Leading philanthropists pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to rescue shrinking tropical forests that suck heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, on the eve of a global climate change summit in San Francisco.

Nine foundations announced the $459 million commitment, to be delivered over the next four years, a day ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit, which is expected to draw about 4,500 delegates from city and regional governments.

“While the world heats up, many of our governments have been slow — slow to act. And so we in philanthropy must step up,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, told journalists at an event announcing the pledge.

The commitment roughly doubles the funds the groups currently dedicate to forest protection, said David Kaimowitz, a director at the Ford Foundation, one of the donors.

Charlotte Streck, director of Amsterdam-based think tank Climate Focus, said the size of the commitment makes the groups major players in supporting anti-deforestation programs.

Norway has led donor efforts by pledging up to $500 million a year to help tropical nations protect their forests, Streck said.

But the new money committed by foundations could prove more “flexible and nimble” than money from governments, she said.

“The money that has been pledged by the governments like Norway and Germany, the UK, sits mostly in trust funds with the World Bank and the U.N. and it doesn’t get out so quickly,” she said.

Often “there is $20,000 missing here or $50,000 missing here, just to do one thing or develop one study or work with one person or have one consultation — and that the foundations can do,” Streck said.

Other groups that are part of the new initiative include the MacArthur Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation.

Help for indigenous people

Funds will mostly assist indigenous people who are forest dwellers, including by helping them secure titles to land they live on so it cannot be sold to private companies without their agreement, said Walker.

“Companies come to our village, our forests and say: ‘You have to leave because I have the license from the government,'” said Rukka Sombolinggi, who heads the Indonesia-based Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN).

The world loses the equivalent of 50 soccer fields’ worth of forest every minute, organizers said.

Yet forests absorb a third of the annual planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions produced — and those emissions need to be slashed substantially more to meet the goals set in the Paris agreement.

The Paris climate agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to “well below” a rise of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times while “pursuing efforts” for the tougher goal of 1.5 degrees C.

The three-day Global Climate Action Summit was organized by Californian authorities and the United Nations to support the leadership of mayors, governors and other sub-national authorities in curbing climate change.
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European Union governments are failing to comply with air quality limits that are already weaker than the World Health Organization’s recommendations, the bloc’s auditors said Tuesday.

The findings by the EU watchdog come as Brussels is taking half a dozen member states to court over their failure to enforce the bloc’s air quality laws.

Respiratory illness caused by pollution result in 400,000 premature deaths a year, costing governments heavily in health care expenses, the European Court of Auditors found.

“There are still considerable impacts on public health,” said Janusz Wojciechowski, one of the report’s authors.

As many as 23 out of the bloc’s 28 nations are failing to comply with the existing limits on harmful pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, according to EU data.

Responding to the report, the EU executive said it was stepping up action to reduce pollution and defended its policy record, pointing to improvements in some areas.

“The commission is fully aware that there is still an urgent need to further improve air quality in Europe,” a European Commission spokesman said.

The commission said in May that it would sue Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Romania at the bloc’s highest court for breaching rules on air pollutants.
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To whip up a monstrous storm like the one chugging for the Carolinas you need a handful of ingredients — and Florence has them all.

— Warmer than normal sea temperatures to add energy and rain to a storm. Check.

— A wind pattern that allows a storm to get strong and stay strong. Check.

— Higher sea levels to make a storm surge worse. Check.

— A storm covering enormous area, to drench and lash more people. Check.

— And an unusual combination of other weather systems that are likely to stall Florence when it hits the Carolinas, allowing it to sit for days and dump huge amounts of rain. Check.

“The longer it stays, the more wind, the more rain. That means the more trees that could fall, the more power outages,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said.

“This one really scares me,” Graham said. “It’s one of those situations where you’re going to get heavy rain, catastrophic, life-threatening storm surge, and also the winds.”

The National Hurricane Center is calling for 10 to 20 inches of rain, and 30 inches in isolated spots. But a computer simulation known as the European model predicts some places could get 45 inches. Sound unlikely? It’s the same model that accurately predicted that last year’s Hurricane Harvey, which also stalled over land, would drop 60 inches.

“It does look a bit similar to Harvey in a sense that it goes roaring into shore and then comes to a screeching stop,” said MIT meteorology professor and hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. “This is not a pretty sight.”

Florence is unusual in that it is aiming at the Carolinas from the east. Usually storms come to the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic from the south — and those usually curve safely out to sea.

But a weather formation known as a high-pressure ridge is parked over the U.S. East Coast, preventing Florence from doing the normal turn, said University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy.

After Florence makes landfall, that ridge, now over Washington and New York, will move east — but be replaced by another one forming over the Great Lakes that will most likely keep the storm stuck, McNoldy said.

Florence’s path remains uncertain. It may move a little north into Virginia or a little south into South Carolina. But it’s such a large storm that the rain will keep coming down in the region no matter where it wanders. And with the Appalachian Mountains to the west, there could be flooding and mudslides, experts worry.

Florence’s large size — tropical storm force winds extend 170 miles from the center in all directions — means its fury will arrive long before the center of the storm comes ashore, Graham said.

Some of Florence’s behavior, both what has been seen so far and what experts expect, shows the influence of climate change.

Its expected sluggishness is becoming more common, a result of climate change, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientist and hurricane expert Jim Kossin.

The ocean waters that Florence is traveling over are about 2.7 degrees (1.5 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, McNoldy said. Even normal water is warm enough for a storm to form there, but this adds to the storm’s fuel and its rainfall. The air is holding 10 percent more water that can be dumped as rain.

And the storm surge, which could be as much as 12 feet in some areas, will be on top of sea level rise from climate change. For example, the seas off Wilmington, North Carolina, have risen 7.5 inches since 1935, according to NOAA.
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Global hunger rose in 2017 for a third consecutive year, fueled by conflict and climate change, the United Nations revealed in a report published on Tuesday.

Obesity levels also increased.

Here are some facts and figures from the report.

World hunger levels rose in 2017 for the third consecutive year.
Globally 821 million people, or one in nine, do not have enough food to eat.
In sub-Saharan Africa, more than one in four may have suffered from chronic hunger in 2017.
Asia has the largest number of undernourished people due to is sheer size - 515 million.
Nearly 151 million children under five suffered from stunting due to malnutrition, a condition that hampers physical and mental development.
More than 50 million children under five are too thin for their height and more than 38 million are overweight.
One in eight adults - 672 million - is obese.
Almost 36 percent of countries that experienced a rise in hunger since 2005 also suffered from severe drought.
Floods cause more climate-related disasters globally than any other extreme climate event.
Between 2011 and 2016, 51 low- and middle-income countries experienced early or delayed onset of seasons.

SOURCE: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, World Food Program
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Three new species of fish, aptly named Pink, Purple and Blue for their coloring, have been found at the bottom of one of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean.

The fish belong to the snailfish (Liparidae) family, with bulbous heads, translucent, ribbon-like bodies and no scales. They were found in the Atacama Trench off the west coast of Chile and Peru at a depth of nearly 8,000 meters. Their unusual bodies are designed to withstand frigid temperatures and extreme pressure.

“Without the extreme pressure and cold to support their bodies, they are extremely fragile and melt rapidly when brought to the surface,” Thomas Linley, a scientist with Britain’s Newcastle University, wrote in a statement released Monday. Linley led the team of 40 scientists from 17 countries that made the discovery.

The research captured video of the fish in their environment. At least one specimen was brought to the surface alive for further study.

More than 100 species of snailfish exist all over the world. Scientists believe there are many more left to be discovered, like the trio found at Atacama.

“There is something about the snailfish that allows them to adapt to living very deep. Beyond the reach of other fish, they are free of competitors and predators,” Linley said in the statement.

From the video shot by the Newcastle team, Linley said it was clear “there are lots of invertebrate prey down there, and the snailfish are the top predator. They seem to be quite active and look very well-fed.” 

Pink, Purple and Blue will receive more scientific names when written about in academic papers.
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U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned Monday that climate change is moving faster than efforts to combat it and that the international community needs to “put the brake” on greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming.

“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us,” Guterres told a gathering of youth, business leaders and diplomats at U.N. headquarters.

“We are careening towards the edge of the abyss,” he said, standing at a podium in front of a rain-splattered window. “It is not too late to shift course. But every day that passes means the world heats up a little more, and the cost of our inaction mounts.”

The U.N. chief renewed his call for action on the eve of the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. California announced Monday that it is committing to 100 percent clean electricity by 2045.

The summit aims to mobilize international and local leaders from states, cities, business and civil society with national government leaders, scientists, students and nonprofits.

Paris agreement

Guterres said the targets agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord are the “bare minimum” to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. In the agreement, world leaders committed to stop global temperatures rising by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to keep it as close to 1.5 degrees as possible. 

“But scientists tell us that we are far off track,” he cautioned, noting these commitments represent just one-third of what is needed. 

“We need to shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels,” Guterres said. “We need to replace them with clean energy from water, wind and sun.” 

The U.N. says that the planet is still consuming 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from renewable energies, including nuclear wind and solar power. 

The United States, which is the only country to have signed and then withdrawn from the Paris accord, has loosened federal regulations on the fossil fuel industry under President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump has also vowed to save the coal industry.

Guterres urged governments to end subsidies for fossil fuels and institute carbon pricing that reflects the true cost of greenhouse gas emissions. 

He said the rise of renewable energy has been “tremendous.”

“Today, it is competitive with — or even cheaper — than coal and oil, especially if one factors in the cost of pollution.”

Guterres singled out China, a major polluter, for investing $126 billion last year in renewable energy — a 30 percent increase over 2016. He noted that countries that have long depended on oil, such as the Arab Gulf states and Norway, are looking at ways to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels. 

“We know what is happening to our planet,” Guterres said. “We know what we need to do. And we even know how to do it. But sadly, the ambition of our action is nowhere near where it needs to be.”

‘Vast opportunity’

Guterres said the transition to cleaner energy and lower carbon emissions can have great economic opportunities. 

“The International Labor Organization reports that common sense green economy policies could create 24 million new jobs globally by 2030,” he noted. 

He appealed for leadership from all sectors to mitigate the impact of global warming. 

In September 2019, Guterres plans to convene a climate summit in New York to try to push climate action to the top of the international agenda. 

“I am calling on world leaders to come to next year’s climate summit prepared to report not only on what they are doing, but what more they intend to do when they convene in 2020 for the U.N. climate conference, and where commitments will be renewed and surely ambitiously increased,” he said.
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When Esperance Nzavaki heard she was cured of Ebola after three weeks of cutting-edge care at a medical centre in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, she raised her arms to the sky with joy and praised the Lord.

Her recovery is testament to the effectiveness of a new treatment, which isolates patients in futuristic cube-shaped mobile units with transparent walls and gloved access, so health workers no longer need to don cumbersome protective gear.

“I started to feel sick, with a fever and pain all over my body. I thought it was typhoid. I took medicine but it didn’t work,” Nzavaki told Reuters in Beni, a city of several hundred thousand, where officials are racing to contain the virus.

“Then an ambulance came and brought me to hospital for Ebola treatment. Now I praise God I’m healed.”

The fight against Ebola has advanced more in recent years than in any since it was discovered near the Congo River in 1976. When the worst outbreak killed 11,300 people in West Africa in 2013-2016, there was no vaccine and treatment amounted to little more than keeping patients comfortable and hydrated.

Now there’s an experimental vaccine manufactured by Merck which already this year helped quash an earlier outbreak of this strain of the virus on the other side of the country in under three months. And there are the cube treatment centers, pioneered by the Senegal-based medical charity, ALIMA.

“With this system … where there are not people donning masks, the patients feel reassured and perceive that there is life here,” said Claude Mahoudeau, ALIMA’s coordinator for the Ebola outbreak in Beni.

In addition, three experimental treatments have been rolled out for the first time, offering patients additional reason to hope that their diagnosis is not a death sentence.

Yet even the smartest science can do little about the marauding rebel groups and widespread fear and mistrust that could yet scupper efforts to contain Congo’s tenth outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic fever.

The latest outbreak is so far believed to have killed 90 people since July and infected another 40.

The stakes are high, not just for health reasons. Ebola could complicate Congo’s first democratic change of power, the holding of a Dec. 23 election to replace President Joseph Kabila that is already two years late.

Rebellion, fear, mistrust

The affected North Kivu and Ituri provinces have been a tinder box of armed rebellion and ethnic killing since two civil wars in the late 1990s. Some areas near the epicenter require armed escorts to reach because of insecurity. Two South African peacekeepers there were wounded in a rebel ambush last week.

And last week, authorities confirmed the first death from Ebola in the major trading hub of Butembo, a city of almost a million people near the border with Uganda, dampening hopes that the virus was being brought under control.

On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said more than 60 of its experts had arrived in the city and that a mobile laboratory had started testing samples.

Insecurity aside, the biggest challenges the government faces could be panic and downright denial, as they were during the catastrophic West Africa outbreak.

“Ebola does not exist in Beni,” resident Tresor Malala said, shaking his head. “For a long time, people got sick with fever, diarrhoea, vomiting and they healed. Now someone gets a fever, they get sent to the Ebola treatment center and then they die.”

Taxi driver Mosaste Kala was equally skeptical: “The only people dying are the ones going to the … treatment center.”

Tackling these perceptions will be crucial if authorities are to halt the epidemic.

At a news conference on Saturday, Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga acknowledged that “community resistance is the first challenge to the response to the epidemic.”

In the district of Ndindi, in Beni, Ebola is spreading due to the community’s reluctance to cooperate with health workers, the ministry says. Some locals have hidden sick relatives or refused to be vaccinated.

The problem, says school teacher Alain Mulonda, many of whose pupils were being kept at home by anxious parents, is that locals have little understanding of Ebola.

“If the population of Beni continues to show this distrust,” he said, “this disease will consume the whole town.”
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Complaints filed with a West Virginia state agency say assisted living ResCare Agency facilities are struggling with staff shortages, causing problems such as missed doctors’ appointments and incorrectly administered medication. 

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports nine substantiated complaints filed with the state Office of Health Facility Licensure and Certification since last year lay out the problems due to staff shortages. One says a lack of supervision allowed a patient to run away. Another says patients are commonly told their doctors appointments have been “cancelled due to staffing issues.” 

The state agency confirmed 32 ResCare facility complaints from 2012 to 2016. Some also included allegations of neglect and sexual abuse. 

The legal director of Disability Rights of West Virginia, Jeremiah Underhill, says low pay may be to blame.
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Emergency officials are urging residents to prepare for severe storms that are forecast to hit the East Coast and Hawaii over the next week at what is the peak of this year’s hurricane season.

       Coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Storm Florence is expected to make landfall Thursday as a level 3 hurricane or greater, steered by winds that could guide it as far south as Florida or as far north as New England.

 

       Meanwhile, Hurricane Olivia is forecast to hit the Hawaiian Islands as a tropical storm on Wednesday, bringing heavy rains just two weeks after Hurricane Lane caused major flooding.

 

       A look at what forecasters are predicting for those storms and the rest of the season:

 

       What do we know about the storms right now?

 

       Tropical Storm Florence was gathering strength Saturday, with the National Hurricane Center expecting it to become a hurricane overnight. Five days out from expected landfall, there’s still wide uncertainty about where it will hit and at what intensity, but the latest models show that it’s most likely to make landfall in the southeast U.S., between northern Florida and North Carolina.

 

       Still, there’s a chance it could be pushed farther north and strike along the mid-Atlantic or New England coast, threatening to make landfall between Virginia and Massachusetts. No matter where it lands, there’s a chance it could stall out and pummel the coasts for days.

 

       The latest models on Saturday show that it’s becoming less likely the storm will veer north and miss the mainland U.S. entirely. At minimum, residents along the East Coast are being told to expect heavy rainfall and storm surges, with the possibility of heavy winds.

 

       Forecasters are also keeping an eye on two storms gathering behind Florence. Tropical Storm Helene was expected to reach the Cabo Verde islands on Saturday but is predicted to miss the mainland U.S. A tropical depression that was upgraded to Tropical Storm Isaac on Saturday is headed toward the Caribbean and brings a greater chance of curving north toward Puerto Rico and the mainland, potentially as a hurricane.

 

       It’s still uncertain whether Hurricane Olivia will make landfall in the Hawaiian Islands, but at minimum meteorologists believe it will come very close and deliver a new round of rainfall.

 

       The National Weather Service has also issued a typhoon watch in the U.S. territory of Guam, where Tropical Storm Mangkhut is approaching from the east and is expected to bring damaging winds by Monday evening.

 

       When will we have a better idea of whether they pose a threat?

 

       Each day brings a clearer picture of the risks posed by the storms. Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground service, says airplanes gathering weather information began flying into Florence on Saturday, which should provide data that will lead to a major boost in the reliability of models on Sunday.

 

       Isaac’s route is still wildly uncertain and will be for days. Forecasters are more confident that Olivia will affect Hawaii, with its path and intensity sharpening in the next few days.

 

       What factors give Florence a chance of being a particulary strong hurricane?

 

       By the time it reaches the East Coast, Florence could strengthen into a major hurricane. Winds higher up in Florence have been weakening, giving it time to gather itself and gain strength over the ocean, experts say. And it’s also approaching water where the temperature is slightly warmer than average, providing heat that the storm can convert into stronger winds.

 

       How should people in areas vulnerable to hurricanes stay prepared?

 

       Residents in evacuation zones are urged to have a plan to flee if the order comes. Others should have at least a week’s supply of food, water and medication for their families and their pets.

 

       Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s school of marine and atmospheric science, says residents who stick it out should have gas cans to fuel their cars and power generators, and should take out some cash in case electronic payment systems are down after the storms pass.

 

       To avoid a headache down the line, residents are also encouraged to keep insurance documents in a safe place ahead of time.

 

       North Carolina’s governor already issued a state of emergency on Friday as the storm advanced, while officials in other coastal states say they’re monitoring forecasts.

 

       What expectations do forecasters have for the rest of the hurricane season?

 

       The second week of September is the peak of hurricane season, so the flurry of activity is no surprise to forecasters. After the current round of storms, though, long-range models suggest a lull for several weeks.

 

       Masters said there’s a chance for another active period by mid-October, which would mark the end of the busiest stretch of the season.

 

       “I don’t think we’re quite done yet,” he said, “but certainly as far as September goes, this is the big week.”
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A replacement bridge being built near a busy U.S. port is being fitted with seismic sensors that will measure earthquake activity in one of the country’s most earthquake-prone regions. The new span is just a few miles from two active faults capable of quakes with a magnitude range of 6.5 to 7. Faith Lapidus reports.
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A highly prized species of tuna appears to be making a slow but noticeable comeback in the Atlantic Ocean. But as sushi lovers rejoice, conservationists are concerned about the future of the endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna as fishermen seek bigger commercial catches. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Two major health scares at U.S. airports involving inbound flights are related to pilgrims returning from the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which ended in late August, U.S. health officials said on Friday.

On Wednesday, U.S. health officials sent an emergency response team with mobile diagnostic equipment to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after they were told that more than 100 passengers aboard an Emirates airlines flight from Dubai were experiencing flu-like symptoms.

Dr. Martin Cetron, director for the division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters in a telephone interview that health officials evaluated nearly 549 passengers at the airport, and sent a total of 11 people to a local hospital for more testing.

Ten people were tested for a battery of respiratory viruses and bacteria in hopes of ruling out serious pathogens that could present a public health threat.

Two of them tested positive for an especially virulent type of influenza A virus, and one of the two, who was gravely ill with pneumonia, was co-infected with another respiratory virus, Cetron said. A third person tested positive for a cold virus.

All three had taken part in the Hajj, which this year drew some 2 million people to Mecca, Cetron said.

Seven crew members, who boarded the flight in Dubai and were not at the pilgrimage, tested negative for a number of respiratory infections of public health concern, Cetron said. The next day, two flights arriving in Philadelphia from Europe were screened by medical teams after 12 passengers reported flu-like symptoms. One of them had visited Mecca for the Hajj.

Cetron said health officials in New York had been prepared to quarantine a large group of sick passengers in an area at the airport. From a total of 11 passengers taken to hospital for evaluation, 10 were tested for respiratory symptoms; one showed signs of food poisoning.

“It was a much smaller incident. That’s not uncommon,” Cetron said. “Often the incoming information from multiple sources can be exaggerated beyond what we really find.”

All 10 patients with respiratory symptoms tested negative for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS, a highly infectious and deadly respiratory infection that was first identified in the Middle East in 2012.

The CDC was not alerted in advance about the two flights that landed in Philadelphia from Paris and Munich, but several travelers had complained of illness, triggering a “medical review” of 250 passengers from those flights, a spokesman said.

Twelve passengers were found to have sore throats and coughs, and one also tested positive for the flu, a CDC spokesman confirmed.

The responses were part of a well-rehearsed network of public health officials trained to identify and contain pathogens as U.S. airports and ports of entry, Cetron said. 

“Our most critical issue was to rule several respiratory illnesses of urgent public health significance,” Cetron said.

Cetron said the CDC monitors databases to track outbreaks of infectious disease that could post a treat in the United States. Although unlikely, MERS was definitely a concern that the team needed to rule out, he said.

“That was a low-probability, high consequence event that we wanted to rule out,” he said.

The CDC said in a statement that the cases were a reminder that flu season is coming, and urged all U.S. citizens six months or older to get a flu shot by the end of October.
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Lizzy Maupa uses a bucket to transfer water she used to bathe from her tub to her toilet. 

She has a four-week-old baby and a three-year-old child, but the city water supply has not been working for a month, says Maupa.  

 

So she collects water from a nearby river, which she boils to drink. Maupa is being extra careful after Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health on Thursday announced an outbreak of cholera in their part of the city. 

 

“I have heard about it. I heard on the news last night,” she says. “So I am trying to be hygienic so that I can take care of the little ones. It has been difficult. I have too many water demands.”

Zimbabwe’s outgoing Health Minister David Parirenyatwa told reporters late Thursday approximately 40 people were being treated for cholera and five had already died from diarrhea and vomiting, typical symptoms of the water-borne disease. 

 

During a visit to a temporary cholera treatment camp in Harare, he warned people to wash their hands and drink only clean water.

“It is usually a problem of contaminated water. These people were drinking water from, we suspect from one or two boreholes that our team has gone to take samples from,” he explained. “If they are contaminated, they will be decommissioned for now. Those that we have here are getting much, much better. As usual prevention, prevention, prevention is key otherwise we will have an outbreak throughout the country.”

A 2008 cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe lasted over a year and killed about 5,000 people.  

 

It was stopped only after international groups like USAID donated drugs and water treatment chemicals.

The head of Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights Calvin Fambirai warns the country must improve basic sanitation to prevent further outbreaks.  

“The conditions that necessitate the spread of cholera and typhoid in Zimbabwe haven’t changed,” he warned. “They are becoming worse by the day. The first problem we face is authorities haven’t been giving resources necessary for the improvement of service delivery in the country to make sure that these archaic diseases do not continue to break out.”

Poor hygiene, water quality and waste disposal in densely populated areas remain unsolved, notes Fambirai.  

 

Residents often go for weeks without running water or waste collection.  

 

Health Minister Parirenyatwa said the sanitation situation would improve  a promise that many have heard before.  
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Early, partial results from a historic gene editing study in human patients that was released earlier this week give encouraging signs that the treatment may be safe and having at least some of its hoped-for effect, but it is too soon to know whether it ultimately will succeed. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Authorities in the U.S. and Britain are stepping up cooperation to tackle female genital mutilation, staging joint operations at airports in London, New York and elsewhere to raise awareness of an issue that affects millions of girls and women worldwide.

Police and border security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have signed a new agreement to share intelligence about when and where victims may be taken for the procedure, known as FGM, and help identify perpetrators. 

In the past week, officials also targeted travel hubs including Heathrow, JKF airport and Eurostar stations, approaching people traveling from countries where the practice is common and encouraging them to report any concerns.

The mutilation of girls’ external genitals for non-medical reasons is practiced across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It also affects immigrant communities in Europe and the U.S.
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Language detectives say the key clues to who wrote the anonymous New York Times opinion piece slamming President Donald Trump may not be the odd and glimmering “lodestar,” but the itty-bitty words that people usually read right over: “I,” “of” and “but.”

And lodestar? That could be a red herring meant to throw sleuths off track, some experts say.

Experts use a combination of language use, statistics and computer science to help figure out who wrote documents that are anonymous or possibly plagiarized. They’ve even solved crimes and historical mysteries that way. Some call the field forensic linguistics, others call it stylometry or simply doing “author attribution.”

The field is suddenly at center stage after an unidentified “senior administration official” wrote in the Times that he or she was part of a “resistance” movement working from within the administration to curb Trump’s most dangerous impulses.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with requests to do that analysis and I just don’t have the time,” says Duquesne University computer and language scientist Patrick Juola.

Robert Leonard, a Hofstra University linguistics professor who has helped solve murders by examining language, says if experts could get the right number of writing samples from officials whose identities are known, “an analysis could certainly be done.”

One political scientist figures there are about 50 people in the Trump administration who fit the Times’ description as a senior administration official and could be the author. The key would be to look at how they write, the words they use, what words they put next to each other, spelling, punctuation and even tenses, experts say.

“Language is a set of choices. What to say, how to say and when to say it,”Juola says. “And there’s a lot of different options.”

One of the favorite techniques of Juola and other experts is to look at what’s called “function words.” These are words people use all the time but that are hard to define because they more provide function than meaning. Some examples are “of,” “with,” “the,” “a,” “over” and “and.”

“We all use them but we don’t use them in the same way,” Juola says. “We don’t use them in the same frequency.” Same goes with apostrophes and other punctuation.

For example, do you say “different from” or “different than?” asks computer science and data expert Shlomo Argamon of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Women tend to use first- and second-person pronouns more — “I,” “me” and “you” — and more present tense, Argamon says.

Men use “the,” “of,” “this” and “that” more often, he says.

There’s even a website that is based on Argamon’s research that tries to determine whether a writer is male or female. Argamon calls it just a toy and the site says it isn’t perfect. In fact, several female writers at The Associated Press were called male, as was the writer of the Times’ opinion piece.

“You look for clues and you try to assess the usefulness of those clues,” Argamon says. But he is less optimistic that the Trump opinion piece case will be cracked for various reasons, including the New York Times’ editing for style and possible efforts to fool language detectives with words that someone else likes to use such as “lodestar.” Mostly, he’s pessimistic because to do a proper comparison, samples from all suspects have to be gathered and have to be similar, such as all opinion columns as opposed to novels, speeches or magazine stories.

Rachel Greenstadt at Drexel University studies when people try to throw off investigators with words they don’t normally use or purposeful bad spellings. She says her first instinct is that the word “lodestar” — one Vice President Mike Pence has used several times — is “a red herring.” It seems too deliberate.

Greenstadt says language analysis “could kind of contribute to the picture” of who wrote the Times’ opinion pieces, but she adds “by itself, I’d be concerned to use it.”

Literary sleuthing

Still, with the right conditions words matter.

Juola testified in about 15 trials and handled even more cases that never made it to court. His biggest case was in 2013, when a British newspaper got a tip that the book The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith was really written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. In about an hour, Juola fed two Rowling books, The Cuckoo’s Calling and six other novels into his computer, analyzed the language patterns with four different systems and concluded that Rowling did it.

A couple of days later, Rowling confessed.

It was far from the first time that language use fingered the real culprit. The Unabomber’s brother identified him because of his distinctive writing style. Field pioneers helped find a kidnapper who used the unique term “devil strip” for the grassy area between the sidewalk and road. The phrase is only used in parts of Ohio.

Even in politics, words are poker tells. In 1996, the novel Primary Colors about a Clintonesque presidential candidate set Washington abuzz trying to figure out who was the anonymous author. An analysis by a Vassar professor and other work pointed to Newsweek’s Joe Klein and he finally admitted it.

But the literary sleuthing goes back to the founding of the republic. Historians had a hard time figuring out which specific Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton and which were by James Madison. A 1963 statistical analysis figured it out: One of the many clues came down to usage of the words “while” and “whilst.” Madison used “whilst”; Hamilton preferred “while.”

Juola says experts in the field can generally tell introverts from extroverts, men from women, education level, age, location, almost everything but astrological sign.

“The science is very good,” Juola said. “It’s not quite DNA. It’s actually considered by some scientists to be considered the second-most accurate form of forensic identification we have because it is so good.”
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Tropical Storm Gordon weakened Wednesday into a tropical depression, while forecasters kept their eyes on a strong storm churning in the Atlantic.

Gordon never strengthened into a hurricane but still brought misery along the central U.S. Gulf Coast. The storm knocked out power, caused floods and spawned several tornadoes. It was responsible for at least one death, when a large piece of a tree fell on a mobile home in Pensacola, Florida, killing a 10-month-old baby.

Flash flood watches were out from the Florida Panhandle west to as far north as Illinois as Gordon moved farther inland.

Meanwhile, forecasters were watching Florence, a strong Category 4 storm that was about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) east of Bermuda as of late Wednesday.

Forecasters predicted Florence would weaken a bit over the next few days but would still be a powerful storm as it crept closer to Bermuda and the U.S. East Coast. That arrival was expected early next week.

Florence would be the first major Atlantic hurricane of the season to make landfall.
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A company whose prescription opioid marketing practices are being blamed for sparking the addiction and overdose crisis says it’s helping to fund an effort to make a lower-cost overdose antidote.

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma announced Wednesday that it’s making a $3.4 million grant to Harm Reduction Therapeutics, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, to help develop a low-cost naloxone nasal spray.

The announcement comes as lawsuits from local governments blaming Purdue, based in Stamford, Connecticut, and other companies in the drug industry for using deceptive marketing practices to encourage heavy prescribing of the powerful and addictive painkillers. Last week, the number of lawsuits against the industry being overseen by a federal judge topped 1,000.

The Cleveland-based judge, Dan Polster, is pushing the industry to settle with the plaintiffs — mostly local governments and Native American tribes — and with state governments, most of which have sued in state court or are conducting a joint investigation. Hundreds of other local governments are also suing in state courts across the country.

The sides have had regular settlement discussions, but it’s not clear when a deal might be struck in the case, which is complicated by the number of parties and questions on how to assign blame.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that drug overdoses killed a record 72,000 Americans last year. The majority of the deaths involved opioids. But a growing number of them are from illicit synthetic drugs, including fentanyl, rather than prescription opioids such as OxyContin or Vicodin.

Governments are asking for changes in how opioids are marketed, and for help paying for treatment and the costs of ambulance runs, child welfare systems, jails and other expenses associated with the opioid crisis.

Polster is expected to rule in coming weeks on motions from drugmakers, distributors and pharmacies to dismiss thee claims. Trials in some of the cases — being used to test issues common to many of them — are now scheduled to begin in September 2019.

Purdue agreed to pay $634 million in fines back in 2007 to settle charges that the company downplayed the risk of addiction and abuse of its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin starting in the 1990s.

It’s facing similar accusations again.

Earlier this year, the privately held company stopped marketing OxyContin to doctors.

Naloxone

The naloxone grant is a way the company can show it’s trying to help stem the damage done by opioids. “This grant is one example of the meaningful steps Purdue is taking to help address opioid abuse in our communities,” Purdue President and CEO Craig Landau said in a statement.

Naloxone is seen as one major piece in overdose prevention strategies. Over the past several years, most states have eased access to the antidote for laypeople. First responders, drug users and others have taken to carrying naloxone to reverse overdoses. But the price of the drug has been a problem for state and local governments.

Pittsburgh-based Harm Reduction Therapeutics says it is trying to get its version to the market within two years.

“Combating the ongoing crisis of opioid addiction will require innovative approaches to both prevention and medication-assisted treatment,” said Harm Reduction co-founder and CEO Michael Hufford, said in a statement, “but it all starts with making sure lives are not lost from overdose.”
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The technology sector provides many jobs for today’s innovators. But one scientist and teacher in Cameroon says there’s no reason why women should not be part of that technological growth. She’s making it her goal to prepare more young girls to enter the workforce. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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The technology sector provides many jobs for today’s innovators. But one scientist and teacher in Cameroon says there’s no reason why women should not be part of that technological growth. She’s making it her goal to prepare more young girls to enter the workforce. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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More than a quarter of the world’s adults — 1.4 billion people — exercise too little, putting them at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancers, according to a World Health Organization-led study.

In 2016, around one in three women and one in four men worldwide were not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity to stay healthy — at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week.

There has been no improvement in global levels of physical activity since 2001, according to the study, which was conducted by WHO researchers and published Tuesday in The Lancet Global Health.

The highest rates of lack of exercise in 2016 were in adults in Kuwait, American Samoa, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where more than half of all adults were not active enough to protect their health.

By comparison, around 40 percent of adults in the United States, 36 percent in Britain and 14 percent in China did too little exercise to stay healthy.

“Unlike other major global health risks, levels of insufficient physical activity are not falling worldwide, on average, and over a quarter of all adults are not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity for good health,” said Regina Guthold of the WHO, who co-led the research.

Noncommunicable diseases

The WHO says insufficient physical activity is one of the leading risk factors for premature death worldwide. It raises the risk of noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.

By becoming more active, it says, people can easily achieve benefits such as improve muscular and cardiorespiratory fitness, better bone health, weight control and reduced risk of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression and various types of cancer.

The study found that levels of low physical activity were more than twice as great in high-income countries compared with poorer nations, and had increased by 5.0 percent in richer countries from 2001 to 2016.

In wealthier countries, the researchers said, a transition toward more sedentary jobs as well as sedentary forms of recreation and transport could explain higher levels of inactivity. In less well-off countries, people tend to be more active at work and for transport, they said.

They urged governments to take note of these changes and put in place infrastructures that promote walking and cycling for transport and active sports and recreation.
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Seven scientists in the United States and Britain who have come up with a revolutionary gene therapy cure for a rare genetic form of childhood blindness won a 1 million euro ($1.15 million) prize Tuesday, Portugal’s Champalimaud Foundation said.

Established in 2006, the annual award for work related to vision is one of the world’s largest science prizes, more than the latest 9 million Swedish crown ($987,000) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

“This is the first, and still only, example of successful gene therapy in humans that corrects an inherited genetic defect and is therefore a milestone in medical therapeutics,” said Alfred Sommer, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and chairman of the award jury.

One of those honored, Michael Redmond of the National Eye Institute in Maryland, had traced the cause of the disease, Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), to a mutated gene.

Three cooperating research teams later managed to replace the gene in the eye, restoring vision to treated children and adults with one form of LCA and “enabling the entire field of gene therapy for human disease,” the foundation said.

These teams are comprised of U.S. scientists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire; Samuel Jacobson and William Hauswirth; and Britons Robin Ali and James Bainbridge.

Their gene augmentation therapy involved the delivery of healthy genes using engineered harmless viruses, described by the foundation as “an elegant solution.”

The foundation, which focuses on neuroscience and oncology research at its Lisbon base, was set up at the bequest of Portugal’s late industrialist Antonio Champalimaud who died in 2004. The first vision prize was awarded in 2006.
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