Innholdsfortegnelse for 03/01/2019 i Newsweek International

Police killed at least four demonstrators, including this man, during clashes on February 12, the sixth day of violence. Protesters had gathered in the capital’s center, near the presidential palace, to demand President Jovenel Moïse’s resignation over a corruption scandal. Nearly $4 billion earmarked for social development went missing, and embezzlement is suspected.…

Sector _ Health Care Location _ Boston Founded _ 2016 DIAGNOSTIC AND TREATMENT procedures are exorbitantly expensive. Claims processes are shrouded in mystery. Critical patient data is fragmented and inaccessible. The health care industry is ripe for block-chain-inspired transformation, and SimplyVital Health is leading the charge. The company—which would be part of a system where patients pay for outcomes rather than for procedures and doctor visits—will allow its customers to securely access all their medical records via their phone. To promote such value-based care, co-founder and CEO Kat Kuzmeskas, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Lucas Hendren and their team have created a network of tools for a new digital health care ecosystem. Their products will let patients, hospitals, doctors, insurers and pharmaceutical companies share medical information quickly and efficiently. And…

Sector _ Digital Identity Location _ Norway Founded _ 2017 AISCHA NAJJAR WAS A DOCTOR in Syria—until war turned her into a refugee. She found safety in the United States, but amid the chaos of her flight, her medical records vanished. She had little choice but to repeat medical school. Millions of displaced people and people in emerging markets face similar problems each year. Tedious and outdated processes prevent them from proving their skills and education, forcing them to miss out on jobs or needlessly repeat years of schooling. This is the problem that the Norway-based startup Diwala is trying to solve with blockchain technology. Working with nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions, Diwala seeks to address two major problems facing people in developing countries: identity theft and certification fraud. Born…

And you think politics in America are polarized. A man turns on supporters of Atiku Abubakar, a member of Nigeria’s People’s Democratic Party, at a final PDP rally in Ribadu Square on February 14, two days before Africa’s most populous country heads to the polls. President Muhammadu Buhari, of the All Progressives Congress party, is seeking to win a second four-year term against Abubakar, the former vice president, in a very close race.…

A WHITE MAN WALKS INTO A BAR. PERHAPS HE’S wearing a “Make America great again” cap or a Red Sox T-shirt or a crucifix. Maybe he has a tattoo sleeve or a nose ring or a yarmulke. Whatever the signifiers, you consciously, or subconsciously, have decided he is one of Us or one of Them. According to researchers humans are hard-wired for tribalism. Labeling is biological. Minorities have put up with it since America’s founding, of course, but, as Irshad Manji argues in her new book, Don’t Label Me (St. Martin’s), the “loathed white guy” isn’t the only one stuffing others into boxes now. Everyone is at it, even those who, like Manji, champion diversity. “Well before Trump,” says the author, “so-called progressives were labeling swaths of Americans as racists…

It would be hard to imagine a more revealing source of personal information than our own DNA. The 3 billion units of genetic information contained in each individual’s genome are a road map of ancestry, personality and potential ailments. As the cost of “sequencing” DNA has dropped, more and more patients are undergoing genetic testing. How will the medical industry use that data to further research and clinical practice while preserving the privacy of patients? David Yizhar, the founder and CEO of Israeli startup Geneyx, thinks blockchain technology could offer a solution. “We want to make genomic data available without putting people’s privacy at risk,” he tells Newsweek. “People need to be able to trust that it is secure and anonymous.” What are some of the ways blockchain could help…

Sector _ Energy and Finance Location _ Zug, Switzerland Founded _ 2017 WHAT DOES RENEWABLE ENERGY have to do with poverty and access to the financial system? Plenty, according to Veronica Garcia, who built BitLumens, a Swiss company that uses blockchain to help get people on the power grid, build their credit profiles and reduce carbon emissions. “WE PROMOTE ENERGY ACCESS AND FINANCIAL INCLUSION IN AREAS THAT ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE POWER GRID.” “We promote energy access and financial inclusion in areas that are not connected to the power grid,” Garcia says. “This is because there is a correlation between the areas that are not connected to the power grid and financial access.” The company aims to use block-chain to help build a decentralized power grid that would help…

Sector _ Supply Chain Location _ Hyderabad,India Founded _ 2016 ONE-THIRD OF THE WORLD’S food is lost in transit, or spoiled or destroyed because it is improperly stored or handled. This failure of the global food supply chain costs consumers nearly $500 billion a year, and it inspired Silicon Valley veteran Sid Chakravarthy (below) to move back to India to start StaTwig, a company founded on the idea that tracking waste in the supply chain will help reduce and perhaps eliminate it. StaTwig, incorporated in Singapore and India, marries blockchain technology with the internet of things, a network of smart devices with cameras and sensors, to monitor goods as they move through the supply chain. That data is then stored in block-chain, creating a permanent and indisputable record of failures…

An indigenous Mexican takes part in a ceremony of purification at the Zócalo Public Square on February 10. Indigenous people, who are concentrated largely in the poor states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, make up about 10 percent of the country’s population. Newly elected President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has pledged to give “special attention” to them. “It is a disgrace that our original communities live with oppression and racism, with poverty and marginalization,” he said in his inaugural address in December.…

A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, A flourishing city existed near what would become St. Louis. Between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants lived in homes and worshiped in temples with thatched roofs and walls. They supped on heady stimulants, worshipped female goddesses and charted the stars from an observatory that was the wooden equivalent of Stonehenge. Rising from the city’s center was a pyramid nearly 100 feet tall, the largest earthen structure in the New World. It was surrounded by a 50-acre public square and 100 earthen monuments. After prospering for about 250 years, the inhabitants vanished mysteriously around 1300 A.D. The remnants of the city (which can be viewed at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site near Collinsville, Illinois) have been subject to mythologizing and speculation since white settlers first came to the…

THE SPRAWLING MAE LA REFUGEE camp deep in the jungles of northwestern Thailand seems an unlikely place to find pioneers of a new digital identity technology. The first time Larry Dohrs visited the camp, the veteran refugee advocate, with his signature white mustache and oversized glasses, was struck by its primitive conditions and “Dickensian” decrepitude. Located 5 miles west of the Myanmar border, in the shadows of the majestic Dawna mountains, the camp was encircled by barbed wire. Ramshackle, two-story bamboo and thatch structures leaned precariously over the muddy, twisting alleyways, teaming with people—predominantly ethnic Karens who had fled violent persecution by their government. The impermanence of the refugee existence itself, as well as how heavily it seemed to weigh on the camp residents, drew Dohrs’s attention to the improbable…

LAST YEAR, SARA REYNOLDS FOUND herself among the brightest minds of her generation at a blockchain conference for students at the University of California, Berkeley. But when she looked around the auditorium, she noticed something: Nearly all the attendees were white men. Reynolds and her fellow female coders saw this as a call to action. They started She(256), a nonprofit dedicated to diversity in the burgeoning block-chain industry. (The name is a play on SHA-256, a secure hash algorithm in the cryptological community.) At first, the group organized conferences for like-minded women to congregate, network and solidify a community throughout the Bay Area. But the warm reception and growing interest told the co-founders that they had only scratched the surface. Their business has since grown to encompass a mentorship program,…