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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A red-hot voyage to the sun is going to bring us closer to our star than ever before.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will get nearly seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft. It will hurtle through the sizzling solar atmosphere and come within nearly 4 million miles of the surface.

It’s designed to take solar punishment like never before, thanks to its revolutionary heat shield that’s capable of withstanding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. To snuggle up to the sun, it will fly past Venus seven times over seven years.

Liftoff is set for the pre-dawn hours of Saturday.
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The World Health Organization says experts are starting to carry out Ebola vaccinations in Congo’s latest deadly outbreak.

Health officials have warned that containing the outbreak is complicated by the presence of multiple armed groups in the northeast region that borders Uganda and Rwanda.

Congo’s health ministry says at least nine people have died in the country’s tenth Ebola outbreak, which was declared Aug. 1. There have been 16 confirmed Ebola cases, 27 probable cases and 46 suspected ones.

The experimental vaccine was used in an earlier, unrelated outbreak in Congo’s northwest that was declared over last month. The first to be vaccinated are health workers, contacts of confirmed Ebola cases and their contacts.

Genetic analysis has confirmed the virus strain in this latest outbreak is the Zaire strain.

 
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The World Health Organization says vaccinations are expected to begin this week, perhaps as early as Wednesday, to help stem the latest Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.  WHO estimates put the number of confirmed and probable cases of Ebola at 43, including 34 deaths.  

The WHO says the same expert team that led the the vaccination program during a recent Ebola outbreak in Congo’s Equateur province will be deployed to the cities of Beni and Mangina in North Kivu province, where Ebola was detected last week.

It says vaccinations in North Kivu will follow the same ring vaccination method.  That means people most at risk of infection, such as health workers and first responders, will be vaccinated first.   They will be followed by family members, neighbors and other people identified as having come in contact with Ebola victims.

Tracing contacts could be dangerous in North Kivu’s highly insecure environment.  WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says some of the people exposed to the deadly Ebola virus might be living in conflict zones and armed guards may have to be used to protect the health workers.  

He tells VOA that WHO personnel will have to work with U.N. peacekeeping forces known as MONUSCO.

“For example MONUSCO is sending, already sent some security vehicles, in haste, to Beni on August 5th and we may have to use these sort of vehicles,” Jasarevic said. “But again, at this stage, we are really trying to do what is needed to be done.  So, the recommendation from the SAGE (Strategic Advisory Group of Experts) is to use ring vaccination.”

Jasarevic says the World Health Organization and partners are working non-stop to contain and stop this latest outbreak of Ebola as quickly as possible.  He says 30 WHO staff members have been deployed to the area and more experts are on the way.  

He says contact tracing has begun in affected zones.  While more than 900 contacts have been registered in Mangina, he says this operation must be rapidly strengthened.  

He notes the cost of responding to this disease is likely to be significant, especially in view of the security situation.  
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, early Tuesday morning, on a mission to deploy a communications satellite.

SpaceX says not long after the rocket lifted off, the Falcon’s re-usable first stage booster landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The second stage stayed in orbit, deploying a communications satellite that will provide service to Indonesia and other areas of South and Southeast Asia.

 
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Astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is 12 times the size of Jupiter, striking not only for its size but also for the fact that it is not orbiting any star. 

The so-called “rogue” planet does not revolve around a star, but instead rotates around the galactic center in interstellar space.

Astronomers say there have been only a few rogue planets discovered to date. They say even though finding such celestial objects are rare, there could be large amounts of such planets in the universe that have yet to be discovered.

The recently discovered planetary mass was originally found in 2016 but was mistaken for a brown dwarf planet. According to new research published in the Astrophysical Journal, the object is now thought to be a planet in its own right, with an usually strong magnetic field. 

Astronomers say the magnetic field of the new planet, named SIMP J01365663+0933473, is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s. They say its strong magnetic field likely led to its being detected by a large radio-telescope in New Mexico known as the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

The planet is thought to be 200 million years old and is 20 light-years from Earth.
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Non-government organizations and researchers are calling on the Lao Government to ensure transparency in its investigations on Lao populations affected by massive flooding from a breach in a hydropower dam wall that left more than two dozen people dead last month in southern Laos.

The southern Lao township of Attapeu, bore the brunt of a wall of water after the July 23 collapse of a portion of the Xe Pian Xe Namnoy hydropower dam. In addition to the dead many people are missing, with at least 6,000 displaced by the torrent.

Keith Barney, a specialist in environmental research and natural resource policy in South East Asia at Australia’s National University, says when faced with disasters and other tragedies governments will move to close down sources of information.

“The tendency in many cases when faced with difficult issues or external criticism is to cover up and shut down and block out the flow of information, and there are indications that some of that is underway, but this will be certainly raising significant questions and criticisms of the strategy,” Barney told VOA.

Satellite images show Attapeu lying on a bend of the river with a pre-crisis network of roads, but a later image shows the flooded area as a brown mass of mud with few structures left recognizable.

Barney says, “These are very vulnerable people. Many of them ethnic minorities that have already been significantly affected from the original dam construction process, either through the downstream impact or through resettlement and this will just be adding on to their vulnerability in the coming year.”

The 410-megawatt Xe Pian-Xe Nam Noy hydropower dam near the Cambodian border is part of a series of dams Laos has planned or built to bolster its economy as the “light bulb of South East Asia” through sales of electricity to neighboring countries.

Non-governmental organizations have been vocal opponents of Laos’ rush to hydro development without adequate assurances over the social and environmental impacts from such projects.

The Xe-Pian-Xe Nam Noy region feeds into the Sekong River, considered “one of the Mekong’s most important tributaries,” according to the non-governmental group Save the Mekong.

The Sekong’s waters and other smaller tributaries are home “to tens of thousands of people from at least 20 different ethnic groups, all of whom rely on wild capture fisheries and surrounding forests and fertile lands” for food, according to the group’s statement.

The coalition of NGOs says much of Laos and the Mekong are “vulnerable to such disasters and to broader environmental threats due to 11 large hydropower dams on the lower Mekong mainstream, and 120 tributary dams planned by 2014.

“This disaster has amplified calls from within Laos to reconsider the country’s heavy investment in hydropower, and to strengthen the enforcement of national laws to ensure greater accountability from foreign investors,” Save the Mekong said.

The group said the hydrological and water quality changes had “decimated local fisheries and villagers living along the Xe Pian River” and who had received “no compensation for the loss of their livelihoods.”

Barney says the collapse also raises questions over construction standards on the projects. “I guess it’s a warning over the adequacy of the actual dam construction process, but also in terms of a broader rethinking of the headline strategy into hydropower that Laos and the other regional governments seem to be following. So how the Lao government responds will be very critical,” he said.

Aid has poured in to assist Laos with recovery and redevelopment from the tragedy. South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia have provided funding and resources for the effort.

The intergovernmental Mekong River Commission, in a statement to VOA, said the commission is “working to develop short- and medium-term programs to support Laos and other countries on dam safety in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”

The programs would cover post failure dam assessment and analyses, reviews of dam construction, external reviews and establishing a national dam safety program.

 
…

While many people complain of struggling to put a name to a face, a rare disorder causes some people to not recognize faces at all. Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is a brain disorder in which people cannot recognize faces, sometimes even those of their family. Sadie Witkowski has more.
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An Egyptian boy born with a disability is making waves in the swimming pool. His arms are short from a rare disease, but that’s not stopping him from chasing his dream. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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A new era in American spaceflight was unveiled Friday, with NASA presenting the flight crews that will carry out the first test flights and operational missions aboard commercial spacecraft to be launched from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Charting marine mammal behavior is no easy feat, but that’s exactly what a group of international citizen scientists is doing off the coast of Italy. As Faith Lapidus reports, they are spending a week on the high seas with researchers from the Milan-based Tethys Research Institute studying whales, dolphins and a host of other marine mammals that live in the Mediterranean Sea.
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U.N. officials warn the deadly Ebola virus could be spread by refugees leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province.  Officials are urging neighboring countries to increase surveillance at border crossings.

More than 100 armed groups are involved in long-standing conflicts in DR Congo’s North Kivu province.  Ongoing fighting and instability in the region are adding layers of complexity and difficulty to international efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak in the region.

At least two decades of conflict has displaced more than one million of the province’s eight million inhabitants.  Peter Salama is World Health Organization emergency response chief.  He tells VOA an additional threat is posed by refugees.  He warns some of those fleeing into neighboring Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi may be taking the infection with them.

“So, not only do you have the problem of tracking that internal displacement, but then you have the potential exportation of infection across borders,” Salama said. “And, that is why we are already working with the government of Uganda particularly, but also Rwanda, which shares a border as well with northern Kivu to be fully prepared for any eventualities across the border.”  

The U.N. refugee agency is lending its expertise to this situation.  It is preparing shelters for at least 1,000 vulnerable Internally Displaced Persons and other extremely vulnerable people in the Ebola-affected Beni area.  It also is undertaking protection and monitoring activities.  

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic says his agency’s staff in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania are on Ebola alert.

“Specifically, in Uganda, we have a continuous influx from the DRC.  Our operation has intensified the awareness-raising among the refugee and host communities.   We have also increased the infection control and outbreak preparedness measures,” Mahecic said. “And, we also are preparing for entry screening, that could be the temperature checks for arriving Congolese refugees at the borders.” 

Mahecic says around 92,000 Congolese refugees have fled to Uganda so far this year.  He says they are continuing to arrive at an average rate of between 100 and 200 a day.
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Honeybees are essential to our food supply, but bee colonies around the world are declining. Among the main culprits are insecticides containing chemicals known as neonicotinoids, which are highly toxic to honeybees. In Europe, where about 80 percent of crops rely to some degree on insect pollination, the chemical is banned but exceptions allowed. Poland’s agriculture ministry has temporarily approved it for use in rapeseed crops, worrying the country’s beekeepers. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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The U.S. space agency NASA on Friday introduced the nine astronauts who will ride the first commercial space capsules into orbit next year.

The move marks a significant shift in the U.S. space program, which will now combine NASA-trained astronauts with private sector space capsules. The capsules, made by SpaceX and Boeing, will ferry the astronauts and cargo back and forth to the International Space Station.

Since NASA’s space shuttle program was shut down in 2011, it has had to rely on Russia to fly astronauts to the space station.

“For the first time since 2011, we are on the brink of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a ceremony at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The nine astronauts — seven men and two women — waved and pumped their fists into the air as they appeared on stage to cheers from the crowd. All but three of the astronauts are space flight veterans.

In 2014, SpaceX and Boeing received contracts for $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively, to develop space capsules that can ferry astronauts to and from the space station.

The two companies are planning for a test flight of their capsules by the end of this year or early next year, with the first crews hoping to fly from Cape Canaveral, Florida, by next spring or summer.
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On a few days over the last year, federal agents approached travelers at several U.S. airports — flights bound for or connecting to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Frankfurt, Germany, and Dakar, Senegal.

The officials — part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — weren’t searching for contraband, or guiding bag-sniffing dogs. They were part of a smaller office within the agency that doesn’t focus on detaining and deporting people. Instead, they were handing out printed materials. They wanted to talk about female genital cutting. 

JFK. Newark. Washington-Dulles. They targeted some of the country’s biggest international airports. In May, they roamed the gates in Atlanta — in the state where an Ethiopian man deported last year was believed to be the first person criminally convicted in the United States for FGC, sometimes referred to as female genital mutilation or FGM.

ICE declined a request to speak with the agents for details about how the initiative is carried out. There are brochures involved and, according to photos attached to the agency’s news releases, male and female agents chat with women about to board flights abroad.

FGC is a federal crime, the agency says it tells travelers. It can have consequences on child custody, and in immigration cases, too, even if the procedure is performed outside the U.S.

An agency spokeswoman told VOA via email that “people were happy to hear that’s why [Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security] was out there with materials. Some folks have never heard of it; many have but don’t understand it, the extent of the problem and how harmful the procedure and associated complications are. And some women had been subjected themselves to FGM.”

The project is modeled after one in the United Kingdom, an “awareness” campaign designed to talk about the risks of FGC, and publicize the criminality of the procedure. 

Removing part of the female genitals for nonmedical reasons is a practice concentrated in a few dozen countries, but performed on a smaller scale in many more, including the United States, where cases have been documented dating to as early as the 19th century. Last year, ICE investigators unraveled the Michigan case of a medical doctor performing FGC on young girls.

Reasons given

The justifications can include religious, cultural or pseudomedical rationales, like when U.S. doctors used the procedure to treat “hysteria.” Hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. are FGC survivors, or are vulnerable to it, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mariya Taher, head of Sahiyo — a U.S. nongovernmental organization that advocates for an end to FGC — has spoken publicly about her experience surviving the procedure. Now, her organization is spearheading its own effort to publicize the stories of other survivors in the U.S., with a video project due out this month.

Does Taher think ICE agents handing out pamphlets and talking to families headed to visit relatives abroad, who are maybe considering having the procedure done on their daughters, or planning to have it done on that summer vacation, is an effective method?

“A large part of prevention is educating that it IS illegal … many people don’t recognize that it IS,” said Taher. She wants to know more about what information is being shared and how the conversations with travelers are happening before passing judgment on the project.

Unintentional effect?

“Any effort about the health, legal consequences, support services, I think is really helpful and beneficial,” Taher said. On the other hand, she noted, “I feel conflict. We’re trying to show that FGC happens across the board, regardless of ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status. … I’m a little afraid, if we’re just targeting certain countries, that we’re unintentionally misrepresenting whom FGC happens to.”

Dozens of U.S. states have passed laws, in addition to the federal legislation, criminalizing FGC. In the Michigan case, doctors who performed the procedure on girls were charged, as well as four mothers who agreed to the medically unnecessary surgeries.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) warns Yemen may be on the verge of another cholera epidemic, which could be deadlier than previous ones because of widespread malnutrition in the war-torn country.

Yemen has had two major waves of cholera epidemics in recent years.

The World Health Organization reports that an increasing number of cases in several heavily populated areas over the past few weeks indicate the country may be on the cusp of a third major wave of this deadly disease.

WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, told VOA another cholera epidemic is likely to be more life-threatening than the previous ones because the population is seriously weakened after three years of civil war. Fighting has been raging between the government and rebel forces.

“What we are likely to see is that interplay with cholera and malnutrition occurring more and more and food insecurity,” he said. “And, not only more cases because of that, but even higher death rates among the cholera cases that do occur because people just do not have the physical resources to fight the disease any longer.”

The United Nations is calling for three days of tranquility between August 4 and 6. It wants the warring parties to stop fighting during this period so WHO and its partners can carry out a massive oral cholera vaccination campaign.

Salama said 3,000 health workers are being mobilized in three districts in northern Yemen. Their aim is to vaccinate more than 500,000 individuals above the age of one. Last year, cholera cases in Yemen topped one million in the world’s worst outbreak of the disease.
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Preparations are being made to send thousands of Ebola vaccines next week to North Kivu, the site of the latest outbreak of this deadly disease.

The World Health Organization says it foresees huge difficulties ahead in efforts to combat the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

North Kivu province, the site of the new outbreak, has been riven with ethnic and political clashes for at least two decades.

WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, said the operation getting under way in North Kivu will be much more difficult and complex than past Ebola response efforts.

Salama was at the forefront of efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak this April in the DRC’s Equateur Province.

“On the scale of degree of difficulty, trying to extinguish an outbreak of a deadly high-threat pathogen in a war zone reaches the top of any of our scales,” he cautioned.

WHO reports four of six suspected cases of Ebola have been confirmed in and around Mangina, a town of about 60,000 people in North Kivu. Around 20 deaths have been reported. Salama, however, said the deaths have not yet been confirmed as Ebola cases.

He said laboratory tests indicate that this particular strain is Ebola Zaire, the same one as in Equateur Province. He added that more information will be forthcoming Tuesday when genetic sequencing results are known.

If confirmed, he said it will be possible to use the same vaccine that was used in Equateur. He told VOA that preparations are under way to deploy vaccines to the affected area next week.

The bad news, he cautioned, is that the Zaire strain carries the highest case fatality rate of any of the strains of Ebola — 50 percent or higher.

“The good news is that we do have, although it is still an investigational product, a safe and effective vaccine that we were able to deploy last time around,” he said. “But, remember last time around — and this is a critical point — we had really large-scale access despite all the logistical constraints to be able to do the contact tracing.”

Salama said security constraints will make moving around in North Kivu far more difficult. He said 3,000 doses of the vaccine that are in the capital, Kinshasa, can be deployed immediately and 300,000 additional doses can be mobilized at very short notice.

Ebola is a constant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the virus thrives in heavily forested areas. The newest outbreak is the 10th since the first one was discovered in 1976.
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