Features

PARIS — Maiwenn Colleaux was 14 when she first started getting migraines, and they immediately turned her life upside down.

“When I had an attack, I could no longer go out, my social life stopped, I couldn’t go to school,” said Maiwenn, who is now 18.

“Inevitably you feel different to the other children, who didn’t understand my suffering and thought I just had a simple headache,” she recently told a press conference in France.

Her story is one of many. Migraines affect between five to 15 per cent of children, according to international research, but the chronic condition is often overlooked or misdiagnosed.

Anne Donnet, a neurologist at France’s Marseille University Hospital Timone, said that child migraines are “poorly understood and little discussed in the medical world”.

In adults, migraines strike one in every five women and one in every 15 men.

But for children, it “affects as many boys as girls before puberty”, Donnet told the press conference, which was held by the French organisation La Voix des Migraineux (the voice of people with migraines). 

Migraines can start becoming frequent in girls from the start of their first menstrual cycle.

However the symptoms are often mistaken for digestive disorders. 

“The clinical presentation of the condition is one of the difficulties in identifying migraines in children, because the symptoms are sometimes very different from what adults experience,” Donnet said. 

‘Tried everything’

Maiwenn’s mother Karine Colleaux said it was only “because I was a migraine sufferer myself that I was able to diagnose my daughter’s illness”.

She added that migraines in children often manifest as “paleness and stomach aches”.

Migraines can be just as debilitating for children as for adults.

Half of children with the condition get at least one episode per month and 78 per cent have moderate to severe attacks, according to La Voix des Migraineux. 

Forty per cent have nausea or vomiting while 33 per cent have abdominal pain.

Justine Avez-Couturier, a paediatric neurologist at France’s Lille University Hospital, told AFP that “the majority of patients we see at consultation arrive at around 10 years old — but the headaches often started before then”.

A diagnosis often becomes particularly important because the migraines affect the child’s schoolwork.

“We cannot eradicate migraines but we can reduce their frequency and intensity,” Avez-Couturier said.

She emphasised that a healthy lifestyle, including a good diet, plenty of sleep and physical activity, is “particularly crucial for children and adolescents with migraines”.

Common treatments include painkillers such as paracetamol and ibuprofen. 

For more serious cases, triptans are prescribed, a medicine that makes the blood vessels around the brain contract, which is thought to counteract what causes migraines, according to Britain’s National Health Service.

“Writing down episodes in a diary, to identify what triggers them, can also help,” Avez-Couturier said.

Migraines can be triggered by many factors, but stress and fatigue are among the main culprits.

Maiwenn said she “tried everything” — including hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing and even horseback riding therapy — but nothing could stop the migraines.

“These methods would soothe me at the time but did not work in the long term,” she said.

“When I have an episode, I don’t take anything — I just wait for it to pass.”

But hope may lay ahead — only 40 per cent of children who suffer migraines see them persist into adulthood.

“Some children will have their migraines become less severe headaches,” Donnet said.

Hardly the first affordable and compact yet capable SUV, the Renault Duster nevertheless proved hugely popular in world markets, since it first launched in 2010 under the Dacia brand, with 2.45-million first generation models sold.

Sold in Middle East markets under the Renault group’s French parent brand, the Duster bridged the gap between ruggedly dedicated small SUVs like the Lada Niva and Suzuki Jimny at one end, and both tough high-riding small saloons and more fashionable car-like crossovers at the other end of the market.

Fresh and refined

Succeeded by a fresher and more refined second generation model in 2018, the Duster continues to be offered in either 2-litre 4x4 or 1.6-litre front-drive variants, with the former more obviously leaning into the small SUV market, while the latter is conceptually closer to the style-led crossover market. That said, the Duster offer plenty by way of practicality, space, comfort and value for money, with even the front-drive version delivers surprisingly good — albeit limited — light off-road ability that exceeds most crossover drivers’ needs and expectations. 

An attainable, economical, practical and popular small SUV in both developing and developed markets, the first generation Duster accounted for 20 per cent of Renault’s Middle East sales and 25 per cent of Dacia’s global sales. Built on same basic mechanicals and platform, the second generation Duster retains the original’s character, utility and “just right” engineering approach. Fresher, more flowing, better aesthetically integrated and more assertive, the second generation Duster’s fresher design comes in tandem with improved driving dynamics, tech upgrades and a more refined cabin makeover.

Economical and evolutionary

Compact and economical but comfortable and spacious for daily family motoring, the thoughtfully well-designed new Duster improves on its predecessor’s recipe. Similarly sized yet aesthetically evolutionary, it features slimmer headlights with a sharper signature, more dynamic grille design and more liberal use of up-market chrome elements. More ruggedly flavoured with its higher waistline, more rakishly angled A-pillars and better defined wheel-arches and surfacing, it also incorporates better integrated roof rails, new alloy wheels, more prominent rear skid plate and sportingly stylish square crosshair rear lights.

Offered in either range-topping 133BHP 2-litre or entry-level 1.6-litre front-drive version, the significantly lighter latter variant’s familiar engine develops 113BHP at 5,500rpm and 115lb/ft torque at 4,000rpm. A tried and true engine, the Duster’s natuaral1y-aspirated 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine can, however, hardly be described as powerful. It is nevertheless progressive in delivery, refined and provides adequate response and versatility, as mated to a continuously variable transmission (CVT) system with its fine-ratio alterations, which well-exploit available output for efficiency, and performance when driven with a heavy right foot.

Smooth and tidy

Carrying its sub-1,300kg mass through the 0-100km/h benchmark in 13.2-seconds and onto a 161km/h maximum, the Duster returns comparatively frugal 6.9l/100km combined cycle fuel efficiency. If more engaging with a traditional manual gearbox as its predecessor, the new entry-level Duster’s CVT’s broader ratio range allows for better on the move flexibility. However, one still needs to carefully time overtaking manoeuvres, especially on steep inclines, where more power would be welcome. The Duster’s smooth CVT can meanwhile mimic a traditional gearbox, with six pre-set manual mode ratios.

Well able to accommodate more power than available, the Duster is adept through winding roads, even with the front-drive model’s less sophisticated torsion beam suspension, in lieu of the 4x4 version’s multilink design. Tidy turning into corners with its quicker, more accurate and 35 per cent lighter new electric-assisted steering, the Duster’s driving dynamics are not too unlike a family hatchback, albeit longer and not quite as nimble. That said, the new Duster is agile and eager, for an SUV, especially when turning in sharp and early.

Comfortably capable

Reassuringly grippy at the rear, the new Duster however seems slightly better balanced and agile, with less understeer bias. Well-absorbing all but the sharpest bumps and potholes, it fluently dispatches most imperfections in its stride. If not as capable as its 4x4 sister, the nimble and manoeuvrable front-drive Duster nevertheless avails itself surprisingly well on moderately demanding pebbly, loose, narrow and winding off-road routes. Comfortably pliant with 215/65R16 tyres, it also benefits from generous 210mm ground clearance, and 21° approach, 30° break-over and 34° departure angles.

Comfortable, refined and settled over imperfections, the Duster is stable at speed, and well-refined from noise, vibration and harshness. Ergonomically and aesthetically improved, it provides a better driving position, seat cushioning and lateral support, and seat height and steering adjustability. Spacious in front and rear, the Duster accommodates 478-litres of cargo, which expands to 1623-litres when split rear seats are folded. Airy inside with good visibility and improved equipment levels, it features rear parking sensors, electronic hill descent assistance, all-round three-point seatbelts, Isofix child seat latches and more.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Engine: 1.6-litre, transverse 4-cylinders
• Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC
• Bore x stroke: 78 x 83.6mm 
• Gearbox: Continually variable transmission (CVT), front-wheel-drive
• Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 113 (115) [84] @5,500rpm
• Specific power: 71BHP/litre
• Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 115 (156) @4,000rpm
• Specific torque: 97.6Nm/litre
• 0-100km/h: 13.2-seconds
• Top speed: 161km/h
• Fuel consumption, extra-urban/urban/combined: 5.8-/8.8-/
• 6.9-litres/100km
• CO2 emissions, combined: 160g/km
• Fuel capacity: 50-litres
• Length: 4,341mm
• Width: 1,804mm
• Height: 1,693mm
• Wheelbase: 2,674mm
• Overhang, F/R: 842/826mm
• Ground clearance: 210mm
• Approach/break-over/departure angles: 21°/30° /34°
• Wading depth: 350mm
• Cargo volume, min/max: 467-/1623-litres
• Cabin width, F/R: 1,403/1,416mm
• Kerb weight: 1,235-1,294kg
• Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts, anti-roll bar/torsion beam, coil springs
• Steering: Electric-assisted rack and pinion
• Turning circle: 10.14-metres
• Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs/drums
• Tyres: 215/65R16

Dr Tareq Rasheed
International Consultant and Trainer

Do you inspire your team members at work and your family members at home to become the best version of themselves? Value-based leaders ignite the potential of others.

The main strategic difference between management and leadership is that management is result and goal-oriented, while leadership is human and value-oriented. Once leaders are committed to values, they become role models who accelerate their followers’ performance and achievement.

What is Values-Based Leadership?

Values-Based Leadership (VBL) forms the base for leaders to motivate, engage and empower others in their workplaces, families and communities. Such leaders draw on their own and followers’ values for direction, inspiration and motivation. Studies have proven that a values-based approach can significantly impact performance.

What are values?

Values consist of beliefs and assumptions about how things should be or how people should behave. Our values guide our behaviours and decision-making, which is why we must consider how we lead our families, organisations and companies. The foundation of values is built on three pillars:

•Principles — guiding rules that constitute our inner beliefs and serve as our compass in personal and professional spheres

•References — the first reference of values is parents and then schooling. Because of this, Napoleon Bonaparte, the first emperor of France, said his famous quote: “Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilised, educated nation.” Elementary school students in Japan, Singapore and Finland are taught ethics in the curriculum and are well known as top-performing countries. Leaders in these countries have recognised the importance of focusing on values and applying Value-Based Leadership. Some values are universal, such as fairness, while others depend on culture or society. Values can be specific to a field of speciality or industry; for example, loyalty and duty may be values highly regarded in military service, while empathy and compassion are fundamental to healthcare. 

•Attitudes — once values are set and taught, they should be reflected in people’s attitudes. Just notice how babies tend to act like their parents because they learn by mirroring. Look at elementary schools where students reflect in their attitudes what has been gained from their teachers. Then, society starts reflecting these values in each field of speciality Value-Based leadership is the first and most important tool for society. Failure to achieve a set of values in the corporate world leads to business failure if values are merely words in a strategic plan and do not transfer to attitudes and practices

VBL in action

Let’s look at the medical and health sectors, where one of the highly needed values is care. Imagine two hospitals that have announced the value of care in their strategic plan and on their websites. When a patient goes to the first hospital, she is happy to read on the screen that care is their value. This value is reflected in everyone’s attitude, from janitors to nurses and doctors, and even post-care and follow-up. Thus, business sustainability is maintained through the transformation of values into actions and attitudes among all employees, underlying the importance of VBL.

The other hospital has the same written value of care, but the patient enters the hospital faced with dirty floors, careless employees and aggressive attitudes from the nurses and doctors. The result is failure, for sure. Although both hospitals have the same written value, one succeeds while the other fails to transform a written value into action.

Values are the secret for any organisation, company, community or individual to sustain results and achieve business continuity. 

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

WASHINGTON — Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.

But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.

A new study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science sets out to provide a convincing answer.

Between 100-200 million years ago, an icy moon they named Chrysalis broke up after getting a little too close to the gas giant, they conclude.

While most of it made impact with Saturn, its remaining fragments broke into small icy chunks that form the planet’s signature rings.

“It’s nice to find a plausible explanation,” Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, told AFP.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, was formed four and a half billion years ago, at the beginning of the solar system. 

But a few decades ago, scientists suggested that Saturn’s rings appeared much later: only about 100 million years ago.

The hypothesis was reinforced by observations made by the Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

“But because no one could think of a way to make the rings 100 million years ago, some people have been questioning the reasoning that led to that deduction,” said Wisdom.

By constructing complex mathematical models, Wisdom and colleagues found an explanation that both justified the timeline, and allowed them to better understand another characteristic of the planet, its tilt.

Saturn has a 26.7 degree tilt. Being a gas giant, it would have been expected that the process of accumulating matter that led to its formation would have prevented tilt.

Gravitational interactions

Scientists recently discovered that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 83 moons, is migrating away from the planet, at a rate of 11 centimetres a year.

This changes the rate at which Saturn’s axis of tilt loops around the vertical — the technical term is “precession”. Think of a spinning top drawing circles. 

Around a billion years ago, this wobble frequency came into sync with Neptune’s wobbly orbit, creating a powerful gravitational interaction called “resonance”. 

In order to maintain this lock, as Titan kept moving out, Saturn had to tilt, scientists argued.

But that explanation hinged on knowing how mass was distributed in the planet’s interior, since the tilt would have behaved differently if it were concentrated more at its surface or the core.

In the new study, Wisdom and colleagues modelled the planet’s interior using gravitational data gathered by Cassini during its close approach “Grand Finale”, its last act before plunging into Saturn’s depths.

The model they generated found Saturn is now slightly out of sync with Neptune, which necessitated a new explanation — an event powerful enough to cause the drastic disruption.

Working through the mathematics, they found a lost moon fit the bill.

“It’s pulled apart into a bunch of pieces and those pieces subsequently get pulled apart even more, and gradually rolls into the rings.”

The missing Moon was baptised Chrysalis by MIT’s Wisdom, likening the emergence of Saturn’s rings to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

The team thinks Chrysalis was a bit smaller than our own Moon, and about the size of another Saturn satellite, Iapetus, which is made entirely of water ice.

“So it’s plausible to hypothesise that Chrysalis is also made of water ice, and that’s what it needs to make the rings, because the rings are almost pure water.

Asked whether he felt the mystery of Saturn’s rings stood solved, Wisdom replied, soberly, “We’ve made a good contribution.” 

The Saturn satellite system still holds “a variety of mysteries,” he added.

PARIS — Jean-Luc Godard — who has died at 91 — was the rebel spirit who drove the French New Wave, firing out a volley of films in the 1960s that rewrote the rules of cinema.

Between “Breathless” (“A Bout de Souffle”) in 1960 and the student protests of 1968, Godard exhilarated audiences as he shook the film world with his technical innovations and savage, occasionally lyrical, satires.

Sometimes working on two movies at the same time, he ranged over crime, politics and prostitution in a burst of creative energy that would inspire two generations of directors.

Godard’s witty aphorisms like “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end — but not necessarily in that order”, became lodestars for filmmakers from Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.

But the flame that had burned so bright in the 1960s veered off into revolutionary politics and Maoist obscurantism in the 1970s, and he came to be seen almost as a tragicomic figure.

Godard spent several years experimenting with video before returning to commercial filmmaking — of a kind — in 1979. 

Modern prophet

But the freshness was gone and critics accused him of becoming too elliptical, with some branding his early films misogynist.

Yet the increasingly reclusive Godard persevered down his singular path, before reinventing himself in his later years as a gnomic cigar-chomping prophet.

He shot his critically acclaimed “Film Socialisme” on board the Costa Concordia cruise ship in 2009, declaring that capitalism was heading for the rocks. When the ship ran aground three years later, it wasn’t just his small band of disciples who treated him as a visionary.

Born in Paris into a well-to-do Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930, Godard was lucky enough to spend World War II at Nyons in neutral Switzerland, returning to the French capital in 1949 to study ethnology at the Sorbonne.

But his real education was in the little cinemas of the Latin Quarter where he first ran into Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, all future luminaries of the French cinema.

He fell in love with American action cinema and began writing criticism under the pseudonym “Hans Lucas” with Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer for small magazines like the “Cahiers du Cinema”, where they plotted to revolutionise the art.

After a failed attempt to make his first film in America, he went to work on a dam in Switzerland and saved enough money to make a film about it, “Operation Concrete” (1954).

It helped lay the foundation for his rapid ascent that would see him hailed as the leader of the French New Wave when “Breathless” was released in 1960. 

‘The Picasso of cinema’

That swaggering story of a small-time crook on the run who romances a young American in Paris was a major landmark in French cinema, heralding the arrival of a generation of irreverent young film-makers determined to break with the past.

So big was its impact that Truffaut called Godard cinema’s Picasso, someone who had “sown chaos... and made everything possible”. As often with Godard, their friendship later turned sour, with Truffaut branding him a “shit” after the pair fell out in 1973.

By shooting on the fly in outdoor locations and improvising endlessly, Godard rewrote the rulebook and helped popularise the idea of the director as “auteur”, the creative force behind everything on the screen.

“Breathless” also gave the first big break to Jean-Paul Belmondo, who would later star in Godard’s masterpiece and most personal film “Pierrot le Fou” (1965), which explored the pain of his break-up with the Danish actress Anna Karina.

From the start, Godard’s career was dogged by controversy. “Le Petit Soldat” (1960), with its references to the Algerian war, was banned by the French authorities for three years and “Une Femme Mariee” (A married woman, 1964) had its title changed from “La Femme Mariee” by censors concerned that its adulterous heroine might be taken for the typical French wife.

But after “Weekend” (1967), a gory examination of the obsession with cars scattered with surrealistic traffic accidents, his work too often appeared self-indulgent.

Indeed, Godard became something of an intellectual oddity, emerging every few years from his bolthole in Rolle on the shores of Lake Geneva to lob a verbal grenade or two.

It was this tragic, cartoonish Godard on the slide who features in “Godard Mon Amour”, the 2017 comedy about him by Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning maker of “The Artist”.

But by then Godard was having the last laugh, with his reputation somewhat restored by a series of low-budget metaphorical films that questioned our image-saturated world. 

“Film is over”, he told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2011, recanting his oft-quoted maxim that “photography is truth, and the cinema is truth 24 times per second”. 

“With mobile phones, everyone is now an auteur,” he said.

PARIS — The drummers puff out their chests, let out a guttural yell, then step up to their kits and furiously pound out their signature beat so that everyone within earshot can tell who is playing.

The drum kit is the giant gnarled root of a tree in the Ugandan rainforest — and the drummer is a chimpanzee. 

A recently published study found that not only do chimpanzees have their own styles — some preferring straightforward rock beats while others groove to more freeform jazz — they can also hide their signature sound if they do not want to reveal their location.

The researchers followed the Waibira chimpanzee group in western Uganda’s Budongo Forest, recording the drum sessions of seven male chimps and analysing the intervals between beats. 

The chimps mostly use their feet, but also their hands to make the sound, which carries more than a kilometre through the dense rainforest. 

The drumming serves as a kind of social media, allowing travelling chimpanzees to communicate with each other, said Vesta Eleuteri, the lead author of the study published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

The PhD student said that after just a few weeks in the rainforest she was able to recognise exactly who was drumming.

“Tristan — the John Bonham of the forest — makes very fast drums with many evenly separated beats,” she said, referring to the legendarily hard-hitting drummer of rock band Led Zeppelin.

Tristan’s drumming “is so fast that you can barely see his hands”, Eleuteri said.

Hiding their style

But other chimps like Alf or Ila make a more syncopated rhythm using a technique in which both their feet hit a root at almost the same time, said British primatologist Catherine Hobaiter, the study’s senior author.

The research team was led by scientists from Scotland’s University of St Andrews, and several of the chimpanzees are named after Scottish single malt whiskies, including Ila — for Caol Ila — and fellow chimp Talisker.

Hobaiter, who started the habituation of the Waibira group in 2011, said it long been known that chimpanzees drummed.

“But it wasn’t until this study that we understood they’re using these signature styles when they’re potentially looking for other individuals — when they’re travelling, when they’re on their own or in a small group,” she told AFP.

The researchers also discovered that the chimps sometimes choose not to drum in their signature beat, to avoid revealing their location or identity.

“They have this wonderful flexibility to express their identity and their style, but also to sometimes keep that hidden,” Hobaiter said.

Michael Wilson, a specialist on chimpanzees at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the research, said the study’s methodology was sound.

But he was not “completely convinced, though, that the drumming is sufficiently distinctive that you could reliably tell all individuals apart”, because some patterns seemed very similar, he said, calling for more research.

‘A sense of music’

While plenty of animals produce sounds we think of as music — such as birdsong — the research could open the door to the possibility that chimpanzees enjoy music on a level generally thought to only be possible for humans. 

“I do think that chimpanzees, like us, potentially have a sense of rhythmicity, a sense of music, something that touches them on an almost emotional level, in the way that we might have a sense of awe when we hear an amazing drum solo or another kind of dramatic musical sound,” Hobaiter said.

Most research on the culture of chimpanzees has looked at their tools or food, she said.

“But if we think about human culture we don’t think about the tools we use — we think about how we dress, the music we listen to,” she added.

Next the researchers plan to investigate how neighbouring and far-off communities of chimpanzees drum in their own differing styles.

Hobaiter has already been looking at chimpanzees in Guinea, where there are very few trees to drum in the open savannah.

“We’ve got early hints that they might be throwing rocks against rocks” to make sound, she said.

“Literal rock music in this case.”