How safe is it to eat snow? A Romanian university study says it depends upon how fresh it is.

A 2017 experiment showed it was safe to eat snow that was a half-day old, and safer to eat it in the colder months. But by two days old, the snow is not safe to eat, Istvan Mathe, a professor at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, told The Associated Press.

Scientists collected snow from a park and from a roundabout in Miercurea Ciuc, central Romania, in January and February and placed it in hermetically sealed sterile containers. They then tried to grow bacteria and mold in them.

The study took place in temperatures ranging from minus 1.1 degrees Celsius to minus 17.4 C (30 degrees to 0.7 degree Fahrenheit) in the city, one of the coldest in Romania.

After one day, there were five bacteria per millimeter in January, while in February that number quadrupled.

“Very fresh snow has very little bacteria,” Mathe said Thursday. “After two days, however, there are dozens of bacteria.”

He said the microorganisms increase because of impurities in the air.

Mathe got the idea for the study when he saw his children eating snow.

“I am not recommending anyone eats snow. Just saying you won’t get ill if you eat a bit,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. stocks tumbled again Thursday as investors continued to fret about the possibility of rising inflation and higher interest rates. 

For the second time in four days, the Dow Jones industrial average sank more than 1,000 points, or 4.2 percent, to end Thursday day at 23,860.

The Standard and Poor’s Index, the benchmark for many index funds, also shed 100.66 points, or 3.8 percent, to close at 2,581. It last hit that low in mid-November.

The two indexes have dropped 10 percent from their all-time highs, set on January 26. That means they are in what is known on Wall Street as a “correction,” fueled by fears that a long stretch of low interest rates and tame inflation, which helped driven up stock prices, might be coming to an end.

As the day wore on, it became evident major U.S. stock indexes were headed toward their fifth loss in the last six days, erasing big gains in the first weeks of the new year.

Stocks began to tumble last Friday after the U.S. Labor Department reported wages grew rapidly in January, sparking concern of higher inflation and lower corporate profits.

Earlier in Europe, stock prices declined and bond yields increased after the Bank of England said it may boost interest rates in response to a strong global economy. Britain’s FTSE-100 Index fell 1.5 percent and Germany’s DAX plunged 2.6 percent.

The picture was brighter in Asia, where Japan’s Nikkei 225 Index climbed just over 1 percent, South Korea’s Kospi Index rose five-tenths of one percent, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index gained four-tenths of one percent. 
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From: MeNeedIt

South Sudan has officially declared an end to the country’s cholera epidemic, which erupted more than 18 months ago, infecting more than 20,000 people and killing 436.

World Health Organization and health ministry officials announced the end of the outbreak at a news conference Wednesday in Juba.

The outbreak, the largest in the country’s history, began in mid-2016, just as a fresh wave of fighting ramped up in Juba.

South Sudan Health Minister Riek Gai Kok says the first case was reported in Al Sabah Children’s Hospital on June 18, 2016, “and it spread to over 26 counties across the country and it continued for a complete year.”

Not one cholera case has been reported in South Sudan for the past seven weeks, Kok said, but that does not mean people should become complacent.

“Instead, we should draw some lessons that might have been the root causes of the previous outbreaks,” Kok said.

International response

The minister said the outbreak ended thanks to an effective response by the WHO, UNICEF, the United States Agency for International Development, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and other agencies who worked together to prevent further spread of the disease.

Evans Majani Liyosi, the WHO’s country representative in South Sudan, said the outbreak dragged on for 18 months because health workers were unprepared.

“Fighting was going on and everybody was hiding, this was in July 2016. It was very difficult for the patients to go to health facilities and for the health workers to be in the health facility. People were moving in any direction and those who were infected continued to move with this disease,” Liyosi said.

Many health workers working with non-governmental organizations were evacuated from conflict areas in 2016, exacerbating the cholera outbreak.

Prevention lessons

Liyosi said the WHO is working with the ministry of health to enact measures in order to prevent future outbreaks of cholera.

“Cholera is a disease that comes as a result of drinking contaminated water and poor sanitation, and these are issues that we have to put down. We are going to work with other partners and ensure that we are able to overcome,” Liyosi said.

WHO and health ministry officials are advising the public to drink only clean water, use boiled water or water treated with chlorine for other household uses, and to always wash both hands with soap after using the latrine or before handling food.  

The public is also strongly advised not to defecate near any source of water.

Despite announcing the end to South Sudan’s outbreak, Health Minister Kok is still advising citizens to report all suspected cases of cholera to the national outbreak hotline, 1144.
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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced $17.5 million in emergency funding to fight the spread of the spotted lanternfly in Pennsylvania.

The invasive species was first spotted in District Township in 2014. It has since spread to 12 counties and threatens the state’s $18 billion grape, orchard and logging industries.

In an announcement Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue says “decisive action” was needed to stop the insect from spreading to neighboring states.

The USDA says $8.7 million will be spent on a survey and control program for the infested area, $7.5 million will go toward insecticides and herbicides and the rest will fund public education efforts.

Perdue says the effort will begin before the insect starts to re-emerge in the spring.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Two scientists in spacesuits, stark white against the auburn terrain of desolate plains and dunes, test a geo-radar built to map Mars by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.

When the geo-radar stops working, the two walk back to their all-terrain vehicles and radio colleagues at their nearby base camp for guidance. They can’t turn to their mission command, far off in the Alps, because communications from there are delayed 10 minutes.

But this isn’t the Red Planet — it’s the Arabian Peninsula.

The desolate desert in southern Oman, near the borders of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, resembles Mars so much that more than 200 scientists from 25 nations chose it as their location for the next four weeks, to field-test technology for a manned mission to Mars.

Public and private ventures are racing toward Mars — both former President Barack Obama and SpaceX founder Elon Musk declared humans would walk on the Red Planet in a few decades.

New challengers like China are joining the United States and Russia in space with an ambitious, if vague, Mars program. Aerospace corporations like BlueOrigin have published schematics of future bases, ships and suits.

The successful launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this week “puts us in a completely different realm of what we can put into deep space, what we can send to Mars,” said analog astronaut Kartik Kumar.

The next step to Mars, he says, is to tackle non-engineering problems like medical emergency responses and isolation.

“These are things I think can’t be underestimated.” Kumar said.

While cosmonauts and astronauts are learning valuable spacefaring skills on the International Space Station — and the U.S. is using virtual reality to train scientists — the majority of work to prepare for interplanetary expeditions is being done on Earth.

And where best to field-test equipment and people for the journey to Mars but on some of the planet’s most forbidding spots?

Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse. Few animals or plants survive in the desert expanses of the Arabian Peninsula, where temperatures can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius.

On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base: a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters.

There are no airlocks.

The desert’s surface resembles Mars so much, it’s hard to tell the difference, Kumar said, his spacesuit caked in dust. “But it goes deeper than that: the types of geomorphology, all the structures, the salt domes, the riverbeds, the wadis, it parallels a lot of what we see on Mars.”

The Omani government offered to host the Austrian Space Forum’s next Mars simulation during a meeting of the United Nation’s Committee On the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Gernot Groemer, commander of the Oman Mars simulation and a veteran of 11 science missions on Earth, said the forum quickly accepted.

Scientists from across the world sent ideas for experiments and the mission, named AMADEE-18, quickly grew to 16 scientific experiments, such as testing a “tumbleweed” whip-fast robot rover and a new space suit called Aouda.

The cutting-edge spacesuit, weighing about 50 kilograms, is called a “personal spaceship” because one can breathe, eat and do hard science inside it. The suit’s visor displays maps, communications and sensor data. A blue piece of foam in front of the chin can be used to wipe your nose and mouth.

“No matter who is going to this grandest voyage of our society yet to come, I think a few things we learn here will be actually implemented in those missions,” Groemer said.

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik ignited a space race between Moscow and Washington to land a crew on the Moon.

But before the U.S. got there first, astronauts like Neil Armstrong trained suspended on pulleys to simulate one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.

Hostile environments from Arizona to Siberia were used to fine-tune capsules, landers, rovers and suits — simulating otherworldly dangers to be found beyond Earth. Space agencies call them “analogues” because they resemble extraterrestrial extremes of cold and remoteness.

“You can test systems on those locations and see where the breaking points are, and you can see where things start to fail and which design option you need to take in order to assure that it does not fail on Mars,” said Joao Lousada, one of the Oman simulation’s deputy field commanders who is a flight controller for the International Space Station.

Faux space stations have been built underwater off the coast of Florida, on frigid dark deserts of Antarctica, and in volcanic craters in Hawaii, according to “Packing For Mars,” a favorite book among many Mars scientists, written by Mary Roach.

“Terrestrial analogs are a tool in the toolkit of space exploration, but they are not a panacea,” said Scott Hubbard, known as “Mars Czar” back when he lead the U.S. space agency’s Mars program. Some simulations have helped developed cameras, rovers, suits and closed-loop life-support systems, he said.

NASA used the Mojave Desert to test rovers destined for the Red Planet but they also discovered much about how humans can adapt.

“Human’s adaptability in an unstructured environment is still far, far better than any robot we can send to space,” Hubbard said, adding that people, not just robots, are the key to exploring Mars.

The European Space Agency’s list of “planetary analogues” includes projects in Chile, Peru, South Africa, Namibia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Canada, Antarctica, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, Norway, Iceland, and nine U.S. states. Next Thursday, Israeli scientists are to run a shorter simulation in a nature preserve called D Mars.

However, there remain so many unknowns that simulations “are not in any way a replacement for being there,” Hubbard said.

The Oman team’s optimism is unflinching.

“The first person to walk on Mars has in fact already been born, and might be going to elementary school now in Oman, or back in Europe, in the U.S. or China,” Lousada said.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Dutch lender Rabobank’s California unit agreed Wednesday to pay $369 million to settle allegations that it lied to regulators investigating allegations of laundering money from Mexican drug sales and organized crime through branches in small towns on the Mexico border.

The subsidiary, Rabobank National Association, said it doesn’t dispute that it accepted at least $369 million in illegal proceeds from drug trafficking and other activity from 2009 to 2012. It pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States for participating in a cover-up when regulators began asking questions in 2013.

The penalty is one of the largest U.S. settlements involving the laundering of Mexican drug money, though it’s still only a fraction of the $1.9 billion that Britain’s HSBC agreed to pay in 2012. It surpasses the $160 million that Wachovia Bank agreed to pay in 2010.

Three execs behind cover-up

Under the agreement, the company will cooperate with investigators. The federal government agreed not to seek additional criminal charges against the company or recommend special oversight.

The settlement describes how three unnamed executives ignored a whistleblower’s warnings and orchestrated the cover-up. Two of the executives were fired in 2015 and one retired that year.

“Settling these matters is important for the bank’s mission here in California,” said Mark Borrecco, the subsidiary’s chief executive.

In 2010, Mexico proposed new limits on cash deposits at the country’s banks, resulting in more tainted deposits at Rabobank branches in Calexico and Tecate, according to the plea agreement. Accounts in the two border towns soared more than 20 percent after Mexico’s crackdown, and bank officials knew the money was likely tied to drug trafficking and organized crime.

Risky customers escaped scrutiny, including one in Calexico who funneled more than $100 million in suspicious transactions. Customers in Tecate withdrew more than $1 million in cash a year from 2009 to 2012, often in amounts just under federal reporting requirements.

“The cartels probably thought these were sleepy towns, no one’s going to notice,” said Dave Shaw, head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego. “When you bring in $400 million, someone is going to notice. The bank should have known and they just chose not to report any suspicious activity.”

Punishment for cover-up, not crime

Heather Lowe, legal counsel and government affairs director at research and advocacy group Global Financial Integrity, said the illegal activity bore similarities to what happened with HSBC and Wachovia.

But those banks were charged with laundering Mexican drug proceeds, while Rabobank only acknowledged covering it up.

“It seems in this case we have the bank taking the hit for lying but not for the violations themselves,” said Lowe, who expects the three unnamed executives will be prosecuted.

A whistleblower alerted two of the three executives to suspicious activity in 2012 and shared her concerns with the bank’s “executive management group,” according to the plea agreement. She also spoke with regulators amid concerns in the company that the government scrutiny could endanger a pending merger. She was fired in July 2013.

The government has a cooperating witness in former compliance officer George M. Martin, who agreed in December to cooperate with authorities in a deal that delayed prosecution for two years.

Martin, a vice president and anti-money laundering investigations manager, acknowledged he oversaw policies and practices that blocked or stymied probes into suspicious transactions and said he acted at the direction of supervisors, or at least with their knowledge.

Martin told investigators that he and others allowed millions of dollars to pass through the bank.

Rabobank, based in Utrecht, Netherlands, said last month that it set aside about 310 million euros ($384 million) to settled allegations against its subsidiary. Sentencing is scheduled May 18.
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From: MeNeedIt

Since 1931, the Gerber baby food baby has been one of the world’s most familiar and ubiquitous trademarks.

This year’s Gerber spokesbaby is extra-special, he is 18-month-old Lucas Warren from Dalton, Georgia, and he has Down syndrome.

Lucas was chosen from 140,000 entries from across the country, all happy and beautiful and deserving, Gerber said.

But Gerber CEO Bill Partyka said Lucas’ “winning smile and joyful expression won our hearts this year.”

Along with a $50,000 prize, Lucas will appear on Gerber social media channels throughout 2018 and, as his mother Courtney says, “spread joy, not only to those he interacts with, but to people all over the country … individuals with special needs have the potential to change the world, just like our Lucas.”

The original Gerber baby, whose sketch has appeared on jars and boxes since 1931, is Ann Turner Cook, who recently turned 91.
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From: MeNeedIt

The private space company SpaceX has launched its largest rocket yet Tuesday, sending a cherry red Tesla Roadster into an elliptical Earth-Mars orbit.

The Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the same launch pad from which NASA’s Apollo 11 lifted off in 1969 on the first mission that landed astronauts on the moon.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters before the launch Tuesday he “would consider it a win if it just clears the pad and doesn’t blow the pad to smithereens.”

The rocket is equipped with three boosters and 27 engines designed to provide more than 2 million kilograms of thrust. If successful, it will be the most powerful rocket in use today, and the most powerful used since NASA’s Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.

The Falcon Heavy was first designed to send humans to the moon or Mars, but Musk said Monday it is now being considered as a carrier of equipment and supplies to deep space destinations.

​While such test rockets usually use items like steel or concrete slabs as payload, but the Tesla Roadster made by another company owned by Musk, carried a mannequin “Starman” sitting at the wheel and the radio set to play David Bowie’s classic hit Space Oddity on a loop.

In a tweet last month, Musk said he loves the thought of a car driving -apparently endlessly through space and, perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future.
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From: MeNeedIt

Female musicians in Nashville have long complained about the lack of representation on country radio, but now a collective of female songwriters are singing “Time’s Up.”

The Song Suffragettes were formed in 2014 in response to a growing concern that women were being excluded by labels and radio and spurred by comments by a radio consultant that compared women to tomatoes in a salad. Only 18 out of the top 100 country singles of 2017 had a female artist featured, a percentage that has been stagnating in the genre for years. 

Kalie Shorr is one of the original members of the collective that plays in a writer’s round every Monday night at the Listening Room Cafe, just a couple of miles away from Music Row. 

“We had all individually gone into a stuffy Music Row office and had someone say, ‘No,’ followed by ‘because you’re a woman,”’ said Shorr. “I have even had label executives say, ‘I am just really burned out on women right now.”’

But Shorr and her fellow singers said the (hash)MeToo and Time’s Up movements that started in Hollywood and spread to other industries is a critical step forward in a conversation that has always been a secret in many industries. Shorr, along with another Suffragette singer Lacy Green, were inspired to write “Time’s Up” after watching the scores of actresses dressed in black at the Golden Globes. 

The music video for “Time’s Up” features the 23 singers dressed all in black, linked arm in arm, singing lyrics like “The scales are tipping, the veil is ripping and the clock is ticking `cause the time’s up.” Proceeds from the sale of the song will go to the Time’s Up organization, which has established a legal defense fund. 

It’s one of the few signs that more artists in country music are willing to address sexual harassment. Keith Urban played a song “Female” on the Country Music Association Awards last November that seemed to address the (hash)MeToo movement. The Country Radio Seminar, an annual gathering of the top country radio stations in the country held this week in Nashville, will have a panel on sexual harassment. 

But other signs suggest that the genre still has a long way to go. For example, a radio host who was fired after he lost a groping lawsuit to superstar Taylor Swift got a new gig at a Mississippi country station this year. And a country singer named Katie Armiger is in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit with her former label Cold River Records, in which she has alleged sexual harassment by unnamed radio personnel. Cold River Records has denied they were aware of the harassment.

The movement has affected some of the Song Suffragettes personally and directly. 

“It’s one thing to see artists come out about it, but actually a few weeks ago, one of my family members came out and said that she had been sexually assaulted,” said Tiera, who goes by her first name as an artist.

Shorr said that those women who have shared their stories about harassment or assault have helped to change the attitude about what was once a very secretive topic. 

“I 100 percent understand why no one would want to share their story, but now it’s like we’re creating this culture where it’s OK to speak about it,” Shorr said. “That’s why I really love this movement, because everybody is just sticking together.”

Candi Carpenter, a new artist on the Sony Music Nashville label, said that the national statistics for sexual assault are staggering, but support is available. 

“Letting victims of this kind of behavior know that when they come forward, they will be believed and they will be supported by a community,” Carpenter said. “That’s what our community does for each other and that’s what we need to do for each other as a country.”

They agreed that the recent Grammy Awards last month missed an opportunity to highlight the work of female musicians. The Recording Academy came under fire for comments made by President Neil Portnow that women needed to “step up” after only two women won awards during the telecast. 

Shorr said while she loved Kesha’s performance of “Praying,” she said the Recording Academy should have given Lorde, the only woman nominated for album of the year, a performance slot.

She said the academy “missed the mark a little bit” and urged members to “look at the bigger picture” and ask: How can we help? “Not to anticipate that kind of backlash is a little bit surprising to me.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Female circumcision is a common but brutal practice in some cultures, where it affects millions of women in 30 countries, mostly in Africa. That is why the U.N. has designated Feb. 6 as the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. In Ethiopia alone, three quarters of women are living with the painful and sometimes life-threatening results of genital mutilation.  As we hear from VOA’s Deborah Block.
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From: MeNeedIt

The rollercoaster ride continued in financial markets Tuesday, with sharp swings rocking major indexes from Asia, Europe and North America. The volatility intensified just a day after the steepest drop on Wall Street on Monday, after the Dow Jones Industrial index plunged nearly 1,200 points. But if the sharp sell-off came as a shock to some, analysts who spoke with VOA say it’s a shock many had been anticipating for some time. Mil Arcega explains.
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From: MeNeedIt

Billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn has resigned as head of Wynn Resorts, less than two weeks after the Wall Street Journal published a report about decades of allegations of sexual misconduct.

The Journal article detailed several incidents in which Wynn allegedly pressured staff to perform sex acts. The allegations include those from a manicurist who claims she was forced to have sex with Wynn in 2005, shortly after he opened his flagship Wynn Las Vegas. The paper said she was later paid a $7.5 million settlement.

Wynn has denied the accusations, including again in a statement issued Tuesday announcing he was stepping down.

“In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself the focus of an avalanche of negative publicity. As I have reflected upon the environment this has created — one in which a rush to judgment takes precedence over everything else, including the facts — I have reached the conclusion I cannot continue to be effective in my current roles,” he said.

Wynn is a towering figure in the gambling world who helped revitalize Las Vegas with resorts such as The Bellagio, The Mirage and Treasure Island.

In addition to being a business mogul, Wynn also served as the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee before resigning from that post last month, and has been a large contributor to the Republican Party.
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From: MeNeedIt