German carmakers reach emissions-cutting deal

German carmakers have agreed with top politicians to cut harmful emissions by updating software in five million diesel vehicles.

New engine management software will improve emission filtering systems and cut toxic nitrogen oxide levels by 25-30%, the industry association VDA said.

The industry is under pressure since a diesel emissions scandal exposed cheating to manipulate test readings.

The deal was struck at a summit with top politicians in Berlin.

It was approved in Berlin by Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen and Opel, VDA said in a statement (in German).

Car firms are a crucial part of the German economy, providing more than 800,000 jobs.

Pressure to cut emissions increased last week, when a court in Stuttgart upheld a proposal to ban older diesel cars from the city.

It is the home city of Mercedes and Porsche, and one of Germany's pollution hotspots.

'Stop-gap measure'

As the summit got under way, Greenpeace environmental activists unfurled a banner on the roof of the transport ministry saying "Welcome to Fort NOx [nitrogen oxide]".

The VDA said the software updates would be free for motorists and would be just as effective, in cutting NOx levels, as any bans on diesel cars in cities.

The diesel cars targeted will be those in the EU's Euro-5 category for car emissions (for new registrations from 1 January 2011) and some in the Euro-6 category (for new registrations from 1 September 2015).

Of the five million cars covered by the agreement, 2.5 million are Volkwagens.

BMW says the offer will cover 225,000 of its cars in the Euro-5 category.

BMW will also give a discount of up to €2,000 (£1,792; $2,373) to drivers who exchange an old Euro-4 category BMW when they buy a new diesel BMW, electric BMW or Mini. Ford has made a similar offer.

The VDA stressed that the software update would not reduce a car's efficiency or durability.

Electric future

Greg Archer of the lobby group Transport and Environment called the software upgrade a "welcome stop-gap measure" but said it was "not a long-term solution to the air pollution crisis".

The BBC's Jenny Hill in Berlin says air pollution now regularly exceeds legal limits in many German cities. It is a headache for the mighty automotive industry and for German politicians, ahead of a 24 September general election.

But Germany is unlikely to commit to ending production of combustion-engine vehicles any time soon, our correspondent says.

France and the UK plan to ban sales of fossil-fuel vehicles from 2040.

But switching to a future of electric vehicles will be hugely expensive - not least because of the need for charging points everywhere.

'Cash Me Outside' teen sentenced to five years probation

DELRAY BEACH -- In an emotional hearing, the local teenager whose viral catchphrase -- "Cash Me Ousside, How Bow Dat?" -- has brought her internet fame was placed on probation for five years.

Danielle Bregoli, a 14-year-old from Boynton Beach who appeared on daytime talk show "Dr. Phil" last year, plead guilty June 28 to charges of grand theft, grand theft auto, possession of marijuana and filing a false report. She was sentenced in Palm Beach County Court in Delray Beach.

Bregoli, at the center of a contentious custody battle between her mother and father, broke into tears in the courtroom as her father read a prepared statement to the judge, describing Bregoli's new-found fame as exploitation.

"I'm afraid of what she's being pushed into and who's profiting from it," said Bregoli's father, Ira Peskowitz. He asked that Bregoli's probation be carried out in Palm Beach County, where he works as a sheriff's deputy.

"She needs to be here in Palm Beach County," Peskowitz told the judge. "She needs to be taken away from this toxic environment."

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Lou Delgado allowed the teen to carry out her probation in California, where she has been living for the past few months, her mother and attorney said in the courtroom.

That decision, said Peskowitz's attorney Robert Shalhoub, was disappointing to Peskowitz.

"How are you going to have the mother and father involved in therapy with the child, when two-thirds of that equation is not local?" Shalhoub said following the hearing.

The conditions of Bregoli's probation include a 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, 100 hours of community service and attending school full time.

The judge also ordered Bregoli to take courses in sexual education, domestic violence and anti-theft.

Bregoli has "significantly changed" in the past year, a representative from the Juvenile Department of Justice said. Her grades and behavior have improved, and she twice cleared state-issued drug tests, one as recently as two weeks ago.

Following the television appearance that thrust her into fame, Bregoli spent time at Turn-About Ranch, a treatment program in Utah for troubled teens.

Her time at the ranch helped her build a healthy relationship with her mother, Bregoli said in court.

"It gives you time to think about what you did, why your parents sent you there," she said of her time at Turn-About Ranch.

Her mother, Barbara Ann Bregoli, added: "She did a lot of soul-searching at that ranch."

Bregoli's sentence stems from four separate arrests, the most recent of which happened in April after her time at Turn-About Ranch. She was found in a car with marijuana, according to the state attorney's office.

"I was with a friend I shouldn't have been with, a friend from my past ... " Bregoli said. "I regret it very much."

On three separate occasions last year, Bregoli allegedly stole her mother's purse, stole her mother's car and called the police to falsely report that her mother had been using heroin, according to the state attorney's office.

The false police report was filed in May 2016 when Bregoli reported a domestic battery involving her mother. When investigators arrived, the teen accused her mother of using drugs and pointed to powdered sugar scattered on a bathroom counter, describing it as heroin.

The teen admitted that the report was false.

Two additional charges were dismissed by the state attorney's office in June.

Yemen conflict: Cholera risk for more than a million children

More than a million children in Yemen are at high risk of dying from cholera, says Save the Children.

The charity warns that the children are severely malnourished, and living in some of the areas of the country worst hit by the disease.

The number of people infected with the disease during the country's civil war has already reached more than 430,000.

Malnourished children are at least three times more likely to die if they are infected with cholera.

It is because their immune systems are weakened and they become less capable of fighting off the water-borne disease.

Out of the million severely malnourished children under five living in Yemen's cholera hotspots, the charity says 200,000 are at imminent risk of starving to death.

More than 1,900 people have died of the disease since April, a third of them were under 15 years old.

Cholera is easy to treat, but with two years of war destroying much of the health system, and continued restrictions on urgently needed medical and food supplies, the charity says Yemen's children are "trapped in a cycle of starvation and sickness".

Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children's country director for Yemen, said: "The tragedy is both malnutrition and cholera are easily treatable if you have access to basic healthcare.

"But hospitals and clinics have been destroyed, government health workers haven't been paid for almost a year, and the delivery of vital aid is being obstructed."

The warning comes as a senior UN official in the country described the situation in Yemen as "very bleak" with "no end in sight".

The UN says 70% of the population - about 20 million people - are in need of humanitarian aid and 60% do not know where their next meal is coming from.

Auke Lootsma from the UN Development Programme said the situation was like a bus "racing towards the edge of a cliff."

"Historically, Yemen has been one of the poorest Arab nations, if not the poorest, with poverty and corruption, poor governance and poor infrastructure. The war has simply made it much worse," Mr Lootsma said.

Human embryos edited to stop disease

Scientists have, for the first time, successfully freed embryos of a piece of faulty DNA that causes deadly heart disease to run in families.

It potentially opens the door to preventing 10,000 disorders that are passed down the generations.

The US and South Korean team allowed the embryos to develop for five days before stopping the experiment.

The study hints at the future of medicine, but also provokes deep questions about what is morally right.

Science is going through a golden age in editing DNA thanks to a new technology called Crispr, named breakthrough of the year in just 2015.

Its applications in medicine are vast and include the idea of wiping out genetic faults that cause diseases from cystic fibrosis to breast cancer.

Heart stopper

US teams at Oregon Health and Science University and the Salk Institute along with the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea focused on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

The disorder is common, affecting one in every 500 people, and can lead to the heart suddenly stopping beating.

It is caused by an error in a single gene (an instruction in the DNA), and anyone carrying it has a 50-50 chance of passing it on to their children.

In the study, described in the journal Nature, the genetic repair happened during conception.

Sperm from a man with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was injected into healthy donated eggs alongside Crispr technology to correct the defect.

It did not work all the time, but 72% of embryos were free from disease-causing mutations.

Eternal benefit

Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a key figure in the research team, said: "Every generation on would carry this repair because we've removed the disease-causing gene variant from that family's lineage.

"By using this technique, it's possible to reduce the burden of this heritable disease on the family and eventually the human population."

There have been multiple attempts before, including, in 2015, teams in China using Crispr-technology to correct defects that lead to blood disorders.

But they could not correct every cell, so the embryo was a "mosaic" of healthy and diseased cells.

Their approach also led to other parts of the genetic code becoming mutated.

Those technical obstacles have been overcome in the latest research.

However, this is not about to become routine practice.

The biggest question is one of safety, and that can be answered only by far more extensive research.

There are also questions about when it would be worth doing - embryos can already be screened for disease through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

However, there are about 10,000 genetic disorders that are caused by a single mutation and could, in theory, be repaired with the same technology.

Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Francis Crick Institute, told the BBC: "A method of being able to avoid having affected children passing on the affected gene could be really very important for those families.

"In terms of when, definitely not yet. It's going to be quite a while before we know that it's going to be safe."

Nicole Mowbray lives with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and has a defibrillator implanted in her chest in case her heart stops.

But she is unsure whether she would ever consider gene editing: "I wouldn't want to pass on something that caused my child to have a limited or painful life.

"That does come to the front of my mind when I think about having children.

"But I wouldn't want to create the 'perfect' child, I feel like my condition makes me, me."

Ethical?

Darren Griffin, a professor of genetics at the University of Kent, said: "Perhaps the biggest question, and probably the one that will be debated the most, is whether we should be physically altering the genes of an IVF embryo at all.

"This is not a straightforward question... equally, the debate on how morally acceptable it is not to act when we have the technology to prevent these life-threatening diseases must also come into play."

The study has already been condemned by Dr David King, from the campaign group Human Genetics Alert, which described the research as "irresponsible" and a "race for first genetically modified baby".

Dr Yalda Jamshidi, a reader in genomic medicine at St George's University of London, said: "The study is the first to show successful and efficient correction of a disease-causing mutation in early stage human embryos with gene editing.

"Whilst we are just beginning to understand the complexity of genetic disease, gene-editing will likely become acceptable when its potential benefits, both to individuals and to the broader society, exceeds its risks."

The method does not currently fuel concerns about the extreme end of "designer babies" engineered to have new advantageous traits.

The way Crispr is designed should lead to a new piece of engineered DNA being inserted into the genetic code.

However, in a complete surprise to the researchers, this did not happen.

Instead, Crispr damaged the mutated gene in the father's sperm, leading to a healthy version being copied over from the mother's egg.

This means the technology, for now, works only when there is a healthy version from one of the parents.

Prof Lovell-Badge added: "The possibility of producing designer babies, which is unjustified in any case, is now even further away."

Trump Administration Sets Up Inquiry Into Discrimination of White College Students

The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minorities to university campuses.

Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan and George Bush administrations who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial.

“The civil rights laws were deliberately written to protect everyone from discrimination, and it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well,” he said.

But Kristen Clarke, the president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do.

“This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

The Justice Department declined to provide more details about its plans or to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.

“The Department of Justice does not discuss personnel matters, so we’ll decline comment,” said Devin O’Malley, a department spokesman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor among many in a “holistic” evaluation, while rejecting blunt racial quotas or race-based point systems. But what that permits in actual practice by universities — public ones as well as private ones that receive federal funding — is often murky.

Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.

He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn.

Some of that data, he added, could be available through the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court most recently addressed affirmative action admissions policies in a 2016 case, voting 4 to 3 to uphold a race-conscious program at the University of Texas at Austin. But there are several pending lawsuits challenging such practices at other high-profile institutions, including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The Justice Department has not taken a position in those cases.

The pending start of the affirmative action project — division lawyers who want to work on it must submit their resumes by Aug. 9, the announcement said — joins a series of changes involving civil rights law since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

In a lawsuit challenging Texas’ strict voter identification law, the Justice Department switched its position, dropping the claim that the law was intentionally discriminatory and later declaring that the law has been fixed. Mr. Sessions has also made clear he is not interested in using consent decrees to impose reforms on troubled police departments and has initiated a sweeping review of existing agreements.

Last week, the Justice Department, without being asked, filed a brief in a private employment discrimination lawsuit. It urged an appeals court not to interpret the ban on sex-based discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation. The Obama administration had shied from taking a stand on that question.

Vanita Gupta, who ran the civil rights division in the Obama administration’s second term and is now president of the liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted that the briefs in the Texas voter identification and gay-rights cases were signed only by Trump administration political appointees, not career officials, just as the affirmative action project will apparently be run directly by the division’s front office.

“The fact that the position is in the political front office, and not in the career section that enforces antidiscrimination laws for education, suggests that this person will be carrying out an agenda aimed at undermining diversity in higher education without needing to say it,” Ms. Gupta said.

The civil rights division has been a recurring culture-war battleground as it passed between Democratic and Republican administrations.

During the administration of George W. Bush, its overseers violated Civil Service hiring laws, an inspector general found, by filling its career ranks with conservatives who often had scant experience in civil rights law. At the same time, it brought fewer cases alleging systematic discrimination against minorities and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites, like a 2006 lawsuit forcing Southern Illinois University to stop reserving certain fellowship programs for women or members of underrepresented racial groups.

In 2009, the Obama administration vowed to revitalize the agency and hired career officials who brought in many new lawyers with experience working for traditional, liberal-leaning civil-rights organizations.

How Birth Control Might Protect You From Depression Later in Life

Women are at increased risk for depression during periods of hormonal fluctuation, such as pregnancy, after childbirth, and at the end of their childbearing years. Now, a new study suggests that women exposed to more estrogen over their lifetime—including those who use hormonal birth control for many years—may be somewhat protected from that increased risk during and after menopause.

The study, published in the journal Menopause, may help explain why some women experience mood changes during these transitions while others breeze through, seemingly unaffected, say the study authors. Previous studies have suggested that reproductive hormones play a role in depression risk, but this is the first to look at specific sources of those hormones over time.

To do so, researchers analyzed data from 1,300 premenopausal women, ages 42 to 52 at the study’s start, who were followed for about 10 years. The women answered questions about their birth control use, the number of pregnancies they had, whether they breastfed, and when they first got their periods—all things that would influence the amount of estradiol (a form of estrogen) they were exposed to over the years.

Other studies have suggested that a woman’s lifetime estrogen exposure may be tied to various health outcomes later in life, including cognitive ability, bone fractures, and breast cancer risk. But estrogen is also involved in the production and metabolism of serotonin, a brain chemical that regulates mood—so the researchers thought it might also be linked to depression risk, as well.

Their hunch was right. Women who got their periods early and went through menopause late—meaning that they had more exposure to estrogen over their lifetimes—were less likely to report depressive symptoms during the transition to menopause and for up to 10 years after.

For each additional year between the start of menstruation and the onset of menopause, the women’s odds of depression decreased by 15%. That was true even when the researchers controlled for other potential risk factors, including demographics, behavioral and health conditions, and whether or not a woman experienced menopause side effects like hot flashes and night sweats.

Birth control use, which tends to raise a woman’s estrogen levels, was also protective: Longer use—measured as 5 or more years in the study—was associated with reduced depression risk. However, a woman’s history of pregnancies (which raise estrogen) and breastfeeding (which lower estrogen) had no association.

Lead author Wendy Marsh, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, says it’s not clear why some of these factors would affect depression risk and others would not. But she points out that a woman’s hormone levels can be affected by many other things—both within her body and in her external environment—and that more research is needed to determine how activities like breastfeeding or taking birth control pills really do affect those fluctuations. “I think a good deal of that remains a mystery,” she says.

The study authors also note that participants were not asked about oral contraceptive use beyond five years, while in reality many women stay on birth control pills for much longer than that. Because of this limitation, they say, their analysis may underestimate the pill’s protective power against depression later in life.

Still, because the study was observational, it could not show a cause-and-effect link between estrogen exposure and reduced depression risk. And while a potential reduction in depression odds may be one benefit of birth control, Dr. Marsh says women shouldn’t be making mental- or reproductive-health decisions based on it.

“I think if there’s concern about the risk of depression, there are clearer ways of staying in a good mood and taking care of one’s mental health,” she says. “Taking birth control wouldn’t be my first choice for preventing or treating depression.

Other studies have also linked birth control pills to worse mood and quality of life, at least for some women. Dr. Marsh says these seemingly conflicting findings show the relationship between birth control and mood is complex, and still not well understood. “Maybe the women who stayed on birth control are the ones who didn’t have the negative effects, and so the reduced depression risk is self-selecting—we don’t really know,” she says.

Dr. Marsh also stresses that, even though hormonal transitions do raise the risk of depression, it’s still not something that most women experience during these times. “Most women do not get depressed during menopause,” she says. “But we’re delighted to be able to contribute to the understanding of why that increased risk does exist, and who it affects the most.”

I cut this out of my diet to lose weight and, no, it's not carbs

I've always believed that things like coconut oil and olive oil were part of a healthy diet. I ate them regularly with just about every meal - I cooked with olive oil, spread coconut oil on my toast, and drizzled avocado oil on my hummus. A few months ago, though, I learned that oil is technically not part of a whole foods, plant-based diet. I was shocked to learn that there was virtually no nutritional value to the oils that we're so used to eating on a daily basis. 

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT, a plant-based dietician and health and fitness expert, confirmed that this is true. "Oils are a processed food," Hever told POPSUGAR. "Basically, the fat is stripped out of the intact food (be it an olive, coconut, or avocado), leaving behind the fiber and many other nutrients." 

Hever also reminded us that oil "contains 120 calories per tablespoon, almost 2000 calories per cup!" But even worse than that, there isn't any satiating fiber in oil, so eating oil regularly is an easy way to consume way more calories than your body needs - and that can quickly lead to weight gain.

This was hard for me to believe at first, but I decided to go cold turkey and cut out all oil from my diet. It was strange at the beginning. I thought I wouldn't be able to roast vegetables or even sauté an onion. You'd be surprised, though, to find that lots of food releases its own natural water or oil, so you don't even need something like olive oil to cook most things. For example, onion naturally contains oil that's responsible for its smell and taste, and you can see it being slightly released when you sauté it in a pan with nothing else. Besides, if I felt like some foods were sticking too much to the pan while I was cooking, I would simply add a little bit of water. 

After two months of eating no oil at home and very little oil while eating out, I noticed my belly was a bit flatter than it was before. It was a small change, but it was a gradual one that became more noticeable over time.

That being said, healthy fats are an important part of our diet, and Hever says we shouldn't ignore them completely. "The best food sources of healthy, disease-fighting fats are nuts and seeds," she told POPSUGAR. "We only need about 1 to 2 ounces a day to meet our essential fatty acid requirements." You can also opt in for some avocado in your dish rather than cooking with oil.

I upped my intake of avocado after I gave up oil, while also logging in all my food to the macros app on my phone to make sure I was getting enough healthy fats. Between avocado, almonds, and chia and flaxseeds, I was getting more than enough of what I needed. 

"Because of their high caloric density, I recommend minimizing intake of oils," Hever told POPSUGAR. It could save you a lot of empty calories that you really don't need.