As hot, dry Santa Ana winds whipped up wildfires in Southern California this week, 300 unlikely heroes were being credited with helping save the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

Three hundred goats, that is.

That’s because in May, 300 goats were brought to the library to eat all the brush around the complex.

“We actually worked with the Ventura County Fire Department in May and they bring out hundreds of goats to our property,” Melissa Giller, a spokeswoman for the library, told ABC. “The goats eat all of the brush around the entire property, creating a fire perimeter.

“The firefighters on the property said that the fire break really helped them, because as the fire was coming up that one hill, all the brush has been cleared, basically,” she said.

The caprine contractors are part of an 800-head herd from 805 Goats, a Southern California company that offers a “sustainable, ecologically friendly” way to reduce fire danger and manage lands.

Scott Morris, the owner, said he charges $1,000 per acre of land to allow the goats to graze.

Vincent van Goat, Selena Goatmez, Goatzart and Nibbles were among the goats in the herd brought in to clear about 13 acres at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Morris said goats, which have voracious appetites, prefer to graze on weeds over grass. As for how it works: The goats are brought to the property and turned loose.

The company’s website said, “Goats will consume the noxious weed vegetation first, consisting of eating all the flower heads and leaves, with only bare stock remaining. With the elimination of the flower heads, the natural progression of the cycle is stopped immediately.”

Morris said his year-old company is busy with clients that include cities, homeowners associations and golf courses.

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TC Energy’s Keystone pipeline has leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of oil in northeastern North Dakota, marking the second significant spill in two years along the line that carries Canadian tar sands oil through seven states, regulators said Thursday.

Crews on Tuesday shut down the pipeline after the leak was discovered, said Karl Rockeman, North Dakota’s water quality division director. It remained closed Thursday.

The Calgary, Alberta-based company formerly known as TransCanada said in a statement that the leak affected about 22,500 square feet (2090 sq. meters) of land near Edinburg, in Walsh County.

The company and regulators said the cause was being investigated.

“Our emergency response team contained the impacted area and oil has not migrated beyond the immediately affected area,” the company said in a statement.

TC Energy said the area affected by the spill is less than the size of a football field and that the amount of oil released — 9,120 barrels — would approximately half fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.  

North Dakota regulators were notified late Tuesday of the leak. Rockeman said some wetlands were affected, but not any sources of drinking water.

Regulators have been at the site since Wednesday afternoon monitoring the spill and cleanup, he said.

Crude began flowing through the $5.2 billion pipeline in 2011. It’s designed to carry crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri on the way to refineries in Patoka, Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma.

It can handle about 23 million gallons daily.

The pipeline spill and shutdown comes as the company seeks to build the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has drawn opposition from people who fear it will harm the environment.

President Donald Trump issued a federal permit for the expansion project in 2017, after it had been rejected by the Obama administration.Together, the massive Keystone and Keystone XL network would be about five times the length of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

The original Keystone has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons (53,000 liters) of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border. That leak was blamed on valve failure at a pumping station.

Another leak in 2016 prompted a weeklong shutdown of the pipeline. The company estimated that just under 17,000 gallons (64,350 liters) of oil spilled onto private land during that leak. Federal regulators said an “anomaly” on a weld on the pipeline was to blame. No waterways or aquifers were affected.

In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 407,000 gallons (1.5 million liters) of oil onto farmland in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border. The company had originally put the spill at about 210,000 gallons (795,000 liters).

Federal regulators said at the time that the Keystone leak was the seventh-largest onshore oil or petroleum product spill since 2010. Federal investigators said the pipeline was likely damaged during installation during 2008 and may have occurred when a vehicle drove over the pipe, causing it to weaken over time.

North Dakota’s biggest spill , and one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history, came in 2013, when 840,000 gallons (3.1 million liters) spilled from a Tesoro pipeline in the northwestern part of the state. The company spent five years and nearly $100 million cleaning it up.

The Sierra Club said the latest spill was an example of why the Keystone XL should not be built.

“We don’t yet know the extent of the damage from this latest tar sands spill, but what we do know is that this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last.”

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took to Twitter on Thursday to condemn the pipeline and Trump for supporting the extension of it.

Sanders said he would shut down the existing pipeline if elected.

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On Aug. 25, 1989, an 8-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis wrote in her journal that it was “the most best day” because scientists had “found a Jean for Cistik fibrosis.”  

On Thursday, the current head of the National Institutes of Health — who was a member of one of the teams that found the gene — wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that a triple-drug therapy has been found to be highly effective in treating the life-threatening disorder.

“We hoped that the gene discovery would someday lead to effective treatments for children and adults with cystic fibrosis,” Francis Collins wrote. “Now, 30 years later, that time has come.”

The drug, called Trikafta, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last week.

Some 30,000 Americans have been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, which causes thick mucus buildup in the patient’s organs, affecting respiration and digestion. While other drugs have helped lengthen patients’ lives, those born with the disease are expected to live only into their 40s.

Past treatments helped only a small percentage of patients, but Trikafta targets Phe508del, the most common mutation of the cystic fibrosis gene. Collins said this means 90% of those suffering from cystic fibrosis — including Jenny, the 8-year-old journal writer — will be helped by the therapy.

Now 38, Jenny McGlincy told The Washington Post that she cried when she read the drug had been approved.

“To think of my lung function improving or my digestion increasing, or even adding a few years to my life that I could spend with my daughter. … Now that it’s available, I’m a little like, ‘Is this really happening?’ ” she told the Post.

 Model of collaboration

Cystic fibrosis research has set a standard of how the collaboration between nonprofits and pharmaceutical firms can help develop treatments. Collins points out that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, frustrated that gene treatments were slow to be found, decided to invest directly in a small company called Aurora Biosciences, which is now Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the developer of Trikafta.

That collaboration, “now spanning more than two decades, can be seen as an important model for other rare genetic diseases,” Collins wrote.

After the discovery of the gene, Collins wrote a song, “Dare to Dream.”  

“The lyrics expressed hope that the gene discovery would lead to effective treatments for cystic fibrosis — that someday we would see ‘all our brothers and sisters breathing free.’ It is profoundly gratifying to see that this dream is coming true,” he said.

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The deaths of 39 migrants in the back of a refrigerated truck near London last week has focused a spotlight on the lives of those who risk everything to earn a better living in Britain.

Many of the victims are believed to have traveled from Vietnam. Tamsin Barber, an expert on the Vietnamese diaspora in Britain at Oxford Brookes University, says many migrants are willing to take huge risks.

“They’re doing that because they know that when they get to the UK, the likelihood is that they’re going to be able to find work in the cannabis industry, where they might be able to earn large amounts of money in a short period of time, paying back their debts, the debts to the smugglers, and then eventually being able to pay send remittances back to their family,” Barber said.

Cannabis and nail salons

As well as the illegal cannabis industry, many Vietnamese work in nail and beauty salons, which have boomed on British high streets in recent years. Others work in the restaurant trade or as cleaners, while some are drawn into prostitution.

Once here, many migrants are effectively trapped, said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch.

“When they get to the UK, the debt bondage, that huge debt, $30,000 to $40,000, is taken from their wages,” Robertson said. “If they don’t behave or if they don’t follow instructions, there could also be ramifications for their families back in Vietnam from those people-smuggling gangs.”

Robertson said some migrants endure slavelike conditions.

“They’re scared to death that if they are reported or somehow seek out the authorities because they are being abused so badly, that all that happens is they’ll be arrested and sent back to Vietnam, still owing a large debt,” he said.

Entire family benefits

Despite the risks, sending a family member overseas is often a joint decision, Barber said.

“The methods that families might use to raise this sort of money might be selling land, it might be remortgaging their houses, it might be borrowing money from money lenders at very high interest rates,” Barber said.

If successful, the profits can transform communities back home. In Do Thanh, 250 kilometers south of Hanoi, rundown shacks are being replaced with luxury villas. Local resident Nguyen Van Thuy, a metalworker who has remained in the village, says it has changed beyond recognition.

“Originally, the entirety of Do Thanh commune was just farmers working in the fields,” Van Thuy said, “but then some people went overseas to work where they got rich. That’s why many people rushed to go, both flying there legally and using illegal ‘underground’ routes.”

Road to tragedy

That illegal route ended in tragedy last week for 39 migrants crossing the English Channel to Britain. It appears they suffocated in the back of a sealed refrigerated truck.

Nguyen Thanh Le fears his son Hung was among them. The family spoke to VOA Vietnamese this week, after being asked by authorities to provide their son’s photograph and their DNA samples for identification.

Hung last talked to his family Oct. 21, two days before the truck was found with the bodies inside, 30 kilometers east of London. The father said he borrowed more than 400 million dong (US $17,000) from the bank to send his son abroad. He still owes a quarter of that money.

“He wanted to go to England to work in a nail spa,” said Le, saying his son promised to “send money home” from his work in the UK.

Hung, 33, left Vietnam less than a year ago, heading to Russia first and then to France.

“Since my wife and I are both sick, Hung wanted to go to work abroad to get better income to help us, and also to look for a chance to get a better life for himself,” Le said. “He got a degree in music but wasn’t able to find a job.”

Hung graduated from the respected Hue Conservatory University but wanted to go abroad to earn more money. 

“In France, Hung worked as a dishwasher in restaurants,” his father told VOA Vietnamese. “But he got back pain after a while doing the work. Hung told me he wanted to go to England as friends told him that working in a nail spa is more comfortable and he may get better pay.”

Le says he wanted his son to stay home and get married, but Hung was determined to go abroad.

It’s a common story, said Barber of Oxford Brookes University.

“They’re taking these dangerous routes and it’s likely they’re still going to continue to come because there’s so much to be gained from their migration here to the UK.”

Barber says the latest tragedy may put off some migrants from taking risky journeys in the short term.

However, as long as there are no legal routes to Britain for low-skilled migrants and the market for cheap, black-market labor remains high, the demand for illegal people-smugglers will continue to grow.

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The Nationals’ World Series victory Wednesday night has brought together fans in a city deeply divided by the impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Washington Nationals defeated the Houston Astros 6-2 on Wednesday in the seventh game of Major League Baseball’s World Series, earning the team’s first championship win in franchise history.

Politics have previously divided fans at D.C.’s Nationals Park, where the team plays its home games. Last Sunday, Trump, first lady Melania Trump and other prominent Republicans attended the fifth game of the series. The president’s group was loudly booed by members of the audience, many jeering “lock him up.”  

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Ballpark Boos a Rarity for Shielded US President

Donald Trump showered with jeers, boos and chants when he attended a World Series game, a rare moment of in-your-face disapproval for a president whose White House takes extraordinary steps to shield him from protests

But sporting events also provide an opportunity to bring people together, as famously happened during the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, when a public encounter between two pingpong players from China and the U.S. was seen as signaling the thawing of U.S.-Chinese relations during the Cold War.

For D.C. residents, the Nationals’ World Series victory became a moment of unity for the city.

“The impeachment is definitely divisive,” said resident Ore Fashola. “The Nationals’ win in the World Series … is a very big cohesive moment.”

Despite the win, D.C. residents said the good news was only temporary.

“On Saturday, everybody will be together for the parade and for one day only, and then it will go back to business as normal,” said resident Daniel Dowhan. While Wednesday’s win was big, it was too small for people to overcome their differences and be “friends,” he added.

Fashola said she thought the win would be a “short-term” unifier. “I think that [impeachment is] more a long-term focus.”

Some Washingtonians, however, had trouble taking even a short break from the impeachment inquiry on the day of the World Series win.

“I’m following and looking forward to seeing a better change,” said one resident, Penelope, when asked about the inquiry.

The House voted Thursday to authorize a public impeachment inquiry targeting Trump for allegedly pushing Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.

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