Tharparkar desert in Pakistan’s Sindh province is known for being hot and dry. But a recent heavy rain spell has turned the desert into a lush green landscape. The green explosion is also attracting visitors from the city. VOA’s Muhammad Saqib has more in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.

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This generation of children are called digital natives because they have grown up in a digital world. But there are two generations of older people and many disadvantaged people for whom the digital world is a mystery. A computer science teacher in Washington DC is working to change that. VOA’s Mykhailo Komadovsky reports.

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Anti-government protesters attacked the Hong Kong office of China’s official news agency in a show of anger against Beijing after chaos broke out downtown on Saturday, with police firing tear gas to repel gasoline bombs.

Streets in the upscale Causeway Bay shopping area and nearby Victoria Park were clouded in tear gas, sending thousands of protesters fleeing as riot police moved swiftly to stymie the latest rally in the city’s 5-month-long push for genuine autonomy.

Police deployed at least two water cannon trucks in the vicinity. They had issued warnings to protesters who occupied the area that they were taking part in an unauthorized rally and were violating a government ban on face masks.

Some protesters stormed Xinhua News Agency’s office in the city’s Wan Chai neighborhood, smashing windows and the glass entrance door, splashing red ink, spraying graffiti and setting a small fire in the lobby. Graffiti that was sprayed on the wall next to the entrance read “Deport the Chinese communists.”

It was the first strike against the Chinese state-run news agency, a day after the ruling Communist Party in Beijing vowed to tighten the grip on the territory.

Protesters have frequently targeted Chinese banks and businesses linked to or that support China. In July, demonstrators threw eggs at China’s liaison office in Hong Kong and defaced the Chinese national emblem in a move slammed by Beijing as a direct challenge to its authority.

Protesters accuse China’s central government of infringing on the freedoms guaranteed to Hong Kong when the former British colony returned to Chinese control in 1997.

Earlier Saturday, some protesters unearthed a goal post from a soccer field and metal railings to block the entrance to Victoria Park.

Pro-democracy candidates running in this month’s district council elections –who can meet with groups of 50 or fewer people without a police permit- held meetings with voters at the park to try get around the rally ban. One candidate was pepper-sprayed in the face and detained after he argued with police.

Pockets of hardcore protesters in full gear quickly regrouped, setting street barriers and thrashing shuttered subway station exits. Protests also spread to the Kowloon district late Saturday.

In multiple places around the city, protesters hurled gasoline bombs at police, who responded by firing tear gas and water cannons. A number of protesters were detained.

Police said in a statement that some masked rioters had damaged shops, committed arson and placed nails on roads. They also said they halted two approved pro-democracy rallies due to the mayhem.

In one of those rallies, thousands gathered at a public square overlooking the city’s harbor to press for the passage of a U.S. bill that could place diplomatic action and economic sanctions on Hong Kong over human rights violations. U.S. lawmakers have passed the bill, which still needs Senate backing.

The chaos Saturday underlined the depth of anger in protests that began in early June over a now-shelved plan to allow extraditions to mainland China but have since swelled into a movement seeking other demands, including direct elections for the city’s leaders.

A move last month by Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, to invoke emergency powers to impose a face mask ban was slammed by protesters as crimping their right to assemble.

The increasingly violent unrest, with more than 3,000 people detained since the protests began, has hurt the reputation of one of the world’s top financial hubs. The city has slipped into recession for the first time in a decade as it grapples with the turmoil and the impact from the U.S.-China trade war.

The civil disobedience has posed a big challenge for Beijing, which vowed Friday to prevent foreign powers from sowing acts of “separatism, subversion, infiltration and sabotage” in Hong Kong.

In a Communist Party document released after its Central Committee meeting this past week, Beijing said it would “establish and strengthen a legal system and enforcement mechanism” to safeguard national security in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from mainland China, has tried to enact anti-subversion legislation before, only to have the measure shelved amid formidable public opposition. Beijing may be indicating it is preparing to take matters into its own hands by having the National People’s Congress issue a legal interpretation forcing the enactment of such legislation.

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The United Nations and human rights defenders are calling for greater protections for journalists as the world observes this year’s International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

The gruesome murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul last year is a textbook case of impunity. The Saudi Arabian assassins and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who allegedly commissioned the killing, have paid no price for this crime.

Many other killings of journalists also go unpunished.   In his message on this International Day, U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, deplores the rise in the scale and number of attacks against the physical safety of journalists and media workers in recent years.

Rheal LeBlanc, the U.N.’s chief of press and external relations in Geneva, told VOA that Guterres warns that world leaders who vilify journalists as purveyors of so-called fake news put the journalists’ lives and liberty in danger.

“I think he said on many, many occasions how it is important for all leaders to show respect for the freedom of the press and all the social tolerance and respect for the work that journalists are doing … Freedom of expression and free media are essential to our democracies.”

UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, reports 1,360 journalists have been killed since 1993.  The non-governmental Press Emblem Campaign reports 65 journalists worldwide have been killed so far this year.  In addition, it notes that journalists in many countries are regularly molested, injured, harassed, detained and prevented from doing their work.

The campaign supports the enactment of an international convention for the protection of journalists to combat impunity more effectively.  It cites the case of Mexico as a country where impunity is almost total because of the corruption of local authorities.  

It says most crimes against journalists in other countries, such as Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Iraq, go unpunished because of the lack of an independent judiciary. It argues that independent international investigation and prosecution mechanisms are needed to identify those responsible for these crimes and bring them to justice.

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GISBORN, NEW ZEALAND – New Zealand has launched an official campaign to revive the indigenous Maori language. The ambitious project is part of an official strategy that sees the revival of the language as a key part in national identity and reconciliation. 

The language has been surprisingly resilient on its own. Case in point – an album by Maori heavy-metal band Alien Weaponry recently went straight to number one in New Zealand. But census data has shown that the number of indigenous speakers in country has fallen.  

Glenis Philip-Barbara, the former head of the Maori Language Commission, is optimistic about the future though.

“There aren’t as many people speaking Maori as I’d like, I mean, around two-in-five Maori can have a conversation in te reo Maori (the Maori language), which is still quite low.  But, look, we’ve made huge gains since the days when we were at two per cent.  That was the 1970s, so we are steadily growing and, of course, without a proper command of the language you don’t actually have that in-depth understanding of your own culture,” Philip-Barbara said.  

Maori TV is publicly funded.  Its presenters and journalists speak only in Maori.  

It is a far cry from when children were beaten or whipped at school for speaking their native tongue.

Tina Ngata, an indigenous rights campaigner, believes colonization has had terrible consequences for language.

“We talk about this idea of cultural genocide and that one of the forms that colonization takes is that the policies, the legislation, the funding, the structures really lend itself towards only letting you survive if you survive as a colonial version of yourself, and it is much more difficult to survive as a Maori.  Our resistance to that is to continue to flood our communities with beautiful Maori-speaking, Maori-singing ceremonial and contemporary versions and on-going, evolving versions of ourselves,” Ngata said.

Millions of dollars of government money has been promised to help revitalize Maori.  Like many other New Zealanders, the country’s prime minister, Jacinta Ardern, is eager to learn.

“What is the most important thing in the world? The people, the people, the people,” she said.

Words such as kia ora (hello), and kai (food) have long been part of New Zealand English.  It is hoped that by 2040, one million Kiwis will be able to speak basic Maori.  

Indigenous New Zealanders make up about 15% of the national population.

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A land mine explosion in Afghanistan claimed the lives of 9 children Saturday as they walked to school, according to police.

Spokesman Khalil Asir said the mine detonated in the northeastern province of Takhar, killing the children, who were nine to 12 years old.   

Asir said the Taliban planted anti-personnel mines to clear the area but, “Unfortunately, today, one of those mines exploded and killed nine primary school students.”

The Taliban, which controls the area and is fighting to oust U.S.-backed foreign troops, was not immediately available for comment.

Saturday’s deaths are the latest in a growing number of civilian casualties this year, despite U.S.-Taliban talks to reach a peace agreement.

The U.N. said last month a record 4,313 civilians were killed or injured between July and September, a more than 40 percent increase from the same period last year.

Of that number, more than 1,000 were fatalities — making the period the most deadly since the U.N. began compiling figures in 2009.

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Hong Kong police Saturday fired tear gas in an effort to disperse protesters whose rallies in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory show no signs of subsiding.

Saturday marked the 22nd consecutive weekend of pro-democracy protests in the territory’s streets.

Friday, Shen Chunyaok, the director of the Hong Kong, Macao and Basic Law Commission warned that China “absolutely will not permit any behavior encouraging separatism or endangering national security and will resolutely guard against and contain the interference of foreign powers in the affairs of Hong Kong and Macao and their carrying out acts of separatism, subversion, infiltration and sabotage.”

Eighteen-year-old protester Gordon Tsoi told the French news agency AFP: “The government and the police have been ignoring and suppressing the people’s demands so we need to continue the movement to show them we still want what we are asking for.”

The Asian financial hub has been mired in massive and oftentimes violent protests since June, sparked by a proposed bill that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China.  The protests have evolved into demands for full democracy for Hong Kong, an independent inquiry into the possible use of excessive force by police and complete amnesty for all activists arrested during the demonstrations.  Masked activists have vandalized businesses and the city subway system, and attacked police with bricks and homemade gasoline bombs.

Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy under the “one government, two systems” arrangement established when China regained control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997.  But political activists and observers say Beijing is slowly tightening its grip on the territory and eroding its basic freedoms.

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Vietnam Friday announced its first arrests in a suspected cross-border trafficking case in Essex, England, where authorities found the bodies of 39 Vietnamese they believe suffocated to death in a refrigerated truck.

Police in Ha Tinh province said they arrested and charged two suspects after 10 local families reported fearing their family members were among the 39 victims. The case has reached the highest levels of government, with both the British and Vietnamese prime ministers ordering investigations. The probes have expanded to include transit countries China, Ireland, and Belgium, where officials say the driver of the truck said he’d been transporting cookies and biscuits.

“The Ha Tinh Police have gathered the forces and means to clearly investigate the legal violations of individuals and organizations involved,” a post on the police website said Saturday. They did not name the suspects but said they detained others for questioning too.

 The suspects were charged with “organizing and brokering for other people to flee abroad or stay abroad illegally.” British police have also arrested or charged at least five people on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people.

Journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai, the author of the book “Chinese Whispers: The Story Behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour,” wrote in the Guardian Wednesday that it is not constructive to merely focus on crime or “evil human traffickers.” She argued the 39 found last month were not hapless victims lured into trafficking, but workers “fighting for a future for their families.”

“In reality, the Vietnamese young men and women who choose to travel on these dangerous routes only do so when they cannot come to Britain in formal ways,” she wrote.

Pai said there “will be more deaths in lorries unless Britain changes” its anti-migrant policies.
“Let our fellow human beings have the opportunity to live and work in the open,” she wrote.

Separately, police in another Vietnamese province, Nghe An, said last week they arrested four people suspected of involvement in a trafficking ring, local media reported. It is unclear if that network was at all involved with the Vietnamese migrants found in Essex, but the truck deaths have increased the attention and urgency around existing investigations.

For the Essex Police, the truck deaths reportedly mark the biggest investigation they have conducted into mass casualties.

Although Vietnam has greatly decreased poverty since the end of the U.S.-Vietnam war, some still find they can earn more money to support their families by going overseas.

Among Asian migrants, Vietnamese pay the highest costs to brokers, and the number of migrants is rising, according to the International Labor Organization in Vietnam. It recommends that governments collaborate to ensure safe channels for migration, so people don’t have to resort to brokers. Migrants are still going through irregular channels because globalization has created more jobs in more places; however, while globalization has fostered the flow of companies and capital across borders, it has not done so for workers, pushing them toward trafficking.

“With collaboration and cooperation, labor migration can be a positive development force, and risks to the safety of migrant workers can be reduced,” Chang-Hee Lee, the ILO country director in Hanoi, said Tuesday.

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The U.S. government has launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co.’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, according to two people familiar with the matter. 
 
While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data. 
 
TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of growing tensions between the United States and China over trade and technology transfers. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said earlier this year. 
 
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks, has started to review the Musical.ly deal, the sources said. TikTok did not seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly, they added, which gives the U.S. security panel scope to investigate it now. 

CFIUS, TikTok confer

CFIUS is in talks with TikTok about measures it could take to avoid divesting the Musical.ly assets it acquired, the sources said. Details of those talks, referred to by CFIUS as mitigation, could not be learned. The specific concerns that CFIUS has could also not be learned. 
 
The sources requested anonymity because CFIUS reviews are confidential. 
 
“While we cannot comment on ongoing regulatory processes, TikTok has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S. Part of that effort includes working with Congress and we are committed to doing so,” a TikTok spokesperson said.  

ByteDance did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 
 
The U.S. Treasury Department, which chairs CFIUS, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.   

Last week, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, asked for a national security probe. They said they were concerned about the video-sharing platform’s collection of user data, and whether China censors content seen by U.S. users. They also suggested TikTok could be targeted by foreign influence campaigns. 
 
“With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore,” Schumer and Cotton wrote to Joseph Macguire, acting director of national intelligence. 
 
TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with special effects. The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States, but the senators noted that ByteDance is governed by Chinese laws. 
 
TikTok also says China does not have jurisdiction over content of the app, which does not operate in China and is not influenced by any foreign government. 
 
Last month, Musical.ly founder Alex Zhu, who heads the TikTok team, started to report directly to ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming, one of the sources said. He previously reported to Zhang Nan, the head of ByteDance’s Douyin, a Chinese short video app. 
 
It was not clear whether this move, which separates TikTok organizationally from ByteDance’s other holdings, was related to the company’s discussions with CFIUS over mitigation.  

In October, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, asked CFIUS to review ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly. He cited questions about why TikTok had “only had a few videos of the Hong Kong protests that have been dominating international headlines for months.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose product competes with TikTok, particularly for younger users, has also criticized the app over censorship concerns. 
 
The United States has been increasingly scrutinizing app developers over the safety of personal data they handle, especially if some of it involves U.S. military or intelligence personnel. 
 
Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. Ltd. said in May that it would seek to sell its popular gay dating app Grindr after it was approached by CFIUS with national security concerns. 
 
Last year, CFIUS forced China’s Ant Financial to scrap plans to buy MoneyGram International Inc. over concerns about the safety of data that could be used to identify U.S. citizens. 

The panel also compelled Oceanwide Holdings and Genworth Financial Inc. to work through a U.S. third party data administrator to ensure the Chinese company could not access the insurer’s  U.S. customers’ personal private data. 
 
ByteDance’s rise 
 
ByteDance is one of China’s fastest-growing startups. It owns the country’s leading news aggregator, Jinri Toutiao, as well as TikTok, which has attracted celebrities like Ariana Grande and Katy Perry. 

ByteDance counts Japanese technology giant SoftBank, venture firm Sequoia Capital and big private-equity firms such as KKR, General Atlantic and Hillhouse Capital Group as backers. 

Analysts have called ByteDance a strong threat to other Chinese tech industry firms, including social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and search engine leader Baidu Inc. 

Globally, ByteDance’s apps have 1.5 billion monthly active users and 700 million daily active users, the company said in July. 
 
The seven-year-old Chinese startup posted better-than-expected revenue for the first half of 2019 at over $7 billion, and was valued at $78 billion late last year, sources have told Reuters. 

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An aid group estimates that more than 1 million people in East Africa are affected by flooding after higher-than-normal rainfall.

Parts of the region are bracing for a tropical storm that could worsen an already dire humanitarian situation.

The International Rescue Committee on Friday said many people had been reeling from an earlier period of severe drought.

The rains in parts of Somalia, South Sudan and Kenya are expected for another four to six weeks.

South Sudan’s president earlier this week declared a state of emergency in 27 counties because of the flooding. 
 
Experts say the floods are a worrying sign of how climate change is affecting already vulnerable communities. 
 

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Experts warn that climate change is speeding up melting on Earth’s frozen peaks, threatening the planet’s long-term water supply. 

The more than 150 global mountain experts attending the first High Mountain Summit warn time is running out for the world’s glaciers. They say climate change is causing temperatures to rise in Earth’s frozen zones, leading to a rapid melting on vital peaks.

For example, scientists say Swiss glaciers have lost 10 percent of their volume in the past five years. The disappearance of hundreds of small glaciers in the Alps was dramatized when hundreds of mourners recently attended what was dubbed a “funeral” to mark the loss of Switzerland’s Pizol glacier.

The World Meteorological Organization reports international observers show an acceleration in the retreat of 31 major glaciers in the past two decades. They include mountains in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush regions and Tibetan Plateau in Asia.  

Summit co-chair, Canadian John Pomeroy, a water resources and climate change expert, said the loss of water resources in mountain ranges around the world is devastating the communities in those areas.  He said it also is destabilizing vast populations downstream.

“Around half of humanity relies upon water and rivers that originate in the high mountains. And, so this is used for irrigation. It is used for power production, hydroelectricity. It is used for our urban and community water supplies and it provides essential water for ecosystems from the mountaintop down to the sea.”  

Pomeroy added the rapidly melting mountain glaciers are contributing to rising sea levels. He notes cities along the ocean such as Miami, Venice and Jakarta already are in big trouble.  

“For the high mountain communities or valleys in north India, Pakistan, central Asia, their irrigation is the only source of water for agriculture that is currently provided by ice melt from glaciers,” Pomeroy said. “And the glaciers are retreating … In the Western U.S., 90 percent of the water supplies are from the high mountains and they drive the economy.”  

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which measures the impact of global warming, predicts snow cover, glaciers and permafrost will continue to decline in almost all regions throughout this century.

The summit is calling for urgent action to support more sustainable development in both high-mountain areas and downstream. That will involve disaster risk reduction measures, better early warning systems, climate change adaptation and investment in infrastructure to make communities safer.
 

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The United Nations global climate meeting next month will take place in Madrid rather than Chile, which had to bow out as host on short notice, officials said Friday. 

U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa said representatives of the body that organizes the annual conference had accepted Spain’s offer to host it in the country’s capital Dec. 2-13. 

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera announced Wednesday that he was canceling plans to host the meeting, as well as a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders, to focus on restoring security in his country following weeks of protests in which at least a dozen people have died. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s office offered Thursday to step in, sending delegates from around the world scrambling to change their travel plans. 

Sanchez, who is facing a national election Nov. 10, celebrated Friday’s decision. 

“Excellent news: Madrid will host the global climate meeting from Dec. 2-13. Spain is already at work to guarantee its staging of COP25. Our government firmly keeps its commitment to lasting progress and a just ecological transition,” Sanchez wrote on Twitter. 

Among those who were planning to attend the conference in Chile was Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, whose climate protests have helped inspire tens of thousands of mostly young people to take to the streets demanding greater efforts from world leaders. 

The teenager made a high-profile crossing from England to New York by sailboat earlier this year and planned to travel overland to Santiago to speak at the meeting. Thunberg refuses to fly because of aviation’s big carbon footprint. 

A little help?

After the move to Madrid was confirmed Friday, Thunberg appealed for help. 

“It turns out I’ve traveled half around the world, the wrong way,” she tweeted. 

“Now I need to find a way to cross the Atlantic in November. … If anyone could help me find transport I would be so grateful,” she added. 

Thunberg voiced regret about not being able to visit Central and South America as planned, saying she had been looking forward to doing so. 

“But this is of course not about me, my experiences or where I wish to travel. We’re in a climate and ecological emergency,” she said. 

The scale of the Madrid conference wasn’t immediately clear. More than 20,000 people attended last year’s climate conference in Katowice, Poland. 

The 25th Conference of the Parties, or COP25, is meant to work out some of the remaining unresolved issues on the rules that countries must follow in their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

The meetings have also become a venue for countries to announce new initiatives to respond to global warming. 

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The Washington Nationals will not have to travel far, or wait all that long, to visit the White House, as the World Series champions have a get-together planned with President Donald Trump on Monday.

Typically, teams wait until the following season when they are in Baltimore or Washington to visit the White House, but the logistics were not all that difficult for a team that plays a mere three miles away. A ceremony on the South Lawn is scheduled for 1:15 p.m. EST.

The White House visit will come after a parade to honor the champions on Saturday. The Nationals completed the seven-game World Series with a victory Wednesday at Houston. 

The road team won every game, the first time that has happened in World Series history.

Trump attended Game 5 of the series on Sunday at Nationals Park, with boos filling the ballpark when he was shown on the video board.

 Trump has also met with the 2017 champion Houston Astros and the 2018 champion Boston Red Sox, although a number of Red Sox players skipped that visit, including manager Alex Cora.

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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.

…

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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U.S. President Donald Trump’s attended two fundraisers this week, raking in millions of dollars for the Trump 2020 and House Republican campaigns. The events, both held at Trump’s own properties in Washington and Chicago are drawing continued scrutiny and charges of ethics violations that the president brushes aside. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.

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Chile canceled the hosting of two important international meetings in the capital, Santiago, because of ongoing protests across the South American country. Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera said Wednesday his country will not host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in November or the COP25 environmental summit in December, as his government has to deal with the unprecedented unrest that has left about 20 people dead and led to the resignation of eight cabinet ministers. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.

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Officials in Pakistan say at least 65 people have been killed and dozens more injured after fire engulfed a passenger train near Pakistan’s Rahimyar Khan city.

Local television footage showed flames pouring out of the train’s carriages and people could be heard crying.

Railway authorities are probing the cause. Initial reports say the fire was caused when a gas cylinder in one of the wagons exploded. Army helicopters are helping in rescue efforts. 

Train accidents are common in Pakistan, where the railways have seen decades of decline because of corruption, mismanagement and lack of investment. They often take place at the unmanned crossings, which frequently lack barriers and sometimes signals.

In July, at least 23 people were killed in the same district when a passenger train coming from the eastern city of Lahore rammed into a goods train that had stopped at a crossing.

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The Washington Nationals defeated the Houston Astros 6-2 Wednesday in the deciding seventh game of the World Series to claim their first Major League Baseball championship in franchise history.

Washington had to rely on what had become a defining factor of their playoff run, staging a late comeback after falling behind early in the game.

The Nationals played in five deciding games in October and at one point trailed in all five. Even making the playoffs seemed like a distant goal in May when the team was struggling with a 19-31 record.

‘We stayed in the fight’

But Manager Dave Martinez, who faced numerous calls for him to be fired, preached resiliency and his motto that to turn things around the team needed only to win that day’s game.

“Guess what, we stayed in the fight,” Martinez said Wednesday, echoing what had become a team slogan. “We won the fight!”

A second-inning home run by Astros first basemen Yuli Gurriel put the Nationals and ace starting pitcher Max Scherzer in a 1-0 hole.

Scherzer was pitching days after being scratched from a planned start in Game 5 of the series thanks to a neck injury. He and the Nationals fell behind 2-0 in the fifth inning as Houston shortstop Carlos Correa singled home Gurriel.

Up to that point, Astros starting pitcher Zack Greinke had been moving methodically through the Washington lineup, allowing only a single by Nationals left fielder Juan Soto in the second inning. Things changed in the seventh inning.

Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon sent a one-out Greinke pitch into the left field stands. Soto came to the plate next and reached on a walk, prompting Astros Manager A.J. Hinch to end Greinke’s night and put the game in the hands of relief pitcher Will Harris.

No relief

The first batter Harris faced was Washington designated hitter Howie Kendrick, already a star of the playoffs for hitting a grand slam in the deciding game of the first round that pushed the Nationals past their painful history of never winning a playoff series.

Kendrick smacked the second pitch from Harris down the right field line where it slammed into the foul pole for a home run that put the Nationals ahead 3-2.

A Soto single in the eighth inning widened the lead to 4-2, and right fielder Adam Eaton gave the Nationals more cushion in the top of the ninth with a single that scored two more runs.

Nationals pitcher Patrick Corbin allowed just two hits in three innings of work, while reliever Daniel Hudson tossed a perfect ninth inning as the Astros failed in their quest to turn their 107-win regular season into a reclamation of the World Series crown they won in 2017.

“Let’s be honest, there’s 28 other teams that would love to have our misery today,” Hinch said after the loss. “We play to get here. We play to have an opportunity to win it all. And I just told our team, it’s hard to put into words and remember all the good that happened because right now we feel as bad as you can possibly feel.”

A game like the season

“The way this game went is the way this whole season went,” said Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman, who was the team’s first draft pick after it relocated from Montreal to Washington in 2005. “What a story. What a fun year, man.”

The most valuable player of the World Series was Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg. He won Game 1 and Game 6 of the series while giving up just two runs and striking out seven batters in each contest.

Strasburg called the experience of winning a championship “surreal.”

“To be able to do it with this group of guys is something special. We didn’t quit.”

The series made history in an odd way with the visiting team winning each of the seven games. Washington won games one, two, six and seven in Houston, while Houston won games three, four and five in Washington.

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