measures that tackle climate change, with the president himself seemingly unaware of the situation in the Arctic.
During an interview on Sunday, Donald Trump said that “the ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record levels.”
In fact, when measured at its September minimum, Arctic sea ice has declined by around 13% per decade since 1979. Last year was the eighth lowest minimum extent in the 38-year satellite record.
The huge glacial ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are reacting more slowly to the warming atmosphere and oceans but scientists are watching them closely as they will heavily influence sea level rise if there’s significant melting. In just the past decade, Greenland has lost two trillion tons of its ice mass.
“I hope we will have an awakening, but we haven’t really done much to save polar bears over the past decade,” said Amstrup. “With this administration, I’m not exactly confident we’ll see a major switch in that.”
