Authorities in South Dakota and Iowa on Tuesday confirmed incidents of vandalism against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in which someone burned a hole through an empty section of pipe.

Texas-based pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners said in court documents Monday that there have been “recent coordinated physical attacks along the pipeline that pose threats to life, physical safety and the environment.” The company didn’t provide further details, including the locations of the attacks, and ETP spokeswoman Vicki Granado on Tuesday declined comment.

South Dakota attorney general’s office spokeswoman Sara Rabern confirmed one incident of what she called “felony vandalism” southeast of Sioux Falls on Friday. Lincoln County Sheriff’s Deputy Chad Brown said it happened at an above-ground valve site that had no fencing or other security.

“When deputies arrived, they observed what appeared to be a hole in the pipe, and it looked like there was burn around the hole,” Brown said, adding it was possible the vandalism was done with a blowtorch.

In Iowa, Mahaska County Sheriff Russell Van Renterghem said it appears someone used a torch to cut a hole in the pipeline at an above-ground safety valve site southeast of Des Moines. He said it appears the culprit maneuvered under a fence around the facility. The incident was discovered March 13.

Local, state and FBI officials are investigating the incidents. No suspects were immediately identified in either case.

The $3.8 billion pipeline runs 1,200 miles through the Dakotas, Iowa and Illinois. State officials in North Dakota, Iowa and Illinois on Tuesday said they were not aware of any pipeline attacks in their states.

Company attorney William Scherman said in the court documents that ETP still plans to have oil flowing this week through the pipeline.

Environmental activists who tried to disrupt some oil pipeline operations in four states last year to protest the Dakota Access pipeline said Tuesday that they weren’t responsible for any recent attacks on that pipeline.

Jay O’Hara with the Climate Disobedience Center told the AP that Climate Direct Action wasn’t involved, and he wasn’t aware of anyone claiming responsibility.

In October, Climate Direct Action activists tried to shut valves on pipelines in North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana and Washington to show support for Dakota Access opponents. Other than that, “we have nothing in the works,” O’Hara said.

The Red Warrior Society, a pipeline protest group that advocated aggressive tactics such as confrontations with pipeline security and police in North Dakota last year, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Jan Hasselman and Nicole Ducheneaux, attorneys for the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, who are leading the legal battle against the pipeline, said the tribes don’t encourage or condone acts of violence against pipeline property.

The company’s reports of attacks didn’t change the plan of authorities in North Dakota to reopen a stretch of highway that was closed for months due to pipeline protests. Part of state Highway 1806 was shut down in late October after a bridge was damaged by fires during protests.

Authorities on Friday began allowing public traffic with the assistance of pilot cars escorting vehicles over the 9-mile stretch near the site where pipeline opponents camped for months. The camps were cleared out and shut down late last month in advance of spring flooding season.

The highway was being fully reopened without pilot cars at midday Tuesday, according to Morton County sheriff’s spokesman Rob Keller.

Authorities also are slowly shuttering a law enforcement staging area that was set up last summer in the protest camp area. There is no set timeline for removing the last officers and structures, but Keller and state Emergency Services spokeswoman Cecily Fong indicated it’s likely to happen soon after oil begins flowing through the pipeline.

“That’s going to be the sort of flash point for us,” Fong said.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Twitter suspended more than 376,000 accounts in the second half of 2016, most of which it said were promoting terrorism.

Most of the accounts, 74 percent, were removed by proprietary software, the company said in its latest transparency report. The software reportedly determines a terrorism related account through how it behaves, rather than what it posts, saying the accounts have “distinctive behavior.”

Two percent of the accounts were suspended by various government requests, according to Twitter.

The number of suspensions is three times more than the social media site deleted in the last half of 2015.

In total, the company says it suspended 636,280 accounts from August 1, 2015 to December 31, 2016.

The report comes as Facebook and Google are wrestling with how to prevent objectionable content from their sites.
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From: MeNeedIt

Fifty thousand Haitians will have access to quality health care for the first time after a modern new hospital opened Monday in the isolated and impoverished Cotes-de-Fer region.

The Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan Center for Health will serve those who, until now, had to travel for hours on rough roads for treatment.

The new hospital is a project of the nonprofit charity Catholic Medical Mission Board. The U.S.- based group Mercy Health contributed $2 million for construction costs.

“With active involvement of the community and an emphasis on training and knowledge sharing, the health center will strengthen the local health system in a long-term and sustainable way,” said CMMB’s director in Haiti, Dr. Dianne Jean-Francois.

Along with an emergency room and pharmacy, the new hospital will give pregnant women a place to deliver their babies, along with postnatal and pediatric care.

The hospital also has plans for expansion for dental and ophthalmology clinics.
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From: MeNeedIt

Cutting-edge technologies — from drones to data collected by taxi drivers — are becoming key weapons in the global battle to improve land rights and fight poverty, experts said Monday.

Advances in earth observation, digital connectivity and computing power provide an array of information, from detailed topographical maps to transportation use, that was previously unimaginable, geospatial experts said at a World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty.

The information collected can be instrumental to helping establish property records and land titling systems in countries where there is no formal ownership or land-use documentation.

Drones help map Africa

Survey-mapping drones may look like toys but are powerful machines having a huge impact on land-use planning in Africa, said Edward Anderson, a senior World Bank disaster management expert.

High-quality, high-resolution images taken by drones in Zanzibar identified nearly 2,000 new buildings in one 12-month period alone, he said.

The mapping exercise, budgeted at $2 million in 2005, was completed at a tenth of the price by local university students operating the small, light, unmanned drones, Anderson said.

“Coastal zones are developing and urbanizing so quickly, waterside areas are being developed into hotels, residential properties,” he said.

“Until now, there was no way of quantifying this change and making comparisons,” Anderson said.

Massive growth exposed

While more than 87 percent of the land mass of Europe is mapped at a local level, such maps exist for only about 3 percent of the entire African continent, he said.

A project using drones in Mauritania, a country twice the size of France but with a population of less than four million, has allowed authorities to document the massive growth of cities such as its capital, Nouakchott, said University of Arizona professor Mamadou Baro.

Originally established in 1959 with fewer than 5,000 residents, Nouakchott is the largest city in the Sahara and home to more than 1.5 million people.

“This is placing huge pressure on social infrastructure and chaos in the development of the city,” Baro said. “Drones are very helpful in attempting to manage and track this kind of enormous growth.”

Private companies that collect data as part of their businesses are being encouraged to share with state planning authorities as well, said Holly Krambeck, a World Bank transport planning expert.

Taxi drivers track roads 

GPS data collected by taxi drivers is helping to design plans for infrastructure and roads in countries such as Brazil and in North Africa, she said.

The shared data comes through agreements with technology companies such as Grab that operates ride-hailing and logistics services apps in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Using technology can also help identify new sources of tax revenue, experts said.

In Tanzania, improved mapping data revealed that up to two-thirds of properties in secondary cities were not on the tax rolls, they said.
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From: MeNeedIt

An experimental anti-malaria vaccine has been developed that protects against more than one strain of the malaria parasite that causes the mosquito-borne illness.  

The vaccine — tested by principal investigator Kirsten Lyke and colleagues — is called PfSPZ and uses whole, live weakened early versions of the most common form of malaria Plasmodium falciparum (P. Falciparum), called sporozoites.

This early form of the parasite is what’s first injected into humans by an infected mosquito.  

By using the entire sporozoite in the vaccine, the immune system responds to more of the parasite, according to Lyke.

15 healthy adults tested

A study of the vaccine conducted by Lyke and colleagues — published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — enrolled 15 healthy adults who were assigned to receive three doses of the vaccine over several months.  

Nineteen weeks after receiving the final dose, the volunteers were exposed to bites of mosquitoes carrying one strain of parasite from Africa.

A second group of six controls that was not vaccinated also got exposed to the mosquitoes. They showed signs of malaria and were promptly treated.

Nine of 14 vaccinated participants, or 64 percent, showed no signs of infection after exposure.  

Of the nine, six participants were selected and exposed to a different strain, 33 weeks after the final immunization.

This time, five of the six were protected against this second strain, according to Lyke.

‘Great’ is not good enough

“Which is great, but not good enough,” said Lyke. “I mean, you don’t want to take a vaccine that’s going to give you a two out of three chance of being protected. So we have to improve on that and get it up to as close to 100 percent as we can. But at least we’ve established that we can get very high protection in six months and we’re seeing cross-strain protection.”

The agent would offer broader protection against a disease that kills mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.  

According to the World Health Organization, 212 million people were infected with the mosquito-carrying parasite in 2015, and 429,000 died.  

There are four types of malaria parasite that typically infect people. The most common and deadly is Plasmodium falciparum, which goes through a number of life-cycle stages during which the parasite evolves into a different form.  

That is what makes it difficult to develop a vaccine.  

Multiple strains a problem

The problem is further complicated by the fact that P. falciparum can mutate and develop into multiple strains.

Lyke said this is particularly true in Africa, in places where the disease is common.

“The falciparum malaria that is so endemic, there’s a lot of genetic change that occurs because it’s so prevalent in the population. And that contributes to different strains of the falciparum malaria so that you know any vaccine that we’d want to introduce we would want to make sure that it broadly covers multiple different strains of falciparum malaria,” said Lyke.

Clinical trials of the early vaccine, produced by the company Sanaria, also are going on in Africa, including in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Bioko Island off of Africa’s west coast.
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From: MeNeedIt

The World Bank reports Africa will receive the bulk of the $75 billion the International Development Association, or IDA, will spend to finance life-saving and life-changing operations over the next three years mainly in 30 of the world’s poorest, most fragile countries.

The IDA is a part of the World Bank which supports anti-poverty programs in the most poor developing countries through long-term, no interest loans.

The World Bank reports the African region will receive $45 billion of the $75 billion allocated for development purposes. It says other recipients will include small Pacific island states threatened by climate change and fragile countries in the Western Hemisphere, such as Haiti.

The fund, which runs from July 1 through June 30, 2020, also will support specific development projects in 82 additional fragile states, including Guinea, Nepal, Niger, and Tajikistan.

Axel van Trotsenburg, vice president for Development Programs at the World Bank, says the aid package will make a huge difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. For example, he says it could deliver essential health and nutrition services for up to 400 million people.

“We will or expect to train up to 10 million teachers to benefit 300-plus million children. We intend to immunize between 130 and 180 million children… and would undertake investments that could improve the access to improved water resources for up to 45 million people,” he said.

Long-term and emergency assistance 

While IDA is largely focused on supporting long-term development projects, it does have provisions for helping people in crisis situations. Van Trotsenburg tells VOA that IDA has just announced a $1.6 billion support package for emergencies, with critical support going for famine relief in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and northern Nigeria, where an estimated 20 million people are at risk of famine.

“The financial support will be a combination of recently approved operations that we have been in the last six, eight months that were already started to target, for example, the north of Nigeria to the remaining resources that are still available in our crisis response window,” he said.

Van Trotsenburg says IDA still has about $360 million left over from development projects executed over the past three years. He says that money will be used for famine relief.
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From: MeNeedIt

A group of celebrities led by Hollywood actor Ben Stiller has joined a social media campaign to send food and water to Somalia through Turkish Airlines.

Last weekend, the group raised more than $1 million online in less than 24 hours. Stiller said in a Twitter message posted Monday that the money has been used to purchase 60 tons of food that the airline will fly to Somalia next week. 

Somali diaspora youth groups have been spearheading a similar movement online, following warnings from the U.N. that more than six million Somalis are at risk of severe malnourishment and starvation because of drought. 

Celebrities got involved at the urging of French Snapchat star Jerome Jarre, who launched a movement called Love Army for Somalia last Wednesday.

After the group began raising donations online, they convinced Turkish Airlines to help deliver one immediate aid shipment to Somalia’s most vulnerable people, prompting the airline to create a Twitter hashtag, #TurkishAirlinesHelpSomalia.

Celebrities who have made donations include American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NBA player Wilson Chandler, YouTube star Casey Niestat and Scottish record producer Calvin Harris.

“And Jerome wants to keep this thing going, because he believes we can raise a lot more money and do a lot more good and really make a dent in what’s going on over there,” Stiller said Monday.

Total donations had risen to more than $1.8 million as of Monday, according to the “Love Army for Somalia” site on GoFundMe, a social fundraising platform.

“For the first flight, we will buy the food in Istanbul, as a thank you to our Turkish friends that support the movement!” said a message on the page. “Later on, we are hoping to learn how to buy food directly from local businesses in Somalia. We want to support the Somalian economy.”

Turkish Airlines was the first carrier outside East Africa to establish regular service to the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

Turkey has become one of the most prominent donors in Somalia, eclipsing many traditional donors both in quantity and quality of its assistance.

Likewise, Ankara has become a major trading partner with Somalia, particularly in the construction, transportation and service sectors, according to a report by Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, a Mogadishu-based research group.
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From: MeNeedIt

Norway displaced Denmark as the world’s happiest country in a new report released on Monday that called on nations to build social trust and equality to improve the well-being of their citizens.

The Nordic nations are the most content, according to the World Happiness Report 2017 produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), a global initiative launched by the United Nations in 2012.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Syria and Yemen, are the least happy of the 155 countries ranked in the fifth annual report released at the United Nations.

“Happy countries are the ones that have a healthy balance of prosperity, as conventionally measured, and social capital, meaning a high degree of trust in a society, low inequality and confidence in government,” Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the SDSN and a special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, said in an interview.

The aim of the report, he added, is to provide another tool for governments, business and civil society to help their countries find a better way to wellbeing.

Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden rounded out the top ten countries.

South Sudan, Liberia, Guinea, Togo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Central African Republic were at the bottom.

Germany was ranked 16, followed by the United Kingdom (19) and France (31). The United States dropped one spot to 14.

Sachs said the United States is falling in the ranking due to inequality, distrust and corruption. Economic measures that the administration of President Donald Trump is trying to pursue, he added, will make things worse.

“They are all aimed at increasing inequality – tax cuts at the top, throwing people off the healthcare rolls, cutting Meals on Wheels in order to raise military spending. I think everything that has been proposed goes in the wrong direction,” he explained.

The rankings are based on six factors — per capita gross domestic product, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, social support and absence of corruption in government or business.

“The lowest countries are typically marked by low values in all six variables,” said the report, produced with the support of the Ernesto Illy Foundation.

Sachs would like nations to follow United Arab Emirates and other countries that have appointed Ministers of Happiness.

“I want governments to measure this, discuss it, analyze it and understand when they have been off on the wrong direction,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke up for free trade at a major technology fair on Sunday with jabs clearly pointed at an increasingly protectionist United States.

Both called for a free trade deal to be reached quickly between Japan and the European Union, in comments made after G-20 finance ministers and central bankers dropped a long-standing mention of open trade in their final communique after a two-day meeting in Germany.

Neither leader named the U.S. government as they opened the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, but both used the opportunity to distance themselves from protectionist tendencies coming from the Trump administration.

“In times when we have to argue with many about free trade, open borders and democratic values, it’s a good sign that Japan and Germany no longer argue about this but rather are seeking to shape the future in a way that benefits people,” Merkel said.

As G-20 president, Germany feels especially committed to these principles, she added.

After meeting President Donald Trump in Washington on Friday for the first time, Merkel said she hoped the United States and the European Union could resume discussions on a trade agreement. Trump said he did not believe in isolationism but that trade policy should be fairer.

Merkel stressed that Germany was strongly in favour of free trade and open markets.

“We certainly don’t want any barriers but at a time of an ‘Internet of things’ we want to link our societies with one another and let them deal fairly with one another, and that is what free trade is all about,” she said.

Speaking at the same event, Abe said: “Japan, having gone through reaping in abundance the benefits of free trade and investment, wants to be the champion upholding open systems alongside Germany.”

He added: “Of course to do so it will be necessary to have rules that are fair and can stand up to democratic appraisal.”

He also said the European Union and Japan should soon reach an economic deal. Merkel welcomed his comments, saying: “It’s very, very good that Japan says we want a free trade agreement, we want it soon because that could be the right statement and Germany would love to be a driving force behind this.”

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Bild am Sonntag newspaper he was pleased that he would be meeting Abe on Tuesday and said the bloc wanted to conclude a free trade deal with Japan this year.
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From: MeNeedIt

Eight million metric tons of plastic wind up each year in the oceans, harming marine life and entering the food chain. Mike O’Sullivan reports a new documentary film called “A Plastic Ocean” looks at the problem, and its solutions.
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From: MeNeedIt

Robots are becoming commonplace in many areas of society — from manufacturing to medicine to our homes. Now, a robot has taken to the stage, in a British play called “Spillikin.” A humanoid robot plays the male companion of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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From: MeNeedIt

In textiles, nothing has the impact of spider silk. These protein strands are stretchy and in some ways as strong as steel but without the weight. Scientists have been making artificial spider silk for years, with varying degree of success. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports some Swedish researchers have found a new way to spin the miracle fiber, and they make it look easy.
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From: MeNeedIt