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Studies show when people pet an animal, their blood pressure goes down along with stress and anxiety. That’s why therapy dogs are increasingly found in schools, counseling centers and even in hospitals. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on two hospitals that use therapy dogs to help patients on their medical journey.
From: MeNeedIt
When billboards in Chinese start appearing, along with Korean and Japanese grocery stores and restaurants that span tastes from almost all of Asia, they are signs that you have entered California’s San Gabriel Valley.
For some people, it is a bedroom community of Los Angeles. For others, the Asian enclave is a home away from home.
Known to the locals as the “SGV,” San Gabriel Valley spans 36 kilometers east of downtown Los Angeles, with close to half a million Asians living there. Nine cities in the area are majority-Asian.
They include the city of Walnut, where Mike Chou’s family settled in 1989 when they immigrated from Taiwan. Walnut already had an established Chinese community.
“My parents, they didn’t speak English at the time, so it’s made it easier for them to kind of get around,” said Chou, who was 5 when his family arrived in the United States. “It’s so close to all the shopping. It’s so close to the (Chinese) grocery stores. It made fitting in there a lot easier.”
Chinese arrived in 1970s
According to the 2019 San Gabriel Valley Economic Forecast and Regional Overview Report, the SGV has a large ethnic Chinese population that started in the 1970s, with a flood of immigrants from Taiwan.
Chou is now a real estate agent with an 80% Asian clientele — half of them Chinese. Speaking fluent Mandarin and English, Chou has been so successful in real estate that he now leads a multilingual team of agents, including Roxane Sheng, who immigrated to the United States from China in 2005 for graduate school and stayed.
“Most of my clients are Mandarin-speaking Chinese,” Sheng said. “But they’re either living here and work here, or study here. Or they come to United States just to reinvest, to buy investment property. But they still go back to China and live there.”
In the past 10 to 15 years, Chou said people from mainland China have become the new immigrants to the SGV.
WATCH: California’s San Gabriel Valley a Mecca for Asian Americans
Mild climate, lots of land
Sheng said the area’s mild climate and the relatively close distance to China make Southern California attractive to Chinese homebuyers. A common language is another attraction.
“Everyone speaks Mandarin.” Sheng said. “They can walk into a bank, post office, grocery stores — they can do everything without speaking English.”
For immigrants who largely lived in expensive high-rise apartments in China, the San Gabriel Valley offers an additional perk.
“We have plenty of single-family homes,” Sheng explained. “They just find a house. They get the land. They get the yard, and they have no neighbors up or down below them. And home prices are still cheaper if they move from Beijing or Shanghai.”
Beyond Chinese
Immigrants from other Southeast Asian countries also live in the region.
Annie Xu, another agent on Chou’s real estate team, was raised in the Philippines of ethnic Chinese parents. She speaks Tagalog, Hokkien, Mandarin and English.
“I’ve been doing real estate for three years, because I used to be a stay-at-home mom,” said Xu, who came to the U.S. with her husband. “And then when my youngest turned 2, I decided that I want to do something. Real estate is a business that you don’t need a lot of startup costs.”
As a real estate agent, she has worked with immigrants from China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia.
One of her clients is Shabana Khan, a half-Pakistani Indian immigrant seeking a house with a yard. Khan moved to the San Gabriel Valley from New York.
“New York has the vibe of the energy and stuff, but you can get it here, too,” Khan said. “But as soon as you have kids, I think California is the best place to settle down. San Gabriel Valley is amazing. You have so many different cultures within Asia.”
Many immigrants, some undocumented
South Asians are among the fastest-growing Asian American groups in the SGV, according to a 2018 report by the civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles.
Using numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, Advancing Justice also found that more than 67% of Asian Americans in the SGV are immigrants, including an estimated 58,000 people who are undocumented. Close to a third in the region are low income, according to the report.
“Some of them just immigrated here, and they haven’t found a stable job. Or their English is not good enough that they have to compromise for a job that’s not ideal for them,” Sheng said.
Regardless of socioeconomic status, the report found that San Gabriel Valley’s Asian population continues to grow.
“You have a lot of restaurants and grocery stores that are in Chinese. And some of the workers, they only speak Chinese, so they don’t speak English. It makes it easy if you’re an immigrant to come here and just kind of feel very much at home,” Chou said.
From: MeNeedIt
U.S. Democrats are celebrating election victories in the states of Virginia and Kentucky that could point to trouble for Republican President Donald Trump and his bid for re-election next year.
Thanks to support from suburban voters, Democrats took control of both chambers of the state legislature in Virginia, a boon to the state’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam.
“Because I am here to officially declare today, November the 5th, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue (Democratic). Congratulations!” Northam told the crowd on election night.
Kentucky race
Democrat Andy Beshear declared victory in the governor’s race in Kentucky over incumbent Republican Matt Bevin. Beshear said he won with a focus on local issues, perhaps a lesson for Democrats nationwide.
“My message would be that this race is not about who is in the White House. It is about what is going on in your house,” he said.
Bevin, perhaps the least popular state governor in the country, has yet to concede but had hoped a last-minute push from Trump would carry him to victory.
“Kentucky is leading the way and we support the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump!” he said.
Mississippi
Trump had better luck in conservative Mississippi, where he rallied support for the winning gubernatorial candidate, Republican Tate Reeves.
“The national liberals believe that if they can come to Mississippi and win this election, that it will hurt Donald Trump in 2020,” Reeves said.
National Democrats were encouraged by the latest results including party Chairman Tom Perez.
“Yesterday’s victory was a victory for all Democrats and, I think, it was a victory for our Democratic values,” Perez said, ” and I cannot say enough about all the great partners in the ecosystem.”
WATCH: Jim Malone’s report
Suburban voters
Republican support among suburban voters was down in this latest round of voting and polls also show the president is losing ground with independent voters as he looks ahead to next year’s election.
Trump remains intensely focused on his political base, says Susan Page of USA Today newspaper.
“Maybe the biggest surprise of the Trump presidency, and I say that recognizing there have been all kinds of surprises, is that he has not from the day of his inauguration tried to expand his support. He has focused almost exclusively on fortifying the support of his core backers,” Page said.
Trump trails his main Democratic rivals in some new national polls but does better in surveys of key battleground states that he narrowly won in 2016.
From: MeNeedIt
Several senior U.S. diplomats, including former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, are key witnesses in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Trump is accused of having withheld U.S. military aid to Ukraine until that country’s new president agreed to investigate one of Trump’s political opponents, former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden. As transcripts from diplomats’ closed-door Capitol Hill hearings are released, many are questioning why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not shield or even support Yovanovitch from an administration campaign that led to her eventual ouster.
Then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovitch told lawmakers in sworn testimony she was shocked to get a phone call in the middle of the night, telling her to leave her post and take the next plane home.
WATCH: Cindy Saine’s video report
She said she was told she had done nothing wrong but was in immediate diplomatic trouble, not from unrest in Ukraine, but from a potential tweet by President Trump undermining her.
A transcript of her deposition was released this week. She outlined her 33 years as a Foreign Service officer, serving under six presidents. She said U.S. diplomats frequently put themselves in harm’s way, believing that in return, their government will protect them if they come under attack. However, she said this basic understanding no longer holds true.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended her early recall on ABC News “This Week,” saying she is still a diplomat in good standing.
“Ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president. When a president loses confidence in an ambassador, it is not in that ambassador, the State Department, or America’s interest for them to continue to stay in their post,” he said.
However, another career diplomat, former U.S. Ambassador Laura Kennedy, told VOA that Pompeo’s lack of support for Yovanovitch is extraordinary.
“She is one of the most straight-arrow, dedicated professionals I know. And the fact that she didn’t even get a hearing or any direct communication with the secretary of state,” Kennedy said.
Yovanovitch testified that U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland had advised her to tweet out her support of Trump to save her job. Unthinkable, former Ambassador Kennedy said.
“We support, of course, the policy of the administration which we serve, we are obligated to support that policy publicly, that’s our job,” she said. ” But again, we, the career diplomats, as other public servants, they pledged their support to the Constitution, not to any particular person.”
Some former diplomats say confidence in Pompeo has taken a hit at the State Department, and they fear it has already hurt recruitment efforts.
WATCH: What does Quid Pro Quo Mean?
From: MeNeedIt
A Chinese court Thursday jailed nine people, one with a suspended death sentence, for smuggling fentanyl into the United States, saying this was the first such case the two countries had worked together on.
China has faced U.S. criticism for not doing enough to prevent the flow of fentanyl into the United States, and the issue has become another irritant in ties already strained by a bruising trade war the two are now working to end.
The announcement of the successful action against the smugglers comes as the two countries are expected to sign an interim trade deal.
Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opioid, 50 times more potent than heroin. It is often used to make counterfeit narcotics because of its relatively cheap price, and it has played an increasingly central role in an opioid crisis in the United States.
US-China teamwork
Yu Haibin, a senior official with China’s National Narcotics Control Commission, told reporters in the northern city of Xingtai where the court case was heard, that Chinese and U.S. law enforcement had worked together to break up the ring, which smuggled fentanyl and other opioids to the United States via courier.
One of the people sentenced by the court was given a suspended death sentence, which in practice is normally commuted to life in jail, and two got life sentences, Yu said.
More than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths, mostly from fentanyl-related substances, were recorded in the United States in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. drug enforcement has pointed to China as the source of fentanyl and its related supplies. China denies that most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originates in China, and says the United States must do more to reduce demand.
Issue of demand
Yu said that the issue of fentanyl was not something any one country could resolve.
“If illegal demand cannot be effectively reduced, it is very difficult to fundamentally tackle the fentanyl issue,” Yu said.
In August, U.S. President Donald Trump accused Chinese President Xi Jinping of not fulfilling a promise to crack down on fentanyl and its analogs.
Yu said China was willing to work with U.S. law enforcement authorities and all other international colleagues to fight narcotics and “continue to contribute China’s wisdom and power for the global management of narcotics.”
From: MeNeedIt
The Berlin Wall’s demise 30 years ago brought an end to a divided Berlin — and symbolized the eventual liberation of East Germany, and later the rest of Eastern Europe, from Soviet communist rule. Yet the wall’s anniversary comes as the politics of east and west continue to reverberate through German society. In former communist East Germany, a democratic slogan from the revolution of 1989 rebounds – and resonates – among the present day nationalist far right. Charles Maynes reports from Thuringia in eastern Germany.
From: MeNeedIt
A lone attacker on Wednesday stabbed three foreign tourists and their tour guide at a popular archaeological site in northern Jordan, the official Petra news agency reported.
The agency said the attacker also wounded a policeman before he was subdued and arrested. The wounded were taken to a hospital.
Amateur video showed a bloody scene next to the Jerash archaeological site, an ancient city whose ruins, including a Roman amphitheater and a columned road, are one of the country’s top tourist destinations.
In one video, a woman can be heard screaming in Spanish. “It’s a dagger, it’s a dagger, there is a knife. Please, help him now!”
One woman is seen lying on the ground, with much blood around her, as someone presses a towel to her back. Another man sits nearby with an apparent leg wound.
There were no further details, but the al-Ghad newspaper said the tourists were Mexican and suffered serious wounds.
From: MeNeedIt
Suspected separatist insurgents stormed a security checkpoint in Thailand’s Muslim-majority south and killed at least 15 people, including a police officer and many village defense volunteers, security officials said on Wednesday.
It was the worst single attack in years in a region where a Muslim separatist insurgency has killed thousands.
The attackers, in the province of Yala, also used explosives and scattered nails on roads to delay pursuers late on Tuesday night.
“This is likely the work of the insurgents,” Colonel Pramote Prom-in, a regional security spokesman, told Reuters. “This is one of the biggest attack in recent times.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, however, as is common with such attacks.
A decade-old separatist insurgency in predominantly Buddhist Thailand’s largely ethnic Malay-Muslim provinces of Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat has killed nearly 7,000 people since 2004, says Deep South Watch, a group that monitors the violence.
The population of the provinces, which belonged to an independent Malay Muslim sultanate before Thailand annexed them in 1909, is 80 percent Muslim, while the rest of the country is overwhelmingly Buddhist.
Some rebel groups in the south have said they are fighting to establish an independent state.
Authorities arrested several suspects from the region in August over a series of small bombs detonated in Bangkok, the capital, although they have not directly blamed any insurgent group.
The main insurgency group, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), denied responsibility for the Bangkok bombings, which wounded four people.
In August, the group told Reuters it had held a secret preliminary meeting with the government, but any step towards a peace process appeared to wither after the deputy prime minister rejected a key demand for the release of prisoners.
From: MeNeedIt
Iranian media reported Wednesday that Iran has put a container containing 2,000 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride in its Fordow nuclear facility in order to begin injecting uranium gas into centrifuges.
The move is Iran’s latest step away from the agreement it signed in 2015 with a group of world powers to limit its nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief.
Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran was allowed to keep 1,044 centrifuges at Fordow in six cascades, four of which were to remain idle while the other two were allowed to spin without uranium.
“Iran’s 4th step in reducing its commitments under the JCPOA by injecting gas to 1044 centrifuges begins today,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wrote on Twitter. “Thanks to U.S. policy and its allies, Fordow will soon be back to full operation.”
Reuters quoted a spokesman from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency saying its inspectors were on the ground in Iran and would report “any relevant activities” to its headquarters in Vienna.
The United States has criticized Iran’s increased nuclear activity, which followed last year’s U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal and a subsequent push by Iran for the remaining signatories to help Iran deal with U.S. sanctions.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said Tuesday that Iran’s actions are a “transparent attempt at nuclear extortion.”
“We have made clear that Iran’s expansion of uranium enrichment activities in defiance of key nuclear commitments is a big step in the wrong direction, and underscores the continuing challenge Iran poses to international peace and security,” Ortagus said in a statement. “The JCPOA was a flawed deal because it did not permanently address our concerns with respect to Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing conduct.”
Iran previously went past limits on the amount of enriched material it is allowed to stockpile and the level to which it is allowed to enrich uranium.
Rouhani said in a televised address Tuesday that all the steps Iran has taken so far are reversible if the other parties to the nuclear deal uphold their commitments to provide Iran with relief from economic sanctions.
From: MeNeedIt
U.S. Democrats claimed an upset win in Kentucky on Tuesday over a Republican governor backed by President Donald Trump and seized control of the state legislature in Virginia, where anti-Trump sentiment in the suburbs remained a potent force.
The outcomes of Tuesday’s elections in four states, including Mississippi and New Jersey, could offer clues to how next year’s presidential election could unfold, when Trump will aim for a second four-year term.
In Kentucky, Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, whose father, Steve, was the state’s last Democratic governor, scored a narrow victory over Governor Matt Bevin despite an election-eve rally headlined by Trump.
In a speech in Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night, Trump – who won Kentucky by 30 percentage points in 2016 – told voters that they needed to re-elect Bevin, or else pundits would say the president “suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world.”
The remarks reflected the extent to which Bevin, 52, sought to nationalize the campaign, emphasizing his support for Trump amid a Democratic-led impeachment inquiry of the Republican president in Congress.
While the result was a significant setback for Trump, who remains relatively popular in Kentucky, it may have had more to do with Bevin’s diminished standing in the state. Opinion polls showed Bevin may be the least popular governor in the country, after he waged high-profile fights with labor unions and teachers.
Beshear’s upset win could also bolster Democrats’ slim hopes of ousting Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is on the ballot himself in the state next year.
At a rally on Tuesday night, Bevin refused to concede, citing unspecified “irregularities,” even as Beshear called on the governor to honor the results.
Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said in a statement that the president “just about dragged Gov. Matt Bevin across the finish line” while helping Republicans win several other statewide races.
Meanwhile, Democrats wrested both chambers of Virginia’s legislature from narrow Republican majorities, which would give the party complete control of the state government for the first time in a quarter-century.
Trump has avoided Virginia, where Democrats found success in suburban swing districts in last year’s congressional elections, as they did in states across the country. Tuesday’s election, which saw Democrats prevail in several northern Virginia suburbs, suggested the trend was continuing.
In Mississippi, where Republican Governor Phil Bryant was barred from running again due to term limits, Republican Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves defeated Attorney General Jim Hood, a moderate Democrat who favors gun rights and opposes abortion rights.
Like Bevin, Reeves campaigned as a staunch Trump supporter in a state that Trump easily won in 2016. The president held a campaign rally in the state last week alongside Reeves.
In New Jersey, Democrats were expected to maintain their majority in the state’s general assembly, the legislature’s lower chamber.
Virginia in the spotlight
The Virginia contest drew heavy attention and money from both parties. Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential front-runner, visited Virginia over the weekend to campaign with several statehouse candidates, and Republican Vice President Mike Pence held a rally on Saturday.
Other Democratic presidential contenders, including U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, have also campaigned with local candidates.
In one notable race, Democrat Shelly Simonds, who lost a state House of Delegates race in 2017 via random draw after the election ended in a tie, won a rematch against Republican David Yancey.
Virginia’s Democratic gains came despite a year of scandal for the party’s top officials in the state. Governor Ralph Northam barely endured a political firestorm after his yearbook page was shown to have photos of someone in blackface and another person in a Ku Klux Klan costume, while Attorney General Mark Herring admitted to wearing blackface himself in college.
Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, meanwhile, has denied two accusations of sexual assault.
The legislative wins likely mean that Democrats can pass a raft of bills that Republicans had resisted, including new gun limits. Democrats will also control the redistricting process in 2021, when lawmakers draw new voting lines for state and congressional elections after next year’s U.S. Census.
From: MeNeedIt
Italy will next year become the world’s first country to make it compulsory for schoolchildren to study climate change and sustainable development, Education Minister Lorenzo Fioramonti said.
Fioramonti, from the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, is the government’s most vocal supporter of green policies and was criticized by the opposition in September for encouraging students to skip school and take part in climate protests.
In an interview in his Rome office on Monday, Fioramonti said all state schools would dedicate 33 hours per year, almost one hour per school week, to climate change issues from the start of the next academic year in September.
Many traditional subjects, such as geography, mathematics and physics, would also be studied from the perspective of sustainable development, said the minister, a former economics professor at South Africa’s Pretoria University.
“The entire ministry is being changed to make sustainability and climate the center of the education model,” Fioramonti told Reuters in the interview conducted in fluent English.
“I want to make the Italian education system the first education system that puts the environment and society at the core of everything we learn in school.”
Fioramonti, 42, the author of several books arguing gross domestic product should no longer be used as the main measure of countries’ economic success, has been a target of the right-wing opposition since becoming a minister in the two-month-old government of 5-Star and the center-left Democratic Party.
His proposals for new taxes on airline tickets, plastic and sugary foods to raise funds for education were strongly attacked by critics who said Italians were already over-taxed.
He then sparked fury from conservatives when he suggested crucifixes should be removed from Italian classrooms to create a more inclusive environment for non-Christians.
Despite the criticism, the government’s 2020 budget presented to parliament this week included both the plastic tax and a new tax on sugary drinks.
“I was ridiculed by everyone and treated like a village idiot, and now a few months later the government is using two of those proposals and it seems to me more and more people are convinced it is the way to go,” Fioramonti said.
ANTI-SALVINI
Surveys showed 70-80% of Italians backed taxing sugar and flights, he said, adding that coalition lawmakers had told him they would table budget amendments to introduce his proposal to hike air ticket prices before the budget is approved by end-year.
Fioramonti said targeted taxes of this kind were a way of discouraging types of consumption which were harmful to the environment or individuals, while generating resources for schools, welfare or lowering income tax.
In this vein, he suggested other levies on various types of gambling and on profits from oil drilling.
His progressive positions on the economy and the environment are the antithesis of Matteo Salvini’s hard-right League, which has overtaken 5-Star to become easily Italy’s most popular party, with more than 30% of voter support.
From: MeNeedIt
