Italians are divided between those who think parents should have the right to decide whether to vaccinate their children and those who feel immunization programs must be decided by the government, which they believe has better access to information. Vaccine regulations differ widely across Europe, and the current situation in Italy is in limbo.

Italians enrolling their children in state-run nursery schools currently are uncertain if they need to provide evidence their children have had 10 vaccinations required by a law that came into effect in March. A week ago, the upper house of parliament voted through an amendment to remove that obligation. But to become law, it must also be approved by the lower house.

Parents have been told that for the time being they can simply provide a self-signed declaration that their children have been vaccinated. Many remain unclear whether their children will be allowed to go to school if they fail to provide a declaration or other evidence of the vaccinations.

A surge of more than 5,000 measles cases last year – the second largest outbreak in Europe – led the government run then by the Democratic Party to pass a bill requiring mandatory vaccinations. However, in the run-up to general elections this year, the 5-Star Movement led by Luigi Di Maio and the League led by Matteo Salvini said they would do away with the law. Now in power, they appear to be keeping their promise

Speaking at a recent political rally near Florence, Salvini admitted he had vaccinated his own children and said that parents who have the best interests of their children at heart should be able to make that choice. He added that 10 vaccines are simply too many for some children and it is unthinkable that Italian children may not be able to enroll in school because they have not been vaccinated.

Salvini said a state that requires 10 vaccines must also give parents the certainty that nothing will happen to their children through pre-vaccine tests, which today do not exist. There are 15 European countries, he added, that do not even have a single mandatory vaccine. Noting that Italy now has the most compulsory vaccinations of any country in Europe, Salvini expressed the concern that some multinational or pharmaceutical company may have chosen Italian children as a testing ground.

Italy’s health minister, Giulia Grillo, a doctor and a member of the 5-Star Movement, has made clear the government believes the right balance must be struck between the right to education and the right to health.

Grillo said the 5-Star Movement is not opposed to vaccines and recognizes their importance and usefulness. She added that citizens need to be informed properly about vaccinations and that the National Health Service must provide support to parents and children before and after they are inoculated.

According to a 2010 survey of 27 EU states, plus Norway and Iceland, 15 countries do not have any mandatory vaccinations; the other 14 have at least one. The most common mandatory vaccine is against polio, followed by diphtheria and tetanus.
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Australian scientists have test driven two cars powered by a carbon-free fuel derived from ammonia.  A team from the Australian government’s research agency, the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), says the pioneering technology will allow highly flammable hydrogen to be safely transported in the form of ammonia and used as a widely available fuel.  

Researchers have found a way to use a thin membrane to turn Australian-made hydrogen into ammonia.  This could be shipped safely to markets in Asia, as well as parts of Europe.  At its destination, the liquid ammonia would then be converted back into hydrogen, and used to power cars and buses,  as well as for electricity generation and industrial processes.

David Harris, CSIRO research director says “the special thing about the technology that we have is that it allows you to produce very pure hydrogen directly with a membrane system from ammonia.”

The technology has the support of Japanese car maker Toyota and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Company.

‘Watershed moment’

Scientists say hydrogen, a highly-flammable gas that can be volatile and hard to transport safely, creates a low emission fuel for cars.  The Australian team describes the membrane technology that separates hydrogen from other gases as a “watershed moment for energy.”

Claire Johnson, the chief executive of Hydrogen Mobility Australia, an industry association, says the pioneering research could forever change the transport sector.

“We see that as a really exciting opportunity to decarbonize the transport sector, but also position Australia as one of the lead suppliers of hydrogen around the world.  There is some competition to play that role, however.  Norway, Brunei and Saudi Arabia have all flagged that they wish to be an exporter of hydrogen around the world.”

There are only a handful of hydrogen-powered cars in Australia, but there are tens of thousands across Japan, South Korea and Singapore.  The South Korean government has recently announced plans for 16,000 more hydrogen-fueled cars and 310 special refilling stations.  

 
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Brazil cut its greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in 2017 to levels below its internationally agreed 2020 climate change targets, the country’s Environment Ministry said Thursday.

Brazil reduced its emission from deforestation in the Amazon rainforest by 610 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), compared to its 2020 target of 564 million tons. In the Cerrado savanna, emissions were reduced 170 million tons of carbon dioxide versus a target of 104 million tons.

The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and the Cerrado, South America’s biggest savanna, soak up vast amounts of carbon dioxide, and their preservation is seen as vital to the fight against climate change. 

But destruction of the forest releases large quantities of CO2, one of the main greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Large-scale Amazon deforestation has made Brazil one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, because of fires and the spread of agriculture and cattle ranching.

The 2020 emission goals were set out in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to combat climate change. Under the more ambitious Paris Agreement in 2015 on climate change, Brazil has set goals for further steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for 2025 and 2030.

“The policy message is that we can and should remain in the Paris Agreement (because) it is possible to effectively implement the commitments that have been made,” said Thiago Mendes, secretary of climate change in the Environment Ministry.
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The head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is stepping down after a 14-month tenure in which the agency proposed broad changes to rules governing protections for thousands of species and pushed for more hunting and fishing on federal lands, officials said Thursday.

Greg Sheehan will leave the agency next week to return to his family and home in Utah, spokesman Gavin Shire said. He has led the wildlife service since last June as the senior political official appointed under President Donald Trump in a newly created deputy director position.

Under his tenure, the wildlife service moved recently to end a long-standing practice that automatically gave the same protections to threatened species as it gives more critically endangered species. The proposal also limits habitat safeguards meant to shield recovering species from harm and would require consideration of the economic impacts of protecting a species.

That’s alarmed wildlife advocates who fear a weakening of the Endangered Species Act, which has been used to save species as diverse as the bald eagle and the American alligator. The proposed changes were cheered by Republican lawmakers and others who say the endangered species law has been abused to block economic development and needs reform.

A request to interview Sheehan was declined.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had sought to make Sheehan acting director of the 9,000-employee wildlife service, which would have given him certain legal authorities. However, Sheehan was barred from that role because he did not have the science degree required for the position under federal law, Shire said.

Vacancies at Interior

His departure comes amid a spate of vacancies at the Interior Department more than a year and a half after Trump took office. Those include the heads of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

Before coming to the federal government, Sheehan worked for 25 years in Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, including five years as its director.

National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara — who considers Sheehan a friend — said during his watch the service had done good work collaborating with state officials and conservation groups. But O’Mara said there needed to be less emphasis on removing regulations and more on making sure wildlife issues are considered, such as during decisions on energy development.

“Given the magnitude of the wildlife crisis, there’s always more that can be done,” O’Mara said.

Another conservation group, the Center for Biological Diversity, had a more critical response, saying Sheehan’s departure was “welcome news for America’s wildlife.”

“In just one year in office, he inflicted incredible harm on imperiled animals by consistently putting special interests ahead of science and the environment,” said Brett Hartl, the group’s government affairs director.

The Interior Department issued a statement saying Sheehan was “an incredible asset to the Interior team and was tremendous in helping Secretary Zinke expand access for hunting and fishing on over a quarter-million acres of public lands across the country.”

Deputy Operations Director Jim Kurth will lead the agency pending another appointment, Shire said.
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A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration endangered public health when it overturned an Obama-era rule banning a dangerous pesticide.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the Seattle-based court gave the Environmental Protection Agency 60 days to pull chlorpyrifos from the market, one of the most widely used pesticides in the country.

The judges said the administration was unjustified in overturning the ban and ignored the science proving that residue of it on food is linked to brain damage in babies.

Former EPA chief Scott Pruitt reversed the Obama decision to extend an earlier ban on the product from general household use to its use on food.

Pruitt called it a return to “sound science” and a move away from “predetermined results.”

Dow Chemical, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, has in the past defended the pesticide as a product helping farmers feed the world while respecting “human health and the environment.”

“The court has made it clear that children’s health must come before powerful polluters,” the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Erik Olson said Thursday. “This is a victory for parents everywhere who want to feed their kids fruits and vegetables without fear it is harming their brains or poisoning communities.”
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Joshua Okumu’s wife, Mary Mwanja, died during childbirth 18 years ago at Pumwani Maternity Hospital in Nairobi. But their daughter survived. 

When he picked up his newborn baby at the nursery, grief-stricken and shocked, Okumu was not entirely sure how to feed her.

“So when I reached home, I started feeding her with a packet of milk called Tuzo,” he said. “By that time, Tuzo was not diluted like nowadays. So, that is what I was using to feed the small baby when I took her from the hospital. If the mum was there it would have been healthier to be fed by her mum.”

For Kenyan widowers like Okumu, there will soon be another option: human donor milk. 

Pumwani is getting Kenya’s first breast milk bank, which will be only the second of its kind on the continent. The other one is in South Africa. 

The bank is a joint initiative by Kenya’s Ministry of Health and PATH, a U.S.-based nonprofit health organization. It will open in September for donations and offer free breast milk by prescription for babies who cannot get it from their mothers.

‘Next best option’

Dr. Elizabeth Kimani Murage, head of maternal and child well-being at the African Population and Health Research Center, is behind the project.

“The World Health Organization recommends that if the mother’s own breast milk is not available for the baby for any reason, the best next option would be the donor milk,” she said. “So the recommendation is to make donor milk available to such vulnerable babies.”

The milk bank aims to help orphaned and malnourished babies get the nutrients essential to healthy development.

Murage said mother’s milk has an enormous impact on child survival, especially during the first month of life.

“Despite improvements in infant mortality, neonatal mortality is reducing at a very slow rate, so those are the children we want to target. According to the Every Newborn Action Plan [from the World Health Organization and UNICEF], we should actually reduce neonatal mortality to 12 deaths per 1,000 live births. But, you see, we are very far [from that goal]. We are at 22.”

There are misconceptions and concerns about hygiene and the spread of disease to newborns in the use of donated milk. Murage noted that all donors’ health would checked at the hospital and that the milk would be pasteurized to ensure that only safe and healthful breast milk is given to babies in need. 
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U.S. Vice President Mike Pence says President Donald Trump’s proposed Space Force is necessary  to “meet the emerging threats on this new battlefied.”

“Now the time has come to write the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces, to prepare for the next battlefield … The time has come to establish the United States Space Force,” Pence said in a speech at the Pentagon.

In June, Trump called for the creation of the Space Force, a new military branch that Trump said is needed to ensure U.S. dominance in space.

Defense Secretary James Mattis expressed skepticism last year over the need for a seperate Space Force, citing more bureaucratic bloat and higher costs.

On Thursday, though, Mattis said he supported the creation of a new command that would utilize members of existing military branches.

“We’ve got to be able to compete, deter and win,” Mattis said.

The Pentagon is to submit a report to Congress soon detailing plans to create the Space Force.

Congress is the only branch of government that has the authority to approve the creation of a new military division.

  
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Kids are addicted to cell phones, tablets … anything with an electronic screen. The problem is, it’s bad for their eyes.

With the popularity of video games and online activities, dry eye is becoming increasingly prevalent in children and teens glued to their screens. The condition can cause permanent eye damage.

But, now there’s an app for that.

Optometrist explains

Professor James Wolffsohn is an optometrist at Aston University in Britain who has noticed something troubling.

“What we’re beginning to see is now with the use particularly of screens, digital screens, tablets, smartphones that even children are reporting dry eyes,” he said.

Tears contain oil, Wolffsohn explained, and your eyes should always have a thin layer of tears.

“The tear film on the front of your eye is there all the time not just when you cry. It’s less than the tenth of the thickness of a human hair, but without it you probably wouldn’t see at all,” he said.

That’s because, without tears, your eyes would dry up, likely get infected or scratched. With kids spending more and more time in front of a screen, many are at risk for developing dry eyes.

“When you concentrate very hard on a task such as on a computer screen, you blink less, and also instead of fully blinking you partially blink and so what’s happening is damage is being done to the front of the eye,” Wolffsohn said.

When tears aren’t being produced, they evaporate and leave behind their salty content, which can do further damage to your eyes.

The app

But now, there’s a smartphone app that can diagnose dry eyes. People tested it at a demonstration in London. The app asks some simple questions and tests how long you can comfortably stare at a screen without blinking.

Wolffsohn notes the irony of using an app on the very device that is causing the problem.

“We’re actually using the technology that potentially could cause problems, if you use a lot of it, to actually help us with the diagnosis,” he said.

Doctors say even if you don’t have the app, you can protect your eyes by simply remembering to blink when you’re in front of a screen. And you should remind your kids to do the same.
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Life has found a way to survive in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. Now, scientists believe they might have found a new habitat for hardy microbes — inside garnets.

New research found unusual patterns of tunnels in Thai garnets with deposits of fatty acids in the burrowed pathways, indicating a microbe caused the damage.

Magnus Ivarsson, lead researcher on the study at the University of Southern Denmark, said the research started with an exchange student from Thailand who was studying the gem quality of the garnets. She discovered the tunnels that branched and changed directions, unlike previously described environmental weathering, and consulted Ivarsson.

“When I first saw these structures, these tunnels, I was sort of intrigued by the complexity of them,” Ivarsson told VOA. “I have previously studied other microbial boring in minerals and materials, but I’ve never seen anything with this complexity.”

The garnets are an unexpected habitat for microbes because of their hardness. In fact, according to Ivarsson, this is the hardest mineral yet discovered to be bored by microbes.

“Who knows what we’ll find next. Maybe a diamond bored by microbes. Who knows?” Ivarsson said.

Researchers are careful to point out that no living organisms were discovered within the gemstones.

Dawn Cardace, a researcher in the department of geosciences at the University of Rhode Island, studies how geology and biology interact. She told VOA that while this study didn’t find any DNA of the organisms, “This wasn’t troubling to me, largely because they chose to work with the sample set they have at a very close, submicroscopic scale.” She said they would have needed at least a thousand gemstones in order to collect a DNA sample.

About the research

The researchers relied on several technologies to come to their conclusions.

First, the scientists used microscopy to make 3D maps of the tunnels on the scale of microns. A human hair is about 50 microns wide, but the tunnels in the garnets were generally smaller, hence the need for high-powered microscopes.

The scientists focused on how the tunnels spread and changed directions, and when they converged at crossing points called “anastomosis.” Although environmental weathering can cause cracks and fissures in hard minerals, Ivarsson said weathering processes can’t explain the complexity of the tunnels they observed.

The second step to demonstrate that microbes most likely created the tunnels required analyzing the interior of the boreholes.

“The organic content tells us that there’s been life living in there,” said Ivarsson.

In particular, they detected lipids and fatty acids, which are organic compounds common among bacteria and fungi.

Ivarsson and his colleagues compared these biological traces to hematite and quartz grains found in the same location as the garnets, in the river sediment of the Chiang Mai stream. Neither of the comparable stones showed signs of fatty acids, indicating the biological traces were unique to the garnet tunnels.

When asked about the results, Ivarsson said, “At this point we can say at least that biology has been involved. I would suggest that it’s fungi that has been involved in this. But at the same time, I think we should be really cautious because there might be other processes [at work] that are not known today.”

More studies needed

Cardace agrees that while microbes were certainly living inside the gemstones, further research is needed to prove how the tunnels were created. She said she would like future studies to show “a set of experiments done with candidate microorganisms that could do the metabolic work” the researchers proposed in their paper. 

Ivarsson and his colleagues did, however, consider why microbes like fungi might be making the garnets their home. They sampled garnets from river sediment in Thailand, as well as within granite upstream.

Ivarsson told VOA, “When we studied these garnets in the granite, we could see that there were no tunnels. But when we looked at the garnets further down the river, we could see that these tunnels structures had evolved. So, something happened along the way, along the transport in the river system.”

The researchers argue that the microbes bored into the garnets while they were in the river bed. Microbes in the sediment of the river lack access to chemical energy sources like iron, which is contained in the garnet crystals. Perhaps, researchers propose, the microorganisms created the filaments within the gemstones to access this resource.

Monetary value

Such changes to the garnets, however, decrease the value of the stones.

Shane McClure, global director of colored stones at the Gemological Institute of America, told VOA that when it comes to determining the value of garnets, “If there’s only one or two [tunnels] and they’re very small, it doesn’t affect the value at all. But if there’s a whole bunch of them and they’re very visible, well then it’s going to affect it quite a bit from a gemstone perspective.”

These gemstones might not be usable for flashy jewelry, but they do demonstrate that life finds a way in all sorts of inhospitable and unexpected locations.

As Ivarsson told VOA, “When we look for life on Mars, we need to know what to look for. And this is one type of biological signature that is definitely interesting in the search for life on Mars or any type of extreme environment.”
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After Ireland voted to legalize abortion in May, will Argentina, another traditionally Catholic country, do the same?

The country’s senators will make the decision Wednesday, amid fiercely polarized campaigns on both sides of the hot-button issue.

The bill was passed by Congress’ lower house in June by the narrowest of margins, but it is widely expected to fall short of the votes needed to pass in the Senate — 37 of the 72 senators have made it known they will say no.

If the measure does fail, lawmakers must wait a year to resubmit the legislation.

As the lawmakers settled in for what was expected to be a marathon session that could stretch past midnight, demonstrators on both sides rallied outside Congress.

Abortion rights supporters wore green scarves while anti-abortion activists donned baby blue. A partition was set up to keep them separated.

Scores of buses have brought people into Buenos Aires from other parts of Argentina, city hall said.

Despite the negative projections and strong opposition from the highly influential Catholic Church in the homeland of Pope Francis, abortion rights proponents are not giving up hope.

“We’re doing everything so that the initiative passes. We have faith in the street movement,” leading campaigner Julia Martino told AFP.

“We believe many senators will show their support when the vote happens.”

Currently, abortion is allowed in Argentina in only three cases, similar to most of Latin America: rape, a threat to the mother’s life or if the fetus is disabled.

If passed, the bill would legalize abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and see Argentina join Uruguay and Cuba as the only countries in Latin America to fully decriminalize abortion.

It’s also legal in Mexico City. Only in the Central American trio of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua does it remain totally banned.

With the tide seemingly flowing against legalization, abortion rights groups tried to amend the bill to reduce from 14 to 12 weeks the period in which it would be permitted, but that move failed.

What activists can count on, though, is huge support from citizens.

Question of rights 

Demonstrations were held in Buenos Aires, with other rallies taking place around the world in front of Argentine diplomatic missions.

One abortion rights protester in Buenos Aires, 20-year-old Celeste Villalba, said keeping abortions illegal would not prevent them from happening.

“This debate is whether it should be legal or done in secret. It’s not about being in favor of abortion or not,” she said.

She said she feared that “social machismo and a patriarchal and retrograde Church” would block adoption of the bill in the Senate.

Various charities estimate that 500,000 illegal, secret abortions are carried out every year in Argentina, resulting in around 100 deaths.

But opponents of abortion are not lacking support and held their own demonstrations.

Priests and nuns have been joined by rabbis, imams and members of other Christian churches to oppose the bill.

One of them, Federico Berruete, a 35-year-old priest, joined anti-abortion demonstrators holding up slogans reading “Life starts at conception.”

“There is a big display of faith, a lot of people have turned out for a more humane country. Children about to be born need to be defended,” he said.

In mid-June, the lower house voted in favor by just 129 to 125 thanks in part to the nonetheless anti-abortion President Mauricio Macri’s insistence in pushing the bill through the legislature.

The conservative president released a letter Wednesday welcoming the debate and saying this is about more than legalizing abortion or not.

“As a society, it presents a peaceful scenario to promote and carry out change,” the president wrote.

Senator Norma Durango from the Justice Party said she would work “until the last minute so that this becomes law,” warning that those who vote against the bill would be “responsible for continuing deaths.”

The Catholic Church has appointed a bishop, Alberto Bochatey, to handle dialogue with Congress on the issue.

Last month, Bochatey, 62, told AFP that “you cannot make a law to justify the elimination of human life,” but said the Church was against locking up those who carried out illegal abortions.
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Most people who use online dating websites seek partners who are out of their league, said a study Wednesday based on heterosexuals in four big US cities.

“Both men and women pursued partners about 25 percent more ‘desirable’ than themselves,” said the report in the journal Science Advances.

Hardly anyone reached out to people who ranked significantly lower than themselves.

People’s desirability was determined using a ranking algorithm based on how many messages they received from other popular users on a dating site in New York, Seattle, Boston and Chicago.

“If you are contacted by people who are themselves desirable, then you are presumably more desirable yourself,” said the study.

Using this PageRank algorithm, which is employed by web search engines, researchers could establish a person’s “league,” which they scientifically coined “hierarchies of desirability.”

For some at the pinnacle of the dating game, the flurry of messages from would-be suitors was dizzying.

“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1,504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month,” said the study.

While researchers did not reveal the end to this lady’s love story, they did find that the majority of daters on the site tended to reach out to people who were ranked higher than themselves.

They also tended to send lengthier messages to people deemed higher on the desirability ladder.

In most cases, these long-shots fell short.

When there is a big gap in desirability between online daters, “there is a pronounced drop in the probability of reply,” said the report.

And only in Seattle were there signs that long letters were more successful than short messages at getting a potential mate to respond.

People have probably been pining for unattainable love interests since the dawn of time.

But taking a scientific look at the phenomenon gives cause for hope, according to lead author Elizabeth Bruch, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“I think a common complaint when people use online dating websites is they feel like they never get any replies,” she said.

“This can be dispiriting. But even though the response rate is low, our analysis shows that 21 percent of people who engage in this aspirational behavior do get replies from a mate who is out of their league, so perseverance pays off.”
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