They say young children are like sponges. They soak up information from all around them unconsciously, and build on that core foundation for the rest of their lives. Baba Ras D, a corrections-officer-turned-singer, is a firm believer in the theory. He created a program for children that inspires peace and unity in the community. And the children love him and the program. VOA’s June Soh met him at a performance in Washington.
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From: MeNeedIt
A pledge by health and development experts to tackle neglected diseases that blind, disable and disfigure millions of the world’s poorest people has spurred tremendous progress in five years, a report said on Thursday.
More than one billion people were treated in 2016 for painful infections, such as sleeping sickness and elephantiasis, as increased funding, drug donations and political will helped health workers reach patients in remote areas, it said.
“There are hundreds of millions more people getting treated now than five years ago,” Ellen Agler, head of the END Fund, a philanthropic initiative to combat Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in emailed comments.
“Effective partnerships and efficient systems to get medicines to those most in need have been built.”
The 2012 London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, set a goal of controlling, eliminating or eradicating 10 diseases, including leprosy and river blindness, by 2020.
NTDs affect one in five people globally, mainly in areas of extreme poverty, often trapping individuals in a cycle of social exclusion.
The number of people affected by NTDs has fallen to 1.5 billion from almost 2 billion in 2011, the report by Uniting to Combat NTDs, a partnership backing the 2020 goal, said.
Since 2012, five countries have eliminated trachoma as a public health problem — meaning it no longer poses a major threat to community health — and four countries in the Americas have eliminated river blindness, it said.
A push to train local health workers is an important element behind the campaign’s success, the report said, as they are trusted by rural communities never reached before.
“We have an obligation to ensure that [communities] are part of the solution,” said Julie Jacobson, a program officer with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, adding that South Sudan has
only had one case of Guinea worm disease so far this year.
Only 26 cases of Guinea worm disease have been reported so far in 2017, down from more than 1,060 cases in 2011, it said.
British physicist Stephen Hawking said this week that eliminating neglected tropical diseases is “within our grasp.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Three astronauts returned to Earth on Thursday after nearly six months aboard the International Space Station, landing on the snow-covered steppes outside of a remote town in Kazakhstan.
A Russian Soyuz capsule with NASA’s Randy Bresnik, Russia’s Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency descended under a red-and-white parachute and landed on schedule at 2:37 p.m. local time (0837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. EST).
The three were pulled out of the capsule within 20 minutes and appeared to be in good condition.
Bresnik, Ryazansky and Nespoli spent 139 days aboard the orbiting space laboratory. The trio who arrived at the station in July contributed to hundreds of scientific experiments and performed several spacewalks.
They left behind Alexander Misurkin, commander of the crew, and two Americans, Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei.
During their stay at the station, the crew had a phone call with Pope Francis who talked with them about Dante’s verses and Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince.”
Bresnik, a U.S. Marine who flew combat missions during the Iraq war, told the pope what strikes him is that in space there are “no borders, there is no conflict, it’s just peaceful.”
Kentucky-born Bresnik also celebrated Thanksgiving in space, feasting on pouches of turkey with his colleagues.
The space station will go back to a six-member crew when NASA’s Scott Tingle, Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov and Japan’s Norishige Kanai take off from Kazakhstan on Sunday.
From: MeNeedIt
The United Nations says humanitarian needs in refugee camps in Cameroon are increasing, exceeding the means available to take care of the growing number of refugees. But some of the refugees have empowered themselves by making use of resources around them to earn a living for their families. At Gado refugee camp in eastern Cameroon, 200 refugee women have developed a fish pond by a river and are supplying fish not only to people in need in the camp but to surrounding villages.
More than a hundred women sing here on the side of a river at Gado near the United Nations refugee camp. It is a day of harvest and many refugees have come to buy. Among the fish farmers is 31-year-old Christine Mboula, a Central African Refugee who has been living in the camp for two years. Her laughs are indicative of how happy she is to raise money from the sale of the fish and then carry some of her catch home for her family.
Mboula says she has come to the river to collect and sell fish so as to help her family. She says the activity has kept them going.
Christine says she had been jobless and poor and could not take care of her three children. She lost her husband in the fighting in C.A.R. and relied on food aid from the United Nations, which she says was never enough.
Boniface Nyado, head of the World Food Program office in the eastern Cameroon town of Bertoua says the inland fish aquaculture program was started in the area in June 2017 by the World Food Program to attend to the needs of C.A.R. refugees and their host communities.
He says they initiated the project when they noticed that the locality had high fishing potential and at the same time there was insufficient food and a deficit in protein needed by the host communities and refugees. He says they brought groups of 200 refugees and host community members who work in the fishing area for six months, harvest and sell the fish and then create their own fish ponds to help them raise revenue and protein.
The refugees and host community members receive business training, emphasizing savings and loan best practices, technical support that includes how to produce low-cost fish food pellets, and other innovative ideas from the World Food Program.
The host communities are involved in efforts to stop any potential conflict that may arise from using water and other resources.
The W.F.P. says the savings and loan program in Gado is part of a new response to the massive displacement of people from C.A.R. to Cameroon and the effects it has on host communities.
Barely 1,000 C.A.R. refugees were here at Gado at the beginning of 2017. Today, close to 25,000 people are seeking refuge and trying to survive as tensions in the central African state continue.
Allegra Baiocchi, resident coordinator of the UN system in Cameroon says the aquaculture program was initiated to support the refugees and empower them rather than have them be dependent on resources that are overstretched and slow to come.
“Our response is underfunded. We need to remember the refugees population and the impact this has on the host communities and we need to do more,” she said. “Overall, the humanitarian response in Cameroon is 40 percent funded. When it comes to refugees, that figure comes down to 20 percent. There is not more we can do with 20 percent of the funding. After three years, what the people are asking us is to give them more long term support. To start putting them on the path of recovery and of development.”
The United Nations raised only $148 million of the 390 million dollars it needed up to the end of last September. The UN says by January, the needs of the refugees will increase to 498 million dollars.
C.A.R. plunged into turmoil in 2013 when the government of the majority Christian nation was overthrown by Muslim rebels, setting off a wave of sectarian fighting.
Christians, fearing reprisal attacks from the Muslim ex-rebels who controlled Central African Republic, fled for safety.
At least two-point-two million are finding it difficult to feed themselves and in May of this year, the U.N. refugee agency said that there were more than 500,000 internally displaced persons in the country.
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From: MeNeedIt
India has issued a rare diktat to its powerful movie moguls, reminding Bollywood to keep women safe from the sort of sex abuse allegations poisoning the U.S. film industry.
India’s minister for women and child welfare Maneka Gandhi wrote to major production houses on Wednesday, asking them to comply with the Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act, which stipulates a series of processes to protect women at work.
“Bollywood filmmakers are ethically and legally accountable for the safety of not only their direct employees but of all outsourced and temporary staff as well,” read a tweet posted by Gandhi’s ministry, quoting from her letter.
Indian firms with 10 or more employees must set up committees to look into complaints of sexual harassment and ensure that female staff know their workplace rights.
Despite such laws, activists say very few of cases of sexual harassment are reported to the police in an industry, like Hollywood, that is run by men and operates by its own rules.
Film families
The vast majority of Bollywood’s biggest producers and film-makers come from prominent film families who until recently controlled most of the high-profile and lucrative industry.
Tales of sexual harassment have begun to surface in Mumbai, home to the world’s biggest film industry, following a wave of similar accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
More than 50 women have claimed that Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them over the past three decades.
Weinstein has denied having non-consensual sex with anyone.
But Bollywood has all the same elements that make it easy for men to exploit wannabe stars eager for fame and fortune.
Thousands of young boys and girls flock to the Bollywood capital Mumbai every year seeking film parts and are often exploited by agents who promise roles in exchange for favors.
While some big Bollywood names have been charged with rape and harassment, they have rarely lost their peers’ support.
From: MeNeedIt
English hospital officials said Wednesday that a baby born with her heart outside her body had survived three surgeries to mend her condition.
Glenfield Hospital in Leicester said Vanellope Hope Wilkins was born in late November with her heart growing on the outside of her body. The unusual condition is called ectopia cordis.
She underwent the first surgery to put her heart back inside her body within in an hour of her birth.
Dr. Nick Moore said the baby was in the hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit.
Only eight babies in 1 million are born with ectopia cordis. The vast majority are stillborn or die within three days.
Cardiologists said they didn’t know of another case in Britain in which a baby had survived this condition. Several babies have survived the surgery in the United States, including Audrina Cardenas, who was born in Texas in 2012.
The English baby’s parents, Naomi Findlay and Dean Wilkins, told BBC news that they named their daughter after a character in the Disney movie Wreck-It Ralph.
“Vanellope in the film is a real fighter and at the end turns into a princess, so we thought it was fitting,” Findlay said.
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From: MeNeedIt
One of the world’s rarest records has resurfaced — several vinyl copies of Prince’s “Black Album,” which the eccentric pop legend had demanded destroyed 30 years ago.
Recordmecca, a collector’s site owned by a former executive on Prince’s Warner Brothers label, on Wednesday was selling a coveted sealed vinyl copy of the album for $15,000.
The Purple Rain star, then at the height of his fame, in December 1987 sought to release music like no one had attempted before — sending it to stores completely secretly, without his name or any art on it.
Warner, with which he had legendary feuds, discouraged Prince but eventually relented and ordered the pressing of the vinyl — which has no actual title but was informally called the “Black Album” for its blank, dark cover.
But Prince soon afterward declared that he had a spiritual revelation that the album was “evil” and demanded the destruction of all copies.
Warner largely succeeded in seizing and destroying the more than 500,000 copies at their factories. But Recordmecca owner Jeff Gold, who worked with Prince at Warner, said he was recently contacted by a fellow former executive who came upon five copies.
Gold said that the executive, who requested anonymity, had been sending records to his own daughter, who had bought a first turntable amid vinyl’s rebirth.
Sifting through his collection, the executive discovered two envelopes distributed within Warner. Inside were five copies of the “Black Album.”
“For 30 years, the two mailers had sat unopened among their other boxed-up vinyl,” Gold wrote.
The former executive decided to sell three copies. Gold was offering one copy online, saying he already sold another one directly and would list the third one later.
Gold said he would attach certificates of authenticity.
Prince in late 1994 finally released the “Black Album” on limited-edition CDs and cassettes but not vinyl, making the record a holy grail for record collectors.
Prince resented Warner’s constraints and in the 1990s changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in hopes of getting out of contractual conditions.
He finally made peace with Warner in 2014 in a deal that gave him control over his classic albums. He died two years later at his Paisley Park estate in Minnesota from an accidental overdose of painkillers.
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From: MeNeedIt
There was a time — in this northwest corner of Montana — when glaciers ruled the land.
Crown of the Continent
The abundance of the massive rivers of ice — and their runoff — created “a land of striking scenery.” That’s how American anthropologist, historian, naturalist and writer George Bird Grinnell described Glacier National Park, nine years before the land was set aside as a national park on May 11, 1910.
Today, there are far fewer icy behemoths. And they’re all shrinking.
“There are currently 26 glaciers in Glacier National Park,” says national parks traveler Mikah Meyer. “I can’t remember the exact number that there were when it was founded but it was vastly higher,” he added. “The glaciers are melting and the snowfall is not restoring their size in the way that they have in past years.”
Melting glaciers
But the glaciers – both those long gone and those that still remain — have left their mark. As they started melting 10,000 years ago, they carved out majestic mountains, lush valleys, and pristine lakes.
Glacial waters are the headwaters for streams that flow west to the Pacific Ocean, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and east across the continent to Hudson’s Bay, according to the National Park Service. It emphasizes that that runoff “affects waters in a huge section of North America.”
With more than 760 lakes and nearly half a million hectares of parkland, it’s easy to see why Mikah has returned.
“Five years ago I stood on this exact same spot; at the end of the dock on Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park,” he said as he stood in front of a landscape so serene, it could have passed as a painting.
“It was one of my first experiences with the National Park Service site and I was hooked,” he admitted.
Waters from those melting glaciers also feed Iceberg Lake — another popular attraction in the park. “It is very cold and very windy and lots of little icebergs floating back there by the snow,” Mikah said as he braved the winds to capture the scene with his camera.
But despite the cold, nearby wildflowers were in full bloom, creating a pastoral setting. As Mikah walked through a field of bear grass, he said he felt like he was “in some fairytale land.”
The elegant white blossoms are a common wildflower in Glacier National Park, which this year grew in prolific numbers. They provided a perfect environment to view the local wildlife, including deer, moose, marmots and mountain goats.
Generous tour companies
Mikah got lucky when several tour companies offered him a chance to explore the park from a variety of perspectives. With Red Bus Tours, Mikah got a nice overview of the park from their vintage 1930s buses.
“It’s a massive park — it takes an hour and a half just to cross it,” he noted. “So it’s a guided tour that allows you to focus on looking at the beauty of the park instead of having to stay on these tiny mountain roads.”
Swan Mountain Outfitters donated a horseback tour for an eight-hour trek to Cracker Lake, an eye-popping turquoise body of water which is also fed by melting glacial waters.
Mikah described the scene: “You crest over this hill on the horses and you’re in the middle, surrounded by bear grass and trees and flowers and these large gray mountains in the background, and it just pops like nothing else.”
And thanks to Montana Whitewater Rafting, Mikah got to experience those glacial waters up close during a rafting tour on the Middle Fork River — a 150-kilometer river in western Montana that forms the southwestern boundary of the park.
“It was a very clear river,” Mikah said, since the water was a combination of glacier melt and snow runoff. “So you could see down through the water to the bottom, see the rocks, and the fish, so very pure, very clear water.”
Mikah was pleased to have experienced the park from the depths of the water as well as from the top of a ski lift where he could see “where it all started.”
Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all 417 national parks in the U.S., says he hopes to come back again one day, even if the glaciers are gone.
“Even if the physical glaciers don’t still exist because they melted away, it can still be Glacier National Park because that’s what created this amazing landscape.”
Mikah invites you to follow him on his epic journey by visiting him on his website MikahMeyer.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
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From: MeNeedIt
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.
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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.
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From: MeNeedIt