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It’s hard to teach young women about getting ahead through technology when they don’t even have enough light to study. That was the problem facing The Green Girls Project in Cameroon. So project leaders took a break from their lessons and focused on solving that problem. The result is enlightening. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt
Thai veterinarians on Monday removed 915 coins from a 25-year-old sea turtle which had been swallowing items thrown into her pool for good luck, eventually limiting her ability to swim.
The coins and other objects removed from the turtle named Omsin — piggy bank in Thai — weighed 5 kg (11 lb). The turtle itself weighed 59 kg (130 lb).
The green sea turtle, living at a conservation center in Sriracha, Chonburi, east of the Thai capital of Bangkok, had been finding it hard to swim normally because of the weight.
The vets said they believed the seven-hour-long operation was the world’s first such surgery.
“We think it will take about a month to ensure she will fully recover,” said Nantarika Chansue, of Chulalongkorn University’s veterinary science faculty, adding that the turtle would need six more months of physical therapy.
There was no immediate estimate of the value of the coins, some of them foreign and many corroded.
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From: MeNeedIt
Everglades National Park, in southern Florida, includes more than half a million hectares of wetlands. National parks traveler Mikah Meyer immersed himself in the River of Grass with treks through mud-filled swamps and close encounters with some of the park’s avian and reptilian residents, and talked with VOA’s Julie Taboh about his adventure.
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From: MeNeedIt
If there are hooligans planning to crash the 2018 World Cup football (soccer) finals in Russia, a Russian lawmaker thinks he has a solution.
Parliament member Igor Lebedev has even drawn up rules for what he calls “draka” – the Russian word for “fight.” There would be 20 unarmed fighters on each side taking on one another in a stadium at a scheduled hour. He said these fights between different fan groups could attract thousands of spectators.
“If visiting fans, for example, begin picking fights they receive an answer — your challenge is accepted. Let’s meet at the stadium at the set time. You can acquaint yourselves with the rules on our site,” Lebedev wrote on his party’s website. Russia would be a pioneer in a new sport, he said.
Last year, organized groups of Russian football fans, many with martial arts training, fought English fans on the streets of Marseille during the European Championship.
Some fan groups in Russia already hold illicit fights along similar lines of what Lebedev is proposing, typically pre-arranged mass brawls in rural locations, away from police. A Russian Premier League game on Saturday between CSKA Moscow and Zenit St. Petersburg was marred by clashes between groups of rival fans who fought one another and tried to break through a security fence.
Lebedev, who represents the opposition Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, is also on the board of the Russian Football Union.
His comments come only 15 months from the kickoff of football’s 2018 World Cup which will be hosted by Russia with 12 venues in 11 cities.
From: MeNeedIt
On the dusty streets of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou soldiers searched visitors to the pan-African Fespaco film festival on Thursday night after they’d emptied their pockets and passed through a metal detector. Close by a soldier manned a heavy machinegun mounted to the back of a military pick-up.
Other international events in West Africa, including the Paris-Dakar Rally and Mali’s Festival in the Desert music event, have been relocated or cancelled due to the threat posed by jihadist groups.
Burkina Faso’s government, however, has been insistent that Fespaco, one of Africa’s pre-eminent film festivals, would continue despite security concerns since a deadly raid last year by al-Qaida militants, the first major attack of its kind in the country.
While security in Burkina Faso remains fragile, this year’s festival, which closed on Saturday, drew robust attendance.
Hubert Kabre, a bank employee in Ouagadougou, has attended the festival for the past three decades and wasn’t about to let al-Qaida militants deter him this year.
“We’re not going to allow ourselves be controlled by terrorists,” he said as he waited, ticket in hand, for the second evening screening at the CineBurkina cinema. “This is the best response.”
Until not long ago, landlocked Burkina Faso, an ally of the West against jihadist groups in the arid West African Sahel region, had largely been spared the violence that plagued its neighbors and all but destroyed tourism and cultural events.
That changed in January last year when militants loyal to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) stormed the packed Cappuccino restaurant and the high-end Splendid Hotel in downtown Ouagadougou in a raid that left 30 people dead and dozens more wounded.
The attack struck a blow to the city’s relaxed vibe, and for a time the future of Fespaco, which has been held every two years since 1969, appeared in doubt.
During the week of this year’s festival at least two attacks occurred in Burkina Faso near the border with Mali. The first targeted a police station and the second killed two people at a school.
Edith Ouedraogo, 25, had initially planned not to go to the festival fearing it would be too dangerous, but later changed her mind.
“I had friends who kept inviting me. As soon as they’d say ‘Hey, we’re going to Fespaco’, I’d say no, no, no. I’m not going where there are jihadists,” she said.
Security forces were out checking vehicles and identification papers at roads into the capital a week before the festival started and a heavy security presence was visible at all of the venues. But for those who attended, it was worth it.
“We don’t have cinemas. Our films don’t circulate in the commercial distribution circuit in Africa. So missing Fespaco would mean not experiencing the thing we love the most,” said Tunisian filmmaker Mohamed Challouf.
“Felicite” a film about a Congolese nightclub singer’s struggle to care for her son following a motorcycle accident, by Senegalese director Alain Gomis won the top prize this year.
“When you stay at home … [the jihadists] can achieve what they want,” said Tako Daouda, 30, following an encore screening of “Felicite” on Saturday night. “You have to go out and take those people on and say ‘No’.”
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From: MeNeedIt
“I am the most presidential person you will ever see,” says a man in a dark suit and red tie, sounding much like President Donald Trump. He’s sporting Trump’s characteristic hairdo, but exaggerated, resembling more of the teased bouffant style popular in the 1960s.
The audience at this performance in Washington laughs at this “fake” Trump, who adds, “Millions of women marched after my inauguration, one day in office, and I have already managed to get more middle aged women off the couch than Michelle’s (Obama) ‘get up and move’ campaign did in 8 years!”He looks at his cellphone as two women beside him sing, “tweet, tweet.”
These are the Capitol Steps, a Washington political satire comedy group, which for 35 years has been poking fun at political officials, including 5 past presidents.And now, with a new chief executive in town, the group has created fresh skits and songs for their performances, which are held mostly in Washington.
“We take an existing song and put new words to it,” explains Elaina Newport, a founding member of the group, who helps write the material.“We’ll try to have a good pun and find something that makes fun of the politician.”
Seeking the spotlight
Instead of being offended, Newport says most politicians “think it’s funny, and want to show the public they have a good sense of humor.”
She recalls that George H.W. Bush, president from 1989-1993, was an especially good sport. “We went to the White House to perform and we were being careful not to do anything that would offend him,” Newport says.“After the show he came up on stage and said ‘I know you have more songs about me.I want to see them.’”Another time, she says, he “got on stage and sang with us.”
But one U.S. senator actually got mad, she says and laughs, “because we didn’t have any songs about him in the show.”
Newport points out that the jokes are not meant to be mean.
“We could do most of the songs “right in front of the person that they’re about,” she says. “We’ve always had a tradition of being bi-partisan, getting everybody.”
That includes Hillary Clinton, whose Capitol Steps portrayal responds to her email scandal by singing, “I’m not indicted and I’m so excited,” to the catchy music of the 1982 Pointer Sisters hit, “I’m So Excited.” Former president Bill Clinton is depicted wearing a hat and dark sunglasses, and saying he never asked for wife’s email “because I was too afraid that she’d ask me for mine.”
A confident, bare-chested Russian president, Vladimir Putin, dances across the stage singing “Putin on a Blitz,” instead of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Laughter and applause
The political humor found a receptive audience.
“I think that we just need to sit back and laugh about it every now and then,” says Mary Tomei, a high school student from New York.
“A little more irreverence would do the country good. It helps to laugh at yourself,” agrees Bob McCunney from Boston.
Besides giving audiences a good laugh, Newport hopes the Capitol Steps can help ease tensions in a very politically divided America. “I think political satire can make us all relax and get along better, and even if you disagree with the person sitting next to you at the show, you can laugh at the same jokes.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Twitter introduced new safety measures this week meant to crack down on online harassment and protect people from viewing offensive material, but some free-speech advocates are concerned the changes could lead to censorship of unpopular ideas.
The social media company announced Wednesday that it would start hiding potentially menacing tweets, even if the tweets or accounts in question hadn’t been reported as abusive.
“We’re working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us,” the company said in a statement announcing the changes. “Then, we’re taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets.”
The so-called stealth bans could be placed on accounts, the company’s statement said, if a Twitter user sent unsolicited messages to another user who was not following the sender.
Twitter said it would “act on accounts” only when it was confident abuse had taken place, based on the algorithms it uses to identify illicit posts.
This new automated stealth ban capability became a cause of consternation for Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, because she said it could easily become a solution “where there is really no problem that needs to be solved.”
‘Mistaken’ moves?
“To take action when there hasn’t been a complaint raises the concern of whether there will be mistaken blocking of accounts or suspending of accounts,” she said. “That raises a risk.”
Twitter has been under pressure to address abusive speech and trolling on its platform in recent months after celebrities and others complained of sustained, coordinated abuse campaigns.
Actress Leslie Jones notably swore off the social media service for a brief time last year after she was targeted by online trolls and harassed with racism and death threats. The incident led to a personal meeting between Jones and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and several months later the company began introducing new tools to address online abuse.
Twitter expanded its “mute” feature to allow users to block specific words or phrases from showing up in their notifications. It expanded users’ ability to report hateful conduct. And it retrained its support teams on dealing with online abuse.
These types of changes that allow users to have more control over what content they see and whom they interact with are positive steps, Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told VOA.
Control for users
The ACLU encourages companies to focus less on a top-down approach to censorship and more “on tools that allow users to control their experience on the platform,” she said.
“Attempts to put the thumb on the scale on the censorship side are prone to error and prone to human biases,” Bhandari said.
Newer tools introduced by Twitter, though, give the company a far greater role in controlling what content gets seen.
In February, Twitter began pre-emptively hiding what it called “potentially abusive or low-quality tweets” from conversations on the website. The tweets will still be visible to users, but only to “those who seek them out.”
“Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward,” Twitter said in a February statement.
VOA contacted Twitter multiple times for clarification on guidelines used to identify “low-quality” tweets but received no response.
Twitter also introduced a “safe search” feature in February that automatically removes tweets that contain “potentially sensitive content” from search results. A request for clarification on how this content is identified was not returned.
Being a private company, Twitter has no real obligation to preserve free speech on its website. But Twitter has billed itself as a platform for free expression, and on the Twitter rules page, it says it believes in “speaking truth to power.”
Global town square
This is a role both PEN America and the ACLU take seriously. Both Nossel and Bhandari referred to the website as a sort of global town square, where everyone’s voice has equal weight.
“As a practical matter, decisions made by Twitter have a huge impact on the messages that we receive, and I hope that Twitter and other companies take those responsibilities seriously,” Bhandari said.
Nossel noted that Twitter has a financial incentive to be cautious on issues involving the balance between allowing free expression and stopping abuse.
“The power and influence of their platform depends on the free flow of ideas, so I think there are commercial reasons why they would not want to limit [free speech],” she said. “And I think for their users, they do have a kind of softer, implicit contract that they are going to be a platform in which you can express things freely.”
Bhandari said it’s important to find that balance, because if Twitter “allows a heckler’s veto to take over,” it will have a chilling effect on speech that’s similar to pre-emptively hiding content.
“One of the really important parts of that has to be transparency,” she said.
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From: MeNeedIt
Unless new antibiotics are developed quickly, people will once again die from common infections. The World Health Organization has issued an urgent call for scientists to develop these new drugs, and for governments to fund the research.
Dr. Trish Perl, chief of infectious diseases at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said if there are no effective antibiotics, it will affect the entire practice of medicine.
“You all of a sudden understand what it was like to practice medicine maybe 50, 70, 80 years ago, when there weren’t antibiotics,” Perl said.
Without antibiotics, surgery will become much more dangerous. Doctors will be unable to treat diseases caused by E. coli, a bacterium that causes urinary tract infections and diarrhea. Even a virus such as the flu, which can lead to bacterial pneumonia, will mean these viruses will ultimately claim even more lives.
WATCH: Doctors Alarmed by Post-Antibiotic Future
New antibiotics needed
New antibiotics are urgently needed against bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health. Those most at risk: residents of nursing homes, hospital patients, and children. Children may have weaker immune systems than adults, and they receive smaller doses of antibiotics than adults do.
“For the longest time we’ve had a number of different antibiotics in the pipeline at any given time, so whenever we ran out of the ability to use one, we would move to the next one,” Dr. Michael Bell, an expert in drug-resistant pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told VOA.
But that’s no longer possible. Joe Larsen, the director of biological, chemical and radiological and nuclear countermeasures at the Department of Health and Human Services, said his department drew up a list of pathogens several years ago that were becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Funding needs to change
“There are antibiotics in the pipeline, but the numbers are insufficient … to deal with the increasing rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” he said.
Larsen’s department invests in pharmaceutical and bio-tech firms to make drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for public health emergency preparedness. Larsen is hopeful that a new antibiotic will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration later this year. He also said two to three more antibiotics are being developed that should be available in a year or two.
The WHO said it’s too expensive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics on their own because they wouldn’t recoup their investment. Larsen agrees that the way antibiotics are commercialized needs to change.
Bacteria are constantly changing
One reason is that the more an antibiotic is used, the less effective it becomes. That’s because bacteria are constantly changing and finding new ways to resist the drugs that kill them. Once they find a way, they can pass on the gene so other bacteria can become drug-resistant as well.
To preserve the effectiveness of an antibiotic, Larsen said the profits from selling these drugs can’t be linked to the volume of sales the way the market normally works. He said the solution lies in public-private partnerships between governments and pharmaceutical or biotech firms.
In the meantime, antibiotic resistance is very real.
Lauri Hicks, who leads research on antibiotic use and resistance trends at the CDC, said, “We are seeing greater than 2 million episodes of antibiotic resistant infections each year in the U.S. alone. Twenty-three thousand of these episodes result in death.”
Don’t overuse antibiotics
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked hospitals and doctors to be careful not to overuse antibiotics. But beyond overuse, Bell, of the CDC, said there are other reasons these drugs are being rendered powerless.
“Antibiotic resistance is being generated by not only using too many antibiotics, but also by spread of infection by lack of hygiene, from unintended contact with soiled surfaces, so the infection-control side is equally important,” he said.
Patients can also help. On its website, the CDC says to take antibiotics as prescribed and finish the prescription, even if you feel better. Still, urgent action on a global level is needed to prevent the catastrophe that a post-antibiotic era would cause.
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From: MeNeedIt
A group of Aboriginal transgender women have traveled more than 3,000 kilometers to take part in Sydney’s world-famous Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. They have spent decades fighting for recognition within the indigenous community on the remote Tiwi Islands.
About 30 transgender women from the islands off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory will march Saturday for the first time with thousands of other participants in outfits colored with glow-in-the-dark paint emblazoned with traditional patterns and totems.
Known as “sistagirls,” the group’s trip has been financed through various fundraising campaigns. They bring to Sydney a story of struggle and defiance. It has taken the women many years to gain acceptance in their remote Indigenous communities, where attitudes have shifted slowly. Several of the women have committed suicide in the past.
Born a male, Simon Miller now identifies as a woman.
“[I] did not know about sistagirls until I was, like, 22. When I am [a] sistagirl, I feel like 100 percent true to me and I feel happy, you know, and when I am, like, dressing like a boy and that I feel, like, depressed and feels really awkward and uncomfortable,” Simon said.
Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras began as a civil rights rally in the late 1970s. It was born out of solidarity for New York’s Stonewall movement, and called for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians.
The group has a loud political voice, as campaigners continue their efforts to persuade Australia’s leaders to legalize same-sex marriage.
Opponents of the march, including some Christian groups, have in the past described it as a “public parade of immorality and blasphemy.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Paula Fox, a prize-winning author who created high art out of imagined chaos in such novels as Poor George and Desperate Characters and out of the real-life upheavals in her memoir Borrowed Finery, has died at age 93.
Her daughter, Linda Carroll, told The Associated Press that Fox died Wednesday at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. She had been in failing health.
Abandoned as a girl by her parents, a single mother before age 20, Fox used finely crafted prose to write again and again about breakdown and disruption, what happens under the “surface of things.” In Poor George, her debut novel, Fox told of a bored schoolteacher and the teen vagrant who upends his life. Desperate Characters, her most highly regarded work of fiction, is a portrait of New York City’s civic and domestic decline in the 1960s, a plague symbolized by the bite of a stray cat.
“It seems to me that in life, behind all these names and things and people and forces, there’s a dark energy,” Fox told The Associated Press in 2011.
Late-life revival
Her work was out of print for years, but she enjoyed a late-life revival thanks to the admiration of such younger authors as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem. She lived for decades in Brooklyn and was a revered figure in the New York City borough’s thriving literary community.
Her other books included the novels A Servant’s Tale, The Western Coast and a memoir about living in Europe after World War II, The Coldest Winter. Fox also wrote more than a dozen children’s books, including The Slave Dancer, winner of the Newbery medal in 1974. Borrowed Finery, published in 2001, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.
She might have written more novels, but a head injury sustained from a mugging in Jerusalem in the 1990s left her unable to write long fiction. She instead began working on memoirs and shorter pieces.
Difficult childhood
Born in New York City in 1923, Fox was the daughter of novelist-screenwriter Paul Fox and fellow screenwriter Elsie Fox. Paula Fox remembered her father as a drunk given to “interminable, stumbling descriptions of the ways in which he and fellow writers tried to elude domesticity.” Her mother was a “sociopath” who kicked her out of the house as a young girl. Fox lived everywhere from a plantation in Cuba to a boarding school in Montreal.
Living in Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, she danced with John Wayne and encountered John Barrymore, “yellowing with age like the ivory keys of a very old piano.” Marlon Brando was a friend, and Courtney Love is her granddaughter, born to Carroll, whom a 19-year-old Fox gave up for adoption. Her brother-in-law, Clement Greenberg, was among the 20th century’s most influential art critics.
Although a devoted reader since childhood, she didn’t publish until past 40. She worked for years as a teacher and as a tutor for troubled children and was married briefly for a second time, to Richard Sigerson, with whom she had two sons. She finally settled down with her third husband, translator and Commentary editor Martin Greenberg, whom she met after he had rejected a story she submitted for the magazine.
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From: MeNeedIt
National parks traveler Mikah Meyer says visiting Everglades National Park in southern Florida was like stepping back in time.
Time standing still
“It’s this huge section of [protected] land … it takes up the entire southwestern corner of Florida and essentially before human interaction, everything south of Orlando looked like the Everglades.”
Join Mikah in the Everglades
That huge expanse of land includes more than half a million hectares of wetland, the largest subtropical wilderness in the U.S. It’s known throughout the world for its unparalleled land and waterscapes, which support a wide variety of plant and animal life.
Mikah immersed himself in the wetlands adventure with treks through mud-filled swamps and close encounters with some of the parks’ avian and reptilian residents.
Teeming with wildlife
On the raised boardwalk of the Anhinga Trail on the east side of the park, Mikah had unparalleled views of some of the area’s lush landscape and unique wildlife.
“It’s a marshland with a bunch of trees, and so there’s all these birds everywhere that make it their home. We saw Terrapin turtles; there’s gators sunning themselves on the banks … we saw one alligator here, and one alligator there, and at one point we walked up and there were like 25 alligators all lying together, on top of each other, next to each other sunning, and it was just like more gators than I’d ever seen in my life,” he said.
In fact, in that one area of the park alone, he said he easily saw “the most amount of wildlife I’ve seen in one place at one time.”
Slough slog
Another highlight for Mikah and his travel companion Andy Waldron was wading through knee-deep water and mud, on a hike called a slough slog.
“So you start out and you slog through the mud and then eventually you get to the water and in that water there’re a bunch of fish, alligators, snakes, all sorts of things that you would not want to come at you,” he recounted.
“Fortunately the park service gives you a giant stick … whose primary function is to step it in front of you to see how deep the water is,” the idea being not to fall into the “fish, possibly gator, possibly snake-infested water.”
“It sounds gross, it sounds horrible but it was one of the most fun things I’ve done at a national park yet,” Mikah admitted. Being in the muddy waters surrounded by exotic trees and plant life “feels like you’re on another planet, like you’re in an episode of Star Trek,” he said.
He credits much of that surreal but awesome experience to their National Park ranger guide, Lori Mobbs.
“Lori was probably one of the most fun people I’ve met this entire trip,” Mikah said. He says she told him how she was from “the hillbilly mountains of Alabama,” and after finishing her service with the U.S. Army, decided to join the National Park Service.
“I spent time protecting America, wearing a green uniform, and now I’m going to get another green uniform and go protect America’s wildlife,” he quoted her saying.
Everglades on steroids
In another part of the park, near the Shark Valley Visitor Center, Mikah and his travel companion were fortunate to find another wonderful guide … Ozzie Gonzalez, from Everglades Nature Tours.
He took the young men on an exclusive and exhilarating ride through the famous southern Florida wetlands on an airboat.
“I think what made this so special is that our guide has grown up in this area and he knew it like the back of his hands,” Mikah said. “So he took us out on this airboat into the middle of the River of Grass and right away he takes us to the spot where there’s always a mama gator.”
Close encounters of the reptilian kind
The female alligator made puffy, hissing noises as the boat drew near.
“She was warning us that my babies are here,” Mikah said, interpreting her warnings as, “’Don’t mess with me or I’m going to be really angry!’ And then sure enough, we look around and we saw like eight different baby alligators.”
And that wasn’t the only close encounter with gators. … Ozzie then took Mikah and Andy to meet another reptilian resident he had come to recognize.
“He parks the air boat and he calls the gator over like a dog and the thing comes swimming right up to the side of the boat,” Mikah marveled. “And it was just so incredible.”
Ozzie also took the time to show off some of the area’s plant life. Parking the airboat near some tall, reed-like plants, he took one in his hands to give them a closer look.
“They call it sawgrass because if you pull your arm against it one way it won’t hurt you at all, but if you go the other way it’ll cut your skin because it’s got these saw ridges on it,” Mikah explained.
Ozzie went on to describe how the plant has all the nutrients one would need to survive for a while out in the wild, and how Native American tribes in the area used to use sawgrass to cut the umbilical cords from babies.
Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 sites within the National Park Service, says his final adventure, on a sunset boat tour at the western edge of the Everglades, captured the wonder of his wetlands experience.
“We had heard that oftentimes you can see dolphins on this tour and it delivered! It was so cool. … It’s such a rare treat to see something in the wild and not in a zoo or not on TV or not in a National Geographic magazine. This was real. It was real life.”
Mikah invites you to learn more about his travels in Florida and all across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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From: MeNeedIt