(Bloomberg) — At Mexico’s state-run oil company, skinnier waists mean bigger bonuses.

Under Petroleos Mexicanos’s new collective bargaining contract with its union, workers who meet certain body weight standards will receive a “health incentive” of 5,545.40 pesos ($287) a year. To qualify, they must have a body mass index, or BMI, of not more than 25 — or a maximum waist circumference of 90 centimeters (35 inches) for men and 80 centimeters (31 inches) for women. The so-called health bonus is a 4.6% increase from the last union contract.

The policy runs counter to recommendations by health experts, who warn that BMI and other bio-metric markers are influenced by genetics and environmental factors, and aren’t easy to control. “Employers mandating differential treatment of individuals based on BMI serve to institutionalize the already pervasive stigmatization of obese people,” according to one report from The Obesity Society in Maryland.

Pemex and its union did not immediately respond..

(KAMPALA, Uganda) — Researchers in Uganda have launched the largest-ever trial of the experimental Ebola vaccine that is expected to be deployed in neighboring Congo, where a deadly outbreak has killed over 1,800 people.

The trial of the Janssen Pharmaceuticals vaccine involves up to 800 people in the western district of Mbarara and is supported by Doctors without Borders and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Pontiano Kaleebu, a Ugandan researcher who leads the trial, said Friday that he regrets that the Janssen vaccine has not yet been deployed in Congo. The health minister there who stepped down last month had argued against its deployment, saying a second vaccine could create confusion on the ground.

Already more than 180,000 people in Congo’s yearlong outbreak have received an experimental but effective Merck vaccine, but health experts worry about the availability of doses as the virus now spreads in a major city, Goma, along the Rwanda border. The wife and 1-..

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed recent missile tests by North Korea and flattered the country’s leader as a friend with a “great and beautiful vision for his country,” as the U.S. tries to lure Kim Jong Un back to nuclear talks.

Trump’s series of three tweets — which took great pains to excuse the actions of a man he once dismissed as “Little Rocket Man” — shows just how much the president has riding on North Korea. Despite widespread skepticism that Kim will give up his prized nuclear weapons program, Trump regularly touts his personal diplomacy with Kim as a great success.

Trump tweeted that North Korea’s recent tests of short-range missiles weren’t part of the commitments he and Kim made at their historic June 2018 summit in Singapore, although he conceded they might be in violation of a U.N. resolution.

“There may be a United Nations violation, but Chairman Kim does not want to disappoint me with a violation of trust,” Trump tweeted. “There is far too ..

Many of the globe’s far northern regions have been experiencing extreme weather events over the past two months. Plumes of smoke have been picked up by satellites from wildfires across Alaska and Siberia and Greenland has experienced rapid ice loss as usually frigid regions have experienced heatwaves and record temperatures.

As the Arctic faces extreme weather events caused by climate change, the events could have ripple effects that accelerate temperature increases across the world, according to scientists and experts.

“The basic chemistry and the basic physics of how the atmosphere absorbs heat — there’s no path where you can imagine that the Arctic is going to start to cool off again,” says Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist and post doctoral fellow at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Cold air has to come from somewhere, cold air doesn’t just magically appear, and that somewhere has to be accounted for in the entire energy balanc..