Rain-fed wildflowers have been sprouting from California’s desert sands after lying dormant for years — producing a spectacular display that has drawn record crowds and traffic jams to tiny towns like Borrego Springs.

An estimated 150,000 people in the past month have converged on this town of about 3,500, roughly 85 miles (135 kilometers) northeast of San Diego, for the so-called super bloom. 

Wildflowers are springing up in different landscapes across the state and the western United States thanks to a wet winter. In the Antelope Valley, an arid plateau northeast of Los Angeles, blazing orange poppies are lighting up the ground. 

What is a super bloom?

But a “super bloom” is a term for when a mass amount of desert plants bloom at one time. In California, that happens about once in a decade in a given area. It has been occurring less frequently with the drought. Last year, the right amount of rainfall and warm temperatures produced carpets of flowers in Death Valley. 

So far this year, the natural show has been concentrated in the 640,000-acre (1,000-square-mile) Anza Borrego State Park that abuts Borrego Springs. 

It is expected to roll along through May, with different species blooming at different elevations and in different areas of the park. Anza Borrego is California’s largest state park with hundreds of species of plants, including desert lilies, blazing stars and the flaming tall, spiny Ocotillo.

‘Flowergeddon’

Deputies were brought in to handle the traffic jams as Borrego Springs saw its population triple in a single day. 

On one particularly packed weekend in mid-March, motorists were stuck in traffic for five hours, restaurants ran out of food, and some visitors relieved themselves in the fields. Officials have since set up an army of Port-A-Pottys, and eateries have stocked up. The craze has been dubbed “Flowergeddon.” 

Locals call those who view the tiny wildflowers from their cars “flower peepers.” Thousands of others have left their vehicles to traipse across the desert and analyze the array of delicate yellow, orange, purple and magenta blooms up close in the park. Many carting cameras have taken care to step around the plants.

Tour groups from as far as Japan and Hong Kong have flown in to catch the display before it fades away with the rising temperatures. 

Rare sightings tracked

Wildflower enthusiasts worldwide track the blooms online and arrive for rare sightings like this year’s Bigelow’s Monkey flower, some of which have grown to 8 inches (203 millimeters) in height. The National Park Service has even pitched in with a 24-hour wildflower hotline to find the best spots at the state park.

“We’ve seen everything from people in normal hiking attire to people in designer flip-flops to women in sundresses and strappy heels hike out there to get their picture. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh no. Please don’t go out there with those shoes on,’” laughed Linda Haddock, head of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce.

On a recent day, a young woman sat among knee-high desert sunflowers and shot selfies against the backdrop of yellow blooms that looked almost neon in contrast to the brown landscape. A mother jumped in the air as her daughter snapped her photo among yellow brittlebushes. 

Blooms draw insects, birds 

The blooms are attracting hungry sphinx moth caterpillars that munch through acres. The caterpillars in turn are attracting droves of Swainson hawks on their annual 6,000-mile (9,656-kilometer) migration from Argentina.

“It’s an amazing burst in the cycle of life in the desert that has come because of a freakish event like a super bloom,” Haddock said. “It’s exciting. This is going to be so huge for our economy.”

Desert super blooms always draw crowds, but lifetime residents said they’ve never seen the natural wonder attract tens of thousands like this time. The park is about a two-hour drive from San Diego and three hours from Los Angeles. 

A lot of rain, a lot of blooms

This year’s display has been especially stunning, experts say. The region received 6½ inches (165 millimeters) of rain from December to February, followed by almost two weeks of 90-degree temperatures, setting the conditions for the super bloom. Five years of drought made the seeds ready to pop. 

Humans also helped. Park staff, volunteers and female prisoners have been removing the Saharan Mustard plant, an invasive species believed brought to California in the 1920s with another plant, the date palm. Saharan Mustard stole the thunder of another super bloom six years ago, said Jim Dice, research manager at the Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center.

“It completely took over the usual wildflower fields and starved out the wildflowers so what we had were giant fields of ugly mustard plant,” Dice said. “That galvanized the community, which depends on tourism largely brought in during the good wildflower years.”

Lia Wathen, a 35-year-old investigator in San Diego, took a Monday off from work so she wouldn’t miss the desert flowers.

“Any single color that you can think of, you’re going to find it right here,” said Wathen, walking with her Maltese dogs, Romeo and Roxy, before stopping to examine a magenta bloom on a spikey Cholla cactus.

Sandra Reel and her husband drove hundreds of miles out of their way when they heard about the super bloom. 

“It is absolutely phenomenal to see this many blooming desert plants all at the same time,” she said. “I think it’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.” 
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From: MeNeedIt

Hundreds of ships are switching off their tracking devices and taking unexplained routes, raising concern the trafficking of arms, migrants and drugs is going undetected.

Ninety percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea. Every vessel has an identification number administered by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization or IMO. But crews are able to change the digital identity of their ship, making it possible to conceal previous journeys.

The Israeli firm Windward has developed software to track the changes. Its CEO, Ami Daniel, showed VOA several examples of suspicious shipping activity, including one vessel that changed its entire identity in the middle of a voyage from a Chinese port to North Korea.

“It’s intentionally changing all of identification numbers. Also its name, and its size, and its flag and its owner. Everything that’s recognizable in its digital footprint. This is obviously someone who is trying to circumvent sanctions [on North Korea],” says Daniel.

Transfers at sea

In a joint investigation with the Times of London newspaper, Windward showed that in January and February more than 1,000 cargo transfers took place at sea. Security experts fear traffickers are transporting drugs, weapons, and even people.

Suspicious activity can be highlighted by comparing a vessel’s journey with all its previous voyages. In mid-January a Cyprus-flagged ship designed to carry fish deviated from its usual route between West Africa and northern Europe to visit Ukraine, deactivating its tracking system on several occasions.

“It’s leaving Ukraine, transiting all through the Bosphorus Straits into Europe, then drifting off Malta,” explains Daniel, as the Windward system plots the route of the reefer [refrigerated] vessel on the screen. “On the way it turns off transmission a few times … then it comes into this place east of Gibraltar. This area is known for ship-to-ship transfers and smuggling, because of the proximity to North Africa.”

Under global regulations all vessels must report their last port of call when arriving in a new port.

“But as you can understand, when it does ship-to-ship transfers here, it doesn’t actually call into any port, right, because it’s the middle of the ocean. So it’s finding a way to bypass what it already has to report to the authorities,” Daniel said.

Finally the vessel sails to a remote Scottish island called Islay, but again it anchors around 400 meters off a tiny deserted bay. The specific purpose of this voyage hasn’t yet been identified.

Lack of political will

Daniel shows another example of a vessel leaving the Libyan port of Tobruk before drifting just off the Greek island of Crete, raising suspicions that it is involved in people smuggling.

But he says using information like this to investigate suspicious shipping activities requires political will as well as technological advances.

“Regulation, coordination, legislation. And then proof in the court of law. And not all of this necessarily exists. The high seas, which means 200 nautical miles onwards by definition, are not regulated right now. The U.N. is still working on it.”

Meanwhile the scale of smuggling around the United States’ coastline was underlined this month, as the Coast Guard intercepted 660 kilos of cocaine off the coast of Florida, with a street value of an estimated $420 million.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Hundreds of ships are switching off their tracking devices and taking unexplained routes, raising concern that the trafficking of arms, migrants and drugs is going undetected. New technology enables authorities to follow the routes of suspect vessels, but security experts say taking on the smugglers will require greater coordination. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Qatar Airways is offering loaner laptops to its business class passengers in the wake of a U.S. ban on them on flights from several countries.

“As an award-winning and global airline we truly appreciate the importance of being able to work on board our aircraft and that is why I have insisted on offering only the best possible solution for our customers,” said Akbar Al Baker, the company’s CEO. “By providing this laptop loan service we can ensure that our passengers on flights to the US can continue to work whilst on-board. This unique ability to offer ‘business as usual’, above and beyond the competition, is yet another example of Qatar Airways justification for being the ‘World’s Best Business Class.’”

A news statement from the airline did not say what kind of computers the loaners will be, nor what software will be available. Photos posted with the statement show a MacBook Pro.

The airline says customers will be able to bring their own USB sticks so they can have access to documents they may be working on.

In a nod to economy passengers, the airline says it will offer one hour of free wi-fi as well as full wi-fi access for the entire flight for $5.

The ban on devices, which as announced earlier this month, includes tablets, e-readers, portable DVD players or any electronic device bigger than a smartphone.

The policy only covers nonstop flights to the U.S. from 10 airports in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of the airports include busy hubs like Istanbul, Turkey, and Dubai in the UAE.

Flights to these destinations from the U.S. are not subject to the ban.

Other airlines affected by the ban are taking similar steps. Emirates is letting passengers use laptops up to the moment they board, and Etihad is offering free wi-fi and iPads to its premium customers.
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From: MeNeedIt

Failing eyesight, poor digestion, bad teeth, limbs no longer so limber: With captive giant pandas living longer than ever, the list of their physical and even emotional needs is growing.

China, the pandas’ native home, is seeking to cater to those requirements with a special home for the old timers along with customized diets, exercise and other care aimed at improving their quality of life.

“Of course we spend more energy taking care of old pandas,” said Xu Yalin, a panda keeper for 19 years at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda Dujiangyan Base in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

“Every day we need to interact with them closely and check their mental state,” Xu said. “We also examine their feces, the shape of it and so on. We worry more about the old pandas than the juveniles.”

Pandas are considered old after they turn 20. The current longevity champion, Basi, recently turned 37 and lives in Fujian province in southeast China.

Of the roughly 30 pandas at the base, Xu is responsible for three, all of them over 20 and starting to develop health issues from failing eyesight to poor digestion and teeth worn down by a lifetime of chomping bamboo.

Those who can no longer handle coarse bamboo shoots get the more tender leaves instead. They eat, sleep and do little else, to the delight of the visitors.

One of Xu’s charges, a 24-year-old female named Qiao Yuan, gets fruits and smooth corn porridge rather than the wowotou bread made of corn and sorghum that younger pandas receive.

“Another panda, who was rescued from the wild, does not eat bamboo because of his bad teeth, so every day we chop bamboo leafs and mix them with pieces of the corn and sorghum bread, with carrots and apples,” Xu said. “It’s like a bamboo-flavored salad.”

Xu visits Qiao Yuan first thing each morning to ensure she spent a good night. While feeding her a snack of carrots and apples, she performs several exercises aimed at checking Qiao Yuan’s eyesight and teeth. She also has her stand up, to make her stretch her limbs.

Dinner is at 4 p.m. – more bamboo and porridge, which Qiao Yuan eagerly slurps up.

“Looking at Qiao Yuan’s behavior at her age, you can’t help but think about an old human being that has difficulty eating and walking,” said Xu. “Taking care of an old panda is just like taking care of an old person.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Part of music icon Bob Dylan’s once-secret 6,000-piece archive, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, has opened in Oklahoma.

More than 1,000 pieces of the collection spanning Dylan’s six-decade career are available to scholars at the Gilcrease Museum’s Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa.

The opening comes a year after the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa acquired the collection for an estimated $15 million to $20 million.

The public will get a glimpse of some of the material when the Bob Dylan Center opens in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District in about two years.

The center will occupy the opposite side of a building that houses a center devoted to Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s major influences.
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From: MeNeedIt

Universal Pictures is going back to its roots — monsters.

The studio Wednesday debuted footage from its upcoming adventure film The Mummy, which opens a monster universe drawing on Universal’s vault of classic properties like Bride of Frankenstein, Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Tom Cruise stars in the Alex Kurtzman-directed The Mummy, which is equal parts action and horror as Cruise’s explorer Nick Morton attempts to combat an ancient evil that has been unlocked and threatens to destroy the world.

Sofia Boutella is the Mummy, once an Egyptian princess who turned to the dark side when denied the throne.

Kurtzman and the cast, including Boutella, Annabelle Wallis and Jake Johnson, discussed Cruise’s famous commitment to eye-popping stunts.

“I think I was brought onto this movie to be afraid to do stunts with Tom Cruise,” Johnson said. “Tom does it all and he makes his co-stars do it, too. And I do mean ‘make.”’

Johnson laughed that when he would complain when he got hurt or bruised, Cruise would quip back: “Yeah, we jumped off a building dummy. It hurts!”

Cruise, who is on location for another filming, delivered a video message to the audience.

“My love for this began with universal classic films,” Cruise said. “To usher in a new age of gods and monsters is something that makes me very proud and excited.”

Audiences can meet “the original monster” June 9.
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From: MeNeedIt

Farmers around the world are using an unsustainable amount of well water to irrigate their crops, which could lead to an uptick in food prices as that water runs low, international researchers warned Wednesday.

Farmers are increasing their use of groundwater to grow staple crops such as rice, wheat and cotton, the scientists said. But much of that water use is unsustainable, as water is being pumped out faster than it can be naturally replenished.

“Groundwater depletion is increasing rapidly, especially in the last 10, 20 years, due to the increasing populations and also associated food production,” said Yoshihide Wada, deputy water program director at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a science organization in Austria.

The shortages are occurring in some big agricultural producers such as India, China and the United States, he said.

But they could have an impact on a much wider area of the world because “much of the agricultural production is traded internationally,” he said.

An estimated 11 percent of crops irrigated with nonrenewable groundwater are traded internationally after harvest, the researchers said in a report published in the journal Nature.

Countries such as Pakistan, Iran and India, which use the most groundwater to grow food, are already suffering from water scarcity, the report said.

For many countries “it doesn’t really make sense that you’re exporting a lot of food that comes from groundwater depletion,” Wada said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Effect on food prices

Unsustainable use of groundwater could lead to rising future food prices, as countries are forced to spend more money to find water to irrigate their crops, he said.

Depleted supplies of groundwater could also hurt local people, who rely on the water for day-to-day use and for other things, including fighting fires or dealing with other emergencies, the scientists said.

Droughts, which are expected to increase as a result of climate change, could also increase the shortages of groundwater and affect food supplies, lead author Carole Dalin added in a statement.

“Where and how the products are grown is crucial, and basic foods like rice and bread could have a damaging impact on global water supplies,” said Dalin, a research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Sustainable Resources.

Unless both food producers and food buyers adopt strategies to use water more wisely, “most of the world’s population risks seeing increased food prices or disrupted food supply,” she warned.

Wada said governments should more closely monitor the use of groundwater and invest in things like drip irrigation technology, which can dramatically cut water use, to better prepare for the future and conserve natural resources.
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From: MeNeedIt

Venezuela has arrested a senior manager of state oil company PDVSA on suspicion of “irregularities” in contracts to supply fuel to the domestic market, authorities said on Wednesday.

The detention of international commerce manager Marco Malave, 47, followed a shakeup of personnel at PDVSA’s trade department since January and amid gasoline shortages around the South American OPEC nation last week.

“PDVSA representatives denounced a series of irregularities in the protocol for contracting companies with vessels to supply the referred hydrocarbon to the Venezuelan market,” the state prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The situation affected fuel distribution in seven states, including the capital Caracas, it said. Malave was arrested last week in Caracas and his bank accounts have been frozen.

Vow to battle corruption

President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government and Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., familiarly known as PDVSA, have repeatedly vowed to take steps to combat corruption, which has affected Venezuela and its oil industry for decades.

Earlier this month, the heads of Venezuela-based subcontracting companies Castillo Max and Guevara Training were arrested and charged with corruption for overbilling in equipment sales at the main oil-exporting port Jose.

Jesus Osorio, the former manager of Jose terminal, was jailed in February over the purchase of two floating platforms costing $76.2 million.

Opposition leaders have said that PDVSA has been crippled by malfeasance under 18 years of socialist rule.

A probe last year by the opposition-run Congress said $11 billion had gone missing from PDVSA. The government dismissed that as part of a right-wing smear campaign.

Change at the top?

Rumors are rife inside PDVSA and in the wider oil sector that company president Eulogio del Pino may depart soon, to be replaced by Oil Minister Nelson Martinez. There has been no official word on this. Attempts to reach Del Pino have been unsuccessful.

“Del Pino’s apparent replacement Nelson Martinez is part of this broader trend of promoting loyalists,” Eurasia consultancy analyst Risa Grais-Targow wrote in a report on Wednesday.

“Martinez is close to Maduro, who has long wanted him to head PDVSA. Martinez represents the most viable alternative to Del Pino considering a shallow bench of skilled oil sector technocrats.”
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From: MeNeedIt

A study by U.S. economic experts and a major health insurance company says a healthy population is a key ingredient in a healthy and growing economy.

Blue Cross and Moody’s Analytics used data from millions of insurance customers to draw a statistical relationship between health and prosperity in the United States.

In counties throughout the 50 states where the population had top health scores, per capita incomes were nearly $4,000 a year higher than in counties where people had just average health scores.  

Unemployment showed a similar pattern: The healthiest counties had a jobless rate eight-tenths of a percent better than communities where health was average. Economic growth also was measurably stronger in the healthiest areas.

The report’s authors cautioned that the statistical correlation did not prove that healthier people cause a stronger economy, but it did make researchers suspect that such a relationship exists. The report also noted that healthier people lose less time from work and bring better skills to the job, because they didn’t miss school lessons.

Obamacare debate

The report came in the midst of a long-running national debate among American lawmakers about how to devise and pay for a system of health insurance.

Since President Donald Trump took office, his Republican Party has been planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act that former President Barack Obama signed into law seven years ago, claiming it is ineffective and financially ruinous.

The sentiment among lawmakers in Congress conflicted with many American families’ feelings about the value of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, and a divided Republican majority in Congress proved unable to repeal or replace the law.
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From: MeNeedIt

Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard?

It may be a mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound.

No matter how tolerant we are, most of us feel uncomfortable if a person sitting close to us in a quiet cinema starts noisily opening a bag of chips and loudly eating them. 

But for some people, who suffer from misophonia, certain repetitive noise can be hardly bearable.

“Mainly sounds made by people’s mouth or breathing. This is certain speech sounds, chewing, certain other sort of noisy wet noises from the mouth, noisy breathing as well. Other ones include things like repetitive noises, pen clicking, foot tapping, keyboards sometimes, packets rustling,” Will Sedley of New Castle University said.

Physical evidence?

Scientists at the Newcastle University wanted to see whether there is a physical evidence of this sensitivity.

Volunteers were asked to rate the level of unpleasantness of different sounds from neutral, such as rainfall or the sound of boiling water, to irritating, like noisy eating, loud breathing or a baby crying.

Their brain scans showed that misophonia has to do with the size of an area in our brains that regulates emotional responses.

“It was smaller and less developed in people with misophonia at a group level. Nothing you’d see on an individual brain screen basis, but suggesting that there may actually be brain structural alterations,” Sedley said.

But the discovery opened new questions.

“It’s difficult to know which is the chicken and which is the egg, whether this is the cause of misophonia or in part, or whether this is the consequence of having this condition or an unpleasant adversant condition like this and how it affects the brain in the long term,” he said.

Scientists say they also want to find out whether severe misophonia is treatable, but they say everybody should be aware that some people are genuinely sensitive to certain noises.
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From: MeNeedIt

Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard? A mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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From: MeNeedIt