More than 60 people graduated in Juba this week with diplomas in midwifery and nursing. Their goal?  To reduce South Sudan’s high rate of maternal mortality.

Eight men were among the 66 graduates of the Kajo Keji Health Science Institute — an unusual occurrence in South Sudan, where midwifery is associated almost exclusively with women.

Samuel Ladu Morish, 26, says he felt he could no longer sit by and watch young women die because of childbirth.

“A lot of mothers are dying so [for] me particularly it pains me. That is why I felt I have to do that course, to try my level best to stop maternal mortality rate in South Sudan,” Morish told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.

Twenty-one-year-old Leju Henry, another male graduate, said he’s been asked many times why he decided to pursue a course in midwifery. Like Morish, Henry said he wants to help South Sudanese women, especially those who suffer complications in child labor.

“Most people think midwifery is a job for females only, but that is not the truth. … the definition of midwifery [is] that a midwife simply means someone who assists in child above all, but not necessarily means a fellow woman,” Henry said.

According to figures published by the World Health Organization in 2017, South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world — 789 women per 100,000 live births.

The rate has actually fallen in recent years, a trend that Makur Koriom, the undersecretary of South Sudan’s Ministry of Health, attributes to increased training of midwives and nurses.

He says South Sudan has added more than 800 midwives and nurses since 2010.

“We believe that’s important, because to address the current health challenges, investing in human resource is very important. But, of course, investment at [the] secondary level without concurrent development at the community level also will not yield [good results], because most of the issues happen at the community level,” Koriom told VOA.
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Most years, December offers up a spectacular light show in the skies, known to astronomy enthusiasts as the Geminid meteor shower.

This year, the celestial show is set to peak overnight Thursday and Friday, followed on Sunday by a bonus close-up visit by 46P/Wirtanen, the brightest comet to be seen from Earth this year.  

The comet will be visible to the naked eye when it flies by Sunday. According to Sky & Telescope magazine, it will also be among the 10 closest comet approaches to Earth since 1950 and the 20th-closest approach of a comet dating as far back as the ninth century.

The comet was first spotted in 1948 by U.S. astronomer Carl Wirtanen of Wisconsin.

While the Perseid meteor shower in August is more well-known, astronomers said Geminid puts on a better show with the best display of shooting stars. 

 

Geminid will be visible in both Northern and Southern hemispheres.
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The head of the Maldives delegation to the U.N. climate conference questioned on Thursday the point of the yearly summits, saying they are failing to produce meaningful results. 

 

Former President Mohamed Nasheed attended the 24th edition of the U.N. talks, being held this year in Poland and set to end Friday. After almost two weeks of talks, negotiators from almost 200 countries have not yet agreed on the rules for implementing the 2015 treaty from Paris on fighting global warming. 

 

“What’s the point,” Nasheed asked, of having such negotiations if they don’t lead to progress or solutions to problems that are related to the lives of people worldwide? 

 

“There is a view among many of us that this is failing,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. 

 

Nasheed said there is an urgent need to implement the Paris Agreement’s call for keeping global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) during this century. Without that, he said, the existence of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, will be threatened. 

 

He said a lack of agreement in Katowice would only worsen the situation. 

 

He said the Indian Ocean nations, thousands of years old, want to live “in our own homelands. We want to live with our communities with our culture, with our people.” 

 

“We don’t think that this is asking for much,” Nasheed said. “We are just only saying: Please do not kill us.”  
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Negotiators from nearly 200 countries produced a draft text Thursday on how to implement the Paris Agreement on combating global warming, but some disputes remain with only one day left before the official end of the conference.

The presidency of the climate talks in Katowice, Poland, had asked for a draft of the final package to be ready by Thursday afternoon after almost two weeks of negotiations, but work continued into the evening to get it ready.

The draft lays out options on ways to implement the 2015 Paris pact which aims to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius.

“We can implement the Paris Agreement as you all designed it. It is now time to move forward. We need to move. Climate change will not wait for us,” Poland’s Michal Kurtyka, president of the talks, told delegates.

Ministers are expected to continue working on sticking points through the night into Friday.

Disputes over finance have been a stumbling block at the talks, as well as monitoring and reporting countries’ efforts to reduce emissions. The United States, which intends to withdraw from the pact, is trying to ensure a level playing field for U.S. businesses against China.

“Money is the most difficult part of it. This is all money talk. This (meeting) is about technical decisions although it turned political,” one delegate told Reuters.

Groups of small island states and poorer countries, representing over 920 million people, issued a statement to Kurtyka expressing their frustration with the slow pace and lack of ambition of the talks.

“(We are) deeply concerned over the direction in which the outcomes … are heading,” the statement said, adding that a robust rulebook is needed to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made.

The text still contains some wording in brackets, denoting it has yet to be agreed, but less than previous drafts.

The talks are formally scheduled to end Friday, but in the past they have often over-run into the weekend.
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A tourism spaceship soared to the edge of space Thursday, the first U.S. commercial flight to achieve the feat since the U.S. shuttle program ended in 2011.

The Virgin Galactic rocket plane, developed by British billionaire Richard Branson, climbed more than 80 kilometers above Earth, which the company considers the boundary of space.

The test flight signals a new age of civilian space travel, with Virgin Galactic competing with other ventures such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Virgin’s carrier airplane holding the VSS Unity spaceliner took off early Thursday from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 145 kilometers north of Los Angeles, California. It returned to Earth minutes later.

After the spaceliner and its two test pilots topped an altitude of 80 kilometers, a crying Branson hugged and high-fived some of the hundreds of spectators who gathered in the California desert to witness the launch.

The test flight comes four years after Virgin Galactic’s original spaceliner crashed, killing the co-pilot and seriously injuring the pilot.

“We’ve had our challenges and to finally get to the point where we are at least within range of space altitude is a major deal for our team,” said Virgin Galactic CEO George Whiteside.

Virgin Galactic is spaceflight company within the London-based Virgin Group.
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Roaches are tough, they’re resilient, they’re filthy, and they’re big business in China. Entrepreneurs are breeding the crawly critters for use in everything from waste management to medicine. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Africans who have the blood disorder sickle cell anemia met this week in the northern Cameroon town of Garoua to step up an awareness campaign.

One hundred people with sickle cell from Cameroon and five other African countries sit and talk at the Garoua market square in northern Cameroon.  

They say their aim is to educate people about sickle cell, an inherited, generally incurable disease that causes tiredness, swelling of the hands and feet, vision problems, and episodes of severe pain.

The patients want to end superstitions about the disease and stop doctors from pushing harmful practices like bloodletting and concoctions that will supposedly fix their blood.

Among the patents here is 26-year old Hayatou Alimatu who lost two children to the disease.

She came out today with her only surviving child, an eight year old girl who also has sickle cell.

Painkillers are expensive, and she hopes to one day take the child to a developed country in the hopes of getting more advanced treatment that could improve her quality of life.

She said her daughter normally gets outstanding grades at school and her averages grades are at the top.  When she has severe episodes, known as crises, her grades drop.

Sickle cell anemia affects red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen throughout the body.  

Cells that are normally round become hard and look like the C-shaped farm tool called a sickle.  They get stuck in blood vessels, causing pain.  The cells also die early, causing a constant shortage of red blood cells.

Shattered dreams

Twenty-four-year old Blaise Fora said his hopes of getting married were shattered because he is a sickle cell patient.

He said he has decided to remain single because when he fell in love once and was preparing to get married, his fiancee’s family was vehemently opposed. They did not want him to – in their words – contaminate their daughter with sickle cell.  

Fora said the family was concerned that the couple’s children might be born with the disease.  Those types of concerns are shared by many people, and aid agencies are responding by suggesting couples that are about to marry to get genetic tests done first.

Haminatu Hadza Karim from Chad, is among those leading the largely informal campaign, organized by associations of sickle cell patients.

She says many of the women she works with have been thrown out by their husbands for delivering babies with sickle cell. She says she invites other women dealing with these prejudices to join them so they can fight for their rights and eradicate the disease.

Genetic counseling

Some people have the sickle cell trait without having the disease.  To pass on the disease to a baby, both parents must be carriers.

Dr. Oumar Zacki, who takes care of sickle cell patients in Garoua, says a lack of genetic counseling means many people are without crucial knowledge.

He says the population of Central and West Africa move about with no visible symptoms but who carry sickle cell genes, passed from generation to generation in a pattern of inheritance.

The World Health Organization reports that in Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Ghana and Nigeria, between 20 and 30 percent of the population carries the sickle cell trait.  In Uganda, more than 40 percent carry the trait.
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Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran have pledged to increase cooperation and information-sharing for effectively combating the trafficking of Afghan opiates.

War-shattered Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer of opium, though the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime noted in its latest survey the opium cultivation decreased by 20 percent in 2018 due to a severe drought and reduced prices.

The illegal opiates are largely smuggled to international markets through Pakistan and Iran.

Need for more initiatives

Afghan, Pakistan and Iranian counternarcotics officials concluded their two-day UNODC-facilitated interaction Wednesday in Islamabad, where delegates underscored the need for more efforts against the massive flow of illicit drugs.

Participants at the “Triangular Initiative” meeting called for timely sharing of information and conducting simultaneously interdiction operations along their shared largely porous borders.

The forum was established in 2007 with a mission to promote regional cooperation to reduce the poppy cultivation, trafficking, and consumption of drugs in the region and beyond.

Officials acknowledged that despite Afghanistan’s political tensions with Pakistan and Iran anti-drugs cooperation largely continues.

Renewed attitude

Cesar Guedes, UNODC representative in Pakistan, noted the three countries attended the Islamabad meeting with “a revived attitude and role”, raising prospects for more effective counternarcotics efforts in 2019.

“More needs to be done because the level of [Afghan opium] production has also increased. They need really to coordinate closer in their joint efforts,” he told VOA

Guedes also called for increased international assistance, saying Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran alone cannot curb the menace of drugs.

“This has to be done in the framework of shared responsibility. All the countries, producers, consumers and transit need to join the effort,” he said.

Despite many challenges facing the government, the head of the Afghan delegation said authorities have taken significant steps to eradicate drug trafficking.

US assistance

Director General for Policy Planing at the Afghan Ministry of Narcotics, Mohammad Osman Frotan, said 89 percent of poppy cultivation this year has taken place in the Afghan provinces most hit by insurgent activities. He said counternarcotics authorities during 2018 have seized more than 433 tons of different types of drugs, and arrested and prosecuted almost 4,000 suspects.

The United States has spent more than $8 billion in the past 17 years to assist Afghanistan in eradication efforts. But the effort has failed to stop opium production, which increased to record highs and stood at an estimated 9,000 tons in 2017. Critics blamed insecurity, rampant corruption and patronage by influential Afghans for the unprecedented growth.
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The United Nations secretary-general flew back to global climate talks in Poland Wednesday to appeal to countries to reach an agreement, as some observers feared the meeting might end without a deal.

U.N. chief Antonio Guterres opened the talks last week, telling leaders to take the threat of global warming seriously and calling it “the most important issue we face.”

 

But as the two-week meeting shifted from the technical to political phase, with ministers taking over negotiations, campaign groups warned of the risks of failure in Katowice.

 

Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International said the main holdouts were the United States, Australia and Japan, while the European Union was “a mere spectator.”

 

“A new leadership must step up,” said Vanessa Perez-Cirera of the environmental group WWF. “We cannot afford to lose one of the twelve years we have remaining.”

 

She was referring to a recent scientific report by a U.N.-backed panel that suggested average global warming can only be halted at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) if urgent action is taken by 2030, including a dramatic reduction in use of fossil fuels.

 

Endorsing the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change became a crunch issue over the weekend, with the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait opposing the move.

 

Jean-Pascal Ypersele, a former deputy chair of the panel, said whether or not countries believe the conclusions of the report was irrelevant because the science was clear.

 

“Nobody, even the so-called superpowers, can negotiate with the laws of physics,” he said.

 

Ypersele called for the 1.5-degree target — already mentioned in the 2015 Paris accord — to be recognized in the final text.

 

“It’s a question of survival for a large part of humanity, and many other species,” he said.

 

Poland, which is chairing the talks, was expected to circulate a condensed draft text Wednesday running to about 100 pages, down from about 300 at the start of the talks.

 

The Dec. 2-14 meeting is supposed to finalize the rules that signatories of the Paris accord need to follow when it comes to reporting their greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to reduce them.

 

Li Shuo, a climate expert at Greenpeace, warned that the current text was riddled with loopholes. “A Swiss cheese rulebook is unacceptable,” he said.

 

Poor countries also want assurances on financial support to tackle climate change.

 

A third objective of the talks is getting governments to make a firm commit to raising ambitions in the coming two years, albeit without any precise figures.

 

One issue that has risen to the fore at the talks is the proposal by Poland for countries to back the idea of a “just transition” for workers in fossil fuel industries facing closure from emissions-curbing measures.

Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, told reporters that her country is committed to phasing out the use of coal, though the exact deadline has yet to be determined.

 

But in a nod to the recent protests in France over fuel prices, Schulze warned against governments forcing through measures, saying they would lose public support “faster than you can spell climate protection, and then people pull on yellow vests.”
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Anyone who has cats knows they are smart. But anyone who knows cats knows they can also seem a bit aloof, at least until dinnertime. But do not let them fool you, turns out your cat is watching you closely, and taking behavioral cues from their humans. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Scientists are seeing surprising melting in Earth’s polar regions at times they don’t expect, like winter, and in places they don’t expect, like eastern Antarctica.

New studies and reports issued this week at a major Earth sciences conference paint one of the bleakest pictures yet of dramatic warming in the Arctic and Antarctica. Alaskan scientists described to The Associated Press on Tuesday never-before-seen melting and odd winter problems, including permafrost that never refroze this past winter and wildlife die-offs.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its annual Arctic report card, detailing the second warmest year on record in the Arctic and problems, including record low winter sea ice in parts of the region, increased toxic algal blooms, which are normally a warm water phenomenon, and weather changes in the rest of the country attributable to what’s happening in the far North.

“The Arctic is experiencing the most unprecedented transition in human history,” report lead author Emily Osborne, chief of Arctic research for NOAA, said Tuesday.

‘A new Arctic’

What’s happening is a big deal, said University of Colorado environmental science program director Waleed Abdalati, NASA’s former chief scientist who was not part of the NOAA report.

“It’s a new Arctic. We’ve gone from white to blue,” said Abdalati, adding that he normally wouldn’t use the word “scary” but it applies.

And that means other problems.

“Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted, and, also, unexpected ways,” the NOAA report said.

One of the most noticeable problems was a record low sea ice in winter in the Bering Sea in 2017 and 2018, scientists said.

In February the Bering Sea “lost an area of ice the area of Idaho,” said Dartmouth College engineering professor Donald Perovich, a report card co-author. 

This is a problem because the oldest and thickest sea ice is down 95 percent from 30 years ago. In 1985, about one-sixth of Arctic sea ice was thick multi-year ice, now it is maybe one-hundredth, Perovich said.

University of Alaska Fairbanks marine mammal biologist Gay Sheffield not only studies the record low ice, but she lives it daily in Nome, far north on the Bering Sea.

“I left Nome and we had open water in December,” Sheffield said at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington. “It’s very much impacting us.”

“Having this area ice free is having this massive environmental change,” Sheffield said, adding there’s been a “multi-species die off” of ocean life. She said that includes the first spring mass die off of seals along the Bering Strait.

Shrinking permafrost

Ornithologist George Divoky, who has been studying the black guillemots of Cooper Island for 45 years, noticed something different this year. In the past, 225 nesting pairs of the seabirds would arrive at his island. This past winter it was down to 85 pairs, but only 50 laid eggs and only 25 had successful hatches. He blamed the lack of winter sea ice.

“It looked like a ghost town,” Divoky said.

With overall melting, especially in the summer, herds of caribou and wild reindeer have dropped about 55 percent — from 4.7 million to 2.1 million animals — because of the warming and the flies and parasites it brings, said report card co-author Howard Epstein of the University of Virginia.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Vladimir Romanovsky said he was alarmed by what happened to the permafrost — ground that stays frozen years on end. This past year, Romanovsky found 25 spots that used to freeze in January, then February, but never froze this year. 

Because of warming, the Arctic is “seeing concentrations of algal toxins moving northward” — infecting birds, mammals and shellfish to become a public health and economic problem, said report card co-author Karen Frey.

And the warmer Arctic and melting sea ice has been connected to shifts in the jet stream that have brought extreme winter storms in the East in the past year, Osborne said.

But it’s not just the Arctic. NASA’s newest space-based radar, Icesat 2, in its first couple of months has already found that the Dotson ice shelf in Antarctica has lost more than 390 feet (120 meters) in thickness since 2003, said radar scientist Ben Smith of the University of Washington.

Another study released Monday by NASA found unusual melting in parts of East Antarctica, which scientists had generally thought was stable.

Four glaciers at Vincennes Bay lost nine feet of ice thickness since 2008, said NASA scientists Catherine Walker and Alex Gardner.

Loss of ice sheets in Antarctica could lead to massive rise in sea level.

“We’re starting to see change that’s related to the ocean,” Gardner said. “Believe it or not this is the first time we’re seeing it in this place.”
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With its wooden walls and posters on protecting forests and fauna, Brazil’s pavilion at the U.N. climate talks in Poland offers no hint of the angst at home and abroad over mixed messages on global warming from its president-elect.

But campaign promises made by Jair Bolsonaro that could weaken protection for the Amazon rainforest are a hot topic of conversation among visitors, said Caio Henrique Scarmocin, one of three hosts on the stand.

At the conference, whose outcome will be key to implementing the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, scientists and environmental activists said they were laying the groundwork should calls for Bolsonaro to protect Brazil’s forests fail.

Campaign statements from Bolsonaro, who takes power in January, suggested indigenous lands could be opened up to economic exploitation, including agribusiness and mining, and environmental fines eased.

The ability of Ibama, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, to fine those who break environmental laws is one of the government’s best defenses against the destruction of forests, stoking fears of a deforestation spike under the new government.

Bolsonaro, who campaigned on a far-right platform, also pushed the Brazilian government to withdraw its offer to host next year’s U.N. climate conference.

“He has a hostile approach over environmental issues,” said Paulo Barreto, a researcher with Imazon, a Brazilian institute monitoring deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil is home to about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, considered by many as nature’s best weapon against global warming, because trees absorb and store carbon from the air.

Alfredo Sirkis, executive secretary of the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change, said he thought dialogue with the incoming government was still possible.

But if environmental roll-backs proceed, there was a “contingency plan,” he told journalists.

A coalition would assemble regional governments committed to respecting Brazil’s emissions reduction goals set under the Paris pact, said Sirkis.

Governors in as many as seven Brazilian states, including Amazonas, Pernambuco, the Federal District, Espirito Santo, Parana and Rio Grande do Sul, had already expressed interest in joining, he said.

“This is for starters,” said the former congressman.

A spokesman for the presidency of Brazil at the climate talks declined to comment.

U.S. shows the way

The plan has similarities with “We Are Still In,” a U.S. group of more than 3,500 mayors, governors and business leaders who have promised they will not retreat from the Paris deal.

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump gave notice the United States would leave the accord — although it cannot formally withdraw until 2020 — arguing it was bad for the economy.

Mauricio Voivodic, executive director of WWF-Brazil, said his group had been in touch with the U.S. campaign through WWF-US, which is part of the “We Are Still In” secretariat.

The American coalition has its own pavilion at the U.N. climate talks.

“We are learning from ‘We Are Still In’ the importance of sub-national (governments) and companies enhancing commitments for the implementation of the Paris Agreement,” Voivodic said.

But WWF-Brazil is not yet trying to emulate the model because it wants to prioritize dialogue already under way with the transition government, he added.

“It could be an option, but we are not going in the direction of starting planning this,” said Voivodic.

Brazil’s future environment minister told Reuters on Monday his “inclination” was not to leave the Paris Agreement, after Bolsonaro said on the campaign trail he might quit the deal, under which countries set their own targets to cut emissions.

Marcio Astrini, public policy coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil, said he also looked to the United States as a vague blueprint to build a similar “resistance movement.”

A Brazilian version would draw on linkages between about 150 civil society groups who worked closely over the last year to oppose Bolsonaro’s campaign, he said.

Also mirroring tactics used in the United States, his group does not exclude filing lawsuits to push back against potential weakening of environmental and climate regulations in Brazil.

“It’s on the table,” he said, adding that it was still a last-resort option.
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A new proposal from the Trump White House would roll back more Obama-era environmental regulations.

Trump administration officials say Tuesday’s proposed change in the Clean Water Act provides “a clear, understandable, and implementable definition” of what kinds of bodies of water the government can regulate. Environmental groups say the new rules are a concession to industry and will pollute the nation’s already polluted waterways.

Definition of ‘waters’

During the Obama era, what constituted “Waters of the United States” was expanded under the Clean Water Act to include all kinds of wetlands from ditches that only contain water part of the year, to wetlands adjacent to larger rivers or lakes. The definition was created to help ensure that America’s water was kept clean at the source, with the assumption being that it was necessary to regulate creeks, ditches and wetlands because they eventually flow into bigger bodies of water.

But farmers, construction companies and landowners bristle at what they say is the expansive nature of the definition, arguing the rules prohibit them from using a significant portion of land under their control.

Reacting to those concerns, the Trump administration is rolling back Obama-era protections in what EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler calls a “simpler and clearer definition” that will “help landowners understand whether a project on their property will require a federal permit.”

The new rules say that the federal government will now only regulate “traditional navigable waters, tributaries to those waters, certain ditches, certain lakes and ponds, impoundments of jurisdictional waters, and wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters.”

That leaves out huge areas of wetlands, meaning “features that only contain water during or in response to rainfall (e.g., ephemeral features); groundwater; many ditches, including most roadside or farm ditches; prior converted cropland; stormwater-control features; and waste-treatment systems” that were covered will no longer be subject to federal regulation.

Christopher Williams from American Rivers says the new rules will remove “protection from wetlands that don’t have an apparent surface connection to another water body, a lake or a river, and there are millions of acres across the country that are isolated like that.”

The argument is that these isolated bodies of water — some of which don’t exist year-round — don’t need protection because they don’t impact the nation’s major waterways.

Williams disagrees.

“These ephemeral streams are incredibly important parts of a freshwater ecosystem,” he told VOA, adding that the Obama-era rules are scientifically dense and lay out the “important ecological connections between all these types of water, whether it’s wetlands or ephemeral streams, isolated or otherwise.”

The old regulations made the case that these areas “should all be included in the definitions of ‘Waters of the United States’ if you’re trying to conserve that freshwater system as a whole,” Williams said.

Some environmental groups vow to fight the new rules.

“This proposal is reckless,” Jon Devine from the Natural Resources Defense Council told VOA via email. “… and we will fight to ensure it never goes into effect.”

There is a 60-day comment period before the rule can be applied. In addition, the Obama-era regulations are in place in 22 U.S. states, while the rules are held up in court in another 28 states.

Environmental policy changes

Williams sees a big change in the way the Environmental Protection Agency has evolved under the Trump administration.

“It’s clearly changed in that much of the rhetoric of the current EPA is about balancing environmental regulations with economic development,” Williams said, “and making sure that they are efficient and not costly to the economy and don’t interfere with business activity.”

Tuesday’s actions follow the U.S. refusal to endorse a new U.N. report on climate change at climate talks last week in Poland. They also follow a White House plan announced last week that would eliminate requirements that coal plants install expensive new technology designed to capture carbon emissions.

Such changes fall under Trump’s campaign promise to roll back government regulation, saying environmental mandates amount to a “war on American energy.” The president also denies the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet.

Responding last week to the 1,600-page National Climate Assessment report produced by 13 federal agencies outlining the potentially devastating impacts of climate change, the president said, “I don’t believe it.”
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Environmental groups opposed to offshore drilling sued the federal government Tuesday to prevent future seismic tests for oil and gas deposits 

in Atlantic waters off the U.S. East Coast. 

Seismic testing, which uses air gun blasts, violates federal laws that protect marine mammals, endangered species and national environmental policy, according the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston, S.C., against U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and the National Marine Fisheries Service. 

The fisheries service in November gave initial permission to five companies to conduct seismic airgun tests beneath a vast region off the East Coast. The permits allow marine wildlife to be harassed but not killed.

Conservationists say the testing, a precursor to oil drilling, can cause disorientation that leads to beachings of an endangered species, the North Atlantic right whale. 

U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing increased petroleum drilling as part of an “energy dominance” policy. A proposal to open nearly all U.S. waters to offshore drilling, announced in January, is pending.

Objections ‘steamrolled’

“The Trump administration has steamrolled over objections of scientists, governors and thousands of coastal communities and businesses to enable this dangerous activity,” Michael Jasny, a director and ocean noise pollution expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

A federal marine biologist said last month that no seismic tests had been known to cause whale beachings. A spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency within the Commerce Department, declined to discuss ongoing litigation.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit also included the Southern Environmental Law Center, Sierra Club, Oceana, the Center for Biological Diversity and the North Carolina Coastal Federation. 

Lawmakers from South Carolina and coastal mayors held a news conference on Tuesday in Charleston to address the issue. 

U.S. Rep.-elect Joe Cunningham, a Democrat, said drilling threatens fishing industries, jobs, recreation and a tourism industry worth $21 billion.

“I’m here not just to say ‘no to offshore drilling’ but ‘hell, no, to offshore drilling,’ ” added Cunningham, who said he would introduce legislation next year to reinstate a ban on U.S. offshore drilling that had been renewed by President Barack Obama. 

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, opposes drilling off the coast of his state. State Attorney General Alan Wilson, also a Republican, will send a letter of opposition to Ross soon, a spokesman said by phone.

More than a dozen states are seeking exemptions from offshore drilling leases.

“Oil spills don’t respect state boundaries,” said Catherine Wannamaker, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
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Deforestation in Brazil’s tropical Cerrado savanna, which makes up a quarter of the country, fell 11 percent to a record low in 2018 compared with a year earlier, the Ministry of Environment said in a statement Tuesday. 

Deforestation in the South American country’s savanna biome totaled 6,657 square kilometers (2,570 square miles), an area larger than the U.S. state of Connecticut. That’s just below 6,777 square kilometers in 2016, the previous low since records began to be kept, the ministry said.

A biome is a grouping of plants and animals that have adapted to a specific environment. 

This contrasts with the Amazon rainforest, making up 40 percent of Brazil, which has seen a 13.7 percent spike in deforestation this year to a 10-year high. 

Activists have been concerned that deforestation could spike under policies proposed by President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who assumes office Jan. 1 and has pledged to end the current “industry of fines” for environmental violations like deforestation.

The figure for Cerrado is based on the change in deforestation between August 2017 and July 2018, the period used to measure annual destruction, as recorded by Brazilian space research agency Inpe. The statement did not give a reason for the decline in deforestation.

The Cerrado’s vegetation soaks up major amounts of carbon dioxide, making its preservation key to curbing greenhouse gas emissions and for countering global warming. 

While the Cerrado is less densely forested than the Amazon rainforest, its plants have deep roots that lock carbon into the ground and are sometimes referred to as an underground forest. 

Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s future environment minister under Bolsonaro, told Reuters on Monday that Bolsonaro would not gut resources for environmental protection, contrary to the fears of environmentalists. 

Money for environmental protection is spent inefficiently and mismanaged, he said, arguing he could produce better results with the same budget.
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A U.S. energy official says “no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability” during a U.N. climate discussions in Poland. Preston Wells Griffith, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of International Affairs at the Department of Energy, spoke at a U.S. government-sponsored event Monday in Katowice, responding to criticism of the U.S. administration’s policy of supporting the fossil fuel industry. Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Scientists have drilled a mile and a half (2.5 kilometers) beneath the seabed and found vast underground forests of “deep life,” including microbes that persist for thousands, maybe millions of years, researchers said Monday.

Feeding on nothing but the energy from rocks, and existing in a slow-motion, even zombie-like state, previously unknown forms of life are abundant beneath the Earth despite extreme temperatures and pressure.

About 70 percent of Earth’s bacteria and archaea — single-celled organisms with no nucleus — live underground, according to the latest findings of an international collaboration involving hundreds of experts, known as the Deep Carbon Observatory, were released at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington.

This “deep life” amounts to between 15 and 23 billion tons of carbon, said the DCO, launched in 2009, as it nears the end of its 10-year mission to reveal Earth’s inner secrets.

“The deep biosphere of Earth is massive,” said Rick Colwell, who teaches astrobiology and oceanography at Oregon State University.

He described the team’s findings so far as a “very exciting, extreme ecosystem.”

Among them may be Earth’s hottest living creature, Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism found in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor.

Its microscopic cells grow and replicate at 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 Celsius).

“There is genetic diversity of life below the surface that is at least equal to but perhaps exceeds that which is at the surface and we don’t know much about it,” Colwell said.

‘Distinct’ from surface life

Similar types of strange, deep life microbes might be found on the subsurface of other planets, like Mars.

“Most of deep life is very distinct from life on the surface,” said Fumio Inagaki, of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

Using the Japanese scientific vessel Chikyu, researchers have drilled far beneath the seabed and removed cores that have given scientists a detailed look at deep life.

“The microbes are just sitting there and live for very, very long periods of time,” he told AFP.

Brought up from these ancient coal beds and fed glucose in the lab, researchers have seen some microbes, bacteria and fungi slowly waking up.

“That was amazing,” said Inagaki.

Scientists have found life in continental mines and boreholes more than three miles (five kilometers) deep, and have not yet identified the boundary where life no longer exists, he added.

How basic biology works?

Gaining a better understanding of subsurface life on Earth can also help understand and better engineer climate-change fighting technologies that may one day sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

“What we learn here will help us understand what to look for on other planets or other systems where life could exist,” said Colwell.

In any case, studying what some scientists have called the “Galapagos of the Deep,” dramatically changes human’s perception of life on Earth, and their place in it.

Most of our planet’s microbial life is deep beneath the surface, and it may have played a big part in the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere by locking carbon dioxide underground and allowing air for people and animals to breathe.

“There is lots and lots of life on Earth that we did not know about. The fact that so much of it — at least in the marine sediment — is functioning at extremely low energy, it really changes our basic conception of how biology works,” said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

“They are new branches on the tree of life that have been on Earth, doing whatever it is that they do, for billions of years, but without us ever noticing them,” she told AFP.

“It is like looking beside you and finding that you have an office mate you never knew about.”
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When a U.S. district judge last month ruled a federal ban on female genital mutilation unconstitutional, he undercut the federal government and alarmed anti-FGM activists, who hope to eradicate the practice.

The World Health Organization calls FGM, also known as female circumcision, a human rights violation of women and girls, with no health benefits.

Some 200 million women and girls around the world, mainly in Africa, have experienced FGM, the WHO says.

In his opinion, Judge Bernard Friedman called FGM “despicable,” but also “a local criminal activity” that must be addressed at the state level. In enacting a federal law, he said, Congress overstepped.

Now, local lawmakers, advocates and newspapers are calling for state bans that equal or surpass the scope of the federal law that was struck down.

‘Never again’

The case Friedman ruled on centers around Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, an emergency room physician accused of performing FGM on at least 100 girls in Michigan for more than a decade.

Prosecutors have focused their case on nine girls, aged 7 to 12, from three states. The girls allegedly were subjected to FGM with the aid of Nagarwala and seven others, including the girls’ mothers.

Defense attorneys say the procedure amounted to only a “nick” on the girls performed as part of a religious ritual — not FGM. But they also argued in July that the federal law banning FGM is unconstitutional.

State Senator Rick Jones, who represents Michigan’s 24th district, told VOA by phone that he was shocked to learn about Nagarwala’s case and strongly disagrees with Friedman’s ruling.

Last year, Jones became the spokesperson for a package of bills outlawing FGM statewide. The legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Now, Michigan has some of the toughest FGM laws in the country.

Health-care providers convicted of performing FGM face up to 15 years in prison, along with the permanent loss of their medical licenses. Parents who take their daughters to doctors to be cut can lose custody.

The 1996 federal law, meanwhile, stipulated up to five years in prison and fines for medical providers who perform FGM.

“We wanted to send a strong message around the world: Never again bring your girls to Michigan for this horrible procedure,” Jones said.

Across the U.S., 27 states have passed laws banning FGM, many of which have been written in recent years and include penalties that go beyond the federal law, which also criminalizes so-called “vacation cutting,” the practice of taking girls out of the United States to have FGM performed overseas.

News organizations are among those pushing for an expansion of state laws. Last month, the Seattle Times editorial board called for a ban in Washington, one of 23 states yet to outlaw FGM.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times editorial board said all 50 states should ban the “barbaric” practice, in light of Friedman’s ruling.

Religious ritual?

The health-care providers and families involved in the Michigan case belong to Dawoodi Bohra, a Shi’ite Muslim sect based in India with about 2 million followers worldwide.

According to a study published earlier this year, FGM, called khafd in Dawoodi Bohra communities, is widespread in the sect and involves cutting the clitoral hood or part of the clitoris, without an anesthetic, when girls turn seven.

The study, commissioned by WeSpeakOut, an advocacy group focused on eradicating khafd, also found that three-quarters of Dawoodi Bohra women have experienced FGM.

The severity and nature of FGM can vary.

Health-care providers have identified four types of FGM. Khafd involves Type 1 FGM. Other types involve removing all of the external genitalia and narrowing the vaginal opening.

Jones rejects the idea that there’s a religious basis for the procedure, however it’s performed.

“Across the world, this has been practiced by Christians, pagans, Muslims, even a small Jewish sect in Ethiopia,” he said.

“This is not about a religion,” he added. “This is about men attempting to control women’s behavior by this horrible procedure.”

The WHO identifies both short-term and permanent harms associated with the practice. Immediate concerns include severe pain, infections and, in some cases, death. Long term, women and girls subjected to FGM face a range of physiological and psychological complications that can affect menstruation, childbirth and sexual health.

The United States has been unequivocal in condemning the practice, saying “the U.S. government considers FGM/C to be a serious human rights abuse, and a form of gender-based violence and child abuse” on a fact sheet posted to the Citizenship & Immigration Services website.

Education and legislation

Friedman’s November decision is the latest in a series of setbacks for prosecutors.

Nagarwala spent seven months in 2017 in jail before 16 friends posted a $4.5 million unsecured bond, against the pleas of prosecutors, who argued Nagarwala could silence potential witnesses or even flee the country if released.

And in January, the judge dismissed charges that Nagarwala and a second doctor, Fakhruddin Attar, transported minors with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, an offense that carries a lifetime sentence.

Nagarwala still faces conspiracy and obstruction charges that could result in decades in prison.

The trial is now set to begin next April, the Detroit Free Press reported last month. However, the prosecution could appeal last month’s decision, drawing the case out further.

Looking beyond the Michigan case, Jones said the key to stopping FGM isn’t just legislation but also education.

“What we have to do is continue to fight this worldwide. This is a global problem,” Jones said.

“It is a violation of human rights,” he said. “And I’m going to continue speaking out worldwide against this horrible, horrible practice that must end.”
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has discovered ingredients for water on a relatively nearby skyscraper-sized asteroid, a rocky acorn-shaped object that may hold clues to the origins of life on Earth, scientists said on Monday.

OSIRIS-REx, which flew last week within a scant 12 miles (19 km) of the asteroid Bennu some 1.4 million miles (2.25 million km) from Earth, found traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules — part of the recipe for water and thus the potential for life — embedded in the asteroid’s rocky surface.

The probe, on a mission to return samples from the asteroid to Earth for study, was launched in 2016. Bennu, roughly a third of a mile wide (500 meters), orbits the sun at roughly the same distance as Earth. There is concern among scientists about the possibility of Bennu impacting Earth late in the 22nd century.

“We have found the water-rich minerals from the early solar system, which is exactly the kind of sample we were going out there to find and ultimately bring back to Earth,” University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission’s principal investigator, said in a telephone interview.

Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early Earth may have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life, and atomic-level analysis of samples from Bennu could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis.

“When samples of this material are returned by the mission to Earth in 2023, scientists will receive a treasure trove of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system,” Amy Simon, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.

“We’re really trying to understand the role that these carbon-rich asteroids played in delivering water to the early Earth and making it habitable,” Lauretta added.

OSIRIS-REx will pass later this month just 1.2 miles (1.9 km) from Bennu, entering the asteroid’s gravitational pull and analyzing its terrain. From there, the spacecraft will begin to gradually tighten its orbit around the asteroid, spiraling to within just 6 feet (2 meters) of its surface so its robot arm can snatch a sample of Bennu by July 2020.

The spacecraft will later fly back to Earth, jettisoning a capsule bearing the asteroid specimen for a parachute descent in the Utah desert in September 2023.
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City frogs and rainforest frogs don’t sing the same tune, researchers have found.

 

A study released Monday examined why Panama’s tiny tungara frogs adapt their mating calls in urban areas — an unexpected example of how animals change communication strategies when cities encroach on forests.

 

These frogs take advantage of the relative absence of eavesdropping predators in cities to belt out longer love songs, which are more alluring to female frogs.

 

Tungara frogs don’t croak like American bullfrogs. To human ears, their distinctive call sounds like a low-pitched, video-game beep. To female frogs, it sounds like pillow talk.

 

Every evening at sunset, the 1-inch male brown frogs crawl into puddles to serenade prospective mates. The lady frog selects a mate largely based on his love song.

 

Researchers found that the urban frogs call faster, more frequently and add more embellishments — a series of staccato “chucks” on the end of the initial whine — compared with those in the forest.

 

Those fancy urban love songs are three times more likely to attract the ladies, as scientists learned by playing back recordings of both city and forest frog calls to an audience of female frogs in a laboratory. Thirty of 40 female frogs hopped over to the speaker playing the urban frog calls, the researchers report in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

 

Whether the female frogs hailed from the city or forest themselves, they showed the same preference for fast-paced, complex crooning that combines high and low tones in quick arrangements.

 

Study co-author Michael J. Ryan, a biologist at the University of Texas who has studied tungara frogs for more than 30 years, said that the high and low notes likely stimulated the inner and outer ear chambers of female frogs in a pleasurable or interesting way.

 

So why don’t rainforest frogs sing the same way?

 

The scientists set out to confirm their hypothesis that frogs that added extra high-pitched “chucks” attracted not only more mates, but also more trouble from frog-eating bats and parasitic midges. With the help of camera traps and sticky paper, the researchers demonstrated that extended frog calls significantly increased the risk of attracting predators.

 

In the rainforest, the frogs must balance two goals: attracting a mate and staying safe.

 

In the city, there are no frog-eating bats, and far fewer snakes and midges. The male frogs are freer to belt their hearts out.

 

“An urban male can take greater risks,” said lead author Wouter Halfwerk, an ecologist at Vrije University in Amsterdam.

 

A town frog also has to work harder to find a mate because lady frogs are rarer in the city. “Competition for females increases,” said Halfwerk. “The best adaptation is to be the most attractive, with an elaborate love song.”

 

Corinne Lee Zawacki, a biologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, said the researchers’ methodology confirmed that urbanization is the reason for the call changes.

 

“I love the choice of study system,” she said. “A lot of background research has already been done on this frog. So we can see clearly how urbanization changes the interplay of natural and sexual selection” — or the trade-offs between survival and courtship goals.

 

But not all amphibians are as lucky as Panama’s tungara frogs.

 

“Amphibian populations are declining worldwide, mostly due to habitat destruction,” said Andrew Blaustein an ecologist at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study. “This is a rare case — and a very interesting case — of an animal adapting quickly, in evolutionary terms, to new circumstances.”
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According to the World Ocean Review, shipping by sea is responsible for about 3 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. But one Norwegian shipping company is creating hybrid ships and planning for a carbon free future. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship finally delivered more than 2,500 kilograms of holiday treats Saturday to the International Space Station after a communications drop-out delayed the shipment.

After two approach attempts, the Dragon locked onto the orbiting lab three days after launching from Cape Canaveral in the southeastern U.S. state of Florida.

NASA nixed the first approach because of a glitch in the communication network that serves the space station.

Mission Control ordered the Dragon to back up from the station before approaching again after NASA switched another communications satellite.

With the Dragon positioned about nine meters from the station, Commander Alexander Gerst locked the lab’s robot arm onto the cargo ship one-and-a-half hours later than planned.

In addition to holiday offerings — including smoked turkey, green bean casserole and fruit cake — mice and worms also were delivered for science experiments.

Three astronauts will be on board the station on Christmas, while three others will return to Earth on December 20. Until then, the station will be home to six astronauts: Gerst, who is German, two Americans, two Russians and one Canadian.
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