Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin says the force he felt during a Soyuz emergency landing last week was like having a concrete block on his chest.

Ovchinin and U.S. astronaut Nick Hague spoke separately Tuesday about their frightening experience when an unknown mishap caused their Russian Soyuz to abort its mission 60 kilometers (37 miles) above Kazakhstan.

The spacecraft was on its way to the International Space Station when the emergency lights flashed in the cabin just minutes into the flight.

“There was no time to be nervous because we had to work,” Ovchinin told Russian television. “We had to go through the steps that the crew has to take and prepare for emergency landing … so that the crew is still functioning after landing.”

Ovchinin recalled being violently shaken from side by side as the crew cabin separated from the rocket, followed by a force seven times stronger then gravity as the cabin plunged through the atmosphere, followed by the shock of the parachutes yanking open.

Back home in Houston, Hague told the Associated Press, “We knew that if we wanted to be successful, we needed to stay calm and we needed to execute the procedures in front of us smoothly and efficiently as we could.”

Hague said he and Ovchinin were hanging upside down when the cabin landed back on Earth. They shook hands and cracked jokes.

Neither man was hurt, and an investigation is under way to find out why the rocket failed.

Hague said he is disappointed to be back home instead of walking in space, but he’s happy to be reunited with his wife and their two young sons, and is ready to fly again as soon as NASA gives him the word.

“What can you do? Sometimes you don’t get a vote,” Hague told the Associated Press. “You just try to celebrate the little gifts that you get, like walking the boys to school this morning.”

This was the first aborted Soyuz launch in more than 30 years.

The Russian spacecraft has been the only way to send replacement crews to the International Space Station since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011.

Two private U.S. companies — Boeing and SpaceX — are working on a new generation of shuttles.
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The World Health Organization says it is convening a meeting on Wednesday to determine whether Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.

Aid organizations have expressed alarm as the rate of new cases has more than doubled this month and community resistance to Ebola containment efforts in some cases has turned violent.

This is Congo’s tenth Ebola outbreak but this is the first time the deadly virus has appeared in the far northeast, an area of active rebel attacks that health workers have compared to a war zone.

WHO recently said the risk of regional spread was “very high” as confirmed cases were reported close to the heavily traveled border with Uganda.

Congo’s health ministry says there are now 179 confirmed cases, including 104 deaths.
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Off the shores of Newfoundland, Canada, an ecosystem is unraveling at the hands (or pincers) of an invasive crab.

Some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) to the south, the same invasive crab — the European green crab — is helping New England marshes rebuild.

Both cases are featured in a new study that shows how the impacts of these alien invaders are not always straightforward.

Around the world, invasive species are a major threat to many coastal ecosystems and the benefits they provide, from food to clean water. Attitudes among scientists are evolving, however, as more research demonstrates that they occasionally carry a hidden upside.

“It’s complicated,” said Christina Simkanin, a biologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, “which isn’t a super-satisfying answer if you want a direct, should we keep it or should we not? But it’s the reality.”

Simkanin co-authored a new study showing that on the whole, coastal ecosystems store more carbon when they are overrun by invasive species. 

Good news, crab news

Take the contradictory case of the European green crab. These invaders were first spotted in Newfoundland in 2007. Since then, they have devastated eelgrass habitats, digging up native vegetation as they burrow for shelter or dig for prey. Eelgrass is down 50 percent in places the crabs have moved into. Some sites have suffered total collapse.

That’s been devastating for fish that spend their juvenile days among the seagrass. Where the invasive crabs have moved in, the total weight of fish is down tenfold.

The loss of eelgrass also means these underwater meadows soak up less planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the same crab is having the opposite impact.

Off the coast of New England, fishermen have caught too many striped bass and blue crabs. These species used to keep native crab populations in check. Without predators to hold them back, native crabs are devouring the marshes.

But the invasive European green crab pushes native crabs out of their burrows. Under pressure from the invader, native crabs are eating less marsh grass. Marshes are recovering, and their carbon storage capacity is growing with them.

Carbon repositories

Simkanin and colleagues compiled these studies and more than 100 others to see whether the net impact on carbon storage has been positive or negative.

They found that the ones overtaken by invasive species held about 40 percent more carbon than intact habitats. 

They were taken by surprise, she said, because “non-native species are thought of as being negative so often. And they do have detrimental impacts. But in this case, they seem to be storing carbon quicker.”

At the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center where she works, the invasive reed Phragmites has been steadily overtaking a marsh scientists are studying.

Phragmites grows much taller, denser and with deeper roots than the native marsh grass it overruns.

But those same traits that make it a powerful invader also mean it stores more carbon than native species.

“Phragmites has been referred to as a Jekyll and Hyde species,” she said.

Not all invaded ecosystems stored more carbon. Invaded seagrass habitats generally lost carbon, and mangroves were basically unchanged. But on balance, gains from marsh invaders outweighed the others.

Not a lot of generalities

To be clear, Simkanin said the study is not suggesting it’s always better to let the invaders take over; but, it reflects an active debate among biologists about the role of invasive species in a changing world.

“One of the difficult things in the field of invasion biology is, there aren’t a lot of generalities,” said Brown University conservation biologist Dov Sax, who was not involved with the research. “There’s a lot of nuance.”

The prevailing view among biologists is that non-native species should be presumed to be destructive unless proven otherwise.

When 19 biologists wrote an article in 2011 challenging that view, titled, “Don’t judge species on their origins,” it drew a forceful rebuke from 141 other experts. 

Sax said the argument is likely to become more complicated in the future.

“In a changing world, with a rapidly changing climate, we do expect there to be lots of cases where natives will no longer be as successful in a region. And some of the non-natives might actually step in and play some of those ecosystem services roles that we might want,” he said.

“In that context, what do we do? I definitely don’t have all the answers.”
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A new study says global warming may leave people crying in their costlier beer.

The international study says bouts of extreme heat waves and drought will cut production of barley, a key ingredient of beer.

When that happens, beer prices on average could double. In countries like Ireland, prices could triple.

Previous studies have detailed how chocolate, coffee and wine will be made scarcer and more expensive because of human-caused global warming.

Steve Davis of the University of California, Irvine, says the beer research was partly done to drive home the not-that-palatable message that climate change is messing with all sorts of aspects of our daily lives.

Results appear in Monday’s journal Nature Plants.
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It’s one of the easiest ways to stop the spread of disease. The U.S. Center for Disease Control says spending just 20 seconds washing hands with soap and warm water can reduce illness in more than a million kids who die each year from preventable sickness. Two young women from New Delhi who studied design in New York say they have the solution: turning a chore into playtime. They are launching a new hygiene product called SoaPen on Global Handwashing Day on October 15. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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The U.N. children’s fund reports the vast majority of children living in Ebola-affected areas of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have returned to school where they are taught ways to avoid infection.

School began one month ago in Democratic Republic of Congo. The U.N. children’s fund says efforts to get children to return to school in Ebola-affected areas in conflict-ridden eastern DRC have been hugely successful.  

It says 80 percent are attending schools in Beni and Mabalako health zones.  They are the epicenters of the current Ebola outbreak, which was declared August 1 in North Kivu and Ituri Provinces. The latest World Health Organization report finds 207 cases of Ebola, including 130 deaths.

UNICEF spokesman, Christophe Boulierac, said the return of so many children to the classroom is encouraging.  He said school provides the children who are living in an area of epidemic and conflict with a sense of normalcy.  He said school offers them a protective environment.

Boulierac said children in school learn how to prevent getting Ebola and when they go home, they promote regular hand washing with their families.  He says this helps avoid further spread of the disease in the community.

UNICEF has identified more than 1,500 schools in the areas affected by the Ebola epidemic. Among them are 365 schools located in the high-risk epicenters of the outbreak. The agency has equipped these schools with hygiene and health equipment.

Boulierac said more than 3,500 teachers and school principals have received training on preventive measures for Ebola. He said more than 69,300 school children have received these Ebola prevention messages.
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For 30 years, the Ocean Conservancy has conducted an ocean cleanup campaign on the world’s beaches. They’ve collected 300 million pounds of garbage, a lot of it plastic. But slowly and surely some entrepreneurs are working to reduce the amount of plastic filling up oceans and landfills. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Climate change is usually thought to bring hotter weather, but scientists say it can also make some places colder. Temperature changes mean some plants and animals struggle to survive, while others seek new territory. That may be the case for one species of barracuda that is living in colder waters than it normally would. A school of them have settled near an island off the coast of Croatia in the Adriatic Sea. VOA’s Deborah Block has the story.
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A runaway hearse carrying an Ebola victim has become the latest example of sometimes violent community resistance complicating efforts to contain a Congo outbreak — and causing a worrying new rise in cases.

The deadly virus’ appearance for the first time in the far northeast has sparked fear. Suspected contacts of infected people have tried to slip away. Residents have assaulted health teams. The rate of new Ebola cases has more than doubled since the start of this month, experts say.

Safe burials are particularly sensitive as some outraged family members reject the intervention of health workers in the deeply personal moment, even as they put their own lives at risk. 

On Wednesday, a wary peace was negotiated over the body of an Ebola victim, one of 95 deaths among 172 confirmed cases so far, Congo’s health ministry said. Her family demanded that an acquaintance drive the hearse, while they agreed to wear protective gear to carry the casket. A police vehicle would follow.

On the way to the cemetery, however, the hearse peeled away “at full speed,” the ministry said. A violent confrontation followed with local youth once the hearse was found at the family’s own burial plot elsewhere. The procession eventually reached the cemetery by day’s end.

The next day, with a better understanding of what was at stake, several family members appeared voluntarily at a hospital for Ebola vaccinations, the ministry said.

“They swore no one had manipulated the corpse,” it added. Ebola spreads via bodily fluids of those infected, including the dead.

The Beni community where the confrontation occurred is at the center of Ebola containment efforts. To the alarm of the World Health Organization and others, it is also where community resistance has been the most persistent — and where many of the new cases are found.

Chronic mistrust after years of rebel attacks is part of the “toxic mix” in Beni, WHO’s emergencies chief Peter Salama said in a Twitter post.

So far, the Ebola work in Beni has been suspended twice since the outbreak was declared on Aug. 1. A “dead city” of mourning in response to a rebel attack caused the first. Wednesday’s violence caused the second. With each pause, crucial efforts to track thousands of possible Ebola contacts can slide, risking further infections.

Defending themselves, Beni residents have pointed out the shock of having one of the world’s most notorious diseases appear along with strangers in biohazard suits who tell them how to say goodbye to loved ones killed by the virus.

“Until now we didn’t know enough about Ebola and we felt marginalized when Red Cross agents came in and took the corpse and buried it without family members playing a role,” Beni resident Patrick Kyana, who said a friend lost his father to the virus, told The Associated Press. “It’s very difficult. Imagine that your son dies and someone refuses to let you assist in his burial. In Africa we respect death greatly.”

Until recently many people in Beni didn’t believe that Ebola existed, thinking it was a government plot to further delay presidential elections, Kizito Hangi, president of Beni’s civil society, told the AP.

Now the population has started to catch on and cooperate, Hangi said. “The problem was that the health workers all came from outside, but local specialists have been included to persuade and inform people in local languages.”

Jamie LeSueur, the head of emergency Ebola operations with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, acknowledged the problem. In early October, two Red Cross volunteers were severely injured in an attack during safe burials in the community of Butemo. Another volunteer was injured in September by people throwing stones.

“It raised a lot of questions for all of us. Where is the violence coming from?” he said. They have stepped up efforts to collaborate with communities and be clearer about messaging while working within cultural norms as best as possible.

“Of course there are limitations,” LeSueur said. “Some people like to view the corpse as it is buried, but with Ebola it is difficult to open up the body bag.” In the emotionally charged environment where families have lost loved ones, a misstep could quickly raise tensions.

While Congo’s government is acting to give more protection to its own safe burial teams in Beni, LeSueur noted that the “militarization” of similar efforts in the far deadlier Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years ago led some residents to hide or not report deaths from the virus.

“I don’t think that will be the case in this event,” but everyone remembers that lesson, he said.

With its position of neutrality, the Red Cross doesn’t use armed guards in any case, LeSueur added. “Community acceptance — that’s our security.”
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The World Food Program warns climate change will have a devastating impact on agriculture and the ability of people to feed themselves.  The WFP forecasts a huge increase in worldwide hunger unless action is taken to slow global warming.  

The WFP warns progress in reducing global hunger is under threat by conflict and the increase in climate disasters. For the first time in several decades, the WFP reports the number of people suffering from chronic food shortages has risen.

This year, it says, 821 million people went to bed hungry, 11 million more than the previous year.  

Gernot Laganda, WFP’s chief of Climate and Disaster Risk Reduction, notes the number of climate disasters has more than doubled since the early 1990s.  He says extreme weather events are driving more people to flee their homes, leading to more hunger.

He told VOA the situation will get much worse as global temperatures rise.

“We are projecting that with a two-degree warmer world, we will have around 189 million people in a status of food insecurity more than today.  And, if it is a four-degrees warmer world, which is possible if no action is taken, we are looking beyond one billion more.  So, there is a very, very strong argument for early and decisive climate action,” said Laganda.

Data from this year’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report by six leading U.N. agencies show the bulk of losses and damages in food systems are due to drought and most of these disastrous events occur in Africa.

Laganda says the number of people suffering from hunger because of climate change-induced drought is rising particularly in Africa and Latin America. He notes that until recently progress in Asia had led to a reduction in world hunger, but that trend has slowed markedly.  

 
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Worldwide cesarean section use has nearly doubled in two decades and has reached “epidemic” proportions in some countries, doctors warned Friday, highlighting a huge gap in childbirth care between rich and poor mothers.

They said millions of women each year may be putting themselves and their babies at unnecessary risk by undergoing C-sections at rates “that have virtually nothing to do with evidence-based medicine.”

In 2015, the most recent year for which complete data is available, doctors performed 29.7 million C-sections worldwide, or 21 percent of all births. This was up from 16 million in 2000, or 12 percent of all births, according to research published in The Lancet.

It is estimated that the operation, a vital surgical procedure when complications occur during birth, is necessary 10-15 percent of the time.

Varying country rates

But the research found wildly varying country rates of C-section use, often according to economic status: In at least 15 countries, more than 40 percent births are performed using the practice, often on wealthier women in private facilities.

In Brazil, Egypt and Turkey, more than half of all births are done via C-section.

The Dominican Republic has the highest rate of any nation, with 58.1 percent of all babies delivered using the procedure.

But in close to a quarter of nations surveyed, C-section use is significantly lower than average.

Reasons to opt for surgery

Authors pointed out that while the procedure is generally overused in many middle- and high-income settings, women in low-income situations often lack necessary access to what can be a life-saving procedure.

“We would not expect such differences between countries, between women by socioeconomic status or between provinces/states within countries based on obstetric need,” Ties Boerma, professor of public health at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and a lead author on the study, told AFP.

Jane Sandall, professor of social science and women’s health at King’s College London and a study author, told AFP that there were a variety of reasons women were increasingly opting for surgery.

These include “a lack of midwives to prevent and detect problems, loss of medical skills to confidently and competently attend a vaginal delivery, as well as medico-legal issues.”

Doctors are often tempted to organize C-sections to ease the flow of patients through a maternity clinic, and medical professionals are generally less vulnerable to legal action if they choose an operation over a natural birth.

Sandall also said there were often “financial incentives for both doctor and hospital” to perform the procedure.

The study warned that in many settings young doctors were becoming “experts” in C-section while losing confidence in their abilities when it comes to natural birth.

Income a factor

It also identified an emerging gap between wealthy and poorer regions within the same country. In China, C-section rates diverged from 4 percent to 62 percent; in India the range was 7-49 percent.

While the U.S. saw more than a quarter of all births performed by C-section, some states used the procedure more than twice as often as others.

“It is clear that poor countries have low C-section use because access to services is a problem,” Sandall said. “In many of those countries, however, richer women who live in urban areas, have access to private facilities have much higher C-section use.”

Risks to mother, child

C-sections may be marketed by clinics as the “easy” way to give birth, but they are not without risks.

Maternal death and disability rates are higher after C-section than vaginal birth. The procedure scars the womb, which can lead to bleeding, ectopic pregnancies (where the embryo is stuck in the ovaries), as well as still- and premature future births.

The authors suggested better education, more midwifery-led care and improved labor planning as ways of ensuring C-sections are only performed when medically necessary, as well as ensuring women properly understand the risks involved with the procedure.

“C-section is a type of major surgery, which carries risks that require careful consideration,” Sandall said.

In a comment accompanying the study, Gerard Visser of the University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, called the rise in C-sections “alarming.”

“The medical profession on its own cannot reverse this trend,” he said. “Joint actions are urgently needed to stop unnecessary C-sections and enable women and families to be confident of receiving the most appropriate care for their circumstances.”
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Parties to a new global treaty to combat the illicit sale of tobacco products have taken the first steps toward cracking down on this multi-billion dollar trade.  At a three-day meeting at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva they have outlined a plan to shut down the lucrative black market trade in tobacco.

A global tobacco treaty (Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products) entered into force on September 25, with 48 countries joining the new protocol, which is part of the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC).  Two-thirds of the parties have enacted or strengthened national legislation aimed at tackling illicit trade in tobacco products.

Parties attending the meeting have set up a working group to create a monitoring system to track and trace the movement of tobacco products. They hope this global information sharing system will be up and running by 2023.  

Head of the FCTC Secretariat, Vera da Costa e Silva, says illicit trade accounts for one in 10 cigarettes consumed.  She says these cigarettes are low-priced and more affordable for young people and vulnerable populations.  She says this results in increased consumption of the toxic product by these groups.

She told VOA the black market in tobacco thrives in both rich and poor countries, but it is a much bigger problem in developing countries.

“In the streets of developing countries, you can see all over the world sales of illicit trade of tobacco products.  They are openly in their markets…. When it comes to the distribution, this is linked to street sales, to bootlegging as well through borders and even to sales to and by minors.  That is a real problem of illicit trade in tobacco products,” she said.

Da Costa e Silva said this flourishing illegal trade undermines tobacco control policies and public health.  She said it also fuels organized crime and increases tobacco profits through tax evasion, resulting in substantial losses in governments’ revenues.   

She said studies show governments lose $31 billion in taxes annually from the illegal trafficking in tobacco products.  

The World Health Organization reports seven million people die prematurely every year from tobacco-related causes.

 
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Health officials say the rate of new Ebola cases has more than doubled since September after rebel violence in northeastern Congo caused response efforts to be briefly suspended.

 

In a statement on Thursday, the International Rescue Committee says it is “alarmed” that there were 33 new cases between October 1 and Tuesday, versus 41 cases during all of September.

 

Officials say most of the new cases have been in Beni, where experts had to suspend Ebola containment efforts for days after a deadly rebel attack.

 

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization noted that all of the health workers who have caught Ebola in this epidemic have been infected outside of hospitals or clinics, meaning that the virus is spreading in the community.

 
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A U.S. astronaut and Russian cosmonaut are safe following an emergency return to Earth minutes after launching on what was supposed to be a mission to the International Space Station.

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said a booster on the Soyuz spacecraft failed after it took off Thursday from the Soviet-era cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

“At that point, per the standard procedure, an abort was initiated,” International Space Station Operations Integration Manager Kenny Todd told reporters.

WATCH: Nick Hague Talks to VOA Before Takeoff

“My heart was beating hard,” astronaut Reid Weisman said of the moment he heard the booster had malfunctioned during his colleagues’ launch.

It was the latest in a string of recent failures for the Russian space program, which also takes American astronauts to the station.

Russian officials said they are investigating the incident, adding that all manned space flight missions would be suspended until investigators figure out what went wrong.

Officials said U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin experienced 6 to 7 times Earth’s gravity, followed by a brief moment of weightlessness, as they separated from the booster before falling to Earth.

Rescuers reached the crew after they landed in Kazakhstan, and both were in good condition. They are now reunited with their families.

Thursday was supposed to be Hague’s first time in space.

Hague, who is an Air Force colonel, was the first member of his class to be assigned to a mission. Todd said there was “no doubt” Hague would be selected for another mission, but it was “yet to be determined” when that would occur.

In an interview with VOA prior to the launch, Hague said he was excited and ready, but also nervous.

“Sitting on top of a rocket for the first time and being shot into space, you know, how can you not be nervous?” he said.

Hague spent the last five years preparing for his mission. When he gets the chance, he will serve as a flight engineer on the International Space Station, doing everything from maintenance of the aircraft to scientific research to study the effects of weightlessness.

The International Space Station is the largest space collaboration ever. Fifteen countries built and operate the live-in satellite, an “unprecedented” feat, according to John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.

“One of the real payoffs with benefits is to demonstrate peaceful collaboration, not only between allies, but between the United States and Russia, even in spite of all the current political tensions between the two countries,” Logsdon said.

Hague told VOA he enjoys working with space explorers from all over the country and world.

Typically, five to seven astronauts man the ISS at one time. Only about 250 people have ever lived on the International Space Station, which celebrates its 20th year in orbit next month.
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NASA says that two astronauts from the U.S. and Russia are in good condition after an emergency landing following booster rocket failure minutes after the launch.

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin lifted off as scheduled at 2:40 p.m. (0840 GMT; 4:40 a.m. EDT) Thursday from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz booster rocket.

They were to dock at the orbiting outpost six hours later, but the booster suffered a failure minutes after the launch.

The two made an emergency landing in Kazakhstan at an unspecified time. Search and rescue crews scrambled to reach the expected landing site.

It’s the first space mission for Hague, who joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2013. Ovchinin spent six months on the station in 2016.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have sunk to post-Cold War lows over the crisis in Ukraine, the war in Syria and allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote, but Russia and the U.S. have maintained cooperation in space.

 
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An estimated 44 million people 65 years and older worldwide have Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disorder that causes memory loss, and impairs thinking, judgment and problem solving. So far, scientists have not found a drug that can stop the disease. But a research program in the United States is trying to prevent it by targeting the earliest changes in the brain while memory and thinking skills are still intact. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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Australia is rejecting the latest U.N. report on climate change, insisting coal remains critical to energy security and lowering household power bills.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its report released Monday that global greenhouse gas emissions must reach zero by the middle of the century to stop global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The authors warned that if warming was allowed to reach two degrees, the world would be on course toward uncontrollable temperatures.

They made special mention of coal, insisting that its use for power generation would have to fall to between zero and two percent of current usage.

The report has received a lukewarm response by Australia’s center-right government. It has said it has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel production because without coal, household power bills would soar.

Canberra also insists it is on target to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement, which attempts to unite every nation under a single accord to tackle climate change for the first time ever.

Australia earns billions of dollars exporting coal to China and other parts of Asia, while it generates more than 60 percent of domestic electricity.

Australia’s Environment Minister Melissa Price believes the IPCC report exaggerates the threat posed by fossil fuel.

“Coal does form a very important part of the Australian energy mixer and we make no apology for the fact that our focus at the moment is on getting electricity prices down,” Price said. “Every year, there is new technology with respect to coal and what its contribution is to emissions. So, you know, to say that it has got to be phased out by 2050 is drawing a very long bow.”

Australia has some of the world’s highest per capita rates of greenhouse gas pollution. A recent government report showed a failure to reduce levels of greenhouse gas pollution. The survey said that between January and March this year, Australia had its most elevated levels of carbon pollution since 2011.

Conservationists argue Australia is doing too little to protect itself from the predicted ravages of a shifting climate.

Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. Scientists warn that droughts, floods, heat waves, brush fires and storms will become more intense as temperatures rise, with potentially disastrous consequences for human health and the environment, including the Great Barrier Reef.
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America’s recycling industry is in the dumps.

A crash in the global market for recyclables is forcing communities to make hard choices about whether they can afford to keep recycling or should simply send all those bottles, cans and plastic containers to the landfill.

 

Mountains of paper have piled up at sorting centers, worthless. Cities and towns that once made money on recyclables are instead paying high fees to processing plants to take them. Some financially strapped recycling processors have shut down entirely, leaving municipalities with no choice but to dump or incinerate their recyclables.

 

“There’s no market. We’re paying to get rid of it,” says Ben Harvey, president of EL Harvey & Sons, which handles recyclables from about 30 communities at its sorting facility in Westborough, Massachusetts. “Seventy-five percent of what goes through our plant is worth nothing to negative numbers now.”

 

It all stems from a policy shift by China, long the world’s leading recyclables buyer. At the beginning of the year it enacted an anti-pollution program that closed its doors to loads of waste paper, metals or plastic unless they’re 99.5 percent pure. That’s an unattainable standard at U.S. single-stream recycling processing plants designed to churn out bales of paper or plastic that are, at best, 97 percent free of contaminants such as foam cups and food waste.

 

The resulting glut of recyclables has caused prices to plummet from levels already depressed by other economic forces, including lower prices for oil, a key ingredient in plastics.

 

The three largest publicly traded residential waste-hauling and recycling companies in North America — Waste Management, Republic Services and Waste Connections — reported steep drops in recycling revenues in their second-quarter financial results. Houston-based Waste Management reported its average price for recyclables was down 43 percent from the previous year.

 

“A year ago, a bale of mixed paper was worth about $100 per ton; today we have to pay about $15 to get rid of it,” says Richard Coupland, vice president for municipal sales at Phoenix-based Republic, which handles 75 million tons of municipal solid waste and 8 million tons of recyclables nationwide annually. “Smaller recycling companies aren’t able to stay in business and are shutting down.”

 

Kirkwood, Missouri, announced plans this summer to end curbside recycling after a St. Louis-area processing facility shut down. Officials in Rock Hill, South Carolina, were surprised to learn that recyclables collected at curbside were being dumped because of a lack of markets. Lack of markets led officials to suspend recycling programs in Gouldsboro, Maine; DeBary, Florida; Franklin, New Hampshire; and Adrian Township, Michigan. Programs have been scaled back in Flagstaff, Arizona; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Kankakee, Illinois.

 

Other communities are maintaining recycling programs but taking a financial hit as regional processors have raised rates to offset losses. Richland, Washington, is now paying $122 a ton for Waste Management to take its recycling; last year, the city was paid $16 a ton for the materials. Stamford, Connecticut, received $95,000 for recyclables last year; the city’s new contract requires it to pay $700,000.

 

A big part of the problem, besides lower commodity prices overall, is sloppy recycling.

 

In the early days of recycling, people had to wash bottles and cans, and sort paper, plastic, glass and metal into separate bins. Now there’s single-stream recycling, which allows all recyclables to be tossed into one bin. While single-stream has benefited efficiency, and customers like it, it’s been a challenge on the contamination side.

 

A tour of Republic’s facility in Beacon, about an hour’s drive north of New York City, makes the challenges clear. A third of the material dumped by collection trucks is non-recyclable “contaminants” such as garden hoses, picnic coolers and broken lawnmowers. Workers have to pull that out and truck it to a landfill, adding to overall costs. Plastic bags contaminate bales of other materials and tangle machinery. Spilled ketchup and greasy pizza boxes turn otherwise marketable material into garbage.

 

“The death of recycling was completely avoidable and incredibly easily fixed,” says Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, which advocates standardized labeling on recycling bins so people understand what goes in and what doesn’t.

 

A range of initiatives have been launched to get people to recycle right. Chicago is putting “oops” tags on curbside recycling bins with improper contents and leaving them uncollected. Rhode Island is airing “Let’s Recycle Right” ads.

 

While some recyclables have been diverted to other Asian markets since China’s closure, there are also signs of market improvement in the U.S. to offset the lost business, said David Biderman, CEO and executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America. He noted Chinese paper manufacturers that had relied on recyclables imported into their country have recently purchased shuttered mills in Kentucky, Maine and Wisconsin.

 

Meanwhile, recyclable materials processors are re-negotiating contracts with municipalities to reflect the fact that prices paid for recyclables no longer offset the cost of collecting and sorting them.

 

“What we’re advocating is to step back and re-look at recycling,” Republic’s Coupland said. “This is the new normal. The model no longer funds itself.”

 
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Nearly 77 years after repeated torpedo strikes tore into the USS Oklahoma, killing hundreds of sailors and Marines, Carrie Brown leaned over the remains of a serviceman laid out on a table in her lab and was surprised the bones still smelled of burning oil from that horrific day at Pearl Harbor.

It was a visceral reminder of the catastrophic attack that pulled the United States into World War II, and it added an intimacy to the painstaking work Brown and hundreds of others are now doing to greatly increase the number of lost American servicemen who have been identified.

 

It’s a monumental mission that combines science, history and intuition, and it’s one Brown and her colleagues have recently been completing at ramped-up speed, with identifications expected to reach 200 annually, more than triple the figures from recent years.

 

“There are families still carrying the torch,” said Brown, a forensic anthropologist with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s lab near Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s just as important now as it was 77 years ago.”

 

Officials believe remains of nearly half of the 83,000 unidentified service members killed in World War II and more recent wars could be identified and returned to relatives. The modern effort to identify remains started in 1973 and was primarily based in Hawaii until a second lab was opened in 2012 at Offutt Air Force Base in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue.

 

With an intensified push, the identifications climbed from 59 in 2013 to 183 last year and at least 200 and possibly a few more this year.

 

The increase has led to a surge of long-delayed memorial services and burials across the country as families and entire communities turn out to honor those killed.

 

Joani McGinnis, of Shenandoah, Iowa, said her family is planning a service Friday at the national cemetery in Omaha now that they have finally learned what happened to her uncle, Sgt. Melvin. C. Anderson.

 

Piecing together bits of history and DNA, the Omaha lab confirmed that remains found in 1946 in Germany were Anderson’s and that he died when his tank was hit in the rugged Hurtgen Forest during a battle that lasted for months and left tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded.

 

Besides returning the remains, McGinnis said the agency gave her a thick file with details about how he died and how researchers unraveled the mystery.

 

“I wish my mom and my grandma were here to know all this information,” said McGinnis, who recalled a framed picture of Anderson that hung in her grandmother’s home in Omaha. “My grandmother was very sad about it. She just wanted to know what happened, and she never knew.”

 

In Kentucky, thousands of people lined roads for miles on a steamy August day to see a hearse carrying the remains of Army Pfc. Joe Stanton Elmore from the Nashville, Tennessee, airport to the small city of Albany.

 

Elmore was reported missing in action in December 1950 after an intense battle at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and as deceased in 1953, but his great-niece April Speck said even decades later, her family would tell stories of “Joe going off to war and never coming home.” Speck said she knew her family would feel a sense of relief that his remains were finally returned, but she didn’t realize what it would mean to her community.

 

“There were people standing out with their signs and there were retired soldiers in their uniforms saluting, and then we get into Albany and it like was a sea of people with all the American flags,” she recalled. “The county did an awesome job of showing respect.”

 

The soaring number of identifications followed years of complaints about a cumbersome process, typically resulting in about 60 completed cases annually. Congress responded by setting a goal of 200 identifications annually, and it supported a reorganization and increased funding that saw spending climb from $80.8 million in the 2010 fiscal year to $143.9 million in 2018.

 

The effort now employs about 600 people.

 

Officials have streamlined the work of determining which remains should be disinterred. Historians focus on where clusters of servicemen died, and examine troop movements and conduct interviews with local residents.

 

“This work is very different from what most historians do,” said Ian Spurgeon, an agency historian in Washington. “This is detective history.”

 

Spurgeon’s focus is on battles in Europe and the Mediterranean, with a goal of disinterring 50 service members annually, up from fewer than five.

 

At Offutt, inside a lab built in a former World War II bomber factory, bones are arranged by type on black-topped tables. In another room, buttons, fabrics, coins and other items found alongside remains are studied for hints about a service member’s role or hometown.

 

DNA is key to identifications, but it can’t be extracted from all bones, and without a match from potential relatives, it has little value.

 

In some cases, lab workers refer to standard chest X-rays of World War II servicemen taken when they enlisted, focusing on the traits of the collarbones shown. An algorithm developed by the University of Nebraska-Omaha helps workers make comparisons of remains in minutes.

 

For Patricia Duran, the result has been finally learning what happened to her uncle, Army Air Forces Sgt. Alfonso O. Duran, who died in 1944 when his B-24H Liberator bomber was shot down. His remains were disinterred from a grave in Slovenia and identified this spring.

 

Duran had for years sought information about her uncle’s remains, and she said she clutched her cousin’s hand while watching him be buried Aug. 22 at Santa Fe National Cemetery, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from his childhood home in the small mountain community of El Rito, New Mexico.

 

“We felt such a sense of closure about it because the whole family heard the stories” about him. “We felt we knew Alfonso,” she said. “We felt he’d come home.”

 
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Mental health disorders are on the rise in every country in the world and could cost the global economy up to $16 trillion between 2010 and 2030 if a collective failure to respond is not addressed, according to an expert report released Tuesday.

The Lancet Commission report by 28 global specialists in psychiatry, public health and neuroscience, as well as mental health patients and advocacy groups, said the growing crisis could cause lasting harm to people, communities and economies worldwide.

While some of the costs will be the direct costs of health care and medicines or other therapies, most are indirect — in the form of loss of productivity, and spending on social welfare, education and law and order, the report’s co-lead author, Vikram Patel, said.

The wide-ranging report did not give the breakdown of the potential $16 trillion economic impact it estimated by 2030.

“The situation is extremely bleak,” Patel, a professor at Harvard Medical School in the United States, told reporters.

Lack of investment

He said the burden of mental illness had risen “dramatically” worldwide in the past 25 years, partly because societies are aging and more children are surviving into adolescence, yet “no country is investing enough” to tackle the problem.

“No other health condition in humankind has been neglected as much as mental health has,” Patel said.

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million people worldwide have depression and 50 million have dementia. Schizophrenia is estimated to affect 23 million people, and bipolar disorder around 60 million.

The Lancet report found that in many countries, people with common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia routinely suffer gross human rights violations — including shackling, torture and imprisonment.

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, which commissioned the report, said it highlighted the “shameful and shocking treatment of people with mental ill health around the world.”

It called for a human rights-based approach to ensure that people with mental health conditions are not denied fundamental human rights, including access to employment, education and other core life experiences.

It also recommended a wholesale shift to community-based care for mental health patients, with psychosocial treatments such as talking therapies being offered not just by medical professionals but also by community health workers, peers, teachers and the clergy.

The report was published ahead of a first global ministerial mental health summit in London this week.
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U.S. President Donald Trump says he hasn’t read an ominous report by a U.N. panel that warned of a dire future for the planet if global warming is not kept to a minimum.

But he said he will.

“It was given to me and I want to look who drew it, you know — which groups drew it, because I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good,” he said Tuesday at the White House. “But I will be reading it, absolutely.”

The comments were his first regarding the report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report lists how Earth’s weather, health and ecosystems would be better off if world leaders could figure out how to limit future human-caused warming to 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) between 2030 and 2052, instead of the globally agreed upon goal of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

In June 2017, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. His administration has also dismantled emissions reduction policies domestically.

According to the U.N. report, some of the benefits of limiting global warming to the lower goal would include:

• Half as many people would suffer from lack of water.

• There would be fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, smog and infectious diseases.

• The West Antarctic ice sheet might not kick into irreversible melting.

• It could be enough to save most of the world’s coral reefs from dying.

The panel met in South Korea recently to finalize the report.

The world’s governments asked for the report in 2015, when a global pact to tackle climate change was agreed upon.

German biologist Hans-Otto Portner, one of the panel members, said some of the panelists were engaged in “wishful thinking” if they thought the gloomy report would encourage governments and people to act quickly and forcefully to counteract the report’s predictions.

Portner warned, however, “If action is not taken, it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future.”
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It was during her first year of high school in rural western Kenya that Mary Kuket says she was “sacrificed to tradition” and her dreams of becoming a doctor shattered forever.

With no explanation, the 15-year-old was given away to another family, who forced her to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), then married her off to their middle-aged son.

“I kept asking my parents why I was being taken and begged them not to send me away, but my father pushed me away, saying that soon I would understand,” Kuket, now 46, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Baringo county. “They never told me I was going to be cut. They never told me I was going to be married to a 45-year-old man. They never told me that I would not go back to school.”

From the fear of being ostracized or killed to the prestige associated with entering womanhood, girls in Kenya are under a barrage of societal pressures to undergo FGM, often with a devastating impact on their education, say campaigners.

A study by the charity ActionAid Kenya published Monday said despite the fact that FGM is illegal in the east African nation, deep-rooted myths supporting the ancient ritual persist.

Violence ‘normalized’

The survey, based on interviews with almost 400 girls and women in eight Kenyan counties, found that FGM affected not only their health but also their schooling.

“Despite efforts to curb FGM, this type of violence against women and girls is so normalized in some communities. Girls are socialized into believing they must undergo the procedure,” said Agnes Kola, women’s rights coordinator for ActionAid Kenya. “But it is stifling their ability to participate in society, as once they undergo FGM, their schooling is impacted and many never complete their education and progress in life.”

Girls missed school to recover after the procedure and suffered medical complications and trauma that affected their class attendance and performance, the report said.

Seen as a rite of passage in many communities, FGM also acted as a trigger for girls as young as 11 to become sexually active and married off as they were perceived as women — often ending with child pregnancy.

As a result, fewer girls than boys in Kenya’s FGM-prevalent counties were finishing their primary education, and even fewer were transitioning to high school, the study said.

While national figures show secondary enrollment of boys and girls in year one to be almost equal, in some FGM-prevalent counties, enrollment of girls in the same group is less than half that of boys, according to government data.

‘Ticket for marriage’

An estimated 200 million girls and women worldwide have undergone FGM, which usually involves the partial or total removal of the genitalia, the United Nations says.

Despite being internationally condemned, it is practiced in at least 27 African countries and parts of Asia and the Middle East, and is usually carried out by traditional cutters, often with unsterilized blades or knives.

In some cases, girls can bleed to death or die from infections. FGM can also cause lifelong painful conditions such as fistula as well as fatal childbirth complications.

Kenya outlawed the practice in 2011, but it continues as communities believe it is necessary for social acceptance and increasing their daughters’ marriage prospects.

One in five females aged 15 to 49 in Kenya has undergone FGM, according to U.N. data.

The study in eight counties found fear of being rejected for marriage, ostracized by the community or even killed was pushing girls to undergo FGM.

In the eastern county of Garissa, Muslim communities were cited as saying anyone who was not circumcised was not permitted to worship and could easily be killed.

“Religiously, we are told that circumcision makes girls to be clean before God, and it is only after undergoing this practice that the girls can be allowed to read the Quran or to worship,” said a woman from Garissa, cited in the report.

Elsewhere, girls and women said they were expected to undergo FGM to comply with cultural expectations of marriage.

“FGM is considered as the community-given ticket for marriage, thus it results in automatic suitors or bidders, which is absolutely the parent’s choice,” said the report. “Young men will ensure their wives get circumcised at the time of marriage.”

Progress hindered

Soon after being cut, the girls, who are drawn from communities in which up to 98 percent of women and girls have undergone FGM, said they struggled to continue with school.

They were absent for weeks to heal and also suffered infections and trauma, according to the report.

The practice also provides social sanction for girls to be married off or have sex, often resulting in pregnancy.

Tony Mwebia of the Men End FGM campaign said visits to primary schools show that even as early as age 10, there are far fewer girls than boys. “Sometimes it’s just one or two girls compared to a whole lot of boys,” he said.

Campaigners said government and civil society had neglected remote, insecure regions where FGM was most prevalent. They called for specific budgets to be allocated to these areas, using positive messaging to engage with communities, and for better coordination between charities.

For Kuket, however, all is not lost.

After 20 years of marriage and seven children, she went back to school, finished her secondary education and has enrolled to work toward a degree in community development.

She is also a prominent human rights activist in her community in western Tangulbei, where she rescues girls who are being forced to undergo FGM and pushed into child marriage.

“I don’t want any other girl to go through what I did,” she said. “FGM is a barrier to a girl’s progress in life — it ruins their lives.”
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