Only about 1 in 5 politicians in the US is female, even though women make up just over half of the US population. With many saying 2018 could be “The Year of the Woman” in American politics, new tools have become available for women running for office. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti shows us some high-tech and social media sites geared toward female candidates.
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From: MeNeedIt
The United States is suffering through an unprecedented, deadly wave of opioid and prescription drug overdoses. The drug crisis comes nearly 50 years after the government declared a “War on Drugs.” VOA’s Chris Simkins looks back at the War on Drugs and how experts say mistakes of the past cannot be repeated in this new battle against opioid drug abuse.
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From: MeNeedIt
Hope is the thing with feathers, poet Emily Dickinson wrote. For Richard Thorns, the feathers are pink.
Thorns’ hope? To prove that a colorful duck is not extinct. This week, he launches a seventh expedition into the inaccessible wilds of Myanmar to search for the pink-headed duck that hasn’t been seen alive since 1949, and that was in India. No one has seen the bird alive in Myanmar in more than a century.
Thorns, a British writer who quit his shop clerk job 20 years ago after reading about the pink-headed duck in the book “Vanishing Birds,” has spent $20,000 of his own money on previous fruitless trips. His birder brother called him mad.
“I could have had a lot of nice things,” the 53-year-old said. “I don’t want nice things. I want to see a pink-headed duck.”
This time, he is backed by the Global Wildlife Conservation group, which launched a hunt for “lost species” — 25 quirky and elusive plants and animals beginning with the duck. A sports optic company and cheesemaking company are also helping pay.
Thorns and three others plan to head to the wetlands north of the vast Indawgyi Lake during the rainy season where they believe they have a better chance of spotting the duck. And Thorn thinks he has a secret weapon: elephants.
He used canoes in the past and thinks he probably spooked the shy birds. Now he plans to bring elephants stomping through the wetlands.
“Clearly a bird isn’t going to hunker down if there are 2-ton elephants,” said Thorn.
As crazy as it may seem, Thorns may be onto something, said ornithologist Kevin McGowan at Cornell University who isn’t part of the expedition.
“Fairly regularly birds get rediscovered,” says McGowan, who has gone on unsuccessful expeditions for the ivory-billed woodpecker. “We don’t see all the world that is in front of our eyes.”
A Cornell student found Bermuda petrels, rare seabirds thought to be extinct for 300 years. Other rediscovered animals include a crow species in Asia and a nocturnal parrot in Australia. These birds survive by not being noticed “so what’s your certainty that it’s gone?” said McGowan.
One thing that keeps Thorns going is the thought that someone else might find the pink-headed duck first.
Every time he goes out, the bird “breaks my heart,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t seen that picture.”
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From: MeNeedIt
There are only two places in the entire world where children have caught polio this year: Afghanistan and Pakistan. In these countries, the virus is not circulating throughout, but only in very remote or very small areas.
Nearly 30 years ago, the polio virus paralyzed 1,000 children a day in 125 countries.
The numbers have dropped so dramatically thanks to a global effort to wipe out the polio virus.
Carol Pandak of Rotary International calls the effort “herculean.” “Hundreds of thousands of frontline health care workers are out there every day immunizing children in urban areas, in remote areas, in all sorts of settings,” Pandak says.
Rotary International was the first organization to promote the global effort to end polio. It has since become a partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which includes the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
At one time, health workers in some countries risked their lives to immunize the children. Pandak says the vaccinators are now people from the communities they work in which has helped alleviate some of the safety issues. In areas of conflict, Pandak says security personnel accompany them.
Dr. Flavia Bustreo at the World Health Organization says the challenge now is to get to zero cases and to maintain that level for at least three years, just to make sure the virus is no longer circulating. The key to that, she says, is strong surveillance so every single case is detected and children are immunized.
The GPEI has developed a network of laboratories around the world that can identify the disease. Maintaining these laboratories and the cost of distributing the vaccine is both a huge undertaking and an enormous expense.
The polio virus is a disease that is only found in humans. It doesn’t infect animals, which is why it can be eradicated.
Dr. David Nabarro at the UN says getting to the end is actually the hardest part of the campaign because governments and organizations have to keep up their commitment until there are no more cases. “We’ve got to remain vigilant and focused until the last case has been found and that we have got everybody protected.”
Once the final case of polio is recorded, it will take three years to ensure that the last case is, in fact, the final one. That means that if the final case is seen this year, all of these programs will continue to need funding and volunteers until 2020. That’s why the theme of this year’s World Polio Day is “We’re Not Done Yet.”
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From: MeNeedIt
It was a source of national pride — technology and discipline besting a crippling lack of water.
But four years of drought have overtaxed Israel’s unmatched array of desalination and wastewater treatment plants, choking its most fertile regions and catching the government off-guard.
“No one imagined we would face a sequence of arid years like this, because it never happened before,” said Uri Schor, spokesman for Israel’s Water Authority.
The Sea of Galilee, technically a lake near the border with Syria, is forecast to hit its lowest level ever before winter rains come, despite the fact that pumping there was massively reduced. Underground aquifers, the other main freshwater source, are nearing levels that will turn them salty.
How to cope with the crisis is becoming an increasingly touchy subject in Israel. Proposed cuts to water use for the coming year, more than 50 percent in some areas, prompted vehement opposition from farmers, who already face tough restrictions and would have been the hardest hit. The government quickly backtracked.
In the Middle East, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, water is also the subject of wider tensions.
Intense pressure on already scarce water resources could lead to an increase in migration and the risk of conflict, the World Bank has warned.
Syria and Jordan depend on some of the same water sources as Israel, which as added to tensions in the past. Palestinians have long complained of inadequate access to water, which is mostly under Israeli control in the occupied West Bank. Israel has said it has supplied more water than required under interim peace deals.
Under discussion for a possible long-term solution to Israel’s water problem is the construction of an additional desalination plant, an industry official said. A similar facility in Israel has cost more $400 million.
Several new reservoirs to catch rain and flood waters could also relieve some pressure as a quick, $60 million fix, the official said, asking to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject.
Just a few years ago Israel, a country two-thirds arid, declared an end to the water shortages that hounded it for decades. A longstanding nationwide awareness campaign ceased and Israelis could take long showers and water their gardens.
There was even talk of exporting surplus water to its neighbors. This came as a result of a massive investment drive which saw Israel put 15 billion shekels ($4.3 billion) in its national water grid and sewage treatment centers. The commercial sector invested another 7 billion shekels into the construction of five desalination plants.
Supply issues are being hardest felt among farmers in the northern tip of Israel, the region where Dubi Amitay, a fourth-generation farmer and president of the Israel Farmers Federation, lives.
Amitay said the shortage had made him decide to dry out 3,700 acres of land, which will take a toll on future harvests.
His home region of eastern Galilee, a lush swath of land between the coast and the Golan Heights, could lose up to 500 million shekels this season, he said.
The lack of reliable waters supply leaves farmers with deep uncertainty.
“Will we have water or not?,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt
A collection of radio telescopes that spans thousands of miles and is remotely operated from central New Mexico has measured a span of 66,000 light-years (one light-year is equal to 6 trillion miles) from Earth across the Milky Way’s center to a star-forming area near the edge of the other side of the galaxy.
Astronomers say they hope to measure additional points around the galaxy to produce a map – the first of its kind – over the next decade.
Alberto Sanna of Germany’s Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy said in a news release that using the Very Long Baseline Array, which is remotely operated near Socorro, allows astronomers to “accurately map the whole extent of our galaxy,” the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Mark Reid, a senior radio astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who worked on the project, said they hope to create the map by measuring additional points around the galaxy. So far, they have measured around 200.
Reid said 100 or so observations must be done from the Earth’s southern hemisphere, so he will be traveling to Australia in the future to use telescopes there.
Although the data for the 66,000 light-year measurement was collected in 2014 and 2015, the team has spent the time since then analyzing it, Reid said. “It’s not like you get a Hubble (Space Telescope) space image,” he said.
While there are artistic renderings of what the Milky Way probably looks like, this effort will yield a highly accurate image, Reid said.
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From: MeNeedIt
Sierra Leone hopes to raise millions of dollars for development projects by auctioning a huge uncut diamond, believed to be one of the world’s largest, in New York in December.
It will be the government’s second attempt to sell the 709-carat gem, known as the “Peace Diamond”, after it rejected the highest bid of $7.8 million at an initial auction in New York in May.
Over half of the proceeds from the sale will be used to fund clean water, electricity, education and health projects in Sierra Leone, and particularly in the village of Koryardu, in the Kono region in eastern Sierra Leone, where the diamond was discovered.
“There’s a reason God gave these diamonds to the poorest people in the world and made the richest people want them. This is Tikun Olam [Hebrew for correcting the world], this is making the world a better place,” Martin Rapaport, chairman of Rapaport Group, a network of diamond companies which will manage the auction, told Reuters.
The diamond, which the auctioneers described as the 14th largest in the world, was unearthed in Koryardu in March by a Christian pastor who gave it to the government.
Diamonds fuelled a decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone, ending in 2002, in which rebels forced civilians to mine the stones and bought weapons with the proceeds, leading to the term “blood diamonds.”
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From: MeNeedIt
The sloping vineyards of New York’s Finger Lakes region known for producing golden-hued rieslings and chardonnays also are offering a splash of orange wine.
The color comes not from citrus fruit, but by fermenting white wine grapes with their skins on before pressing – a practice that mirrors the way red wines are made. Lighter than reds and earthier than whites, orange wines have created a buzz in trendier quarters. And winemakers reviving the ancient practice like how the “skin-fermented” wines introduce more complex flavors to the bottle.
“Pretty outgoing characteristics. Very spicy, peppery. A lot of tea flavors, too, come through,” winemaker Vinny Aliperti said, taking a break from harvest duties at Atwater Estate Vineyards on Seneca Lake. “They’re more thoughtful wines. They’re more meditative.”
Atwater is among a few wineries encircling these glacier-carved lakes that have added orange to their mix of whites and reds. The practice dates back thousands of years, when winemakers in the Caucasus, a region located at the border of Europe and Asia, would ferment wine in buried clay jars. It has been revitalized in recent decades by vintners in Italy, California and elsewhere looking to connect wine to its roots or to conjure new tastes from the grapes. Or both. Clay jars are optional.
Aliperti has been experimenting with skin fermenting for years, first by blending a bit into traditional chardonnays to change up the flavor and more recently with full-on orange wines. This fall, he fermented Vignoles grapes with their skins in a stainless steel vat for a couple of weeks before pressing and then aging them in oak barrels.
Orange wines account for “far less than 1 percent” of what is handled by Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, the nation’s largest distributor with about a quarter of the market, according to Eric Hemer, senior vice president and corporate director of wine education.
Hemer expects orange wines to remain a niche variety due to small-scale production, higher retail prices _ up to $200 for a premium bottle – and the nature of the wine.
“It’s not a wine that’s going to appeal to the novice consumer or the mainstream wine drinker,” Hemer said. “It really takes a little bit more of, I think, a sophisticated palate.”
The wines have caught on in recent years among connoisseurs who like the depth of flavors, sommeliers who can regale customers with tales of ancient techniques and drinkers looking for something different. Christopher Nicolson, managing winemaker at Red Hook Winery in Brooklyn, said the wines hit their “crest of hipness” a couple of years ago, though they remain popular.
“I think they’re viewed by these younger drinkers as, ‘Oh, this is something new and fresh. And they’re breaking the rules of these Van Dyke-wearing, monocled … fusty old wine appreciators,’” Nicolson said.
It’s not for everyone. The rich flavors can come at the expense of the light, fruity feel that some white wine drinkers crave. And first-time drinkers can be thrown by seeing an orange chardonnay in their glasses.
“Actually I wasn’t sure because of the color, but it has a really nice flavor,” said Debbie Morris, of Chandler, Arizona, who tried a sip recently at Atwater’s tasting room. “I’m not a chardonnay person normally, but I would drink this.”
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From: MeNeedIt
The FBI hasn’t been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies and law enforcement officials trying to recover encrypted communications.
In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, federal agents were unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices, Wray said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia.
“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board – narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation.”
The FBI and other law enforcement officials have long complained about being unable to unlock and recover evidence from cellphones and other devices seized from suspects even if they have a warrant, while technology companies have insisted they must protect customers’ digital privacy.
The long-simmering debate was on display in 2016, when the Justice Department tried to force Apple to unlock an encrypted cellphone used by a gunman in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. The department eventually relented after the FBI said it paid an unidentified vendor who provided a tool to unlock the phone and no longer needed Apple’s assistance, avoiding a court showdown.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump has suggested it will be aggressive in seeking access to encrypted information from technology companies. But in a recent speech, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stopped short of saying exactly what action it might take.
“I get it, there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to keep the public safe,” Wray said.
In a wide-ranging speech to hundreds of police leaders from across the globe, Wray also touted the FBI’s partnerships with local and federal law enforcement agencies to combat terrorism and violent crime.
“The threats that we face keep accumulating, they are complex, they are varied,” Wray said, describing threats from foreign terror organizations and homegrown extremists.
Wray also decried a potential “blind spot” for intelligence gathering if Congress doesn’t reauthorize an intelligence surveillance law set to expire at the end of the year. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to collect information about militants, people suspected of cyber crimes or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other foreign targets outside the United States. Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the act is vital to national security.
A section of the act permits the government, under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to target non-Americans outside the United States.
“If it doesn’t get renewed or reauthorized, essentially in the form that it already is, we’re about to get another blind spot,” Wray said.
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From: MeNeedIt