A federal judge in Miami fined Princess Cruise Lines $40 million Wednesday for illegally dumping oil waste into the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and for falsifying records.

It is the largest such water pollution fine in U.S. history.

The Miami Herald newspaper says the British engineer who reported the dumping to the U.S. Coast Guard will get a $1 million reward.

According to the Herald, engineers aboard the Caribbean Princess in 2012 and 2013 were ordered to dump the oily water straight into the sea and avoid the ship’s filtration system, in order to save money. It said the ship’s two senior engineers falsified the vessel’s records.

The British engineer recorded the dumping on a cellphone.

Four other Princess ships also were involved in the illegal dumping off the East Coast, and near Florida and Texas.
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From: MeNeedIt

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates is urging British leaders not to back down from their commitment to foreign aid, saying it could cost lives in Africa.

Gates on Wednesday was in London, where campaigning has started for early elections called by Prime Minister Teresa May.

May has so far declined to say whether she will heed calls by fellow Conservatives to slash British foreign aid as part of her party platform.

Gates told the Guardian newspaper Wednesday that a British refusal to commit itself to targeted spending on foreign aid could hurt efforts to wipe out malaria in Africa.

“The big aid givers now are the U.S., Britain and Germany … and if those three back off, a lot of ambitious things going on with malaria, agriculture and reproductive health simply would not get done,” he said.

Gates said British funding has made an “absolute phenomenal difference” in eradicating tropical diseases that affect more than 1 billion people.

Many conservatives want the government to spend more money at home to combat domestic crises. Some also contend that foreign aid money is frequently squandered.

Gates said as a business executive who spends $5 billion a year helping developing nations, he hates wasting money. But he told an audience of British politicians and diplomats that no country can “build a wall to hold back the next global epidemic,” and that foreign aid combats socioeconomic problems “at the source.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Egypt has unveiled a massive granite statue of Ramses II, the most powerful and celebrated of the ancient Pharaohs, after completing its restoration.

Standing 11 meters (36 feet) tall and weighing 75 tons, the statue was presented in a floodlit ceremony at the Luxor Temple on the banks of the Nile on Tuesday evening. When the statue was discovered between 1958 and 1960, it was in 57 pieces.

Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great or Ozymandias, reigned more than 3,000 years ago. He led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian empire to stretch from Syria in the north to Nubia in the south.

The statue was displayed just hours after archaeologists unveiled the tomb of a nobleman from more than 3,000 years ago, the latest in a series of discoveries that Egypt hopes will revive a tourist business hit by political instability.

“What we’re happy with is that [the kind of tourists drawn to] classical Egypt, Luxor, Aswan, Nile cruises … are back to normal levels again,” said Hisham El Demery, chief of Egypt’s Tourism Development Authority.

However, an attack Tuesday claimed by Islamic State near St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, one of the world’s most important Christian sites, revived fears for the tourist sector there.

The attack left one police officer dead and four others wounded.
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From: MeNeedIt

Peru’s economy will recover in coming years with investment in construction after recent flooding, likely growing 4.5 percent in 2018 and 5 percent in 2019, Finance Minister Alfredo Thorne said on Wednesday.

Previously, the government had expected growth of 4.3 and 4.1 percent for the next two years.

The estimate for 2017 growth was lowered this month to 3 percent from 3.8 percent previously due to flooding.

“The shock will be temporary,” Thorne said in a presentation at Lima’s Chamber of Commerce.

The floods have damaged 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) of roads, destroyed thousands of houses and killed 106 people since December.

Peru’s economy, which has also been hurt by paralyzed infrastructure projects due to a corruption investigation involving Brazil’s Odebrecht, grew at its lowest rate in more than two years in February.
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From: MeNeedIt

Komodo dragons, fearsome giant lizards found in Indonesia, may be a source of a potent antibiotic. If so, researchers say the agent could be an answer to the growing, global health problem of antibiotic resistance.  

Huge, toothy and aggressive, Komodo dragons are surrounded by filth in their daily lives. As a result, Barney Bishop, a biochemist at George Mason University near Washington, said Komodo dragons have developed what he called a “robust” immune system.

Bishop studies molecules produced by the immune system as a front-line defense against infection. That, he said, is the reason for the interest in Komodos.

“They are known to eat carrion; they live in an unsanitary environment; they have been recorded to have up to 57 bacterial strains in their mouths,” some of which can cause disease, he said. “Yet the reptiles themselves are not harmed by these bacteria, whether it’s in their mouths or wounds inflicted by other lizards.”

Bishop and his colleagues, working with blood from Komodos, isolated peptides, or small proteins, produced by the reptiles’ immune systems. The peptides, Bishop said, seem to have remarkable anti-bacterial properties.

Artificial version tested

Researchers made artificial versions of these peptides and tested the most promising one — DRGN-1, or DRAGON-1 — in wounded mice and human skin cell cultures. They found the protein molecules exhibited three outstanding properties: They destroyed the outer layer of bacteria, dissolved biofilms — a sticky colony that microbes form to shield against antibiotics — and speeded up healing.

The work with Komodo dragon peptides was published in the journal Biofilms and Microbiomes.

Bishop said, “Their peptides may offer some promise and some new insights or provide new templates for development of new therapeutics to treat infection.”

Bishop said the three-pronged action of DRGN-1, if made into an antibiotic, would make it unlikely that disease-causing bacteria could become drug-resistant.  

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department, paid for the research. The military is interested in the work because it may relate to bioweapons.

Samples of blood for the study were taken from a 45.3-kilogram (100-pound) male Komodo dragon named Tujah who lives at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and Zoological Park in Florida.

Bishop said only a one-time sample of blood was needed because the peptides were artificially reproduced, so no animal was harmed for the study.
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From: MeNeedIt

[Mining is big business in South Africa. It is the world’s largest producer of chrome and platinum, and the second largest producer of palladium and zirconium. It is also the 5th largest producer of gold. But digging up all those riches is a dirty business, and it has left behind a poisonous legacy.
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From: MeNeedIt

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that unprecedented progress had been made in tackling many of the world’s most disfiguring and disabling neglected tropical diseases over the past 10 years.  

Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said there has been “record-breaking progress towards bringing ancient scourges like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis to their knees.”

About 1.5 billion people in 149 countries, down from 1.9 billion in 2010, are affected by neglected tropical diseases (NTD), a group of 18 disorders that disproportionately affect the very poor.

In 2007, the WHO and a group of global partners devised a strategy for better tackling and controlling NTDs.  

Five years ago, a group of nongovernmental organizations, private and public partners signed the London Declaration, committing greater support and resources to the elimination or eradication of 10 of the most common NTDs by the end of the decade.

“That has been a game changer in the expansion of NTD interventions worldwide,” said Dirk Engel, director of the WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Meeting on Wednesday

The WHO’s fourth report on neglected tropical diseases was launched to coincide with a one-day meeting Wednesday at the agency’s headquarters to take stock of what has been achieved in the fight against NTDs and to explore ways to move the process forward.   

Engel said health ministers, representatives from pharmaceutical companies, academics, donors and philanthropists “will look at the changing landscape of NTDs” and explore better ways of integrating the fight against these diseases into global health and development.    

The report described achievements made in controlling the debilitating diseases. For example, it noted that an estimated 1 billion people received 1.5 billion treatments donated by pharmaceutical companies for one or more NTDs in 2015 alone.

It cited dramatic successes in efforts to eliminate visceral leishmaniasis, a parasitic, disfiguring disease that attacks the internal organs.  

“If you get it, it kills. There is no way out,” said Engel.  

The disease is prevalent in Southeast Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Engel said a subregional program was organized to provide early treatment with donated medicines and vector control through indoor residual spraying, similar to that used in malaria control.

“With those two interventions, you reduce the incidence of visceral leishmaniasis almost to nothing,” said Engel. “And the aim was to have less than one case in 10,000 people at the subdistrict level, which is a tough target.”

He noted that the disease had been eliminated in 82 percent of subdistricts in India, 97 percent of subdistricts in Bangladesh, and eliminated entirely in Nepal.

“This is a result that we had not anticipated a few years back,” he said.

While Asia is burdened with the greatest number of NTD cases, Africa has the highest concentration of the diseases. Engel told VOA that between 450,000 and 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected by at least one tropical disease — but usually several — at the same time.   

He said Africa was making excellent progress in controlling neglected tropical diseases. African sleeping sickness has been reduced from 37,000 new cases in 1999 to fewer than 3,000 cases in 2015, and Guinea worm disease has gone down “to only 25 human cases, putting eradication within reach,” he said.

Engel noted that lymphatic filariasis, an infection transmitted by mosquitoes, causing enlargement of limbs and genitals, also was being brought under control.

“Some countries are lagging a bit behind. Some countries are actually doing fairly well,” he said. “We have just acknowledged the first African country that has eliminated lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem — Togo.”

He noted that so much progress has been made in the treatment of onchocerciasis, or river blindness, that “we are now thinking of setting a new target of elimination post-2020.”

In another important advance, the report found that trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, “has been eliminated as a public health problem” in Oman, Morocco and Mexico.

Affected areas

Neglected tropical diseases used to be prevalent throughout the world. Now, they are found only in tropical and subtropical regions with unsafe water, bad hygiene and sanitation, and poor housing conditions.  

“Poor people living in remote, rural areas, urban slums or conflict zones are most at risk,” said the report.

The World Health Organization said improving water and sanitation for 2.4 billion people globally who lack these basic facilities was key to making further progress in the fight against neglected tropical diseases.

Christopher Fitzpatrick, health economist in the WHO’s department of tropical diseases, told VOA that the socioeconomic costs in terms of lost productivity and out-of-pocket health expenditures by people infected with NTDs is very high.  

“It has been calculated that for every dollar invested [in improving water and sanitation infrastructure], there will be about $30 of return to affected individuals,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

A frog found in India secretes a substance that has been shown to be highly effective at killing influenza viruses.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta say the secreted peptide — a subunit of a protein chain — kills dozens of flu strains that plague humans. It is effective against H1 viruses, including ones that could cause pandemics.  

Unlike humans, frogs don’t have an immune system that is capable of protecting them against pathogens like viruses and bacteria. But they do produce a slimy mucus that does the job for them.  

Researchers at Emory screened 32 peptides derived from the mucus of the frog, called Bahuvistara, and found one that was effective against all H1 viruses. The frog is found in the southern Indian province of Kerala.

Joshy Jacob, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory’s vaccine center and senior author of the study, describing the peptide in the journal Immunity. He and his colleagues administered the peptide to mice and then exposed them to H1 viruses. He said it protected the animals from infection.

“The beauty of this peptide is that it directly kills the virus. It’s virucidal. So if you put the peptide and the virus together, it actually destroys the virus,” Jacob said.

The researchers named the peptide urumin, after a sword blade that snaps and bends like a whip.

Jacob said the mucus is collected from the frog after exposing it to a mild electric current, which makes the amphibians secrete the antiviral agent.

Three dozen peptides

After identifying the more than three dozen immune peptides in the mucus, the protein building blocks were made synthetically in the lab.

Four emerged as antiviral candidates. But one, urumin, killed all H1 viruses.

Jacob said an flu-fighting peptide could be especially useful when vaccines are not available or when circulating viral strains become resistant to current drugs.

He said one of the next challenges would be turning the effective peptide into a pill or injection to protect humans from viruses.

“It’s like when you get a headache, you take a Motrin [a painkiller]. [The peptide] doesn’t keep you from getting [the flu] again, but it kills the virus. It’s like taking an antibiotic for bacterial infection. You take this for a flu infection,” Jacob said.

Jacob said the peptide was not effective against seasonal flu viruses that mutate rapidly. But researchers plan on testing more of the frog-derived peptides to try to find others that work against other types of influenza virus.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order aimed at making it harder for companies to hire temporary foreign workers.

The order, called “Buy American — Hire American,” will take initial steps to reform the H1-B visa program.

H1-Bs allow employers — mostly high-tech firms — to hire skilled foreign workers to work in the U.S. for three years. There are 85,000 slots available each year, 65,000 for applicants with bachelor’s degrees and 20,000 for those with master’s degrees or higher.

“We are going to use a tool you all know very well. It’s called the sledgehammer,” Trump said Tuesday during a speech at Snap-on Tools, a company in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The administration will require companies to demonstrate that the visas are going only to the most highly skilled workers in their fields.

“They [H1-Bs] should be given to the most skilled and highest-paid applicants and not be used to replace Americans,” Trump said.

WATCH: H1-B Visas Let US Firms Hire Foreigners for Specialized Jobs

Open to abuse

The administration says the visas, which can be renewed once, have contributed to a slide in American wages; 80 percent of H1-B visa holders are paid less than the median wage in their fields.

Howard University political science professor Ron Hira said the Trump administration is right: “The laws are loose, and so what happens is it’s become a way for employers to bring in cheaper, indentured workers as opposed to filling those skills gaps. As a result, the program is oversubscribed, and it’s actually undercutting Americans.”

When the application season opened for H1-Bs this month, federal offices were quickly flooded. As in recent years, there were so many applications that the U.S. government stopped accepting them within a week. Visa winners will be chosen by a computer-generated lottery.

Hira also said the intent of the program is good in serving as a guest worker program for when there are shortages of American workers. What got in the way? Politics.

Companies are making so much money, he said, that they are able to influence Congress to prevent changes in the H1-B program. And it’s all legal.

Fixing H1-Bs

Hira said that if the sledgehammer seemed to be velvet-coated, that’s because the executive order is not really intended to change policy so much as to guide policy changes. Federal agencies will have to implement it.

“The idea behind the executive order is to make it merit-based, that the really highly skilled people get preference over the cheap labor that goes on,” Hira said.

Overwhelmingly, India has been the biggest recipient of H1-B visas. The Department of Homeland Security reports that 71 percent of H1-Bs went to Indians in 2015. China was a distant second with 10 percent of the visas.

India’s success is attributed to its huge outsourcing firms that submit thousands of applications every year, increasing their chances of winning the visa lottery.  

Outsourcing firms, which supply services to other companies, are controversial because they are not subject to a federal requirement that they not displace American workers if they pay the H1-Bs at least $60,000 a year.

Hira said the new policy might help high-tech American companies at the expense of the outsourcing firms that abuse the system.

But “expect the Indian government to lobby against the changes,” he predicted.

The executive order also called on all federal agencies to buy American. It established a 220-day review on waivers and exemptions to government “Buy American” rules.

VOA’s Mil Arcega contributed to this report.
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From: MeNeedIt

The Trump Administration says it is time for tougher enforcement of rules governing hiring certain foreign workers in the United States, and to review laws requiring U.S. government agencies to use American-made products. The president is scheduled to sign an executive order regarding “Buy American/Hire American” rules on Tuesday.

In a briefing for journalists, senior administration officials said lax enforcement and numerous legal loopholes mean American workers and companies lose jobs and business to foreign competition, which hurts the U.S. economy.

Government agencies are being directed to review their procurement practices and require that exceptions to the “buy American” rules be approved by the head of the agency.

Officials also said government procurement portions of existing trade agreements will be reviewed to see if U.S. companies get the same chance to sell products to the governments of our trading partners that foreign firms get in Washington.

Another review is aimed at rules governing visas issued to foreigners with certain skills, called the “H-1-B visa” program. The program is supposed to bring workers with skills that are scarce in the United States into the country. But Trump Administration officials say they are concerned that companies are hiring foreigners who do the same work as Americans at lower wages.

Government agencies are being directed to do “top to bottom” reviews of these rules and laws, and report problems and recommendations that may bring changes to laws and rules.
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From: MeNeedIt

Retail sales were weaker than expected in both March and February, after government data showed the worst two-month performance for the retail sector in two years. US Census data suggest the weakness was the result of lower fuel prices and reduced auto profits. But retail experts say the industry itself is changing, driven by technological and demographic change.
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From: MeNeedIt

Scientists like to let the facts speak for themselves. But with the Trump administration’s embrace of what advisor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts,” many scientists feel it’s time to speak up. An unprecedented March for Science is planned for April 22 and in more than 500 cities around the world.
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From: MeNeedIt