WASHINGTON – The United States imposed sanctions yesterday on 10 people and 13 groups in a Venezuelan food subsidy scheme the U.S. Treasury said lined the pockets of President Nicolas Maduro, his stepsons and others as ordinary Venezuelans suffer food shortages.

The Treasury Department said Colombian national Alex Nain Saab orchestrated a vast corruption network for food imports and distribution in Venezuela and profited from overvalued contracts, including the food subsidy programme. Saab bribed Maduro’s three stepsons to win no-bid, overvalued government contracts, said Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

“Alex Saab engaged with Maduro insiders to run a wide-scale corruption network they callously used to exploit Venezuela’s starving population,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “Treasury is targeting those behind Maduro’s sophisticated corruption schemes, as well as the global network of shell companies that profit from” the country’s military-controlled food distribution program, he said. (Reuters)…[+]

GENEVA– The hot air that smashed European weather records this week looks set to move towards Greenland and could cause record melting of the world’s second largest ice sheet, the United Nations said today.

Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, said the hot air moving up from North Africa had not merely broken European temperature records on Thursday but surpassed them by 2, 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, which she described as “absolutely incredible”. “According to forecasts, and this is of concern, the atmospheric flow is now going to transport that heat towards Greenland,” she told a regular U.N. briefing in Geneva.

“This will result in high temperatures and consequently enhanced melting of the Greenland ice sheet,” she said. “We don’t know yet whether it will beat the 2012 level, but it’s close.” Nullis cited data from Denmark’s Polar Portal, which measures the daily gains and losses in surface mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

“In July alone, it lost 160 billion tonnes of ice through surface melting. That’s roughly the equivalent of 64 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Just in July. Just surface melt – it’s not including ocean melt as well.” The Greenland Ice Sheet covers 80% of the island and has developed over many thousands of years, with layers of snow compressed into ice. The dome of ice rises to a height of 3,000 meters and the total volume of the ice sheet is approximately 2,900,000 cubic kilometres, which would raise global sea levels by 7 metres if it melted entirely, according to the Polar Portal website. (Reuters)…[+]

The Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions (JSLC) says that about 45 per cent of Jamaicans suffered from the chikungunya virus (CHIKV) during the outbreak in 2014. A special module fielded on the chikungunya virus outbreak by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) and the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) revealed that 45.4 per cent of the respondents reported that they had the illness.

Regional figures were 49.5 per cent in the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA), 47.7 per cent in “Other Towns”, and 42.1 per cent in Rural Areas. Of those who reported an illness or injury, 74.3 per cent sought care, with similar figures by region, and an average of 1.3 visits were made to health facilities over the four-week reference period.

Comparison by sex showed that a larger proportion of females (77.7 per cent) than males (68.8 per cent) sought care. The larger proportion of those who sought care used private health facilities exclusively (51.3 per cent), compared with 46.1 per cent who used only public facilities. Some 2.6 per cent used both public and private facilities. The poorest quintile recorded 70.9 per cent going to public facilities exclusively.(Jamaica Observer)…[+]