The number of deaths in major air crashes around the globe fell by more than half in 2019, according to a report by an aviation consulting firm.The To70 consultancy said Wednesday that 257 people died in eight fatal accidents in 2019. That compares to 534 deaths in 13 fatal accidents in 2018.The 2019 death toll rose in late December after a Bek Air Fokker 100 crashed Friday on takeoff in Kazakhstan, killing 12 people. The worst crash of 2019 involved an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX plane that crashed March 10, killing 157 people.The report said fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019 that led to the grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX raised questions about how aviation authorities approve aviation designs derived from older ones, and about how much pilot training is needed on new systems.The group said it expects the 737 MAX to eventually gain permission to fly again in 2020.The report said the fatal accident rate for large planes in commercial air transport fell to 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019 from 0.30 accidents per million flights in 2018. That means there was one fatal accident for every 5.58 million flights.The firm’s annual compilation of accident statistics stressed that aviation needs to keep its focus on the basics of having well-designed and well-constructed aircraft flown by well-trained crews.Last year may have seen fewer deaths but did not equal the historic low of 2017, which saw only two fatal accidents, involving regional turboprops, that resulted in the loss of 13 lives.This report is based on crashes involving larger aircraft used for most commercial passenger flights. It excludes accidents involving small planes, military flights, cargo flights and helicopters.
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Month: January 2020
Don Larsen, the journeyman pitcher who reached the heights of baseball glory when he threw a perfect game in 1956 with the New York Yankees for the only no-hitter in World Series history, died Wednesday night. He was 90.Larsen’s agent, Andrew Levy, said the former pitcher died of esophageal cancer in hospice care in Hayden, Idaho. Levy said Larsen’s son, Scott, confirmed the death.Larsen was the unlikeliest of characters to attain what so many Hall of Famers couldn’t pull off in the Fall Classic. He was 81-91 lifetime, never won more than 11 games in a season and finished an unsightly 3-21 with Baltimore in 1954, the year before he was dealt to the Yankees as part of an 18-player trade.In the 1956 World Series, won in seven games by the Yankees, he was knocked out in the second inning of Game 2 by the Brooklyn Dodgers and didn’t think he would have another opportunity to pitch. But when he reached Yankee Stadium on the morning of Oct. 8, he found a baseball in his shoe, the signal from manager Casey Stengel that he would start Game 5.“I must admit I was shocked,” Larsen wrote in his autobiography. “I knew I had to do better than the last time, keep the game close and somehow give our team a chance to win. Casey was betting on me, and I was determined not to let him down this time.”No-windup deliveryThe Dodgers and Yankees split the first four games and Stengel liked the deception of Larsen’s no-windup delivery. The manager’s instincts proved historically correct. The lanky right-hander struck out seven, needed just 97 pitches to tame the Dodgers and only once went to three balls on a batter — against Pee Wee Reese in the first inning.In winning 2-0, the Yankees themselves only managed five hits against the Dodgers’ Sal Maglie, but scored on Mickey Mantle’s home run and an RBI single by Hank Bauer.Larsen, selected MVP of the 1956 Series, had two close calls. In the second inning, Jackie Robinson hit a hard grounder that was deflected by third baseman Andy Carey to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw out Robinson. In the fifth, Mantle ran down a long drive to left-center field by Gil Hodges. With two outs in the ninth, pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell took a third strike, completing the perfect game and sending catcher Yogi Berra dashing out from behind the plate to leap into Larsen’s arms. Their celebration remains one of baseball’s most joyous images.FILE- New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra embraces pitcher Don Larsen as he leaps into Larsen’s arms at the end of Game 5 of the World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers at New York’s Yankee Stadium, Oct. 8, 1956. Larsen pitched a perfect game.Out on the town before perfect gameBorn Aug. 7, 1929, in Michigan City, Indiana, Larsen moved with his family to San Diego, where he went to Point Loma High School, the alma mater of another Yankees perfect game pitcher, David Wells. Larsen played basketball and baseball and was signed by the St. Louis Browns for a $500 bonus and $150 a month.After two minor league seasons, Larsen hurt his arm and then spent two years in the Army. He was promoted to the Browns in 1953 and moved with the team to Baltimore the following year. He struggled through his 3-21 season but two of the wins were against the Yankees, who insisted he be included in the trade that also brought pitching star Bob Turley to New York.Larsen started 1955 with the Yankees’ farm team in Denver, where he went 9-1 and developed the no-windup delivery. Promoted to the majors midway through the season, he finished 9-2 for New York. Larsen went 11-5 the next season and enjoyed the party atmosphere that came with playing for the Yankees, often running with Mantle, Billy Martin and Whitey Ford in their late-night rounds of the city. On the night before his perfect game, he had been out on the town, believing he was not in Stengel’s plans for the next day. Larsen pitched in three other World Series. He won Game 2 of the 1957 series against Hank Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves, but lost the decisive Game 7. He shut out the Braves 4-0 on six hits in Game 3 of the 1958 Series, when New York beat Milwaukee in seven games, and was back in the Bronx with the San Francisco Giants for the 1962 Fall Classic.Record unbrokenLarsen retired in 1967 with an 81-91 record over 14 major league seasons. He later worked as a liquor salesman and paper company executive. When David Cone tossed a perfect game for the Yankees during the 1999 season, Larsen was in attendance after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch.No other pitcher has thrown a perfect game in the postseason, but in 2010 the Phillies’ Roy Halladay pitched a no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds during the National League Division Series. “They can never break my record,” Larsen would say of his game. “The best they can do is tie it. October 8, 1956, was a mystical trip through fantasyland. Sometimes I still wonder whether it really all happened.”Late on Wednesday night, Cone tweeted “RIP my friend” with a photo of himself, Wells and Larsen together on the field at Yankee Stadium.“We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Don Larsen, who remained a welcome and familiar face at our annual Old-Timers’ Day celebrations in the decades following his playing career,” the Yankees said. “He will be missed.”In addition to his son, Larsen is survived by his wife of 62 years, Corrine, daughter-in-law Nancy, and grandsons Justin and Cody.
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Former commissioner of the National Basketball Association David Stern, who oversaw the NBA turning from a struggling U.S. league into a global powerhouse, died in New York Wednesday. He was 77.The NBA said Stern had been seriously ill since emergency surgery for a brain hemorrhage in early December.Stern joined the NBA’s legal department in the 1960s and took over the league in 1984 when U.S. professional basketball was struggling to attract the same kind of fans base that followed other sports, such as baseball and American football.Stern focused on marketing professional basketball overseas, including Europe and Asia, allowing fans who were barely aware of the sport to see superstars such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.Under Stern, the NBA expanded from the United States into Canada and was the first U.S. major league sport to play a regular season game outside North America, when the Phoenix Suns facing off against the Utah Jazz in Japan in 1990.The NBA has grown into a $5 billion a year league with games broadcast in more than 200 countries in 40 languages. Stern retired from the NBA in 2014.
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A Google artificial intelligence system proved as good as expert radiologists at detecting which women had breast cancer based on screening mammograms and showed promise at reducing errors, researchers in the United States and Britain reported.The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is the latest to show that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the accuracy of screening for breast cancer, which affects one in eight women globally.Radiologists miss about 20% of breast cancers in mammograms, the American Cancer Society says, and half of all women who get the screenings over a 10-year period have a false positive result.The findings of the study, developed with Alphabet Inc’s DeepMind AI unit, which merged with Google Health in September, represent a major advance in the potential for the early detection of breast cancer, Mozziyar Etemadi, one of its co-authors from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said.The team, which included researchers at Imperial College London and Britain’s National Health Service, trained the system to identify breast cancers on tens of thousands of mammograms.They then compared the system’s performance with the actual results from a set of 25,856 mammograms in the United Kingdom and 3,097 from the United States.The study showed the AI system could identify cancers with a similar degree of accuracy to expert radiologists, while reducing the number of false positive results by 5.7% in the U.S.-based group and by 1.2% in the British-based group.It also cut the number of false negatives, where tests are wrongly classified as normal, by 9.4% in the U.S. group, and by 2.7% in the British group.These differences reflect the ways in which mammograms are read. In the United States, only one radiologist reads the results and the tests are done every one to two years. In Britain, the tests are done every three years, and each is read by two radiologists. When they disagree, a third is consulted.’Subtle cues’In a separate test, the group pitted the AI system against six radiologists and found it outperformed them at accurately detecting breast cancers.Connie Lehman, chief of the breast imaging department at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, said the results are in line with findings from several groups using AI to improve cancer detection in mammograms, including her own work.The notion of using computers to improve cancer diagnostics is decades old, and computer-aided detection (CAD) systems are commonplace in mammography clinics, yet CAD programs have not improved performance in clinical practice.The issue, Lehman said, is that current CAD programs were trained to identify things human radiologists can see, whereas with AI, computers learn to spot cancers based on the actual results of thousands of mammograms.This has the potential to “exceed human capacity to identify subtle cues that the human eye and brain aren’t able to perceive,” Lehman added.Although computers have not been “super helpful” so far, “what we’ve shown at least in tens of thousands of mammograms is the tool can actually make a very well-informed decision,” Etemadi said.LimitationsThe study has some limitations. Most of the tests were done using the same type of imaging equipment, and the U.S. group contained a lot of patients with confirmed breast cancers.Crucially, the team has yet to show the tool improves patient care, said Dr. Lisa Watanabe, chief medical officer of CureMetrix, whose AI mammogram program won U.S. approval last year.”AI software is only helpful if it actually moves the dial for the radiologist,” she said.Etemadi agreed that those studies are needed, as is regulatory approval, a process that could take several years.
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Thanks to a very special gift, one family is exceptionally grateful to be celebrating the New Year together this year. Bronwyn Benito tells us about a new surgical technique that makes it easier to give the gift of life.
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A California startup called OFFWORLD has ambitious plans that are out of this world. They are working on developing autonomous robots that would be able to mine the Moon and Mars. Alexey Gorbachev has the story narrated by Anna Rice.
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Illinois started the new year on a high note Wednesday, becoming the latest U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana as the governor pardoned thousands for past low-level cannabis convictions.The Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act will allow residents 21 and older to legally purchase marijuana and will expunge thousands of individuals’ criminal convictions throughout the state.”We are restoring rights to many tens of thousands of Illinoisans. We are bringing regulation and safety to a previously unsafe and illegal market. And we are creating a new industry that puts equity at its very core,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said in a statement.On Tuesday night, Pritzker granted 11,017 pardons for people with low-level cannabis convictions, the first round of a planned total of more than 700,000.A long line of people brave the cold as they wait to be the first in Illinois to purchase recreational marijuana at Sunnyside dispensary in Chicago, Jan. 1, 2020.According to the statement, the new law will use 25 percent of the state’s cannabis revenue to help “the communities hit hardest” by the earlier crackdown on marijuana.”Today we took another step toward justice, as we continue to address the failed war on drugs and the disproportionate impact it had on communities of color,” Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx said in the statement.Illinois residents age 21 and older will now be allowed to legally possess 30 grams of cannabis, five grams of cannabis concentrate or 500 milligrams of THC — the main active ingredient of cannabis — contained in a cannabis-infused product.Non-residents are allowed to carry 15 grams of cannabis under the bill, which will also create a licensed growing and dispensary system.CDC studyIllinois is the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana, along with Washington, D.C. Thirty-four states and the federal capital permit medical cannabis treatment.But the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration still considers marijuana a dangerous substance alongside LSD and heroin.A study by the federal Centers for Disease Control published in August found that states that legalize recreational marijuana see a reduction of at least 20 percent in fatalities linked to opioid overdoses.Marijuana legalization has also been shown to improve a state’s economic activity, creating jobs and bringing in new tax revenue.
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The world has a plastic pollution problem. That is the big picture. It has countries looking for creative solutions. Environmentalists say there’s no more time for talk. As VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, they say it’s time for action
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India plans to make a fresh attempt to land an unmanned mission on the moon in 2020 after a failed bid last year, the head of the country’s space program said Wednesday.Work is going “smoothly” on the Chandrayaan-3 mission to put a rover probe on the moon’s surface, Indian Space Research Organization chairman K. Sivan told a press conference.”We are targeting the launch for this year but it may spillover to next year,” Sivan said. Indian sources said authorities had set November as a provisional target for launch.India seeking to become only the fourth nation after Russia, the United States and China to put a mission on the moon’s surface and boost its credentials as a low-cost space power.The country’s Chandrayaan-2 module crash-landed on the moon’s surface in September.Sivan said the new propulsion module, lander and surface rover would cost about $35 million, with a significantly higher outlay for the launch itself.He added that India had chosen four candidate astronauts to take part in the country’s first manned mission into orbit, pledged to take place by mid-2022.The four are to start training in Russia later this month. Up to three astronauts are to take part in the mission, which will be one of the landmark projects scheduled for the 75th anniversary of India’s independence from British rule.
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President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the federal government will soon announce a new strategy to tackle underage vaping, promising, “We’re going to protect our families, we’re going to protect our children, and we’re going to protect the industry.”Trump was vague about what the plan would entail, but suggested “certain flavors” in cartridge-based e-cigarettes would be taken off the market “for a period of time.”The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration would ban the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes, such as those sold by Juul and NJOY. E-cigarette pods formulated to taste like tobacco or menthol would still be allowed.The Journal also reported that tank-based vaping systems, which are less popular among teenagers, would still allow users to custom-mix flavors. The Journal report cited anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”Previous effort stallsIn September, Trump and his top health officials said they would soon sweep virtually all flavored e-cigarettes from the market because of their appeal to young children and teens. But that effort stalled after vaping lobbyists pushed back and White House advisers told Trump the ban could cost him votes with adults who vape.On Tuesday, Trump suggested a ban of flavored e-cigarettes might be temporary.“Hopefully, if everything’s safe, they’re going to be going very quickly back onto the market,” he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he was hosting a New Year’s Eve party.“People have died from this, they died from vaping,” the president said. “We think we understand why. But we’re doing a very exhaustive examination and hopefully everything will be back on the market very, very shortly.”FDA announcementBut the FDA had already announced that, starting in May, all e-cigarettes will need to undergo a review. And only those that can demonstrate a benefit for U.S. public health will be permitted to stay on the market.In Florida, Trump added: “Look, vaping can be good from the standpoint — you look at the e-cigarettes, you stop smoking. If you can stop smoking, that’s a big advantage. So, we think we’re going to get it back on the market very, very quickly.”
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The world rang in a new year and decade Wednesday with fireworks, music and all-night parties.The celebrations included the usual massive gathering in New York’s Times Square where people counted down the remaining seconds of 2019 and cheered as 2020 officially arrived.People celebrate as they watch the traditional New Year’s fireworks at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Dec. 31, 2019.Several million people gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a massive celebration featuring fireworks and music on Brazil’s famous Copacabana beach.In Paris, fireworks lit up the Champs-Elysees area as France took its turn welcoming the new year.Fireworks explode over the Kremlin during New Year’s celebrations in Red Square with the Spasskaya Tower, left, in the background in Moscow, Jan. 1, 2020.The huge clock looming over the Kremlin in Moscow chimed in 2020 with fireworks in the sky and fake snow on the ground. Unusually warm temperatures has made it a wet, not white New Year’s Eve, leading Russian authorities to spread artificial snow around Moscow to create the proper New Year’s atmosphere.A 10-minute fireworks show delighted revelers in Dubai, while in Japan, celebrants took turns in striking Buddhist temple bells, an ancient tradition.Fireworks brightened the skies elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific, including Sydney Harbor in Australia.Fireworks were canceled in other parts of the country because of the extremely dry conditions that led to devastating wildfires.Pro-democracy demonstrators broke out in chants as midnight approached in Hong Kong. Authorities there canceled the traditional fireworks over the city for “security reasons,” replacing them with a light show beamed against skyscrapers.
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East Africa has the highest rates of cervical cancer in the world, according to the World Health Organization. In October, Kenya launched a mass vaccination of girls against the human papillomavirus (HPV),which can lead to cervical cancer. For those who acquired HPV, the vaccine is being welcomed in hopes of protecting their children against cervical cancer. Rael Ombuor reports from Nairobi.
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