YCLOAK

A team of teenage Gambian students are upset and mystified at being denied visas to attend a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month.

This comes days after an Afghan girls team was also turned down by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Neither team was given any reason.

“It’s very disappointing, knowing that we are the only two countries that aren’t going to take part in the competition,” Gambian student Fatoumata Ceesay said.

The two teams will instead enter the competition via Skype. But the video link is no substitute after the youngsters worked for months perfecting their projects and dreamed of the thrill of visiting Washington.

“It would be an experience to see and discover other robots and ask questions and exchange ideas with others. It’s more than 160 countries, so we’d have the chance to mingle,” Ceesay said.

The Gambian and Afghan students are especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not.

Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.”

The U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Gambia and the State Department say they cannot discuss visa requests.

WATCH: Robotics contest for youth promotes innovation

A group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build interest in science, technology, engineering and math around the world.

The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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Hundreds of environmentalists protested in Kraków Tuesday against widespread logging in Europe’s last primeval forest as a conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee got underway in the historic city in southern Poland.

The environmentalists demanded that the Polish government stop felling trees in the Białowieża forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site that straddles the border with Belarus. The forest of nearly 142,000 hectares is one of the last and largest remaining parts of an immense primeval forest that stretched across the European Plain 10,000 years ago.

Separated by a police cordon, forest rangers held a counterdemonstration in Kraków. They support the government’s explanation that selective logging will help save the forest, which is north of Brest, the Belarusian capital, and Białystok in Poland.

The forest is home to many rare species of birds and plants as well as hundreds of European bison, the continent’s largest mammals. It contains a number of large, ancient oak trees, survivors of the wars in Eastern Europe during the 20th century and many earlier conflicts; the biggest trees, named after historical figures in many cases, have circumferences of over 600 centimeters (20 feet) and stand over 30 meters (98 feet) tall.

The government said it increased logging to fight an infestation of bark beetles that has affected many spruce trees. Ecologists claim authorities have been felling not only infected trees but also healthy ones. They contend the government’s stand is a pretext to increase timber production for profit.

Scientists and the European Union, which says the increased logging is illegal, have also protested the logging. In late April, the European Commission gave Polish authorities a “final warning” to address its concerns over the forest or face being summoned by the EU’s top court.

The UNESCO committee, meeting in Poland through July 11 in its 41st annual session, is expected to decide Wednesday whether to send a mission of experts to the Białowieża Primeval Forest to reassess the situation.
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Lawyers from around Africa gathered in Cameroon this week to call for tougher legislation against counterfeit medicine.

 

Sixty tons of counterfeit medicine was burned after being seized by customs officials in Cameroon, who say the stockpile had an estimated value of $80,000.

Customs official Marcel Kamgaing said the imitation medicine was being used to treat everything from diabetes and hypertension to cancer and erectile dysfunction. He said the forged drugs were destined for sale at shops and roadside pharmacies.

He says illicit drugs are very dangerous to the health of consumers and may even kill due to poor packaging and preservation. He says importers should be informed that Cameroon’s customs laws give them the authority to destroy all fake drugs.

Counterfeit drugs conference

The burning was scheduled to coincide with an international conference this week in Yaounde on the problem of phony drugs in Africa.

Jackson Ngnie Kamga, president of the Cameroon Bar Association, says the current penalties are not enough of a deterrent. He said traffickers should face jail time.

He says because of its deadly consequences, it is high time for Cameroon to join African states to start considering the transportation and commercialization of bogus drugs as a major crime, not a simple offense punishable by fines and seizure of the illicit goods. He says the number of people who die because of such drugs makes them consider it another form of homicide, which the international community should help Africa tackle.

The World Health Organization says falsified medical products may contain no active ingredient, the wrong active ingredient or the wrong amount of the correct active ingredient. The WHO says about 100,000 deaths-a-year in Africa are linked to counterfeit drugs.

Asian source

Issouf Baadhio, an attorney from Burkina Faso, represented the International Association of Lawyers as its vice president. He said the counterfeit drugs are primarily manufactured in Asia, especially in China, and so African countries need to focus on stopping importation.

 

He says besides the fact that this trade is illegal, importing fake drugs has disastrous economic consequences and as such civil society organizations and professional groups like the International Association of Lawyers should join states and make sure that markets are protected and custom controls are set up at entrances to all states to detect and stop the sale of all dangerous drugs.

Identifying counterfeit medicines can be difficult. The WHO urges officials and consumers to look for signs like misspelled words on the packaging and to check that the manufacture and expiration dates inside and outside packaging match.
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The U.N. children’s fund warns tens of thousands of malnourished children are at great risk in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, which are on the brink of famine.

UNICEF reports an estimated 4.7 million children in the three cholera-stricken countries are malnourished. Of these, UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac tells VOA, more than one million are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

“Let me remind you that a child who is suffering from severe acute malnutrition are nine times more likely to die of disease than a well-nourished child,” he said. “So, having cholera and diarrhea in countries where so many children are so fragile because of malnutrition among other things because of such a bad access to safe water is extremely worrying.”

Sudan outbreak

UNICEF says it also is extremely worried about an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea in Sudan, where the Federal Ministry of Health reports more than 20,000 cases of the disease, including over 400 deaths.

Boulierac says the disease has spread to 14 of 18 states and children account for more than 20 percent of the affected population.

“The situation in White Nile State, which is in central Sudan, is deeply worrying, since it is the most affected with 7,200 reported cases and since it has almost 100,000 refugees living in camps,” he said.

UNICEF says it needs access, security and more money to contain cholera and acute watery diarrhea in all four countries. It says aid operations must be scaled up. Malnourished children must receive special life-saving medication, therapeutic feeding and have access to safe drinking water.
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Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees the rule defining milk as coming from healthy cows.

It’s “not a trivial decision,” the FDA warned in one of the 2011 emails about the USDA’s desire to use the term.

The sour history over who gets to use “milk” reaches back to at least 1997, when a soy foods group petitioned the FDA to recognize the term “soymilk.” A couple of years later, the group pointed out that the FDA itself had used the term. Even now, the National Milk Producers Federation says it’s working to build support for legislation directing the FDA to enforce the federal standard. The dairy group says both “soy milk” and “soymilk” are inappropriate ways to describe non-dairy drinks made from soybeans, and that the one-word version is just an attempt to get around the definition.

There are plenty of other food names at issue. A European Union court recently ruled that a company named TofuTown can’t describe its products as “cheese.” U.S. rice producers have railed against “pretenders ” like diced cauliflower and said they may take the issue to the FDA.

But the FDA hasn’t even always been able to get other agencies to go along, as illustrated in the emails obtained by the Good Food Institute, which advocates alternatives to industrial animal agriculture. The GFI sued the FDA for public records relating to soy milk.

The email exchange started when a nutrition adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services alerted the FDA that the USDA planned to use “soy milk” in educational materials about dietary guidelines.

“USDA staff are preparing consumer publications and fervently want to use the term ‘soy milk’ because beverages are widely marketed this way,” the adviser wrote.

The FDA bristled and provided the federal definition of milk as a “lacteal secretion” from cows. Therefore, the FDA declared that referring to soy, almond and rice drinks as “milk” would be incorrect. It suggested the other agency say “beverage” or “fortified beverage.”

When that didn’t put the matter to rest, the FDA warned that the USDA’s use of the term could undermine the FDA’s regulatory authority.

That apparently didn’t stop the USDA, either.

“They are adamant about using the term in consumer publications,” the nutrition adviser wrote. The USDA had indicated that it would use “soy beverage” in official policy documents, but it wanted to use “plain language” in materials for the public.

Despite the federal regulation, others may also consider “soy milk” an acceptable term. The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t limit milk’s definition to cows, saying it is “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young.”

It also allows for a “food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow’s milk.”

Asked how the spat was resolved, the USDA provided materials from 2011 that use both terms by referring to “soymilk (soy beverage).” The agency also uses the term elsewhere, including on its “Choose My Plate” website, which currently says “calcium-fortified soymilk (soy beverage)” is part of the dairy group.

The National Milk Producers Federation says the USDA’s usage of the term shows even other government agencies are confused about how to describe soy beverages in the absence of consistent enforcement by the FDA.

The FDA declined to comment.
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A robot wheels across a rocky, windswept landscape that looks like the surface of some distant planet from a science fiction film. But it is not in outer space, it’s on the slopes of Europe’s most active volcano.

Mount Etna, in Sicily, is a test bed for the approximately three-foot high, four-wheeled machine ahead of a future mission to the moon. It is being conducted by the German Aerospace Center, the agency which runs Germany’s space program.

The program has enlisted experts from Germany, Britain, the United States and Italy to research ROBEX (Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments) with the aim of improving robotic equipment that will be used in space.

“This is aimed at simulating a future, hypothetical landing mission on the moon or Mars and they use a lot of robots which are there to transport and install different instruments”, said Boris Behncke, a volcanologist from the National Vulcanology Institute in Catania, near Mount Etna.

Scientists also hope to use the robots to explore the depths of Mount Etna and relay back useful technical data on seismic movement. The techniques learnt on Etna would then be deployed in lunar missions or in the exploration of Mars.

An initial robotic testing phase has nearly been completed on the Piano del Lago area of the volcano, a desolate stretch of terrain buffeted by strong winds.

Next, a network of equipment including rover robots and drones will be mounted to monitor seismic activity that closely simulates that which would be used on the moon.

 

 

 

 
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX accomplished another space first when its reusable Dragon cargo ship capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after its second successful mission to the International Space Station.

The commercial spacecraft completed its first mission in September 2014. Its second journey to the ISS began on June 3 when it was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The ship took about 2,700 kilograms of supplies to the ISS and brought back about 2,000 kilograms of scientific samples as well as unneeded equipment.

“Good splashdown of Dragon confirmed – completing first re-flight of a commercial spacecraft to and from the @Space_Station,” the company tweeted early Monday.

Astronaut Jack Fischer tweeted a photo of the capsule’s fiery reentry, saying, “beautiful expanse of stars – but the ‘long’ orange one is SpaceX-11 reentering! Congrats team for a successful splashdown & great mission!”

SpaceX crews were waiting off Long Beach, Calif., to retrieve the capsule and unload its cargo.

The successful splashdown marks a new milestone for the company that hopes to dramatically drive down the cost of space operations through its reusable rockets and capsules.

In a minor setback Sunday, the company was forced to delay the launch of another satellite, but was to try again later Monday.
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Recent progress in forecasting the intensity of hurricanes — 

which has lagged behind storm track forecasting — could be undermined by proposed cuts in federal funding for tropical weather research, says the retiring chief of a team of U.S. hurricane specialists.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program in 2009 with a $13 million budget. Funding has shrunk to less than half that, and President Donald Trump’s proposed budget includes further cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service.

 

“It’s hanging on really by a thread in terms of funding,” said James Franklin, who oversees the National Hurricane Center team that releases tropical storm forecasts and warnings.

 

During his time at NOAA, Franklin was on research teams that made breakthroughs in tropical storm forecasting and in the understanding of the winds circling a hurricane’s eye. His research with dropsondes — sensor-filled tubes that send weather data as they fall through hurricanes — helped improve forecasts of storm tracks and led NOAA to buy a “hurricane hunter” jet that’s still used today. He also helped develop new GPS dropsondes that showed how eyewall winds vary.

 

Before his June 30 retirement, ending a 35-year NOAA career that included 83 flights breaching hurricane eyewalls, Franklin discussed forecasting with The Associated Press:

 

Uneven forecast improvements 

Hurricane track forecasts have steadily improved partly because the weather elements that direct a storm’s path are easy to see, Franklin said.  For example, a high-pressure area over the Atlantic known as the Bermuda High, which can nudge storms toward land instead of over open waters, is hundreds of miles (kilometers) across.

However, forecasting intensity has been more difficult because it depends on the interactions between the ocean and thunderstorms at the core of a tropical storm, and those interactions happen in an area just tens of miles (kilometers) wide and are difficult to observe even with advanced dropsondes, drones and satellites, Franklin said.

 

“We’ve always been able to see many or most of the steering factors or steering features in the atmosphere, and we get better at it all the time,” he said.

 

“But when it comes to intensity, what’s going to make a tropical depression strengthen into a hurricane — now you’re talking about all kinds of things going on in the atmosphere on very small scales. You’re talking about the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere. How much heat is going to get extracted from that ocean? That’s a big driver for intensification.”

 

Despite forecasts, use caution     

 

Improved forecasts, however, can be a double-edged sword, Franklin said. Despite a variety of warnings and advisories highlighting specific storm hazards, such as storm surge flooding, some people still expect hurricanes to stick to a predicted track, even though forecasts include a range of potential outcomes.

 

“I find this surprising because there’s still so many bad forecasts out there — ours included — yet we see it over and over: people don’t have a good grasp on just what the forecast uncertainties still are,” he said.

Potential storm advisories     

 

The hurricane center issued its first advisories for potential tropical cyclones in June, alerting the U.S. Gulf Coast and Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to strong winds and heavy rains a full day before tropical storms Bret and Cindy were officially named. Franklin said those advisories reflect both forecasting improvements and the hurricane center’s emphasis on potential risks for communities in a storm’s path.

 

“As the models got better and as the data got more plentiful, the models became much more capable of forecasting formations of storms,” he said. “If you’re going to do advisories on potential tropical cyclones, you really need to have a good handle on which ones are going to develop and which ones aren’t, so it was that science advance that allowed us to do that. I don’t think we could have done potential tropical cyclone [advisories] 10 years ago.”

 

Seven-day forecasts?      

 

The hurricane center only issued two-day forecasts when Franklin began working for NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in 1982. Five-day forecasts were introduced in 2003. The hurricane center has practiced creating seven-day forecasts for several years, but Franklin said they still aren’t accurate enough for public use, and he’s skeptical that they’d be useful to coastal communities.

 

“I’m not in a hurry to do a public seven-day forecast. There’s not a lot you can do seven days in advance,” he said. “The emergency management community is not telling us that this is important for them.”

 
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3-D printing has given artists and engineers a way to create some of their most daring visions. But it is giving Argentine inventor Gino Tubaro a chance to change lives by building customized prosthetic limbs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Sudanese doctors and aid workers are urging the government to declare a state of emergency over a cholera outbreak and delay the start of the school year, which began Sunday.

 

The disease, which is passed through contaminated water, has surfaced in five states, including the capital, Khartoum. The U.S. Embassy said last month that fatalities had been confirmed, and Egypt has begun screening passengers from Sudan at Cairo’s international airport.

Some 22,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea have led to at least 700 fatalities since May 20, said Hossam al-Amin al-Badawi, of the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors, adding that it is most likely cholera, but the government refuses to test for it.

 

Doctors say cholera, a bacterial infection linked to contaminated food or water, has surfaced in the states of Khartoum, Al-Jazeera, Sennar, White Nile and North Kordofan, and are urging the government to seek international aid.

The fast-developing, highly contagious infection can spread in areas without clean drinking water or with poor sanitation. If left untreated, it can cause death from dehydration.

 

Sudan’s official news agency SUNA meanwhile announced the opening of the school year, saying that authorities had the outbreak of “acute watery diarrhea” under control.

 

Activists and the opposition say President Omar al-Bashir’s government refuses to acknowledge the cholera outbreak because it would reveal failures in the country’s crumbling health system, where corruption is rife.

 

Neighboring South Sudan is grappling with the “the longest, most widespread and most deadly cholera outbreak” since the it won independence in 2011, according to the U.N. Since the outbreak began a year ago, over 11,000 cases have been reported, including at least 190 deaths, according to the World Health Organization and South Sudan’s government.

 

 

 

 

 
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Panic buttons, used by the elderly when they need help from the police or medical personnel, can be the difference between life and death. Now, a new bracelet fitted with a mobile phone and GPS tracking device could replace panic buttons — and not just for seniors. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us about this technological advance that can be a lifeline for anyone who needs help in a hurry.
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