How many places are there in the U.S. where visitors get to see nature in all its abundance within a single setting? National parks traveler Mikah Meyer thinks Glacier National Park, in northern Montana on the border with Canada, comes pretty darn close. He shared highlights of his experiences with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
…
From: MeNeedIt
‘Food Fraud’ costs the food and beverage industry an estimated $30 billion every year. Food fraud is the deliberate substitution or misrepresentation of food products for economic gain. It can be as harmless as selling watered down olive oil, or as dangerous as substituting starch or plastic for rice. But a new laser test developed in Italy can spot the fakes with incredible accuracy. VOAs’ Kevin Enochs reports.
…
From: MeNeedIt
Every year hundreds of the most famous names in high tech gather on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M.I.T, for the EmTech Conference, an opportunity to discover future trends in technology that will drive the new global economy. This report by VOA Russsian Service reporter Evgeny Maslov is narrated by Bob Leverone.
…
From: MeNeedIt
Scientists have unearthed in New Zealand fossil bones of what might be the heavyweight champion of the penguin world, a bird nearly 6 feet tall (1.77 meters) that thrived 55 to 60 million years ago, relatively soon after the demise of the dinosaurs.
Researchers said on Tuesday the ancient penguin, called Kumimanu biceae, weighed nearly 225 pounds (101 kg), and was much bigger than the largest of these flightless seabirds alive today, the emperor penguin, which grows to about 4-1/4 feet (1.2 meters) and about 90 pounds (40 kg).
The only ancient penguin yet discovered that might have been larger than Kumimanu is known only from a leg bone, said ornithologist Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt.
“Gigantism in penguins evolved more than once,” Mayr said.
Kumimanu, named after a creature from Maori folklore and the Maori word for bird, is the second-oldest known penguin. The older one, also from New Zealand, was 61 million years old.
Kumimanu’s partial skeleton lacks the skull. Mayr said other fossils indicate that the earliest penguins possessed much longer beaks than their modern relatives, useful for spearing fish.
“It would have been very impressive: as tall as many people, and a very solid, muscly animal built to withstand frequent deep dives to catch its prey,” said Alan Tennyson, vertebrate curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, another of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
“It would not have been the kind of bird that someone could catch alive. It would have been considerably more powerful than a person.”
Kumimanu and other early penguins had already developed typical penguin features including flipper-like wings and an upright stance. Studies suggest early penguins were brownish, not the trademark black and white of today’s penguins, Mayr said.
Penguins are thought to have evolved from a flying ancestor perhaps resembling a cormorant, Mayr said. The asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago also eliminated the large marine reptiles that dominated the seas, clearing the way for fish-eating divers like penguins.
Kumimanu lived long before Antarctica’s glaciation. At the time, New Zealand and Antarctica were subtropical.
“It’s a common myth that penguins only live in very cold environments such as the Antarctic region,” Tennyson said.
“Today, Galapagos penguins live at the equator, and many fossils show that early forms of penguins lived in warm seas.”
…
From: MeNeedIt
The United States, European Union and Japan vowed Tuesday to work together to fight market-distorting trade practices and policies that have fueled excess production capacity, naming several key features of China’s economic system.
In a joint statement that did not single out China or any other country, the three economic powers said they would work within the World Trade Organization and other multilateral groups to eliminate unfair competitive conditions caused by subsidies, state-owned enterprises, “forced” technology transfer and local content requirements.
The move was a rare show of solidarity with the United States at a World Trade Organization meeting dominated by differences over U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” trade agenda and U.S. efforts to stall the appointment of WTO judges.
It reflected growing frustration among industrial countries over China’s trade practices, along with concerns that other developing countries will follow Beijing’s lead.
The statement said protectionist practices “are serious concerns for the proper functioning of international trade, the creation of innovative technologies and the sustainable growth of the global economy.”
EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said China’s industry subsidies, including for aluminum and steel, were flooding global markets and hurting European workers in a “very, very dramatic” way.
“There’s no secret that we think that China is a big sinner here, but there are other countries that are as well,” Malmstrom told reporters on the sidelines of a business forum.
In the opening session of the WTO ministerial conference in Buenos Aires on Monday, the United States and Japan criticized a lack of transparency in some WTO members’ trade practices, a thinly veiled swipe at Beijing.
China, meanwhile, appealed for members to “join hands” and uphold WTO rules to protect globalization in the face of rising protectionism.
The joint statement came after Japan approached the European Union and the United States about overcapacity, according to an EU source, with both Tokyo and Brussels concerned about the possibility the Trump administration could act unilaterally.
“There is a thought that if we bring them into the fold, and can work jointly with them, then it reduces the risk of them going alone,” the source said.
’Playing by the rules’
Washington, Brussels and Tokyo have previously raised complaints about China’s excess production capacity in a number of industrial sectors that has pushed down world prices and caused layoffs elsewhere.
The United States recently sided with the EU in arguing that such distortions mean the WTO should not grant China market economy status, a move that would severely weaken their trade defenses.
“We have been … reaching out to China to tell them they really must start playing by the rules,” Malmstrom told reporters.
The EU’s and Japan’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration comes despite disagreements over the role of the WTO and the future of multilateral trade deals.
Trump has expressed his preference for bilateral negotiations, and his trade rhetoric has cast a cloud over the WTO meeting.
Efforts on Tuesday to make progress on a ministerial statement from all 164 WTO members were unsuccessful, since one country could not agree on the language, WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told reporters, declining to name that country.
U.S. officials last month blocked WTO efforts to draft a statement of unity over the “centrality” of the global trading system and the need to aid development.
A spokeswoman for the office of the U.S. trade representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Trump administration is considering several unilateral tariff actions on steel, aluminum and China’s intellectual property practices that are likely to draw disputes from WTO members.
…
From: MeNeedIt
French President Emmanuel Macron gathered business leaders and 50 world leaders in Paris for a summit Tuesday focused on boosting funding to fight climate change.
The summit comes two years after nearly 200 nations agreed to the Paris climate accord, which calls for nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions and for rich countries to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change.
U.S. President Donald Trump was not among those invited to take part in the conference. Last year, Trump announced was pulling out of the accord saying it “disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”
While the U.S. federal government stepped back from the global effort, many of the country’s states and some cities have pledged to move forward with steps consistent with the agreement.
“We have 38 states that have renewable portfolio standard laws,” said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is attending the summit. “We have 90 cities, the major cities in America, their mayors all committed to meeting Paris. So 80 percent of the population of American is in those 38 states that are committed, and we are going to stay on track.”
The European Union announced a new investment plan aimed at supporting renewable energy production, climate-friendly transportation, sustainable water and sanitation systems, as well as growth in sustainable agriculture.
EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete also urged contributors to fulfill their commitments to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing nations to help them utilize renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels that boost carbon levels in the atmosphere.
Also Tuesday, a group of 225 investors launched an initiative to push 100 of the world’s largest greenhouse gas-emitting companies to align their business plans with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
“In few short months a substantial community of institutional investors have coalesced around this initiative because they want to send an unequivocal signal directly to companies that they will be holding them accountable in order to secure nothing less than bold corporate action to improve governance, curb emissions, and increase disclosure to swiftly address the greatest challenge of our time,” said Andrew Gray, senior manager of investments governance at Australian Super.
Ahead of Tuesday’s summit, Macron awarded 18 scientists, including 13 from the United States, grants to relocate to France and carry out climate change research. He announced the initiative after Trump said the United States was withdrawing from the global accord, and the French leader played on Trump’s campaign slogan by naming his own program “Make Our Planet Great Again.”
“I refuse this double fatality, the one that says that there is this global warming that we can do nothing against and the one that says that this world is forced onto us and we cannot make profound changes,” Macron said. “But what you are showing here tonight, through your commitment, these projects that have been selected through your commitment on a daily basis is the exact opposite. We don’t want climate change and we want to produce and create jobs and do things differently if we decide so. There is no fatality.”
…
From: MeNeedIt
Medical marijuana has been used to treat epilepsy in patients for years, and this month, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said it should be studied and treated like other pain relief drugs. A growing body of scientific evidence is leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to do that. Meanwhile, researchers at Colorado State University are examining the benefits of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana, for treating dogs with epilepsy and arthritis. Faith Lapidus reports.
…
From: MeNeedIt
Propelled by the power of hearing their stories in their own language, some Cambodian American audience members fled in tears from a screening of First They Killed My Father, the Angelina Jolie film adaptation of an English-language memoir of a 5-year-old girl who witnessed the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975.
The movie uses the Khmer word “pa” for “father” a word the Khmer Rouge banned as foreign-sounding and elitist and replaced with “puk,” which the regime preferred as a purer Khmer word for “father.”
Other words recalled other horrors —“-srek khlean” “ohh sangkhoeum” and “kosang” are Khmer words which mean “hungry” “hopeless” and “build or rebuild” in Khmer, the language of Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge era, the first two carried the weight of a brutal social transformation that killed an estimated 2 million. “Kosang” in the black-is-white world of dictator Pol Pot meant near-certain “execution.”
“When Cambodians hear these phrases they will just cry because it is our story,” said Panha Nith, a 45-year-old Battambang native who now works as a cosmetologist in Leesburg, Virginia, some 70 kilometers from a screening of the film based on the memoir by Cambodian-American Loung Ung. “They forced us to change from ‘pa’ and ‘mak’ to ‘puk’ and ‘mae.’ It took a while to get used to that.”
Jolie attended the first screening, which was in Cambodia in February, and Netflix began streaming its production in September. Panha Nith decided to wait for a traditional theater screening, where other people would also attend. She saw the film in October at Montgomery College, just outside Washington, D.C. at a community screening and panel discussion designed to bring first and second generation Cambodians together to revisit the Khmer Rouge era, the first chapter in the refugee stories of many Cambodian-Americans. Many who attended the screening came as a family. The most recent screening was on Dec. 9 in Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in the United States outside California.
If the movie, the first major Khmer-language Hollywood-standard movie with English subtitles, had been in English, Cambodians would “still understand the story but some meaning and nuances will get lost and it may not feel as tragic,” said Panha Nith, whose own story of childhood survival and a father who disappeared mirrors that of Loung Ung’s.
Other movies, The Killing Fields (1984), andThe Missing Picture (2013) have focused on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era, but not completely in Khmer.
About thirty minutes into the screening of the Oscar-submitted Jolie film, Panha Nith left, crying. “At the scene where the children were given porridge, and it was so little … it reminded me of our situation where there was barely any rice in the porridge,” she said. “I can’t even describe it — I had to add leaves and gave it to my younger siblings, willing to starve myself.”
Panha Nith’s 10-year-old daughter Beaunita Nith attended the screening with her mother even though she has watched the film three times on Netflix. She said her mother, whom she calls “mak” at home, had prepared her for a possibly traumatic experience.
“She always kept on telling me” that her father was a teacher, “and that they didn’t find him and that my grandma almost died, too, like a lot of people almost died,” said Beaunita Nith, a fifth-grader who can speak some Khmer.
She liked hearing the language as she followed Loung Ung’s experience because the story felt closer to her mother’s experience. “This is a story of a Cambodian but if it is (told) in a voice of an American, that won’t make any sense,” said Beaunita Nith.
Cambodian-American Sarah Kith, 46, is a convener at the Library of Congress who lives in northern Virginia. She had not read or streamed First They Killed My Father because the story too closely parallels her own, rekindling difficult memories.
Sarah Kith attended the screening with three generations of her family, including her grandmother who barely speaks English. Hearing Khmer words such as “srek khlean” (hungry) and “ohh sangkhoeum” (hopeless) triggered vivid memories of Sarah Kitch’s five-year-old self.
“While (the book) was written in English, the way it is played out in the movie is … very culturally appropriate,” said Sarah Kith. It was written “from the perspective of a young girl so there are many lenses that are superimposed or rather filtered through. But it quite accurately captured (events), so we get to re-experience it in a way that helps us heal.”
For Heng Kim, 81, of Arlington, Virginia, the Khmer words in the film such as “kosang” (rebuild/reeducation) brought back memories of his near execution in the Ba Phnom district of his native Prey Veng province. If he hadn’t escaped to Vietnam, his daughter’s story would have echoed that of Loung Ung.
Many of the Khmer words would be difficult to express in English because of what was happening at the time; “kosang” carried the connotation of “execution.”
“As Cambodians, these words hit us hard,” said Kim Heng. “I understood parts of The Killing Fields, and had to rely on translation for some parts. But for this movie, the Khmer-language is so real I couldn’t bear it. It gave me headaches.”
The Killing Fields, the first Khmer Rouge-themed movie to attract international acclaim —including Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for the late Cambodian Haing S. Ngor, and best cinematography and best film editing — was shot mainly in English on locations outside Cambodia, which was still engulfed in civil war. First They Killed My Father featured an all-Cambodian crew of over 3,500 actors and was also filmed completely in Cambodia’s Siem Reap and Battambang provinces.
Visal Sam, 45, was born in Battambang city, one of the First They Killed My Father locations. Like Loung Ung, in the movie, she too lost her father who was a former military official during the Lon Nol regime.
Visal watched the movie with her husband and her four children.
Her daughter, Vichethyda Sam, 19, and the oldest of her children said that although she understood the film without reading the English subtitles, the movie made her want to learn more Khmer and connect with Cambodian-Americans her age.
“I’m glad that the movie was in Khmer,” she said.
Building a sense of family and community were the main goals of Kunthary de Gaiffier, 61, one of the event organizers.
She was pleased that more than 200 people came to the Friday night screening, and that many were second-generation Cambodian-Americans with their parents.
Kunthary de Gaiffier said that she believed the film may open intergenerational dialogue among Cambodian-American families, conversations that may help with trauma healing.
“After the screening of this movie, they start to open up, at least those who dare not discuss in the past now at least dare to ask,” she said.”
Kunthary de Gaiffier, who was in France during the Khmer Rouge era and has two adult Cambodian-American children, says the film may prompt second-generation Cambodian-Americans to learn more about Cambodian history, language and culture. “They can relate to family experience and can become more curious to learn more and ask more questions that they dared not ask for many years.”
…
From: MeNeedIt
Scientists have for the first time fixed a protein defect that causes Huntington’s disease by injecting a drug from Ionis Pharmaceuticals into the spine, offering new hope for patients with the devastating genetic disease.
The success in the early-stage clinical trial has prompted Roche to exercise its option to license the product, called IONIS-HTT(Rx), at a cost of $45 million.
Lead researcher Sarah Tabrizi, professor of clinical neurology at University College London, said the ability of the drug to tackle the underlying cause of Huntington’s by lowering levels of a toxic protein was “groundbreaking.”
“The key now is to move quickly to a larger trial to test whether IONIS-HTT(Rx) slows disease progression,” she said in a statement Monday.
Ionis senior vice president of research Frank Bennett said the protein reductions observed in the study “substantially exceeded our expectations” and that the drug was also well tolerated.
However, experts cautioned that the results were still early and the ability of the new medicine to improve clinical outcomes for patients had yet to be demonstrated.
“The question is whether this is enough to make a difference to patients and their clinical course, and for that we will have to wait for bigger trials,” said Roger Barker of the University of Cambridge, who was also involved in the research.
Huntington’s is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting mental abilities and physical control that normally hits sufferers between the ages of 30 and 50 years before continually worsening over a 10- to 25-year period.
There is currently no effective disease-modifying treatment for the condition, with existing medicines focused only on managing disease symptoms.
Ionis said Roche would now be responsible for all IONIS-HTT(Rx) development, regulatory and commercialization activities and costs.
The drug uses an approach called antisense to stop a gene producing a particular protein. The technique has already led to a drug for spinal muscular atrophy that was approved last year.
Shares in Ionis rose around 2 percent in early Nasdaq trade as did those in Wave Life Sciences, which is also working on antisense medicine.
…
From: MeNeedIt
President Donald Trump will sign a directive Monday ordering the National Air and Space Administration to revive the program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.
“The president listened to the National Space Council’s recommendations, and he will change our nation’s human spaceflight policy to help America become the driving force for the space industry, gain new knowledge from the cosmos and spur incredible technology,” deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement Monday.
“Since the beginning of his administration, President Trump has taken steps to refocus NASA on its core mission of space exploration by signing the NASA Transition Authorization Act, the INSPIRE Women Act and an executive order on reviving the National Space Council,” he said.
Trump has made clear he wants the United States to return to space exploration in a big way. With former astronaut and moon walker Buzz Aldrin at his side last June, Trump signed an executive order re-establishing the National Space Council and naming Vice President Mike Pence as its head.
At the council’s first meeting in October, Pence said the goal of the program would be to resume America’s leadership in manned space exploration.
“We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond,” the vice president said.
The signing of the latest directive comes on the 45th anniversary of the last manned mission to land on the moon on December 11, 1972.
Last March, Trump signed the first NASA funding authorization in more than six years, which endorses a “stepping stone approach to exploration” with “missions to intermediate destinations in sustainable steps” while maintaining a long-term goal of human missions to Mars.
The $19.5 billion bill ordered NASA to come up with an “initial exploration road map” that is due this month.
…
From: MeNeedIt
U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade chief said on Monday that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is losing its focus on trade negotiations in favor of litigation, and was going too easy on wealthier developing countries such as China.
With Trump’s “America First” trade agenda casting a cloud over the WTO’s 11th ministerial meeting in Buenos Aires, representatives of other major members criticized protectionism and advocated a stronger multilateral trading system, while acknowledging the WTO’s shortcomings.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who has said he does not want major agreements out of the meeting, voiced concern that the WTO was becoming a litigation-centered organization.
“Too often members seem to believe they can gain concessions through lawsuits that they could never get at the negotiating table,” he said. “We have to ask ourselves whether this is good for the institution and whether the current litigation structure makes sense.”
Too many countries were not following WTO rules, he complained, and too many wealthier members had been given unfair exemptions as developing countries.
“We need to clarify our understanding of development within the WTO. We cannot sustain a situation in which new rules can only apply to a few and that others will be given a pass in the name of self-proclaimed development status,” Lighthizer told the conference’s opening session.
He said five of the six richest countries claim developing country status at the WTO, without providing evidence to back up the assertion. Of the countries with the six largest economies by Gross Domestic Product, according to the World Bank, only China claims developing market status.
Ahead of the meeting, the United States blocked efforts to draft a joint statement emphasizing the “centrality” of the global trade system and the need to aid development. Its opposition has raised concerns that the WTO will not be able to accomplish even modest goals, such as addressing fishing and agricultural subsidies, at the conference.
“We need to have a clear objective in mind,” European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said. “For the European Union, this is clear: to preserve and to strengthen the rules-based multilateral trading system.”
Swipes at China
Trump has indicated his preference for bilateral deals over the multilateral system embodied by the WTO. The United States has vetoed new judges for trade disputes, pushing the organization into a crisis.
On Monday, Lighthizer said it was impossible to negotiate new rules when many of the current ones were not being followed, and added that too many members viewed exemptions from WTO rules as a path to faster growth.
In a thinly veiled swipe at China’s trade practices, Lighthizer said the United States was leading negotiations to “correct the sad performance of many members in notification and transparency.”
The United States is backing the EU in its resistance to recognizing China as a market economy, arguing the government unfairly intervenes in the economy. The case, currently before the WTO, could lead to dramatically lower tariffs on imports of Chinese goods.
Chinese Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said on Monday that while trade protection was rising, no country would be able to succeed in isolation and that WTO rules were critical to protecting globalization.
“Let us join hands and take real action to uphold the authority and efficacy of the WTO,” Zhong said.
…
From: MeNeedIt