A load of space station supplies rocketed into orbit from Virginia on Saturday, the second shipment in two days.

And another commercial delivery should be on its way in a couple weeks.

“What an outstanding launch,” said NASA’s deputy space station program manager, Joel Montalbano.

Northrop Grumman launched its Antares rocket from Wallops Island before dawn, delighting chilly early-bird observers along the Atlantic coast. The Russian Space Agency launched its own supplies to the International Space Station on Friday, just 15 hours earlier.

The U.S. delivery will arrive at the orbiting lab Monday, a day after the Russian shipment. Among the 7,400 pounds (3,350 kilograms) of goods inside the Cygnus capsule: ice cream and fresh fruit for the three space station residents, and a 3D printer that recycles old plastic into new parts.

Thanksgiving turkey dinners — rehydratable, of course — are already aboard the 250-mile-high outpost. The space station is currently home to an American, a German and a Russian.

There’s another big event coming up, up there: The space station marks its 20th year in orbit on Tuesday. The first section launched on Nov. 20, 1998, from Kazakhstan.

“As we celebrate 20 years of the International Space Station,” Montalbano noted, “one of the coolest things is the cooperation we have across the globe.” Then there’s the U.S. commercial effort to keep the space station stocked and, beginning next year, to resume crew launches from Cape Canaveral. “To me, it’s been a huge success,” he said.

This Cygnus, or Swan, is named the S.S. John Young to honor the legendary astronaut who walked on the moon and commanded the first space shuttle flight. He died in January.

It is the first commercial cargo ship to bear Northrop Grumman’s name. Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATK in June. SpaceX is NASA’s other commercial shipper for the space station; its Dragon capsule is set to lift off in early December.

Experiments arriving via the Cygnus will observe how cement solidifies in weightlessness, among other things. There’s also medical, spacesuit and other equipment to replace items that never made it to orbit last month because of a Russian rocket failure; the two men who were riding the rocket survived their emergency landing. Three other astronauts are set to launch from Kazakhstan on Dec. 3.

 
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In a historic vote, nations on Friday unanimously approved a groundbreaking overhaul to the international system of measurements that underpins global trade and other vital human endeavors, uniting behind new scientific definitions for the kilogram and other units in a way that they have failed to do on so many other issues.

Scientists, for whom the update represents decades of work, clapped, cheered and even wept as the 50-plus nations gathered in Versailles, west of Paris, and one by one said “yes” or “oui” to the change, hailed as a revolution for how humanity measures and quantifies its world.

The redefinition of the kilogram, the globally approved unit of mass, was the mostly hotly anticipated change. For more than a century, the kilogram has been defined as the mass of a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy kept in a high-security vault in France. That artefact, nicknamed “Le Grand K,” has been the world’s sole true kilogram since 1889.

But now, with the vote, the kilogram and all of the other main measurement units will be defined using numerical values that fit handily onto a wallet card. Those numbers were read to the national delegates before they voted.

Scientists at the meeting were giddy with excitement: Some even sported tattoos on their forearms that celebrated the science.

Nobel prize winner William Phillips called the update “the greatest revolution in measurement since the French revolution,” which ushered in the metric system of meters and kilograms.

Jon Pratt of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said the vote left him “a basket case” and “extremely emotional.”

“Those units, those constants chosen now, include everything we know, everything we have always known and provide that springboard for us to go pursue those things that we don’t know,” he said. “That was just leaving me in a puddle of tears.”

The Grand K and its six official copies, kept together in the same safe on the edge of Paris and collectively known as the “heir and the spares,” will be retired but not forgotten. Scientists want to keep studying them to see whether their masses decay over time.

Benefits of the change

The change will have no discernable impact for most people. Bathroom scales won’t suddenly get kinder and kilos and grams won’t change in supermarkets.

But the new formula-based definition of the kilogram will have multiple advantages over the precision-crafted metal lump that set the standard from the 19th century to the 21st, through periods of stunning human achievement and stunning follies, including two world wars.

Unlike a physical object, the new formula for the kilo, now also known as “the electric kilo,” cannot pick up particles of dust, decay with time, or be dropped and damaged.

It is expected to be more accurate when measuring very, very small or very, very large masses and help usher in new innovations in science, industry, climate study and other fields.

With time, as the science behind the new definition becomes more accessible and affordable, it should also mean that countries won’t have to send their own kilograms back to France to be checked occasionally against Le Grand K, as they have done until now, to see whether their mass was still accurate.
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Somalia’s 30 years of chronic conflict have left an estimated 1 in 3 people affected by mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, there are only three licensed psychiatrists in the entire country. Mohamed Sheikh Nor reports from Mogadishu on Somalia’s huge mental health challenges.
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The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has already killed hundreds of people, could continue for several months. That’s the latest warning from a senior World Health Organization official. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them. 

 

PURU NI TIMBUL, MALAYSIA — Swinging his machete with an economy of movement that only the jungle can teach, Matakin Bondien lopped a stray branch from the path of his boat. He hopped barefoot from the prow, climbed a muddy slope and stared once more at what he’d lost. 

Not long ago, the clearing had been home to mangroves, saltwater-loving trees that anchor a web of life stretching from fish larvae hatching in the cradle of their underwater roots to the hornbills squawking at their crown. Now the trees’ benevolent presence was gone, in their place a swath of stripped soil littered with felled trunks as gray as fossils. 

“Do you think we can find any food in this place now?” asked Bondien, a village leader of the Tombonuo people. “The company thinks it can do anything it wants — that we don’t count.” 

The company is Sunlight Inno Seafood. Owned by Cedric Wong King Ti, a Malaysian businessman known as “King Wong,” it has bulldozed swaths of mangroves in the Tombonuo’s homeland in northern Borneo to make space for plastic-lined ponds filled with millions of king prawns. The shrimp are destined to be fattened for three months, scooped up in nets, quick-frozen, packed into 40-foot refrigerated containers and loaded onto cargo ships bound for distant ports. 

Gargantuan as it may seem to Bondien and his relatives, the project represents only a speck in the global aquaculture industry, one of the world’s fastest-growing sources of protein. 

Unfolding across Asia and around the world, this revolution in farming could help mitigate the impacts of climate change — or make them even worse. 

As the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases causes the world’s oceans to warm, ecosystems that formed hundreds of thousands of years ago are being upended in less than a human lifespan. Across the planet, fish and other marine creatures are being forced into a desperate search for cooler waters. Even coral is on the move: Some Japanese reefs are expanding northward at up to nearly nine miles per year, researchers have found. 

Tropical seas may be the hardest hit. Species in the once-stable conditions near the equator could find it much harder to tolerate even mild temperature increases than hardier cousins at higher latitudes, which are used to coping with the contrast between summer and winter. 

“If you ask me what is the No. 1 concern that I have on climate change effects on fisheries, it is on these tropical, developing countries,” said William Cheung, director of science at the Nippon Foundation-University of British Columbia Nereus Program. “The sheer speed of the change will make it that much harder for marine life to adapt.” 

Coral reefs, as vital to tropical fish as trees are to birds, are becoming more vulnerable to a process called bleaching, which occurs when a spike in water temperatures causes coral to expel the algae that provide their kaleidoscopic colors, leaving them prone to starvation or disease. Today, swaths of the once-psychedelic Great Barrier Reef in Australia have turned boneyard white and largely devoid of life. 

Scientists fear a similar fate could await the Coral Triangle, a huge underwater wonderland east of Borneo endowed with a trove of biodiversity comparable to the rainforests of the Amazon Basin. Millions of people depend on its bounty to survive, a large share of them Malaysians, who eat an average of 125 pounds of fish each a year — more than double the world average. 

With climate change bearing down on the tropics, the search is on for a more sustainable way of getting food from the sea, one that doesn’t take more than nature can give. 

Farther to the north on Borneo, an island divided among Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, villagers are raising sea cucumbers: curious-looking creatures resembling giant slugs that are typically braised and served with oysters, mushrooms and spring onions, or — if you’re in Japan — thinly sliced, flavored with wasabi and eaten raw. 

These echinoderms, close relatives of sea urchins and starfish, may not appeal to every palate. But farming them has one of the lightest footprints of any form of food production, a reminder of the vast untapped global potential for harvesting oysters, mussels, clams and many other types of filter-feeders. 

A couple of hours’ drive from the Sunlight Seafood shrimp farm, inhabitants of the stilted village of Mapan Mapan have created a maze of sunken enclosures fenced with a barnacle-covered mesh.  

Immersed waist-deep in one of these briny paddocks, sea-cucumber farmer Astinah Binti Jamari plucked one of the sandpaper-skinned creatures from the seabed. It responded by squirting her with a jet of saltwater — a defense normally used to scare away crabs.  

A revolution in fish 

Forty years ago, only 5 percent of the world’s fish production was farmed. After decades of rapid growth, aquaculture reached a tipping point in 2013, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, when the amount the industry raised in cages, tanks and ponds outweighed the tonnage of freely swimming fish hauled from lakes, rivers and seas for people’s plates. 

​In many respects, the industry has a good-news story to tell. Farmed salmon, for example, can convert feed into edible protein far more efficiently than cows or pigs, while producing fewer greenhouse gases. Now, almost all the salmon sold in restaurants and supermarkets is raised in captivity, with Norway, Chile and Scotland the biggest producers. 

But this phenomenal expansion has come at a cost. The appetite for farmed species is so voracious, almost 20 percent of the annual catch from the world’s seas is ground into fishmeal, a nutrient-rich powder that forms the basis of the feeds used from salmon cages in Scottish lochs to shrimp ponds on Borneo. Vast amounts of fish have been taken from poorer countries to feed species destined for the plates of wealthier consumers. In addition, shrimp farms, in particular, have made coastal communities in the tropics even more vulnerable by cutting down mangroves, their first line of defense against extreme weather and rising sea levels. 

Since the mid-1970s, the aquaculture industry has led to the destruction of more than 1.3 million acres of mangroves spread across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, China, Brazil and Ecuador, according to a 2013 paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Untreated waste and epidemics of shrimp-killing diseases mean the gains can be short-lived: A study published this year identified more than half a million acres of abandoned shrimp ponds in Indonesia alone. 

Nevertheless, some governments in Southeast Asia and Latin America have concluded that it’s worth sacrificing more mangroves in return for the export earnings and employment the projects can generate. Among them is the Malaysian state of Sabah, which is a partner in King Wong’s shrimp farm. 

Hope of a better life 

In 2013, representatives of Sunlight Seafood offered leaders of the Tombonuo and other indigenous communities a deal. In return for some of the land flanking the tidal creeks where their mangroves stood, locals recalled, the company would provide running water, electricity and much-needed employment for youths in the surrounding area, known as Pitas. 

Five years since the bulldozers went to work, Tombonuo community leaders say they’ve lost more than 2,000 acres of mangroves and that the jobs and infrastructure they were promised haven’t materialized. 

“I have no words. It’s like we’ve lost our whole world,” said Samad Samayong, a Tombonuo elder, surveying a sacred outcrop consecrated by his ancestors that is now encircled by shrimp ponds. “We only realized what was happening when it was too late.” 

On the other side of a fence, a lone worker trudged past carrying a large bag of Royal Dragon brand shrimp feed on his shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice Samayong and other Tombonuo watching from the trees. 

Sunlight Seafood didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests for comment made by telephone, email and a letter hand-delivered to its office in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah. Reuters also contacted a law firm in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, that had acted for the company in the past but received no reply. 

Sunlight Seafood has issued statements to Borneo media saying the project was built on land long earmarked for aquaculture by government officials, and that it is boosting the economy in Pitas, one of the poorest districts in Sabah. 

The sheer scale of the farm is only fully apparent from up close. In July, a Reuters reporter and photographer accompanied Samayong, Bondien and others on a three-boat party to various points where water from the ponds gushed from pipes, leaving foamy trails of scum in the creeks. 

It took hours to trace even a portion of the fence enclosing the site. The barrier’s stark edges cut a jarring contrast to the tangle of mangrove roots straddling saltwater and land, their branches home to proboscis monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, blue-eared kingfishers and storks. 

The Sabah Environmental Protection Association, a nongovernmental organization, says Sunlight Seafood has already cut down 2,300 acres of mangroves, citing satellite imagery. 

“They cleared the mangroves with no proper consultation with the community,” said the group’s president, Lanash Thanda. “They have to redress the wrong they have done.” 

Apart from losing more trees, Samayong and Bondien fear diggers will further encroach on their ancestral shrines, such as an eerie riverbank guarded by a spirit husband and wife. 

Visiting on his boat, Bondien dedicated a cigarette he had rolled from mangrove bark to the couple, placing it on an altar made of branches. 

“It’s not only the forest that’s being destroyed,” said Mastupang Somoi, another member of the Tombonuo. “It’s our identity.” 

Trees provide buffer 

With evidence mounting that mangroves represent an effective buffer against climate impacts, some tropical countries are starting to question the gusto with which they once felled the trees, which can take 15 years to mature. 

Were it not for the way mangroves served as shields, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami could have taken many more than 220,000 lives. The trees can also help mitigate the impact of rising sea levels: Their multi-tiered root systems trap sediment to raise the land around them relative to the encroaching waves. 

Equally ingeniously, mangroves sequester more greenhouse gases than almost any other type of forest, as well as serving as natural larders of fish, birds, fruit and the kind of snails you can eat raw by snapping their conical shells and sucking out the innards. 

“If you catch a fish in the open sea or off a coral reef, it may well have spent part of its life in the mangroves,” said Dan Friess, an associate professor of geography at the National University of Singapore. 

Sabah’s government says it is committed to striking a balance between economic development and preserving Borneo’s extraordinary natural heritage, including by designating extensive areas of forest as nature reserves for threatened orangutans and creating Malaysia’s largest marine protected area. 

Earlier this month, Junz Wong, Sabah’s agriculture minister, toured the Sunlight Seafood farm and said the company had operated “quite professionally” and created nearly 400 jobs. On his Facebook page, Wong said he had rejected a company request to cut down an additional 1,000 acres of mangroves. “I told them NO,” he wrote. “No more destroying of mangroves.” 

In July, a Reuters reporter visited Sunlight Seafood’s offices in a suburb of Kota Kinabalu and hand-delivered a letter summarizing the Tombonuo community’s grievances and requesting an interview with owner Wong or another company representative. 

While the reporter was explaining the purpose of the letter to a worker who had been sent to meet him at the door, a security guard cut their conversation short and escorted the reporter off the premises. The guard then closed the gate to the driveway. It bore a large sign in red letters warning that trespassers would be prosecuted. 

​Food without a face 

Nestled in sea-cucumber farmer Jamari’s palm, the specimen she had fished from the seabed convulsed with a slow-motion shudder. Jamari, once a struggling single parent, says the creatures came to her rescue, earning her enough money to put her five children through school and build a new house. 

“The sea cucumbers are my treasure chest,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what life would be like without them.” 

Mapan Mapan has earned so much money from its sunken farms that it has declared an annual sea cucumber “birthday” festival, at which villagers give thanks by stewing a share of their harvest in a communal meal. 

Chinese traders have been importing sea cucumbers for more than a thousand years. Served at royal banquets, they were considered both a status symbol and an aphrodisiac. A Ming Dynasty book published in 1602 called “Miscellanies of Five Items” lists them as “sea ginseng.” 

This mystique drives much of the appetite today. In the decade that ended in 2016, global production of sea cucumbers more than doubled to nearly 275,000 tons, according to the FAO. 

At top Chinese restaurants, the echinoderms are used to make one of the world’s most expensive soups, a broth called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall that can sell for $400 and needs to be ordered five days in advance. 

Irwin Wong is a manager at Oceandrive, a Malaysian seafood company that buys the sea cucumbers for export. He served as an adviser when Mapan Mapan started cultivating the creatures eight years ago in a 20-farmer pilot project backed by the local government. He says the scheme is harvesting wild sea cucumbers at a sustainable rate, but that even better management could help Borneo produce many more. 

“Perhaps this is the lowest impact of all aquaculture activities,” Wong said, standing on a platform overlooking a planned new phase, to be built with barnacle-proof mesh and more durable epoxy-coated stakes. “It can seriously go very big.” 

Researchers believe there is enormous potential to scale up global production of plankton-eaters such as scallops, clams, oysters, cockles and other bivalves — and, of course, sea cucumbers. 

“The current way of feeding ourselves is simply not sustainable,” said Sebastian Ferse, an ecologist at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany. “I think on a global level we have to start thinking about the lower levels of the marine food chain, such as bivalves, when it comes to supplying our proteins.” 

Scientific advisers to the European Union agree. They concluded last year that it should be possible to harvest a combined 165 million tons annually of bivalves and seaweed — almost double the world’s annual landings of wild-caught fish. 

The beauty of these creatures is that, unlike farmed fish or prawns, they don’t require any feed apart from the nutrients they absorb from the sea. No mangroves have to be felled to culture them. Neither do they spew tons of fish waste or chemical pollutants. In fact, bivalves actually remove toxins from the water; a single oyster filters 50 gallons of seawater a day. 

Yet even as the risks posed by climate change bring the potential of shellfish, seaweed and sea cucumbers into sharper focus, it is also putting them in danger. As oceans absorb carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, seawater is rapidly becoming more acidic. There is already evidence that acidification can make mussels’ shells more brittle, or weaken their grip on rocks, leaving them at greater risk of being swept away by advancing waves. 

​‘Preserve every species’ 

Life has been kind to the prize specimens at the Borneo Marine Research Institute: mammoth tropical fish known as giant grouper, which can weigh as much as a person, and in some cases have been swimming in spirals in silo-like tanks for almost 20 years. The only drama happens at feeding time. When fresh sardines hit the surface, the fish dart through the water with torpedo force. 

Their wild relatives will have to work a lot harder to survive. In experiments to simulate the effects of more acidic waters, the institute has found that grouper — a staple in the Coral Triangle — find it harder to reproduce, and their young don’t develop properly. The findings have sharpened concerns about what climate change will mean for the region’s marine life, already struggling with plastic pollution, runoff from oil palm plantations, damage to reefs by dynamite fishing and the loss of mangroves. 

Shek Qin, a research assistant, visits the busy fish-landing quay at Kota Kinabalu two nights a week to monitor catches of sharks and rays. In the early hours of a July morning, she picked up a newly landed shark by its tail, plonked it onto the dock and cheerfully inserted her forefinger into its mouth, peering inside to inspect the teeth — a trick for classifying a specimen more accurately, especially if fishermen have lopped off the fins. 

“It’s a whole food web: If one species is declining, others will get affected, too,” Qin said, cradling a recently deceased hammerhead. “That’s why we need to preserve every species of fish.” 

Near the fence surrounding the Sunlight Seafood shrimp farm, villagers Bondien and Samayong moored their flotilla under some mangrove trees and cast lead-weighted hooks. Samayong’s daughter Ida remembered her grandfather regaling her with tales of the monster fish of his youth — notably, a ray he once caught that was bigger than his boat. But that day, nothing came to nibble. 

“You used to be able to catch a fish here in 10 minutes,” said Bondien, his line slack in the water. “Now, even if you have good bait, you can wait an hour and get only one — maybe nothing.”  

Around a bend in the river, an empty bag of Royal Dragon feed had become snagged in some mangrove branches. It was emblazoned with an image of a shrimp. 
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Meditation worked as well as traditional therapy for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder in a small experiment sponsored by the Department of Defense.

One method preferred by the Department of Veterans Affairs is exposure therapy, but it doesn’t work for everyone and many can’t handle what it requires: purposely recalling traumatic events and confronting emotions.

Meditation could be a better choice for some, the researchers said.

Exposure therapy unpopular

The experiment tested meditation against exposure therapy, which involves working with a therapist and gradually letting go of fears triggered by painful memories.

Many vets won’t try exposure therapy or drop out because it’s too difficult, said Thomas Rutledge, the study’s senior author and a Veterans Affairs psychologist in San Diego.

Evidence for meditation “allows us to put more options on the table” with confidence they work, Rutledge said.

The study was published Thursday in the journal Lancet Psychiatry.

Follow-up study needed

About 400,000 veterans had a PTSD diagnosis in 2013, according to the VA health system. The VA already is using meditation, yoga and similar approaches to supplement traditional therapy with PTSD, said Paula Schnurr, executive director of the VA’s National Center for PTSD.

While the three-month study adds to evidence supporting these lifestyle practices, Schnurr said, more research is needed to learn how long meditation’s benefits last.

“There’s no follow-up in this study,” Schnurr noted, and one therapist did 80 percent of the exposure therapy so the findings hinge largely on one therapist’s skills.

Researchers measured symptoms in about 200 San Diego area veterans randomly assigned to one of three groups. Some learned to meditate. Others got exposure therapy. The third group attended classes where they learned about nutrition and exercise.

All sessions were once a week for 90 minutes.

After three months, 61 percent of the meditation group improved on a standard PTSD assessment, compared to 42 percent of those who got exposure therapy and 32 percent of those who went to classes. When researchers accounted for other factors, meditation was better than the classes and equally effective as exposure therapy.

The researchers defined success as at least a 10-point improvement in scores on a standard symptoms test, given to participants by people who did not know which kind of treatment they’d received. The test measures symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares and insomnia.

PTSD also can be treated with medications or other types of talk therapy. Many of the participants were taking prescribed medicine for PTSD.

Most of the vets were men with combat-related trauma, so it’s not clear whether meditation would be equally effective in women or with other types of trauma.

More interest, styles

There’s growing interest in meditation in the United States. A government survey last year found 14 percent of adults said they had recently meditated, up from 4 percent from a similar survey five years earlier.

There are many styles of meditation. The type taught to vets in the study was transcendental meditation, or TM, which involves thinking of a mantra or sound to settle the mind.

TM was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles in the late 1960s. Some of the study authors are affiliated with a university in Fairfield, Iowa, founded by Maharishi. Their role was to oversee the meditation training.

Rutledge, who was the principal researcher, said he does not practice meditation himself.

Meditation could be more acceptable to veterans who might associate mental health treatment with weakness, Rutledge said.

“It’s probably less threatening,” he said. “It may be easier to talk to veterans about participating in something like meditation.”
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Millions of Brazilians may be left without access to doctors due to the end of a program that brought Cuban physicians to rural and dangerous areas in Brazil, the former health minister who helped create the initiative said Thursday. 

The Cuban government on Wednesday said it would end the program after Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said it could only continue if several conditions were met. 

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, campaigned in part on promises to take a hard line against left-leaning governments. As a congressman, the far-right leader often complained about the Cuban doctors’ program and tried to end it.

In a phone interview, former Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said the decision to pull out would leave millions of Brazilians without access to doctors. 

Padilha said Cuban doctors were in 2,800 cities and towns — and they were the only doctors in 1,700 of those towns. Padilha said the initiative was launched in 2013 because local doctors could not be found for many positions. 

“This will have an immediate and terrible impact on the health care system,” said Padilha. “Cuban doctors are in the most vulnerable areas. They are in the Amazon, rural towns and in slums.”

Brazil, which includes the largest portion of the Amazon basin, is a vast country, a little bit larger than the continental United States. Many areas, particularly in the Amazon and historically poor Northeast region, are sparsely populated and lacking basic infrastructure.

After Cuba’s announcement Wednesday, Bolsonaro made a blistering critique of the program. Frequently referring to the Cuban government as a “dictatorship,” he said the program was “slave work” because the Cuban government keeps 70 percent of doctors’ salaries. He also said Brazil had no way to verify if the doctors were truly qualified. 

Neither Bolsonaro nor the Cuban government has said when the estimated 8,500 Cuban doctors currently in Brazil would be leaving. Bolsonaro said Cuban doctors who asked for asylum would get it, though he stopped short of saying Brazil would provide that to any Cuban who asked.

Bolsonaro, who takes office Jan. 1, said he had signaled the program could only continue if doctors directly received their salaries from Brazil, were able to bring their families during their assignments and had their credentials verified. 

“We have no proof that they are really doctors and able to take on these functions,” Bolsonaro said. 

Padilha said the program, passed by Congress, already includes an evaluation of the doctors’ credentials and language training; Brazil’s national language is Portuguese and Cuba’s is Spanish. 

The former health minister said the doctors were not only highly qualified, but specialists in rural medicine, something that Brazil’s health system badly lacks. He said the salary structure was something the Cuban government had worked out with more than 60 countries that participate in the program, and not something specific to Brazil. 

“Bolsonaro doesn’t understand that a doctor doesn’t just practice medicine for money,” said Padilha. “Doctors who work in the poorest areas are not just thinking about money.”
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Smoke masks. Eye drops. No outdoor exercise. This is how Californians are trying to cope with wildfires choking the state, but experts say an increase in serious health problems may be almost inevitable for vulnerable residents as the disasters become more commonplace.

Research suggests children, the elderly and those with existing health problems are most at risk.

Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke can worsen existing asthma and lung disease, leading to emergency room treatment or hospitalization, studies have shown.

Increases in doctor visits or hospital treatment for respiratory infections, bronchitis and pneumonia in otherwise healthy people also have been found during and after wildfires.

Some studies also have found increases in ER visits for heart attacks and strokes in people with existing heart disease on heavy smoke days during previous California wildfires, echoing research on potential risks from urban air pollution.

For most healthy people, exposure to wildfire smoke is just an annoyance, causing burning eyes, scratchy throats or chest discomfort that all disappear when the smoke clears.

But doctors, scientists and public health officials are concerned that the changing face of wildfires will pose a much broader health hazard,

“Wildfire season used to be June to late September. Now it seems to be happening all year round. We need to be adapting to that,” Dr. Wayne Cascio, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cardiologist, said this week.

In an overview published earlier this year, Cascio wrote that the increasing frequency of large wildland fires, urban expansion into wooded areas and an aging population are all increasing the number of people at risk for health problems from fires.

Wood smoke contains some of the same toxic chemicals as urban air pollution, along with tiny particles of vapor and soot 30 times thinner than a human hair. These can infiltrate the bloodstream, potentially causing inflammation and blood vessel damage even in healthy people, research on urban air pollution has shown. Studies have linked heart attacks and cancer with long-term exposure to air pollution.

Whether exposure to wildfire smoke carries the same risks is uncertain, and determining harm from smog versus wildfire smoke can be tricky, especially with wind-swept California wildfires spreading thick smoke hundreds of miles away into smoggy big cities.

“That is the big question,” said Dr. John Balmes, a University of California, San Francisco, professor of medicine who studies air pollution.

“Very little is known about the long-term effects of wildfire smoke because it’s hard to study populations years after a wildfire,” Balmes said.

Decreased lung function has been found in healthy firefighters during fire season. They tend to recover but federal legislation signed this year will establish a U.S. registry tracking firefighters and potential risks for various cancers, including lung cancer. Some previous studies suggested a risk.

Balmes noted that increased lung cancer rates have been found in women in developing countries who spend every day cooking over wood fires.

That kind of extreme exposure doesn’t typically happen with wildfires, but experts worry about the kinds of health damage that may emerge for firefighters and residents with these blazes occurring so often.

Whether that includes more cancer is unknown. “We’re concerned about that,” Balmes said.

Regular folks breathing in all that smoke worry about the risks too.

Smoke from the fire that decimated the Northern California city of Paradise darkened skies this week in San Francisco, nearly 200 miles southwest, and the air smelled “like you were camping,” said Michael Northover, a contractor.

He and his 14-year-old son have first-time sinus infections that Northover blames on the smoke.

“We’re all kind of feeling it,” Northover said.

Classes were canceled Thursday in at least six universities in Northern California as smoke from the fire continued to blanket all nine counties of the Bay Area. Some were closing all buildings but others, including Cal State East Bay said libraries, health centers and dining halls would stay open.

At Chico State University, 11 miles from Paradise, ash was falling this week and classes were canceled until after Thanksgiving.

“It’s kind of freaky to see your whole town wearing air masks and trying to get out of smoke,” said freshman Mason West, 18. “You can see the particles. Obviously it’s probably not good to be breathing that stuff in.”

West returned home this week to Santa Rosa, hard hit by last year’s wine country fire, only to find it shrouded in smoke from the Paradise fire 100 miles away. West’s family had to evacuate last year for a week but their home was spared.

“It’s as bad here as it was in Chico,” West said. “It almost feels like you just can’t get away from it.”

Smoke has been so thick in Santa Rosa that researchers postponed a door-to-door survey there for a study of health effects of last year’s fire.

“We didn’t feel we could justify our volunteer interns going knocking on doors when all the air quality alerts were saying stay indoors,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a public health researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study includes an online survey of households affected by last year’s fire, with responses from about 6,000 people so far.

Preliminary data show widespread respiratory problems, eye irritations, anxiety, depression and sleep problems around the time of the fire and months later.

“Conventional thinking is that these effects related to fires are transient. It’s not entirely clear that’s the case,” Hertz-Picciotto said.

Researchers also will be analyzing cord blood and placentas collected from a few dozen women who were pregnant during the fire, seeking evidence of stress markers or exposure to smoke chemicals.

They hope to continue the study for years, seeking evidence of long-term physical and emotional harms to fire evacuees and their children.

Other studies have linked emotional stress in pregnant women to developmental problems in their children and “this was quite a stress,” Hertz-Picciotto said.

It’s a kind of stress that many people need to prepare for as the climate warms and wildfires proliferate, she said.

“Any of us could wake up tomorrow and lose everything we own,” she said. “It’s pretty scary.”
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A U.S. astronaut said on Thursday she had full confidence in the safety of the Russian-made Soyuz rocket that will blast a three-person crew into space next month in the first such launch since a rocket failure.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and U.S. and Canadian astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques are due to embark for the International Space Station on Dec. 3 after a similar launch on Oct. 11 ended in an emergency landing.

Two minutes into that launch, a rocket failure forced Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin and U.S. astronaut Nick Hague to abort their mission and hurtle back to Earth in a capsule that landed in the Kazakh steppe. The two were unharmed.

Speaking at a news conference in Star City near Moscow, McClain said that occasional failures were inevitable, but that the mishap with the Soyuz-FG in October had demonstrated the reliability of its emergency safety mechanisms.

“We trust our rocket. We’re ready to fly,” she said at the conference also attended by her colleagues Kononenko and Saint-Jacques.

“A lot of people called it an accident, or an incident, or maybe want to use it as an example of it not being safe, but for us it’s exactly the opposite because our friends came home,” McClain told reporters.

Russian investigators said the rocket failure was caused by a sensor that was damaged during assembly at the Soviet era-cosmodrome at Baikonur from where McClain, Saint Jacques and Kononenko are due to launch.

Ahead of their mission, an unmanned rocket carrying cargo is due to launch on Nov 16. in what will be the first Soyuz-FG take-off from Baikonur since the mishap.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced sweeping new restrictions on flavored tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes popular among teenagers in an effort to prevent a new generation of nicotine addicts.

The much-anticipated announcement will mean that only tobacco, mint and menthol e-cigarette flavors can be sold at most traditional retail outlets such as convenience stores.

Other fruity- or sweet-flavored varieties can now only be sold at age-restricted stores or through online merchants that use age-verification checks.

The FDA also plans to seek a ban on menthol cigarettes, a longtime goal of public health advocates, as well as flavored cigars.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the moves are meant to prevent young people from continuing to use e-cigarettes, potentially leading to traditional cigarette smoking.

“We won’t let this pool of kids, a pool of future potential smokers, of future disease and death, to continue to build,” he said. “I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes,” Gottlieb said.

The agency has faced mounting pressure to act on e-cigarettes amid their surging popularity among U.S. teenagers in recent years. One of the most popular devices, made by San Francisco-based Juul Labs Inc, has become a phenomenon at U.S. high schools, where “Juuling” has become synonymous with vaping.

Data released Thursday by the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a 78 percent increase in high school students who reported using e-cigarettes in the last 30 days, compared with the prior year.

More than 3 million high school students, or more than 20 percent of all U.S. high school students, used the product, along with 570,000 middle school students, according to the survey.

Juul and tobacco giant Altria Group Inc had announced measures to pull flavored e-cigarette products from retail outlets, after the FDA threatened in September to ban Juul and other leading e-cigarette products unless their makers took steps to prevent use by minors.

 
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When Moustapha Dieng came down with stomach pains one day last month he did the sensible thing and went to a doctor in his hometown of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital.

The doctor prescribed a malaria treatment but the medicine cost too much for Dieng, a 30-year-old tailor, so he went to an unlicensed street vendor for pills on the cheap.

“It was too expensive at the pharmacy. I was forced to buy street drugs as they are less expensive,” he said. Within days he was hospitalized — sickened by the very drugs that were supposed to cure him.

Tens of thousands of people in Africa die each year because of fake and counterfeit medication, an E.U.-funded report released on Tuesday said. The drugs are mainly made in China but also in India, Paraguay, Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

Almost half the fake and low-quality medicines reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) between 2013 and 2017 were found to be in sub-Saharan Africa, said the report, also backed by Interpol and the Institute for Security Studies.

“Counterfeiters prey on poorer countries more than their richer counterparts, with up to 30 times greater penetration of fakes in the supply chain,” said the report.

Substandard or fake anti-malarials cause the deaths of between 64,000 and 158,000 people per year in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.

The counterfeit drug market is worth around $200 billion worldwide annually, WHO says, making it the most lucrative trade of illegally copied goods. Its impact has been devastating.

Nigeria said more than 80 children were killed in 2009 by a teething syrup tainted with a chemical normally used in engine coolant and blamed for causing kidney failure.

For Dieng, the cost can be measured in more than simple suffering. The night in hospital cost him more than double what he would have paid had he bought the drugs the doctor ordered.

“After taking those drugs, the provenance of which we don’t know, he came back with new symptoms … All this had aggravated his condition,” said nurse Jules Raesse, who treated Dieng when he stayed at the clinic last month.

Fake drugs also threaten a thriving pharmaceutical sector in several African countries.

That has helped prompt Ivory Coast – where fake drugs were also sold openly – to crack down on the trade, estimated at $30 billion by Reuters last year.

Ivorian authorities said last month they had seized almost 400 tonnes of fake medicine over the past two years.

Able Ekissi, an inspector at the health ministry, told Reuters the seized goods, had they been sold to consumers, would have represented a loss to the legitimate pharmaceutical industry of more than $170 million.

“They are reputed to be cheaper, but at best they are ineffective and at worst toxic,” Abderrahmane Chakibi, Managing Director of French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi’s sub-Saharan Africa branch.

But in Ivory Coast, many cannot afford to shop in pharmacies, which often only stock expensive drugs imported from France, rather than cheaper generics from places like India.

“When you have no means you are forced to go out onto the street,” said Barakissa Cherik, a pharmacist in Ivory Coast’s lagoon-side commercial capital Abidjan.
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A frozen and dimly lit planet, dubbed a “Super-Earth,” may be orbiting the closest single star to our solar system, astronomers said Wednesday, based on two decades of scientific observations. 

The planet, estimated to be at least 3.2 times more massive than Earth, was spotted circling Barnard’s Star, a type of relatively cool and low-mass star called a red dwarf. Barnard’s Star is about 6 light-years away from our solar system, comparatively close in cosmic terms, and it’s believed that the planet obits this star every 233 days. 

Planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system are called exoplanets. Nearly 4,000 have been discovered. The newly discovered one is the second closest to our solar system ever found. It is thought to be a “Super-Earth,” a category of planets more massive than Earth but smaller than the large gas planets. 

“After a very careful analysis, we are 99 percent confident that the planet is there,” researcher Ignasi Ribas of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the Institute of Space Sciences said in a statement. “However, we’ll continue to observe this fast-moving star to exclude possible, but improbable, natural variations of the stellar brightness which could masquerade as a planet.”  

Alpha Centauri

The only closer stars than Barnard’s Star are part of the triple-star system Alpha Centauri, located a bit more than 4 light-years from our solar system. 

Two years ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a roughly Earth-sized planet circling Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri system, in an orbit that might enable liquid water to exist on its surface, raising the possibility that it could harbor alien life. 

The newly detected planet orbiting Barnard’s Star may not be so hospitable, with surface temperatures of perhaps minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 170 degrees Celsius). Barnard’s Star provides the frigid planet only 2 percent of the energy that the sun provides Earth. 

The researchers studied the planet by combining measurements from several high-precision instruments mounted on telescopes around the world. 

The research was published in the journal Nature. 
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Mist rises from the ripped-up and muddy earth as moist soil meets chilly morning air. This field deep within in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest looks more like a Game of Thrones battleground than a woodlands restoration project.

This is how Chris Barton is bringing forests back to Appalachia’s old strip mines: with a bulldozer tearing up the soil with meter-long metal teeth.

“We’ve had a lot of people kind of look at us twice,” he laughed.

Barton is a forest scientist at the University of Kentucky. On these former mines, he’s found that before he can plant a forest, he has to ravage a field.

“The really interesting thing is, after we do it, there’s no question that that was the right thing to do,” he said.

More on that later. First, Barton’s work lies at a crossroads for Appalachia, and for much of the world.

Not rocket science

Coal mines have stripped away roughly 400,000 hectares of Appalachian forests.

Burning coal for energy is adding more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. As the planet heats up, experts warn that simply cutting greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. CO2 must also be removed from the atmosphere.

Currently, experimental machines that pull CO2 directly from the air are too expensive to be practical.

However, a new report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says effective carbon-removal technology already exists.

It’s not rocket science. It’s forests.

The report says planting trees and managing forests, along with carbon-absorbing farming and ranching practices, are among the most cost-effective strategies that are ready for large-scale use today.

Taking advantage of these natural systems could take care of more than a third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to prevent devastating climate change, according to another recent study. 

Turning red spruce loose

In Appalachia, no ecosystem is better at capturing carbon dioxide than red spruce forests.

They’re even better than hardwood forests, according to Forest Service soil scientist Stephanie Connolly.

That’s because when deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall, “photosynthesis shuts down and the trees go dormant,” she said.

Red spruce is an evergreen. It continues to photosynthesize and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere all winter long.

When evergreen needles do fall, they decompose more slowly than deciduous leaves, she added. And the year-round shade provided by evergreens keeps the soil cool and decomposition slow.

Plus, these forests are more than just carbon sinks. They also absorb water during heavy rains, preventing flooding; and their soils release water during droughts. They provide habitat for rare species like the Cheat Mountain salamander and the northern flying squirrel.

Appalachia has lost 90 percent of the roughly 200,000 hectares of red spruce forest that once blanketed its mountains. Barton, the Forest Service, and a host of partners are working to return red spruce habitat to a thousand-hectare tract of the Monongahela that was strip-mined in the 1980s.

Stuck

But there’s a problem with many of these lands.

After the mines closed, they were restored according to best practices of the time. The leftover rock from mining was packed down to prevent erosion and planted with shallow-rooted grass.

“That’s fine for stability,” Barton said. “But for plant life, if you went out and planted trees in these sites, they just didn’t grow. The ground was way too compacted. Water didn’t infiltrate. Roots can’t penetrate. Oxygen can’t circulate in those environments.”

Decades later, lands that had been strip-mined and reclaimed were “stuck.” Nothing but grass could grow on them.

Barton figured that ripping up the compacted soil would “unstick” them.

But it wasn’t an easy sell.

Jack Tribble was a new forest ranger at Monongahela when Barton and Green Forests Work approached him. Tribble had already tried and failed to get trees to grow on the site.

“These guys came to us and said, ‘You need to rip this,'” he said. “Of course, that doesn’t make sense at all to me.”

But he approved a 30-hectare trial plot and crossed his fingers.

“We [had] a piece of equipment the size of a dozer out there ripping the ground,” he said. “That’s just kind of a scary thing.”

That was 2011. Seven years later, he said, “these trees are just growing really, really well.”

“I get it,” he added. “I totally get it.”

Cost benefit

This kind of reforestation is not cheap. Tribble said it costs roughly $5,000 per hectare. He estimates that restoring the most critical areas will add up to about $4 million.

Partnerships with the Nature Conservancy, American Forests, the Arbor Day Foundation and many others have helped with know-how and fundraising.

Plus, he added, the effort is spending money and hiring locally.

Barton said that’s an important part of what Green Forests Work is about.

In Appalachia, where the declining coal industry is shedding jobs, he said, “the idea was to build an ecological program to restore forests, but also, at the same time, develop an economic program for Appalachia, by putting people to work.”

Restoration projects need heavy equipment operators. Locals collect seeds from native plants, and local nurseries grow the seedlings. So far, Barton says the Monongahela project has poured about $1 million into the community. 

Since 2009, Green Forests Work has planted nearly 2.5 million trees on roughly 1,600 hectares of what used to be strip mines across Appalachia. 

In West Virginia alone, Connolly said, restoring red spruce to its old habitat could lock up the equivalent of 56 million barrels of oil. 

Not right away. It takes decades.

Nature works slowly. But it works.
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Juul Labs, the U.S. market leader for electronic cigarettes, said on Tuesday it will pull popular flavors such as mango, cucumber and fruit from retail store shelves in an effort to reduce surging teenage use of its products.

The move comes as Juul and other e-cigarette makers have faced heightened scrutiny from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration amid a sharp increase by high school students in use of the devices, which look like a USB flash drive and vaporize a flavored liquid containing nicotine.

In a statement on Tuesday, Juul Chief Executive Kevin Burns said the company wants to be “the off-ramp for adult smokers to switch from cigarettes, not an on-ramp for America’s youth to initiate on nicotine.”

Juul said it will stop selling flavors except for tobacco, mint and menthol in all retail outlets, including convenience stores and vape shops, until retailers can install technology that scans buyers’ IDs to independently verify they are 21 or older.

Until then, popular fruit flavors and other sweet flavors that appeal to younger users will only be available on Juul’s website. The company said it uses an age-verification system that requires buyers to enter their social security number, address and birth date, which is verified by a third-party service.

In addition, the company said it is shutting down its social media channels on Instagram and Facebook, and working with social media companies to remove “unauthorized, youth-oriented content on their platforms” relating to Juul.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Twitter that “voluntary action is no substitute for regulatory steps FDA will soon take,” but he acknowledged Juul’s actions and urged other e-cigarette makers to take steps to reduce use by minors.

‘Juul rooms’

Some of Juul’s early social media and Youtube videos included images of attractive young people using the product.

User-generated social media about Juul became popular over the last two years, with young people posting videos and photos of themselves using the product at school or with friends, often under the hashtags #doit4juul or #juullife.

“Juuling” has become synonymous with vaping in high schools across the country, where some teachers and administrators have started locking bathrooms, jokingly called “Juul rooms” by students.

The FDA in September threatened to ban Juul and four other leading e-cigarette products unless their makers took steps to prevent use by minors. The FDA gave Juul and four big tobacco companies 60 days to submit plans to curb underage use, a compliance period that has now ended.

The agency is expected to announce restrictions on flavored e-cigarette products this week that mirror those suggested by Juul and other manufacturers. A senior agency official last week said the FDA plans to only allow sales of tobacco, mint and menthol flavors in convenience stores and gas stations. Other flavors could still be sold at vape shops.

Changes by companies

Juul said that beginning in early 2017 it required models used in advertisements of its products be older than 35. Earlier this year, it began featuring only former cigarette smokers in its ads to highlight smoking cessation benefits.

Juul has grabbed significant U.S. market share over the last year, growing from 13.6 percent of the market in early 2017 to nearly 75 percent now, according to a Wells Fargo analysis of Nielsen retail data.

Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc, which sells e-cigarettes under the MarkTen brand, last month said it would stop selling its pod-based electronic cigarettes, generally smaller devices that use pre-filled nicotine liquid cartridges, in response to FDA’s concerns. The company also said it would restrict flavors for its other e-cigarette products to tobacco, menthol and mint.

James Campbell, a spokesman for the Imperial Brands Plc unit that makes blu e-cigarettes, said the company told the FDA it plans to introduce a technology early next year that would lock devices in an effort to prevent underage use. The company also said it would review its flavors and packaging to minimize youth appeal, strengthen age verification for online sales and terminate contracts with retailers found to sell to minors.

Michael Shannon, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Vapor, a unit of British American Tobacco, said last week the company planned to tell the FDA it would penalize retailers that sell to youth and strengthen online sales restrictions to prevent underage or large bulk purchases of its products.
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The emergencies chief for the World Health Organization predicted Tuesday that Congo’s Ebola outbreak will last at least another six months, saying that informal health facilities have become “major drivers” of the current, deadly transmission.

Dr. Peter Salama said that makeshift “tradi-modern” health centers — offering both traditional and modern treatment — were believed to be linked to more than half of cases in Beni, the largest city affected by the current outbreak that has taken more than 200 lives.

Salama, who returned from a trip to Ebola-hit eastern Congo last week, said Tuesday it appeared “very likely” that some cases of Ebola had been misdiagnosed as malaria, because early symptoms are virtually identical.

He said that the WHO is planning on “at least another six months before we could declare this outbreak over.”

In some cases, people appeared to have contracted Ebola while visiting the centers for other health concerns, Salama said.

He described the “tradi-modern” centers as popular but unregulated neighborhood facilities that vary from stand-alone structures to “just a room in someone’s house.”

Salama noted how many residents appear suspicious of foreigners, officials and outside organizations, but that many also believe in the effectiveness of injectable medicines. And when proper hygiene isn’t respected — like through sharing of needles — conditions are more propitious for viruses like Ebola to spread.

“Probably more than 50 percent of cases in Beni have been driven from these tradi-modern health care facilities, and the fact that hygiene and injection practices in these areas are relatively unsafe,” he said.

Salama said the current Ebola outbreak is “arguably the most difficult context that we’ve ever encountered,” pointing to activities of two armed opposition groups in the region. The outbreak has been “amplified” by the health centers, he said.

 
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Sidewalk prayers near shoot-up spots. Sunday sermons in the back of a bar. Pleas to struggling souls to surrender to God. Funerals for members of their flock who didn’t make it.

Clergy members have become spiritual first responders in the opioid crisis, often leaving the pulpit to minister on the streets.

They can be reverends, rabbis, priests or pastors. Though their faiths differ, they invariably approach people with addiction as equals. No Bible-thumping, no blaming. Quite a few are in recovery themselves.

Despite some signs of a slowdown, the nation’s all-time deadliest drug overdose epidemic endures. Opioids were involved in most of the deaths, killing nearly 48,000 people last year.

A spiritual element to recovery is familiar to people who have worked 12-step programs, with their references to an undefined higher power. Scientific studies have found evidence that religious faith can help substance abusers with their recovery.

Working with addicted people means trips to hospital rooms and fresh graves. But there are flashes of light in the darkness, too.

Three dispatches from the front lines:

A CHURCH FOR IMPERFECT PEOPLE

Nine minutes into his sermon, Pastor Brad Hill made a confession.

“I gotta be honest. I ask myself a lot of the times, ’God, why did you allow me to be an addict?” Hill says from the pulpit of his Grace Downtown Church. “Why are my friends dying of an overdose? … I gotta ask God, ‘Why, God, do you allow this?’”

Hill hears those questions a lot.

The church Hill started in the back of a Winchester, Virginia, bar moved this year to a space that can accommodate hundreds, many trying to turn the page on their addictions. Six and a half years in recovery, Hill calls it a totally judgment-free zone, “a church for imperfect people.”

Hill has a salty beard, smiling eyes and booming voice to sermonize about the suffering he sees so often in the Shenandoah Valley. His phone lights up constantly with messages from struggling people and their loved ones. One recent text read: “Do those who commit suicide still go to heaven?”

Too often, Hill speaks at funerals for overdose victims, three in the past three months alone. He honors the dead while telling survivors, “You don’t have to be like this person. There is a way out.”

A funeral in September for a 38-year-old married father of four was especially hard on Hill. They were friends, and Hill had been talking to him about his struggle just a week before he died. It was Hill who welcomed the man’s grieving family to a Sunday service.

“They lost one of …” Hill swallowed, clapped his hands together twice, and continued in a softer voice. “They lost one of my favorite people. So I just ask that we pray real quick for them, OK?”

Hill’s own addiction to painkillers led to a prescription fraud conviction in 2007 and a yearlong jail sentence that cost him a thriving church in Virginia Beach.

About four years ago, he came to Winchester and started Sunday services in the backroom of a downtown bar called Brewbaker’s for a handful of people struggling with addiction. They’d drop a sheet over the liquor bottles before services.

It grew by attracting people like Matthew Fanning, who met Hill at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

Hill would talk about spirituality, but Fanning wasn’t ready to hear it until he relapsed into heroin addiction. Hill visited him in rehab in 2015, encouraged him and gave him Bible-based homework.

Fanning is now in recovery and a Grace Downtown regular.

“You don’t have to come in your quote-unquote Sunday best,” Fanning said. “You come as you are, whether you’re struggling, or whether you don’t believe, or whether you’re just curious.”

The nondenominational church moved this year to a nearby strip mall with room to seat 400.

While some churches merely welcome the homeless, Grace Downtown picks them up in a van. Other worshippers come from local rehabilitation centers. Hill estimates that more than half who show up on Sundays are in recovery or related to someone who is.

“I have folks that come in that just got high the night before,” Hill says. “I’ve got folks that overdosed the night before. I’ve got folks who have lost everything.”

NEVER STOP GETTING OUR HANDS DIRTY

Pastor Jamie Casey prays with addicted people all over New Bedford, Massachusetts. He joins hands with them in their living rooms days after overdoses, in hospital emergency rooms and on sidewalks in front of wind-beaten houses in this struggling city.

The 45-year-old associate pastor in a nondenominational church is part of a team of clergy from a variety of faiths who regularly crisscross town with police officers and counselors. Their goal is to get people into treatment and, if they will listen, to offer some spiritual advice.

“Surrender,” Casey told Brian Peets, who stepped out from his makeshift shelter beneath a railroad track platform.

“I can’t,” Peets said.

“Surrender.”

“I can’t right now.”

“Surrender,” Casey repeated, alluding to his own addictions that started with alcohol and cocaine.

“For 20 years I fought and fought and fought against myself. Because you’re your biggest enemy. You know that, right?” he told Peets. “So what ended up happening is that I ended up in a place that I lost almost everything. But then I had to surrender to this addiction, surrender to my circumstances, surrender to myself and then surrender to God.”

New Bedford logged 56 opioid-related overdose deaths last year, a per-capita rate a third higher than nearby Boston. Police hope such outreach ride-alongs can get struggling people into treatment before the next setback.

The three-person teams cold-call homes where there have recently been overdoses to see if anyone wants help.

On a recent evening, Casey put on his shirt with “CHAPLAIN” on the back to ride with Officer Scott Carola and counselor Peter Lagasse around the city in an unmarked car.

Casey had a list of addresses of recent overdoses. But when they knocked on doors, most people either weren’t home or weren’t answering.

The trio was unfazed.

The person who ignores you today might embrace you tomorrow, said the Rev. David Lima, who heads the Inter-Church Council of Greater New Bedford and directs the program.

Only a small percentage will get treatment, but participating clergy contend that it’s about more than numbers. Says Rabbi Raphael Kanter, quoting the Talmud, “if you save one life, it’s as if you’ve saved the whole world.”

They spotted James Sessine talking to friends on a busy corner outside a food market. The 29-year-old has struggled with addiction and recently has been living in a tent.

Sessine’s friends scattered as the car stopped, but he stayed and listened to Casey’s suggestion that he get a treatment slot.

Casey called a provider. Can they give him a time tomorrow? Yes.

Sessine got on the phone and promised he’ll be ready the next morning, meanwhile, “I’m going to walk around all night, like I do every night.”

Sessine ended the call and hugged Casey.

“I shoot heroin daily,” Sessine explained a few minutes later, “and it’s coming to the point where enough is enough.”

Casey says his preaching, teaching and intervening is all part of his goal to “love people back to life.”

“My best friend and I, we made a deal,” Casey said, his voice catching. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Promise me we’ll never stop getting our hands dirty,’ And I made that promise to him and God, because had people given up on me, I wouldn’t be here.”

They picked up Sessine the next morning.

Casey looked for Peets too, but could not find him.

FRIARS FLYING THE JESUS FLAG

With his bushy beard and long gray robe cinched by a rope, the Rev. Giuseppe Siniscalchi would look at home illuminating manuscript in a monastery. But he and his fellow Franciscan friars are familiar figures on the sidewalks of Newburgh, New York.

They walk in pairs by row houses, empty storefronts and shoot-up spots in this Hudson River city. They offer people hot chocolate, iced tea or bagels along with their Roman Catholic blessings.

“When we approach the people on the street, whether they’re addicted, whether they’re even drunk, or whether they’re high at the moment or they’re a prostitute, whatever’s going in in their life, we want to approach them first of all in love,” Siniscalchi says.

On one afternoon walking with the Rev. Antonio Maria Diez de Medina, the pair greeted men on a street corner, a mom on her front steps and kids on scooters. Diez de Medina greeted some people in Spanish.

A dark-haired woman ran up to them from across the street and proudly told him about her recovery.

She acted calmly, different from when Siniscalchi saw her sitting restlessly in a parked car months ago. He offered to pray for her. The two friars laid a hand on her shoulders as they all bowed their heads on the sidewalk.

She closed her eyes so tightly her nose crinkled.

The friars are not specifically looking for people struggling with drugs, but they make a point of walking past some of the most troubled corners of Newburgh.

This once-grand city about an hour north of New York City has a poverty rate higher than that of the Bronx. For every fixed-up row house, there is another run down or abandoned. A hospital two blocks from the friary reported that it saved the lives of 205 overdose patients over a year’s time.

“There been a few times where I’ve come across people with their little hypodermic needle kit ready to shoot up … and you just say, ‘Hi. How are you? How you doing,’” Siniscalchi says. “They kind of recognize or get a sense of who we are, and a conversation ensues.”

The friars moved to an old church rectory here in 2016, establishing the St. Mary of the Assumption Friary. They take turns on the four-times-a-week walkabouts with Brother Peter Anthony Curtis.

In recent months, they started dispensing drinks from a metal cart they push down the streets. The rubber-wheeled cart sports a Jesus flag and a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a resonant image in a city with a robust Hispanic population.

After two years, the sight of robed men with long beards chatting up people barely draws second glances. Quite a few people chat.

On one walk, a middle-aged bicyclist asked, “You guys Catholics or something?” He then had his silver crucifix blessed. A passing woman took a blue plastic crucifix that matched her clothes. At one point, Siniscalchi sat down next to a downcast woman, pulled out a crucifix and told her Jesus loves her.

“People don’t,” she replied, looking down.

That doesn’t matter, he said, Jesus does.

After a few minutes, the friars said goodbye to go greet more souls.

 
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As the Democratic Republic of Congo battles the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, just across the border Ugandan survivors of a 2007 outbreak are reminded of the near-death experience they went through. Bundibugyo district at the border with Uganda and the DRC faced the brunt of the hemorrhagic disease as both health workers and residents lost their lives. Halima Athumani reports from Bundibugyo, in Uganda.
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This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

This series has explored the damaging effects of warming waters in the world’s oceans on marine life — and human life. Stressed by this climate change hidden beneath the waves, fish and other marine species are facing enormous disruption.

What can you do to try to lighten your effect on these animals? We talked to five people intimately involved with the sea: a Norwegian seafood chef with a locavore emphasis; an explorer fighting to ban fishing in two-thirds of the world’s oceans; an environmental scientist concerned about the global boom in aquaculture; an entrepreneur training unemployed young people as “sea rangers” to protect marine reserves; and a New England sushi chef who focuses on invasive species.

Christopher Haatuft, chef

Slapping a 13-pound halibut as long his arm on his restaurant counter, Christopher Haatuft slips the tip of his knife in near the gills, then runs the blade tailward to slice off a fillet.

The snow-white flesh and its delicate texture are a favorite among customers at his Lysverket restaurant in the Norwegian port of Bergen, where Haatuft and fellow “Neo-Nordic” chefs are reimagining Scandinavian cuisine.

But Haatuft isn’t merely concerned with the flavor. He also knows exactly where the halibut was raised: the Glitne farm on a fjord north of the city, which uses land-based tanks to avoid discharging fish waste into the sea.

“I like using it because it’s a progressive way of farming fish,” said Haatuft, whose arms are emblazoned with tattoos dating to younger days in the punk rock scene. “I think chefs are starting to get very conscious about where the fish is coming from, and they want to make sure they represent the restaurant well by having sustainable fish.”

His latest goal is to persuade langoustine fishermen to sell him the octopuses that stray into their traps instead of killing them and throwing them back.

“I would love to see the fishing industry at least branch out from the industrialization that’s been going on into more artisanal, boutique types of suppliers,” Haatuft said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that five to 10 years from now, you’ll have more specialized wholesale fish suppliers that don’t necessarily do mass market, but they do line-caught, very easily traceable fish.”

Enric Sala, marine ecologist

Enric Sala is fighting for one of the most ambitious goals in the history of conservation: to turn almost two-thirds of the oceans into a marine reserve.

Sound like wishful thinking? Sala and his team, working with partners around the world, have persuaded governments to create 19 protected areas in the decade since they launched the Pristine Seas project, which the National Geographic Society calls its largest initiative dedicated to environmental preservation. Added together, these new parks cover waters equivalent to half the size of Canada.

Sala believes that the quickest way to begin to buffer the oceans against the effects of climate change would be by banning fishing on the high seas — the maritime no man’s land not under any country’s jurisdiction that covers almost half the surface of the Earth.

“We are in a planetary emergency: Global warming and acidification are going to damage ocean life in a way that we have never seen before,” said Sala, a former professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The science is clear, the economics are clear: Protecting the high seas could be the lowest hanging fruit for ocean conservation.”

“It’s easy to be depressed, but we should be enraged,” he said. “We need to redirect this anger, this energy, into positive action.”

Jennifer Jacquet, environmental scientist

Majestic orcas, playful dolphins and gimlet-eyed great whites: These creatures have all cast their spell on generations of ocean lovers.

The cockles, mussels and clams feeding unobtrusively on the seabed don’t tend to ignite quite so much excitement. Jennifer Jacquet believes it’s time they did.

Jacquet, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University, believes that bivalves could hold the key to reducing pressure on ocean life under siege from fast-accelerating climate change.

Her logic is simple: A global boom in the aquaculture industry is placing an unsustainable burden on the oceans by using vast quantities of wild-caught fish to feed salmon and other farmed carnivores. If the industry switched away from farming carnivorous fish and produced low-impact shellfish and seaweed instead, it would do a lot to ease the pressure, she argues.

“Our argument is that we need to farm lower on the food web,” Jacquet said. “We need to rethink what aquaculture is and will be in the future. Otherwise, it will remain part of the problem — and the worst part is, people think it’s part of the solution.”

Wietse van der Werf, entrepreneur 

It’s one of the big wins for environmentalists of the past decade: Governments in many parts of the world have created new marine reserves to protect ocean life. But Wietse van der Werf, who spent years campaigning against illegal fishing in the Mediterranean and North Africa, fears these victories will amount to little if no one is there to keep out the poachers.

A Dutch environmental-activist-turned social-entrepreneur, Van der Werf believes he’s found a solution: hire veterans from the navy and marines to train unemployed young people as “sea rangers” to patrol areas that governments don’t have the resources to cover.

“The danger is that the legacy that we leave behind as a conservation movement is merely one on paper and it doesn’t actually mean anything,” Van der Werf said. “The question is: How are you going to monitor these areas?”

With backers including a foundation set up by former Google exec Eric Schmidt, his Sea Ranger Service works like this: Young people struggling with long-term unemployment apply for free training as maritime professionals. Applicants attend a five-week “boot camp” where one in four is selected to undergo months of training at sea. Once qualified, the crews then, for a fee, perform a wide range of tasks for government agencies, companies and research institutes.

The first team of 12 Sea Rangers is preparing to set sail next month in the North Sea.

“The maritime domain is changing very fast,” Van der Werf said. “If we’re talking about growing food offshore, if we’re talking about the energy transition, there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Bun Lai, chef 

Chef Bun Lai had just cooked a meal of fried inch-long silverside fish and tiny invasive Asian shore crabs along with tempura wakame seaweed, all of which he had harvested from the nearby Long Island Sound earlier in the day. He was sitting at his dining room table, smoking a cigarette.

It was a jarring contradiction for a man whose restaurant, Miya’s Sushi, is renowned for its heart-healthy sushi creations, often made with invasive species of marine life and seaweed as well as weeds scavenged from his overgrown garden. But Lai is a bundle of energetic contradictions.

He bills his restaurant, a few blocks from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as the first sustainable sushi restaurant on Earth.

The menu includes invasive wild boar from Texas, a roll called sushi salaam dedicated to a “world without violence and retribution,” as well as a dish with dried crickets emerging from rice.

 

“This is our climate-change dish,” he said. He had formed a six-inch-wide puck of frozen seawater from the Sound. It was mixed with invasive seaweed, also from the Sound, and salt from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which is struggling to stay above the rising sea levels. He placed the puck atop a water jug with a candle at the bottom. The puck glowed and cast green shadows onto a thinly sliced island of invasive lionfish.

Lionfish is native to Kiribati, Bun said, but the fish he serves was caught in Mexico. After being released into the wild by aquarium owners, the Pacific fish has spread to the U.S. Southeast and throughout the Caribbean. Without any natural predators, it is crowding out many native species.

To him, serving the lionfish speaks to eating animals and plants in concert with what nature provides rather than forcing nature to provide what we want.
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The Greater Paris region will become a low-emission zone from next summer, which will limit the circulation of old diesel cars, the regional authority decided on Monday.

The Metropole du Grand Paris council said on its Twitter feed it had voted to ban diesel cars registered before Dec. 31, 2000 from the area within the A86 second ring-road, which includes Paris and 79 municipalities around it, a region with 5.61 million inhabitants.

The ban will use France’s new “Crit’Air” vignette system, which identifies cars’ age and pollution level with color-coded stickers. Cars with the Crit’Air 5 sticker (1997 to 2000-registered diesels) as well as cars without a sticker will be banned.

The council plans to gradually tighten regulations in order to allow only electric or hydrogen-fueled cars on Greater Paris roads by 2030. In central Paris, pre-2000 diesels have been banned since July 2017.

Fifteen French metropolitan areas including Lyon, Nice, Aix-Marseille and Toulouse last month agreed to install or reinforce low-emission zones by 2020. The French government hopes this will prevent European Union sanctions over non-respect of European air quality standards.
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Both nature and humans share blame for California’s devastating wildfires, but forest management did not play a major role, despite President Donald Trump’s claims, fire scientists say.

Nature provides the dangerous winds that have whipped the fires, and human-caused climate change over the long haul is killing and drying the shrubs and trees that provide the fuel, experts say.

“Natural factors and human-caused global warming effects fatally collude” in these fires, said wildfire expert Kristen Thornicke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Multiple reasons explain the fires’ severity, but “forest management wasn’t one of them,” University of Utah fire scientist Philip Dennison said.

Trump tweeted on Saturday: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”

The death toll from the wildfire that incinerated the town of Northern California town of Paradise and surrounding areas climbed to 29, matching the mark for the deadliest single blaze in California history. Statewide, the number of fire dead stood at 31, including two victims in Southern California.

One reason that scientists know that management isn’t to blame is that some areas now burning had fires in 2005 and 2008, so they aren’t “fuel-choked closed-canopy forests,” Dennison said.

In those earlier fires, Paradise was threatened but escaped major damage, he said. In the current blazes, it was virtually destroyed.

The other major fire, in Southern California, burned through shrub land, not forest, Dennison said.

“It’s not about forest management. These aren’t forests,” he said.

The dean of the University of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said Western fires are getting bigger and more severe. He said it “is much less due to bad management and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.”

Wildfires have become more devastating because of the extreme weather swings from global warming, fire scientists said. The average number of U.S. acres burned by wildfires has doubled over the level from 30 years ago.

As of Monday, more than 13,200 square miles (34,200 square kilometers) have burned. That’s more than a third higher than the 10-year average.

From 1983 to 1999, the United States didn’t reach 10,000 square miles burned annually. Since then, 11 of 19 years have had more than 10,000 square miles burned, including this year. In 2006, 2015 and 2017, more than 15,000 square miles burned.

The two fires now burning “aren’t that far out of line with the fires we’ve seen in these areas in recent decades,” Dennison said.

“The biggest factor was wind,” Dennison said in an email. “With wind speeds as high as they were, there was nothing firefighters could do to stop the advance of the fires.”

These winds, called Santa Ana winds, and the unique geography of high mountains and deep valleys act like chimneys, fortifying the fires, Thornicke said.

The wind is so strong that fire breaks – areas where trees and brush have been cleared or intentionally burned to deprive the advancing flames of fuel – won’t work. One of the fires jumped over eight lanes of freeway, about 140 feet (43 meters), Dennison said.

Southern California had fires similar to the Woolsey fire in 1982, when winds were 60 mph, but “the difference between 1982 and today is a much higher population in these areas. Many more people were threatened and had to evacuated,” Dennison said.

California also has been in drought for all but a few years of the 21st century and is now experiencing its longest drought, which began on Dec. 27, 2011, and has lasted 358 weeks, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Nearly two-thirds of the state is abnormally dry.

The first nine months of the year have been fourth-warmest on record for California, and this past summer was the second-hottest on record in the state.

Because of that, there are 129 million dead trees, which provide fuel for fires, Thornicke said.

And it’s more than trees. Dead shrubs around the bottom of trees provide what is called “ladder fuel,” offering a path for fire to climb from the ground to the treetops and intensifying the conflagration by a factor of 10 to 100, said Kevin Ryan, a fire consultant and former fire scientist at the U.S. Forest Service.

While many conservatives advocate cutting down more trees to prevent fires, no one makes money by cutting dead shrubs, and that’s a problem, he said.

Local and state officials have cleared some Southern California shrub, enough for normal weather and winds. But that’s not enough for this type of extreme drought, said Ryan, also a former firefighter.

University of Alberta fire scientist Mike Flanigan earlier this year told The Associated Press that the hotter and drier the weather, the easier it is for fires to start, spread and burn more intensely.

It’s simple, he said: “The warmer it is, the more fire we see.”

For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit that the air warms, it needs 15 percent more rain to make up for the drying of the fuel, Flannigan said.

Federal fire and weather data show the years with the most acres burned were generally a degree warmer than average.

“Everyone who has gardened knows that you must water more on hotter days,” Overpeck said. “But, thanks in part to climate change, California isn’t getting enough snow and rain to compensate for the unrelenting warming caused by climate change. The result is a worsening wildfire problem.
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More women and girls in poor countries are using modern contraception, signifying progress in efforts to involve women in family planning, according to a report released Monday.

The number of women and girls using contraceptives in 69 of the world’s poorest countries surpassed 317 million in 2018, representing 46 million more users than in 2012, said the report by Family Planning 2020, a U.N.-backed global advocacy group working to promote rights-based family planning.

Access to modern contraception helped prevent over 119 million unintended pregnancies and averted 20 million unsafe abortions between July 2017 and July 2018, although populations continue to soar across Africa and other low-income countries, the report said.

“The best way to overcome this challenge of rapid population growth is by giving women and girls [the] opportunity to decide how many children they want to have,” Beth Schlachter, executive director of Family Planning 2020, told The Associated Press.

The mix of contraceptive methods has improved significantly in 20 of the surveyed countries, “meaning that more women are able to find the short-term, long-acting, emergency, or permanent method that suits their needs and preferences,” the report said.

But even as millions of poor women use contraceptives, millions more who want to delay or prevent pregnancy are still unable to access it, often due to lack of information, the report said, citing perceived health side-effects and social disapproval as deterrents.

Under Family Planning 2020, which grew out of a summit on family planning held in London in 2012, donors have pledged millions of dollars to bring contraception to 120 million more women and girls in developing countries by the year 2020.

Many of the 69 countries surveyed for the report are in sub-Saharan Africa, which is witnessing a population boom even as other parts of the world see dropping birth rates. Over half of the global population growth between now and 2050 will take place in Africa, according to U.N. figures.

According to the new report, contraceptive use is growing fastest in Africa, even though the region’s fertility rates remain high.

The most recent U.N. global population report estimates Africa’s fertility rate to be 5.1 births per woman.

Because the region’s growing population is not backed by substantial rises in family incomes and the development of public infrastructure, there are concerns that a population boom may deepen poverty levels for many Africans. 

Over the years, family planning has often been difficult to sell in heavily paternalistic sub-Saharan Africa, with the matter becoming controversial as some African leaders challenge the view that a growing population is bad for the world’s poorest continent.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni insists Africa needs more people, and has lambasted what he calls “the shrill cries of NGOs about population control.”

In February, President John Magufuli of Tanzania encouraged polygamy, citing the 10 million more women than men in his country in advising men to marry “two or more wives” to reduce the number of single women.
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After years of nursing a sometimes dusty cylinder of metal in a vault outside Paris as the global reference for modern mass, scientists are updating the definition of the kilogram.

Just as the redefinition of the second in 1967 helped to ease communication across the world via technologies like GPS and the internet, experts say the change in the kilogram will be better for technology, retail and health — though it probably won’t change the price of fish much.

The kilogram has been defined since 1889 by a shiny piece of platinum-iridium held in Paris. All modern mass measurements are traceable back to it — from micrograms of pharmaceutical medicines to kilos of apples and pears and tons of steel or cement.

The problem is, the “international prototype kilogram” doesn’t always weigh the same. Even inside its three glass bell jars, it gets dusty and dirty, and is affected by the atmosphere. Sometimes, it really needs a wash.

“We live in a modern world. There are pollutants in the atmosphere that can stick to the mass,” said Ian Robinson, a specialist in the engineering, materials and electrical science department at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory.

“So when you just get it out of the vault, it’s slightly dirty. But the whole process of cleaning or handling or using the mass can change its mass. So it’s not the best way, perhaps, of defining mass.”

What’s needed is something more constant.

So, at the end of a week-long meeting in the Palace of Versailles, Paris, the world’s leading measurement aficionados at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures will vote Friday to make an “electronic kilogram” the new baseline measure of mass.

Just as the meter — once the length of a bar of platinum-iridium, also kept in Paris — is now defined by the constant speed of light in a vacuum, so a kilogram will be defined by a tiny but immutable fundamental value called the “Planck constant.”

The new definition involves an apparatus called the Kibble balance, which makes use of the constant to measure the mass of an object using a precisely measured electromagnetic force.

“In the present system, you have to relate small masses to large masses by subdivision. That’s very difficult — and the uncertainties build up very, very quickly,” Robinson said.

“One of the things this [new] technique allows us to do is to actually measure mass directly at whatever scale we like, and that’s a big step forward.”

He said it had taken years of work to fine-tune the new definition to ensure the switchover will be smooth.

But while the extra accuracy will be a boon to scientists, Robinson said that, for the average consumer buying flour or bananas, “there will be absolutely no change whatsoever.”
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