After a mild winter, the northeastern United States is in for a banner year when it comes to ticks. That would be little more than a nuisance if it were not for the fact that the tiny bloodsuckers carry some potentially deadly diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: July 2017
Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Stone
While our fossil fuel-dependent civilization keeps releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, scientists are racing to find a viable method for lowering the emission of the most harmful one — carbon dioxide. It can be captured and stored underground, or it can be turned into a harmless rock. The price is steep, but the cost of not doing something could be higher. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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As Puppies Join Police Forces, Veteran Dogs Retire
Not every police officer patrols on two legs. Some have four legs, and fur. Faith Lapidus reports on some new recruits and some veterans leaving police work behind.
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WHO: Spread of Untreatable ‘Superbug’ Gonorrhea Imminent
At least three people worldwide are infected with totally untreatable “superbug” strains of gonorrhea, which they are likely to be spreading to others through sex, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.
Giving details of studies showing a “very serious situation” with regard to highly drug-resistant forms of the sexually transmitted disease (STD), WHO experts said it was “only a matter of time” before last-resort gonorrhea antibiotics would be of no use.
“Gonorrhea is a very smart bug,” said Teodora Wi, a human reproduction specialist at the Geneva-based U.N. health agency. “Every time you introduce a new type of antibiotic to treat it, this bug develops resistance to it.”
78 million infected a year
The WHO estimates 78 million people a year get gonorrhea, an STD that can infect the genitals, rectum and throat.
The infection, which in many cases has no symptoms on its own, can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, as well as increasing the risk of getting HIV.
Wi, who gave details in a telephone briefing of two studies on gonorrhea published in the journal PLOS Medicine, said one had documented three specific cases, one each in Japan, France and Spain, of patients with strains of gonorrhea against which no known antibiotic is effective.
“These are cases that can infect others. It can be transmitted,” she told reporters. “And these cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhea is actually more common.”
Drug resistance
The WHO’s program for monitoring trends in drug-resistant gonorrhea found in a study that from 2009 to 2014 there was widespread resistance to the first-line medicine ciprofloxacin, increasing resistance to another antibiotic drugs called azithromycin, and the emergence of resistance to last-resort treatments known as extended-spectrum cephalosporins (ESCs).
In most countries, it said, ESCs are now the only single antibiotics that remain effective for treating gonorrhea. Yet resistance to them has been reported in 50 countries.
Manica Balasegaram, director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, said the situation was grim and there was a “pressing need” for new medicines.
Few new drugs coming
The pipeline, however, is very thin, with only three potential new gonorrhea drugs in development and no guarantee any will prove effective in final-stage trials, he said.
“We urgently need to seize the opportunities we have with existing drugs and candidates in the pipeline,” he told reporters. “Any new treatment developed should be accessible to everyone who needs it, while ensuring it is used appropriately, so that drug resistance is slowed as much as possible.”
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Judge: Bill Cosby to Be Retried on Sex Assault Charges in November
Entertainer Bill Cosby will be retried on charges of sexually assaulting a former employee of his alma mater in November, five months after his first trial on those charges ended in a hung jury, a Pennsylvania judge ruled on Thursday.
Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill said the 79-year-old comedian would be tried again beginning on Nov. 6. He is accused of the sexual assault of Temple University administrator Andrea Constand in his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.
Cosby built a long career on a family-friendly style of comedy exemplified by the 1980s TV hit “The Cosby Show” before dozens of women came forward to accuse him of sex assault in a series of incidents dating back to the 1960s.
The vast majority of those alleged incidents were too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution, but Cosby has faced one criminal trial because prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged him in December 2015, just days before the statute of limitations was to run out on Constand’s claim.
The jurors who heard Cosby’s first trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, who were bused in from Pittsburgh, 300 miles (480 km) away, failed to reach a unanimous verdict last month after 52 hours of deliberations that often stretched late into the night.
Cosby has long denied any criminal wrongdoing and has said that any sexual contact he had with his accusers was consensual.
His spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, hailed the hung-jury outcome as a victory for Cosby, who has not performed to a paying audience for more than two years.
Cosby is also awaiting two trials over civil lawsuits filed against him by accusers, with both scheduled for the summer of 2018.
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Director Franco Zeffirelli Gets Museum Featuring Life’s Work
Director Franco Zeffirelli’s art works and personal library have been moved from his Roman villa to his native Florence to fill a museum honoring his life’s work.
The museum and performing arts center will display around 500 sketches of production sets that Zeffirelli made during his vast career, make available his 10,000-volume library and incorporate artistic activities.
His son, Pippo Zeffirelli, said at a presentation Thursday in Rome “the project was born from the maestro’s desire to leave all his artistic treasures” intact and accessible. Zeffirelli was expected to attend, but his son said he was feeling unwell because of a heat wave.
The film, TV and opera director, who is 94, also will be honored at La Scala with a revival of his 1963 production of “Aida.”
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US Judge Allows Twitter Lawsuit Over Surveillance to Move Forward
A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that Twitter could move forward with a lawsuit that aims to free technology companies to speak more openly about surveillance requests they receive from the U.S. government.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said in a written order that the U.S. government had failed to show the kind of “clear and present danger” that could possibly justify restraints on the right of Twitter to talk about surveillance requests.
“The government’s restrictions on Twitter’s speech are content-based prior restraints subject to the highest level of scrutiny under the First Amendment,” Rogers wrote.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights including freedom of speech.
Twitter filed the lawsuit in 2014 after revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. spying.
The detail that tech companies can provide about U.S. national security requests is limited, so that companies can release the number of requests only within a range, such as 0-499 in a six month period.
Rogers scheduled a hearing in Twitter’s case for next month.
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Pediatric Unit Built by Madonna in Malawi to Open July 11
Madonna says the children’s wing at a hospital in Malawi she has been building for two years completed its first surgery last week and will officially open July 11.
The Mercy James Institute for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care, located at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in the city of Blantyre, had a soft opening and is the first of its kind in Malawi. It was built in collaboration with the Malawian Ministry of Health.
“When you look into the eyes of children in need, wherever they may be, a human being wants to do anything and everything they can to help, and on my first visit to Malawi, I made a commitment that I would do just that,” Madonna said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“I’d like to thank everyone who has joined me on this unbelievable journey. What started out as a dream for Malawi and her children has become a reality, and we couldn’t have done it without your support,” she added.
Madonna adopted four children, David Banda, Mercy James, Stelle and Estere from Malawi. The children’s wing was named after 11-year-old Mercy.
The pop star’s charity, Raising Malawi, has built schools in Malawi and has funded the new pediatric unit, which began construction in 2015. Madonna, 58, visited the site last year.
The children’s unit includes three operating rooms dedicated to children’s surgery, a day clinic and a 45-bed ward. It will enable Queen Elizabeth hospital to double the number of surgeries for children and will provide critical pre-operative and post-operative care. It also includes a playroom, an outdoor play structure and murals curated by Madonna and other artists.
Sarah Ezzy, executive director of Raising Malawi, said the charity has been working with Queen Elizabeth hospital since 2008, helping the hospital’s chief of pediatric surgery, Dr. Eric Borgstein, develop a training program.
“Pediatric intensive care is not something that has formally existed in Malawi. There hasn’t been any training on it. It’s not part of the curriculum in nursing school [or] medical school. People had to leave the country to train … now people don’t have to leave the country to train,” Ezzy said in an interview. “This facility is attached to the college of medicine and nursing so it will be a learning, teaching hospital.”
Trevor Neilson, who works at Charity Network and has been advising Madonna’s philanthropic efforts for the last six years, said “only someone like Madonna could do this. If you weren’t Madonna, you would have given up a long time ago.”
“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives will be saved by the hospital in the course of it operating,” added Neilson, who has worked on charity projects with Bill Gates, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Bono and others.
Madonna founded Raising Malawi in 2006 to address the poverty and hardship endured by Malawi’s orphans and vulnerable children.
“Malawi has enriched my family more than I could have ever imagined. It’s important for me to make sure all my children from the country maintain a strong connection to their birth nation, and equally important to show them that together as humans we have the power to change the world for the better,” Madonna said.
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Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands of Workers in Sales Shake-up
Microsoft is laying off thousands of employees in a shake-up aimed at selling more subscriptions to software applications that can be used on any internet-connected device.
Most of the people losing their jobs work in sales and are located outside the U.S. The Redmond company confirmed that it began sending the layoff notices Thursday, but declined to provide further specifics, except that thousands of sales jobs would be cut.
“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others.”
Microsoft Corp. employs about 121,500 people worldwide. Nearly 71,600 of them work in the U.S.
Software subscriptions
The job cuts are part of Microsoft’s shift away from its traditional approach of licensing its Office software and other programs for a one-time fee tied to a single computer. The company is now concentrating on selling recurring subscriptions for software accessible on multiple devices, a rapidly growing trend known as “cloud computing.”
That part of Microsoft’s operations has been playing an increasingly important role, especially among corporate and government customers, since Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as the company’s CEO in 2014.
Microsoft’s “commercial cloud” segment is on a pace to generate about $15 billion in annual revenue. More than 26 million consumers subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 service that includes its Word, Excel and other popular programs. That number has more than doubled in the past two years.
Meanwhile, revenue from licensing of Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been increasing by 5 percent or less in the past three quarters.
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At 70, John Prine is the Hippest Songwriter in Nashville
The first time a new country songwriter named Kacey Musgraves saw one of her songwriting heroes, John Prine, she had an unusual proposition when she approached.
“I said, ‘Hey, my name is Kacey and I am a really big fan. I don’t want to offend you or anything, but is there any way you might want to burn one with me?”’ Musgraves recalled saying after one of his shows in Nashville, Tennessee.
Musgraves, who would later go on to win two Grammy Awards for her 2013 major label debut album, was hoping to fulfill a fantasy of smoking a joint with Prine. It was also the premise of an unreleased song she had written that somehow ended up on Prine’s desk.
Prine, who has survived a couple of bouts of cancer, politely declined.
“He says, ‘Well, I don’t do that anymore, but if I did, I would with you,”’ Musgraves, who is now 28, recalled.
This 70-year-old former mailman from Chicago is the hippest writer in Nashville and still in demand. Prine has become an affable songwriting guru for many of Nashville’s talented young artists, including country rebel Sturgill Simpson, Americana darlings Jason Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, and rocker Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.
All those artists have lined up to open for Prine, when they are easily selling out their own venues as headliners.
“I have met some really great people in the last five years that it’s easy to see that music in general is in good hands,” Prine said in an interview from his office, which is decorated year round with Christmas lights and a white Christmas tree.
Prine published his first book in April, a songbook called “Beyond Words,” which features guitar chords, family photos, handwritten or typed lyrics with his editing marks and witty musings alongside some of his most well-known songs, from “Sam Stone,” “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” and “Hello in There.”
Prine’s reinvigorated career came after neck cancer in the late ’90s left him with a much lower and grittier voice. After his recovery, he just moved his songs to lower key.
“Some of my oldest songs that I used to perform every night became brand spanking new just because I changed the key,” Prine said.
He started his own record label Oh Boy in Nashville in the early ’80s, which sold his CDs by direct mail to fans. He enjoys his independence from major labels, even if it has meant fewer sales. He says his only advice to young songwriters is don’t give up their publishing rights in a record deal.
“I am not a big one for advice,” Prine said. “I will tell them stories about things I have failed at or places I have stumbled and hope they take it as a parable. And maybe apply it to themselves and maybe not.”
Auerbach and Prine wrote several songs together, including the title track for Auerbach’s new solo album, “Waiting On a Song.”
“It was like having a conversation really,” the 38-year-old singer said of writing with Prine. “And I think for me, that’s what John does so well with his music. It’s not over your head. He uses simple language to convey big meaning.”
The Grammy-winner has taken on heavy topics including coal mining on Appalachia, the treatment of Vietnam veterans and the loneliness of growing old, and earned praises from Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Kris Kristofferson, who helped Prine get his first record deal. But he also likes to write with humor, as evidenced by another popular duet with Iris Dement “In Spite of Ourselves,” that contains some of his best one-liners about love and marriage.
“I think John is very youthful at heart,” Musgraves said. “He’s a big kid. So naturally he gets along with people that are younger than him. But also he probably recognizes himself in a lot of the up-and-coming songwriters that respect him.”
Even a trip to the grocery store is an opportunity for aspiring writers to pitch him. “I used to leave Kroger with cassettes in my pockets because people would drop CDs and cassettes because they want John Prine to hear it,” Prine said.
His last album in 2016 was a collection of classic country duets with artists like Musgraves, Alison Krauss and Miranda Lambert. He hasn’t released an album of new songs in 12 years, but his wife and manager, Fiona, and his son, Jody, who runs his label, convinced him it was time again.
He’s going back in the studio in July to record new music and he’s also been nominated for artist of the year at this year’s Americana Honors and Awards show held in September.
“I like the scene in Nashville,” Prine said. “I am not particularly happy with modern country music, but it’s part of a tradition. It will come and it will go, but it will always revert back to what country was before. I can see it coming around again. I am going to stick around Nashville and see what happens.”
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Trump to European Leaders: Look at US as Energy Exporter
U.S. President Donald Trump urged the leaders of central and eastern European nations Thursday to enter into agreements to purchase U.S. energy exports, instead of relying heavily on imports from Russia.
“America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies, so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump said in Warsaw, Poland, where he attended a meeting of 12 European nations.
Trump did not mention Russia, but many observers believed his remarks were meant to get the leaders to view the U.S. as a viable alternate source of energy.
In 2008, Russia cut supplies of natural gas to Europe during a dispute with Ukraine. Russia’s subsequent military intervention in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea raised concerns about Europe’s over-reliance on Russian gas.
The meeting of the European nations, The Three Seas Summit, was attended by nations located around the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas. The nations are involved in an ongoing initiative to strengthen relations through energy, trade and infrastructure deals.
One of the goals of the Three Seas nations is to develop energy infrastructure that aligns with recent European Union efforts to more effectively merge gas pipelines to guard against supply disruptions, particularly from Russia.
The Trump administration hopes to export more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the region. The U.S. has large inventories of low-priced natural gas and is constructing new terminals for shipping the gas overseas.
Trump’s comments were made one day before he is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.
FBI and several congressional probes are under way into whether Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia when it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
Trump has dismissed or downplayed findings by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia meddled in the election with the intent of helping Trump win the presidency.
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Bringing the Internet to the World’s Far-flung Corners
Without adequate power, even the best smartphone or laptop can quickly become useless. It’s a simple concept that’s often taken for granted in industrialized nations. But not in the developing world where basic internet access is a challenge.
“You have a very large population of people who are not on the electrical grid, so you can’t bring them internet access if you can’t also solve issues around energy access,” said Paul Garnett, director of Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiatives. “Companies who are starting out in the internet access space are ending up in the energy access space, and vice versa.”
Two years ago, Microsoft launched the Affordable Access Initiative (AAI), which recently doled out $75,000 to $100,000 to 10 firms working to bridge the digital divide. Each firm also receives Microsoft’s cloud services and software.
Andy Bogdan Bindea, CEO of California-based Sigora International, knows a thing or two about the challenges of bringing power to developing countries. Sigora’s electrification efforts in Haiti made it one of this year’s grant winners. The company works to build solar-powered, mini electricity grids in the country’s most remote regions.
“It is a very, very difficult place to work in, logistically. It costs about 28 percent extra to bring any kind of equipment into the country,” said Bogdan Bindea, “It takes us 12 hours to get from the capital to our pilot project, which is 100 miles away … nine hours if you drive like a maniac.”
Through the partnership with Microsoft, Bogdan Bindea hopes to expand Sigora’s offerings, building a web portal for instance, so customers can pay for internet access and online content using digital wallets.
“More than anything, a company like ours needs names like Microsoft, needs partners like Microsoft” said Bogdan Bindea.
Access to the internet is as essential a need as food, shelter and clothing these days. More than half of the world’s population, 3.9 billion people, are stranded along the digital divide, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
Picosoft is a startup in Kathmandu and one of this year’s AAI grant winners. The company uses untapped TV frequencies or “white space”, to provide internet access to schools in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal.
“One of the great things about TV white space frequencies is they are in the broadcast bands, and therefore the signals that are transmitted over those frequencies travel over very long distances,” Garnett said.
SunCulture was another one of this year’s grant winners. The Kenya-based startup offers solar-powered irrigation kits to smallholder farmers across Africa. Working with Microsoft, team members plan to build a digital platform for farmers that will provide data on crops, collected from connected sensors and cameras in the field.
“Internet is a conduit to other services in the markets that we work in,” said Samir Ibrahim, SunCulture CEO and co-founder.
“The value that SunCulture provides and the value of our company isn’t in the things that we sell to farmers, it is in the connected experience and the relationship we build with them,” said Ibrahim. “So internet for us is a conduit to build the relationships with farmers so we can continue to develop solutions for them.”
Microsoft’s AAI grant winners may have clinched the prize, but Garnett says the real gains can’t be counted in dollars and cents.
“The bigger value that the relationship delivers is really the network and the mentorship, helping companies to adapt and evolve their business models,” said Garnett.
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France Vows to End Sales of Gas, Diesel Cars by 2040
France will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2040.
The move, announced by the country’s ecology minister Nicolas Hulot, is part of a plan to meet emissions targets set forth in the Paris climate accord.
“We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040,” Hulot said, adding that it would be a “veritable revolution.”
Saying the goal would be “tough” to accomplish, he added that French carmakers such as Peugeot-Citroen and Renault would be able to handle the changes. France is the biggest manufacturer of electric cars sold in Europe.
France is the latest country to focus on electric cars. India has said it wants all cars sold there to be electric by 2030. Norway has said it will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2025, and Germany is aiming to have 1 million electric cars on its roads by 2020.
In 2016, the largest market in the world for electric cars was China, where more than 500,000 were sold.
On Wednesday, Volvo announced it would stop producing cars with conventional engines by 2019.
According to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), only 3.6 percent of cars sold in Western Europe in 2016 were hybrid or electric.
Hulot said getting conventional cars off the road was important to “public health” as several French cities, including Paris and Lyon have recurring issues with air pollution. Hulot said the move was part of the country’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2050.
To that end, he announced last month that France would no longer give licenses for oil and gas exploration in France and its overseas territories.
“One of the symbolic acts of the plan is that France, which previously had made the promise to divide its greenhouse gas emissions by four by 2050, has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision,” Hulot said.”The carbon neutral objective will force us to make the necessary investments.”
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris pact saying it would be unfair to American businesses and too expensive for taxpayers.
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Physicists Find New Particle With a Double Dose of Charm
Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together.
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon.
Baryons are subatomic particles made up of quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common baryons. Quarks are even smaller particles that come in six types, two common types that are light and four heavier types.
The high-speed collisions at the world’s biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment.
The particle has two heavy quarks – both of a type that are called “charm”- and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark.
It may have been brief, but in particle physics it lived for “an appreciably long time,” he said.
The two heavy quarks are in a dance that’s just like the interaction of a star system with two suns and the third lighter quark circles the dancing pair, Wilkinson said.
“People have looked for it for a long time,” Wilkinson said. He said this opens up a whole new “family” of baryons for physicists to find and study.
“It gives us a very unique and interesting laboratory to give us an interesting new angle on the behavior of the strong interaction (between particles), which is one of the key forces in nature,” Wilkinson said.
Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at the Fermilab near Chicago, who wasn’t part of the discovery team, praised the discovery and said “it gives us a lot to think about.”
The team has submitted a paper to the journal Physical Review Letters.
The Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN.
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As Overdose Deaths Rise, Canada Adds Safe Injection Centers
Canada is attacking its expanding opioid crisis with an unusual measure: It’s giving addicts a safe place to shoot up.
The government has allowed seven “safe injection sites” to open and a score of others are being considered across the country.
The storefront sites give addicts clean syringes, medical supervision and freedom from arrest. They don’t get help in kicking their problem unless they ask for it, but the program dramatically reduces the chance of a fatal overdose or the transmission of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV.
The effort, inspired by some in Europe, is being closely watched in the U.S., where officials are struggling to cope with a surge in overdose deaths from opioid use. Several cities say they are considering similar measures despite fears that they may encourage drug use.
First center in Vancouver
Dozens of people a day have been coming to three new centers in Montreal, where users are given a small kit to safely inject drugs they bring with them and then an opportunity to relax for a half hour on couches listening to music, according to a 30-year-old addict who would only give his first name, Francois. The center operators denied access to the media once the center opened.
“They give you everything you need,” Francois said as he left a center in the gentrifying downtown neighborhood around Sainte-Catherine Street after injecting heroin. “Everyone is pretty relaxed.”
A single injection site opened in 2003, run by a Vancouver nonprofit organization under authorization by Health Canada. It received 214,898 visits by 8,040 individuals last year, with nurses intervening in 1,781 overdoses. It said it’s never had an overdose death.
Another center also has opened in that West Coast city, and in recent weeks, two more have opened in British Columbia and three in Montreal. Another is scheduled to open in Montreal soon and three in Toronto. More than a dozen other potential sites are being considered across Canada federal officials say.
More overdoses prompt more centers
Health Minister Jane Philpott said the government felt compelled to add sites because of the escalating number of overdose deaths, which topped 2,400 last year.
“They are absolutely known to save lives and reduce infections,” Philpott said. “We have a very significant public health issue in our country.”
She acknowledged they are not a complete answer to the drug problem: “This is only one in a very broad range of tools. A comprehensive approach is necessary.”
Seattle to open centers
U.S. drug overdose deaths have tripled in 15 years, reaching at least 52,000 in 2015, making it the leading cause of death for people under 50. Seattle and King County in Washington are moving forward with plans for safe injection centers and a city task force in Philadelphia has proposed some, though such measures have faced opposition.
John Walters, who directed the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George W. Bush, said safe-injection sites merely prolong addiction and eventually lead to deaths.
He noted that overdose deaths have risen sharply in British Columbia despite the presence of the first safe-injection site in North America. The province had 136 deaths in April, a 97 percent increase over the same month a year earlier. There were 967 overdose deaths in British Columbia in 2016, up from 517 in 2015. And there have been 640 this year through May.
“Government-sanctioned injection sites are now said by advocates to prevent overdose deaths. That clearly has not happened in British Columbia,” Walters said.
Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, isn’t convinced they work either but said he understands their appeal.
“The opioid crisis is so horrible that you are desperate and willing to try anything,” he said. “There’s a part of me that says, ‘Sure, give it a shot.”’
Neighbors not pleased
Gilles Beauregard, executive director of a Montreal safe injection site opening in September, argued that the service will help neighborhoods.
“At street level, we’re going to see a decrease in the number of needles lying around, and less people shooting up in parks and alleys and public toilets,” he said.
Not everybody living nearby agrees. Angry residents met Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and other officials when they inaugurated the Sainte-Catherine Ease facility in late June. Chantal Beauregard, who lives in the area, said it has attracted junkies at all hours and needles now litter the ground.
“It’s been one week and we’re already fed up,” she said.
A new safe injection facility scheduled to open a mile east in Montreal in September is also drawing criticism
“Having a supervised injection site in a school zone doesn’t make sense,” says Christelle Perrine, who has two children in a school about 200 yards (meters) from the facility.
A tall, broad-shouldered and extensively tattooed man who gave his name only as Benjamin was among about a dozen drug users who made their way to the Sainte-Catherine East injection site over an hour one midweek day.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this for years. It’s great. You don’t have junkies shooting up everywhere, leaving their needles all over the place,” the 46-year-old said after injecting cocaine. “It’s clean, the staff is great.”
“I understand why people who live around here aren’t happy. I have a heart and I have a brain,” he said. “My life’s ambition wasn’t to do this, but at least with this, we’re safe.”
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Afghan Girls Robotic Team Not Deterred Despite US Visa Denial
A team of Afghan teenage girls who were denied a visa to participate in a robotics contest in Washington say they will not be deterred and have sent their home-made robot to the contest. While disappointed, the girls are glad their robot will be part of the competition. Bezhan Hamdard narrates this report by Khalil Noorzai and Mohammad Ahmadi of VOA’s Afghan service.
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History of Catalina Bison: Hollywood, Tourism and Ecology
In prehistoric times, millions of bison roamed North America, but by the late 1800s, they were nearly extinct. Through conservation efforts, they can now be found in all 50 states, including national parks, private lands and even on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. As VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports, the story of how the bison crossed 45 kilometers of ocean to get to Catalina Island is right out of a Hollywood movie.
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Experts Warn That Robots Can Also be Hacked
While the public contemplates how to protect large computer systems, such as banks and voting machines, from hacking, experts warn that another critical part of the data-based world may be vulnerable. Robots are rapidly entering everyday life, and they also rely on a connection to the internet and thus are potentially open to malware. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Common Baker’s Yeast Used to Detect Fungal Pathogens
Using only baker’s yeast, researchers at Columbia University have designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Faith Lapidus has details of the new biosensor, described in the journal Science Advances.
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Newly Discovered Photo May Clear Up Amelia Earhart Mystery
A newly discovered photograph may provide the answer to one of the 20th century’s greatest unsolved mysteries — the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
The legendary American pilot vanished 80 years ago this month somewhere over the Pacific. She was attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world.
What is known is that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan radioed on July 2 that they were in trouble between Papua, New Guinea, and Howland Island.
U.S. investigators quickly gave up the search, concluding they crashed into the ocean and formally pronounced them dead in 1939.
There have been numerous theories of what happened to Earhart and Noonan.
But a new television documentary shows a previously lost photograph of a woman resembling Earhart and a man who experts say is almost certainly Noonan on a dock somewhere in the Pacific.
The woman has her back to the camera and is looking to her right. She has the short hair style and men’s-style pants Earhart was known to favor.
A barge in the background appears to be towing an object that looks like the same size as Earhart’s plane.
The man in the foreground has the same hairline and prominent nose as Noonan’s.
The photo was misplaced in a box at the National Archives in Washington and the filmmakers found it by accident.
Possibly seen as spies
They theorize that Japanese forces captured Earhart and Noonan, believing them to be spies and held them prisoner in the Mariana Islands.
It is unknown when or how they died.
The producers believe someone spying for the U.S. against Japan took the photograph.
They say that may be the reason why the United States hastened to give up looking for Earhart and Noonan.
Shawn Henry, a former assistant director of the FBI and Earhart aficionado, hosts the documentary. He says the aviator was abandoned by her own government and “may very well be the first casualty of World War II.”
The documentary, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” premiers Sunday night on The History Channel.
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Hobby Lobby to Forfeit Ancient Iraqi Artifacts in Settlement With US DOJ
The U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday it had reached a settlement with national arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby to forfeit thousands of ancient artifacts illegally smuggled into the country from the Middle East.
Under the terms of the settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, Hobby Lobby Stores has agreed to forfeit the antiquities, which originated from the region of modern-day Iraq, as well as $3 million, federal prosecutors said in a statement.
“The protection of cultural heritage is a mission that (Homeland Security Investigations) and its partner U.S. Customs and Border Protection take very seriously as we recognize that while some may put a price on these artifacts, the people of Iraq consider them priceless,” Angel Melendez, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York, said in the statement.
Representatives for privately-held Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. could not immediately be reached by Reuters for comment.
The president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green, is the chairman and founder of the Museum of the Bible, which is under construction in Washington, D.C., and on its website describes its collections as biblical objects and artifacts.
Prosecutors say that Hobby Lobby, which is based in Oklahoma City, began assembling a collection of historically significant manuscripts, antiquities and other cultural materials in 2009.
The following year an expert on cultural property law retained by Hobby Lobby cautioned company executives that artifacts from Iraq could have been looted from archaeological sites, advising the company to verify that those being sold had been obtained legally.
Despite that warning and other red flags, prosecutors say, Hobby Lobby in December 2010 spent $1.6 million to purchase more than 5,500 artifacts comprised of cuneiform tablets and bricks, clay bullae and cylinder seals. Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing on clay tablets.
A dealer based in the United Arab Emirates shipped packages containing the items to three different Hobby Lobby corporate addresses in Oklahoma City, bearing labels that falsely described their contents as “ceramic tiles” or “clay tiles” and the country of origin as Turkey.
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US Company to Forfeit Thousands of Iraqi Artifacts
U.S. federal prosecutors say arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby has agreed to turn over thousands of ancient artifacts from the Middle East after the company illegally smuggled them into the country.
In a civil complaint filed Wednesday, the prosecutors said in 2010 Hobby Lobby paid $1.6 million for 5,500 tablets and bricks featuring cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, as well as other objects.
Those artifacts, and others purchased a year later, were sent to Hobby Lobby retail and corporate locations in shipments that falsely identified the contents as coming from Turkey and Israel. The shipping labels also said the packages contained “ceramic tiles” or “clay tiles.”
Prosecutors said an expert warned the company that acquiring cultural property likely from Iraq brought the risk that the items were looted from archaeological sites.
“The protection of cultural heritage is a mission that [Homeland Security Investigations] and its partner U.S. Customs and Border Protection take very seriously as we recognize that while some may put a price on these artifacts, the people of Iraq consider them priceless,” said HSI Special Agent-In-Charge Angel Melendez.
In addition to forfeiting the objects, Hobby Lobby also agreed to pay a $3 million fine.
Hobby Lobby President Steve Green said the company cooperated with the government and should have “more carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled.”
“At no time did Hobby Lobby ever purchase items from dealers in Iraq or from anyone who indicated that they acquired items from that country,” Green said in a statement. “Hobby Lobby condemns such conduct and has always acted with the intent to protect ancient items of cultural and historical importance.”
The company agreed to adopt new practices on buying cultural property, and to submit regular reports to the government about such purchases for 18 months.
Hobby Lobby began assembling a collection of historical Bibles and other artifacts in 2009.
Green is the founder and chairman of a Bible museum under construction in Washington.
Hobby Lobby also won a prominent U.S. Supreme Court case in 2014 involving a government rule that company health plans were required to cover contraceptives. Hobby Lobby said such a rule went against the closely held religious beliefs of its ownership, and the court agreed in a narrow decision that under a religious freedom law the company should not be forced to provide the coverage.
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