WWII Code Talker and longtime NM lawmaker dies at 94
John Pinto, a Navajo Code Talker in World War II who became one of the nation’s longest serving Native American elected officials as a New Mexico state senator, has died. He was 94.
Senate colleague Michael Padilla confirmed Pinto’s death in Gallup on Friday after years of suffering from various illnesses that rarely kept him from his duties.
After serving as a Marine, Pinto was elected to the Senate in 1976 and represented a district that includes the Navajo Nation for more than four decades. The region is one of the poorest in the country.
“Words cannot express the sadness we feel for the loss of a great Dine warrior,” said Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, using the indigenous word for Navajo. “He dedicated his life to helping others.”
Born in Lupton, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation to a family of sheep herders. Pinto didn’t start formal schooling until he was nearly a teenager.
“At the age of 12, I was in kindergarten,” Pinto told the Albuquerque Journal in a 2007 interview. “I guess I did all right.”
Pinto also recalled that his grandparents told of being forced at gunpoint from their land in the 1860s by the U.S. Army in the forced relocation of the Navajo people on foot to southern New Mexico.
After serving as a Code Talker — a group of radio men who translated American coordinates and messages into an indecipherable code based on the Navajo language — Pinto had to take an English test four times before he was finally admitted into the University of New Mexico’s College of Education.
He graduated with a bachelor’s in elementary education at 39, and eventually earned his master’s, becoming a teacher and a truancy officer in Gallup.
Pinto delved into politics to address the needs of impoverished indigenous populations. The Democrat won a seat in state Senate in 1976 as one of the state’s first Native American senators.
An unassuming appearance and manner belied Pinto’s political determination that carried him through 42 years in the Legislature. Laurie Canepa, the senior librarian for the Legislative Council Service, said that made him the longest serving senator in state history.
Manny Aragon, the state’s one-time Senate president, tells the story of driving to the Statehouse in a January 1977 snowstorm and picking up a middle-aged Navajo man who was hitchhiking in Albuquerque. The hitchhiker was newly elected Sen. Pinto.
“I just thought he was a transient,” Aragon said.
In the Legislature, Pinto advocated for education reform and anti-poverty programs. Receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2016, Pinto recalled going hungry at times as a child while his parents juggled odd jobs and said the experience influenced his work on issues of homelessness as a lawmaker.
Every year, Pinto would sing on the Senate floor the “Potato Song” — a Navajo song about a potato, planted in the spring and visited in the summer until it is harvested. Fellow senators, staff and aides clapped along to Pinto’s rendition.
Lenore Naranjo, the Senate’s chief clerk, says Pinto taught her bits of Navajo language over the decades.
“A beautiful man is all I can say,” Naranjo said.
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Medicine Treats Fatal Genetic Disease — for $2M
U.S. regulators have approved the most expensive medicine ever, for a rare disorder that destroys a baby’s muscle control and kills nearly all of those with the most common type of the disease within a couple of years.
The treatment is priced at $2.125 million. Out-of-pocket costs for patients will vary based on insurance coverage.
The medicine, sold by the Swiss drugmaker Novartis, is a gene therapy that treats an inherited condition called spinal muscular atrophy. The treatment targets a defective gene that weakens a child’s muscles so dramatically that they become unable to move, and eventually unable to swallow or breathe. It strikes about 400 babies born in the U.S. each year.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the treatment, called Zolgensma, for all children under age 2 who are confirmed by a genetic test to have any of the three types of the disease. The therapy is a one-time infusion that takes about an hour.
Novartis said it will let insurers make payments over five years, at $425,000 per year, and will give partial rebates if the treatment doesn’t work.
The one other medicine for the disease approved in the U.S. is a drug called Spinraza. Instead of a one-time treatment, it must be given every four months. Biogen, Spinraza’s maker, charges a list price of $750,000 for the first year and then $350,000 per year after that.
‘Dramatically transforms’ lives
The independent nonprofit group Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which rates the value of expensive new medicines, calculated that the price of the new gene therapy is justifiable at a cost of $1.2 million to $2.1 million because it “dramatically transforms the lives of families affected by this devastating disease.”
ICER’s president, Dr. Steven D. Pearson, called the treatment’s price “a positive outcome for patients and the entire health system.”
The defective gene that causes spinal muscular atrophy prevents the body from making enough of a protein that allows nerves that control movement to work normally. The nerves die off without the protein.
In the most common type, which is also the most severe, at least 90% of patients die by age 2, and any still alive need a ventilator to breathe. Children with less-severe types become disabled more slowly and can live for up to a couple decades.
Zolgensma works by supplying a healthy copy of the faulty gene, which allows nerve cells to then start producing the needed protein. That halts deterioration of the nerve cells and allows the baby to develop more normally.
In patient testing, babies with the most severe form of the disease who got Zolgensma within 6 months of birth had limited muscle problems. Those who got the treatment earliest did best.
Babies given Zolgensma after six months stopped losing muscle control, but the medicine can’t reverse damage already done.
Success story
Evelyn Villarreal was one of the first children treated, at eight weeks. Her family, from Centreville, Va., had lost their first child to spinal muscular atrophy at 15 months. Two years later when Evelyn was born a test showed she also had the disease, so the family enrolled her in the gene therapy study at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Evelyn is now 4½ years old and showing no muscle problems other than minor trouble standing up, said her mother, Elena Villarreal. She has been feeding herself for a long time, she draws and speaks well, and will be starting kindergarten in the fall.
She's very active and goes to the playground a lot,'' said Elena Villarreal.She’s walking and even jumping.”
It is too early to know how long the benefit of the treatment lasts, but doctors’ hopes are rising that they could last a lifetime, according to Dr. Jerry Mendell, a neurologist at Nationwide Children’s. Mendell led one of the early patient studies and is Evelyn’s doctor.
“It’s beginning to look that way,” he said, because a few children treated who are now 4 or 5 still have no symptoms.
Early diagnosis is crucial, so Novartis has been working with states to get genetic testing for newborns required at birth. It expects most states will have that requirement by next year.
The FDA said side effects included vomiting and potential liver damage, so patients must be monitored for the first few months after treatment.
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SpaceX Launches First Satellites for Its Internet Service
A SpaceX rocket has launched 60 satellites into orbit, which will be used to provide internet service from space.
The rocket was launched Thursday night from Cape Canaveral in the southeastern U.S. state of Florida.
It had been originally scheduled to launch last week, but was postponed because of high winds over the Cape and the need for a software update.
The Starlink internet service will go into service only after hundreds more satellites are launched into orbit and activated.
SpaceX is the private rocket company of Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk.
Musk said he saw Thursday’s launch as “a key stepping stone on the way towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon.”
your ad hereStudents Worldwide Protest Inaction on Climate Change
Thousands of school students in Australia and New Zealand took to the streets Friday, initiating an international day of protests against the lack of action against climate change.
Organizers expect that more than a million young people in at least 120 counties will participate in protests.
Demonstrators are demanding that politicians and business leaders take swift measures to slow global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, which are damaging planet Earth.
The school protesters in Frankfurt, Germany, marched on the headquarters of the European Central Bank (ECB) to demand it stop financing the fossil fuel industry.
According to environmental scientists, greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels have caused droughts and heatwaves, the melting of glaciers, rising sea levels and devastating floods.
The worldwide protests are inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish activist who began a single-handed climate protest outside the Swedish parliament in August. Since then, her school strike movement “Fridays for Future” has grown exponentially.
Global carbon emissions reached a record high last year, despite warnings from the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October that gas emissions must be curbed over the next 12 years to stabilize the climate.
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Silicon Valley Carefully Navigates US-China High Tech Cold War
Silicon Valley has long been a power center of American innovation. Now that high-tech is also becoming a focus of tensions between the U.S. and China, companies based here are trying to understand how they fit in. VOA’s Michelle Quinn speaks with the head of the U.S. Defense Department’s local outpost who sees the tech industry as key to U.S. national security.
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Anacondas Born to ‘Virgin Mother’ at Boston Aquarium
Anna, a female green anaconda that has lived most of her life in an all-female enclosure at the New England Aquarium, has given birth.
The anaconda produced 18 snakes in early January. A DNA test has confirmed that the births were a result of a nonsexual reproduction process known as parthenogenesis, or “virgin birth,” according to the aquarium.
Parthenogenesis commonly occurs in the plant world and among animals without a backbone, but is rare among vertebrates. The process has been documented only among lizards, birds, sharks and snakes.
The phenomenon involving Anna is the second known confirmed case of parthenogenesis for a green anaconda. The first was at a British zoo in 2014.
Only two of Anna’s 18 offspring have survived.
Aquarium staff said the young snakes are clones of their mother. Limited genetic sequencing shows complete matches on all the sites tested.
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Scientists: Chile’s Southern Patagonia Ice Field Ruptured by Climate Change
Chile’s 12,000 square kilometer (4,633 square mile) Southern Patagonia Ice Field split in two and is likely to continue to fracture amid climate change, according to a team of Chilean scientists who were in the region in March.
Gino Casassa, chief of the Snow and Glacier Division of Chile’s DGA water authority, told Reuters increasing temperatures along the Andes Mountains in southern Chile and Argentina have meant less snow and ice to replenish the region’s abundant glaciers.
“What occurred is a fracture as the ice has retreated, Casassa said.
The chunk of ice that split off from the main glacier was estimated at 208 square kilometers (80.3 square miles), a relatively small part of the ice field.
But Casassa said it may be a sign of things to come.
The ice field, he said, is now “split in two, and we’ll likely discover further divisions to the south,” he said.
Two icebergs broke off the Grey Glacier in southern Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park earlier this year, adding to fears that such ruptures are becoming more frequent.
your ad hereEast Africa Closer to Banning Hydroquinone Skin-Lightening Products
East African countries are set to ban skin-lightening products that contain hydroquinone, a medical agent linked to health problems when used in high concentrations. The East African Legislative Assembly last week passed a resolution calling for a region-wide ban on the manufacturing and importation of products containing hydroquinone.
At a beauty parlor in Arusha, 52-year-old Rose Mselle has been using skin-bleaching products since she was a teenager. She says women like her want to be beautiful
“And in the process of looking for beauty, or for our skin color to shine, we use things that we shouldn’t,” she added.
At a nearby market, 32-year-old clothing vendor Janet Jonijosefu used skin-lightening products that contain hydroquinone, a medical agent used to treat dark spots, for years. She stopped after her skin became fragile.
She said the beauty products containing hydroquinone badly affected her skin. She started developing patches on her face. She went to the doctor and was advised to stop using products containing hydroquinone and instead use aloe vera.
Skin-lightening products often use high concentrations of hydroquinone, which can cause skin problems or become toxic when mixed with other bleaching chemicals.
Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa ban or regulate the agent in cosmetics. Tanzania bars imports.
The East African Legislative Assembly last week passed a resolution on a region-wide ban of hydroquinone’s manufacture and importation.
Suzan Nakawuki, a member of the regional assembly from Uganda, noted that hydroquinone is not only used by women but also men.
“We have seen men bleaching seriously even more than women,” she said. “But it’s becoming a problem. If we don’t regulate it, it is going to become very problematic.”
When used medically, hydroquinone can be an effective treatment for skin discoloration. Some East African lawmakers spoke out against a blanket ban.
Aden Abdikadir, a lawmaker from Kenya, said he is concerned a blanket ban will cause “serious trade disruption” for cosmetics.
If signed by heads of state, the ban becomes law in all six East African Community states, which include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
Critics point out bans on hydroquinone have failed to stop smuggled products from being sold openly. Cosmetics labeled as having hydroquinone are on display at shops in Arusha.
If bans are not backed by enforcement, they will have little effect on the use of the high demand skin-lightening products, despite the risk to health.
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Mass Cleanup of Italian Beaches Planned for Weekend
Every year, 8 million tons of waste suffocate beaches and sea beds, says Italy’s environment league, Legambiente. Its Beach Litter report issued this week revealed that more than 80 percent of the waste found on 93 beaches was plastic.
A mass cleanup is planned next weekend, involving thousands of volunteers on 250 beaches and coastal sites. Legambiente, which organized the effort, also urged the government to approve the Salvamare (Save Our Seas) bill that would allow fishermen to bring to shore any plastic that ends up in their nets, without having to pay for disposal costs.
Greenpeace Italy sounded its alarm this week when a young sperm whale washed ashore on a Sicilian beach with plastic in its stomach. Giorgia Monti, campaign manager for Greenpeace, said five sperm whales had beached in the last five months in Italy. She could not confirm whether plastic was the cause of the death of the last whale found, but said it was very likely.
“The sea is sending us a cry of alarm, a desperate SOS,” Monti said.
Later this month, Greenpeace is launching an effort to monitor plastic pollution levels at sea, with a focus on the west coast of Italy.
To stem the tide of plastic waste, initiatives have been spearheaded across Italy. Among new technology to combat pollution in many Italian ports are filters called sea-bins, which are active 24 hours and able to capture more than 1.5 kilograms of plastic daily.
While campaigners say much more needs to be done, some tourist resorts have banned the use of non-recyclable plastic and fine violators.
your ad hereCricket Fans in Pakistan Turn to Night Matches in Ramadan
During Ramadan, when many in Muslim-majority Pakistan do not eat or drink during the day, sports enthusiasts turn to night games. For years, amateur cricketers in the capital, Islamabad, used empty roads or local play grounds — any open space with lights — to fulfill their passion. VOA’s Ayesha Tanzeem shows how informal tournaments are flourishing.
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Belgian Monks, Israeli Researchers Tackle Ancient Beer-Brewing Traditions
A Belgian abbey is reviving its centuries-old tradition of beer-making after 220 years. The monks at Grimbergen Abbey are using ancient recipes to offer specialty beers in their new microbrewery. Meanwhile, researchers in Israel have made beer with yeast from jars that are thousands of years old. Beer is one of the oldest beverages, but producers are making new and attractive brews. As VOA Zlatica Hoke reports, there is a growing interest in traditional beers and the history of brewing.
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South African Vet Pioneering Medicine for Africa’s Endangered Pangolins
Veterinarian Dr. Karin Lourens has become known as Africa’s “pangolin doctor” for leading medical efforts to help the scaly anteaters rescued from the illegal wildlife trade to recover. Her pioneering tube-feeding and blood testing is helping to improve her endangered patients’ survival rate. Marize de Klerk reports for VOA from Johannesburg.
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What Baby Names Say About America
“Emma” rules the West Coast, while “Liam” reigns supreme in the American Midwest.
In the southeastern part of the United States, parents prefer the name “William” for boys and “Ava” for girls, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration, which compiled a list of 2018’s most popular baby names.
At the top of the list nationwide are “Liam” for boys (for the second year) and “Emma” for girls (continuing a 5-year streak). The names “Noah” and “Olivia” come in second.
While naming a child might feel like one of the most personal decisions a person can make, that choice is often heavily influenced by outside forces.
“Names say more about the parents than the kids,” Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told VOA in an email. “How unique parents want to be, where in the country they were when the child was born, and what influences around them shape their lives.”
Today’s digital media-saturated world means new parents are exposed to a much broader range of potential baby names than ever before. They might be influenced by celebrities or characters from movies and television shows.
For example, the name “Arya,” from a beloved character on the “Game of Thrones” television series, ranked 119th on the list, well ahead of traditional names like “Angela” (264), “Jennifer” (345) and “Alexis” (179).
“Khaleesi,” another iconic character from the hit show, was the 549th most popular name for newborn girls, beating names like “Lisa” (891), “Christine” (926) and “Anne” (599).
“Increasingly, parents may feel that they want to — and are able to — make their own choices about forenames for their children in an expression of their sense of their own individuality and the desire to endow a distinctive and unique individuality in their children as they grow up,” sociologist Jane Pilcher, an associate professor at Nottingham Trent University in England, told VOA via email.
She refers to names as “workhorses” because they can reveal significant information about a person. But that can also have a downside.
“A forename can tell us about a person’s sex and gender, ethnicity and nationality, social class and cohort,” Pilcher says. “These social identities, unfortunately, are each linked to discrimination and inequality. So, a forename can very much impact upon a person’s experiences and opportunities.”
A 2012 study found that when science faculty from research universities were given identical applications for a laboratory manager position, they rated candidates named “John” more highly than candidates named “Jennifer.”
A person’s name often reflects their culture, and is a marker of when and where they lived, and of the prevailing social trends at the time of their birth.
Berger found that names starting with “K” became more popular after Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic damage in New Orleans in 2005. Parents heard the name on the news so often, that its sounds or syllables became more familiar and therefore more appealing.
“Names are more likely to become popular when other, similar names have been popular recently. So, if ‘Katy’ and ‘Katherine’ have been popular, other names that start with a hard ‘K’ like ‘Kevin’ are more likely to take off,” says Berger. “Hearing a name more often makes people like it more, but if something is too popular, people avoid it.”
So, ultimately parents look for the comfort of familiarity, while also searching for a name that stands out.
American-born Meghan Markle and her husband, Prince Harry, recently named their son Archie, a name which ranked 992nd in the U.S. in 2018. It remains to be seen if that royal seal of approval will influence Archie’s U.S. popularity in 2019.
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UK, Japan Mobile Operators Suspend Huawei 5G Phone Launches
British and Japanese mobile phone companies said Wednesday they’re putting on hold plans to sell new devices from Huawei, in the latest fallout from U.S. tech restrictions aimed at the Chinese company.
Britain’s EE and Vodafone and Japan’s KDDI and Y! Mobile said they are pausing the launch of Huawei smartphones, including some that can be used on next generation mobile networks, amid uncertainty about devices from the world’s No. 2 smartphone maker.
The U.S. government last week restricted technology sales to Chinese telecom gear suppliers because of alleged security risks, though telecom carriers got a 90-day grace period to let them find other suppliers. The sales ban is part of a broader trade war between Washington and Beijing.
British mobile chip designer Arm said separately it was complying with the U.S. rules, after the BBC reported it was suspending business with Huawei — a move that could hobble the Chinese tech company’s ability to produce chips for new devices.
Vodafone said in a statement that it’s “pausing pre-orders” for the Mate 20X, Huawei’s first phone for 5G networks, as “a temporary measure while uncertainty exists regarding new Huawei 5G devices.”
EE CEO Marc Allera said sales would not resume until it gets “the information and confidence and the long-term security” that customers will be supported over the device’s lifetime. The company was also set to sell the Mate 20X followed by Huawei’s Mate X folding handset.
EE said it’s working with Huawei and Google, which makes the Android mobile operating systems to make sure it “can carry out the right level of testing and quality assurance.”
The Trump administration’s order last week cuts Huawei’s access to American chips and Google, which makes the Android operating system and services for its smartphones.
Y! Mobile, owned by Japanese technology company Softbank, said sales of the Huawei P30 lite, set for May 24, have been delayed, and advance orders were canceled.
SoftBank spokesman Hiroyuki Mizukami said the company wants its “customers to feel safe using our products.”
KDDI also indefinitely delayed its sales, initially set for late May.
It’s unclear when, or if, the companies will lift the sales freezes.
British carriers plan this year to roll out 5G services while Japan will follow in 2020. Fifth generation mobile networks will enable superfast downloads and pave the way for new innovations like connected cars and remote medicine.
Arm, which is also owned by Softbank and designs mobile microprocessors that power most of the world’s smartphones and tablets, said it “is complying with all of the latest regulations set forth by the U.S. government.”
The company told employees to halt all business deals with Huawei, the BBC reported, citing a company memo that said its designs contained “U.S. origin technology.”
In response to the report on Arm, Huawei said it recognizes that some of its partners are under pressure as a result of “politically motivated decisions” but that it’s “confident this regrettable situation can be resolved.”
your ad hereKenyan Author, LGBT Activist Binyavanga Wainaina Dies at 48
One of Africa’s best-known authors and gay rights activists, Binyavanga Wainaina, has died at age 48, a colleague and friend said Wednesday.
The Kenyan author died Tuesday night in Nairobi after an illness, Tom Maliti, the chairman of the Kwani Trust which Wainaina founded, told The Associated Press.
Wainaina, who won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, was a key figure in the artistic community who promoted local authors. Friends and supporters in an outpouring of tributes on Wednesday shared his work including his biting essay “How to Write About Africa.”
“Always use the word Africa' orDarkness’ or Safari' in your title," it began. "Subtitles may include the wordsZanzibar’, Masai',Zulu’, Zambezi',Congo’, Nile',Big’, Sky',Shadow’, Drum',Sun’ or `Bygone’,” Wainaina advised in the piece.
It quickly became one of Granta magazine’s best-loved essays, the magazine said Wednesday. “As a student, he sent the magazine a strongly worded letter condemning our 1994 Africa issue,” the magazine tweeted on Wednesday. “His ironic critique was so incisive and true that we published it.” He became a frequent contributor.
Wainaina also helped to create tolerance for the LGBT community by coming out publicly in 2014 as gay in Kenya, a country where laws still criminalize homosexual behavior. He also revealed he was HIV-positive. He published a painfully honest essay online to mark his 43rd birthday.
He said he came out to help preserve his dignity.
“All people have dignity. There’s nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit,” he said, in an interview with The Associated Press in January 2014. “There is nobody who is a beast or an animal, right? Everyone, we, we homosexuals, are people and we need our oxygen to breathe.”
In the interview, Wainaina, who dyed his hair in rainbow colors, lashed out at laws against homosexuality in Nigeria and Uganda. He also criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, who promoted legislation banning “gay propaganda” aimed at youth.
“I can’t sleep at night because there are people who I may know or who I don’t even know … who may be dying or being beaten or being tortured right now in a Nigerian cell or three weeks ago in a Ugandan one,” he said.
After he came out, Time magazine in 2014 named him one of the “100 most influential people.” Fellow author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote there that Wainaina “demystified and humanized homosexuality,” saying he decided to speak openly after the death of a friend: “He felt an obligation to chip away at the shame that made people like his friend die in silence.”
Wainaina’s death comes just days before a long-awaited court ruling in Kenya on Friday on whether to abolish laws that criminalize homosexual behavior. Kenyan laws, like in many other African countries that outlaw same-sex relations, are vestiges of British colonial rule.
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Seeking Energy Independence, Palestinians Open Solar Plant
Palestinian officials say they have inaugurated their first solar panel plant as part of a plan to reduce their dependence on Israeli power sources.
Mohammed Mustafa, head of the government’s investment fund, says that Tuesday’s plant opening in the ancient West Bank city of Jericho is one of four planned plants. One has been donated from China.
He says the Palestinians rely almost entirely on power imported from Israel and the new plants are part of a long-term project to reduce that by 50% over the next decade. He says the four solar panel stations should cover about 30% of Palestinian power consumption.
Mustafa says the West Bank consumes about $700 million a year in electricity.
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Research on Children’s Health Risks in Doubt Over EPA funds
Long-running research projects credited with pivotal discoveries about the harm that pesticides, air pollution and other hazards pose to children are in jeopardy or shutting down because the Environmental Protection Agency will not commit to their continued funding, researchers say.
The projects being targeted make up a more than $300 million, federally funded program that over the past two decades has exposed dangers to fetuses and children. Those findings have often led to increased pressure on the EPA for tighter regulations.
Children’s health researchers and environmental groups accuse the EPA of trying to squelch scientific studies that the agency views as running counter to the Trump administration’s mission of easing regulations and promoting business.
“A lot of the centers, including mine, have identified a lot of chemicals that are associated with diseases in children,” said Catherine Metayer, an epidemiologist who directs research into children’s leukemia at University of California at Berkeley through the federal program.
The EPA awarded smaller than average funding for the research grants for this year, asked Congress to cut funding for it from its budget, and has refused to commit to future funding for the program.
“The EPA anticipates future funding opportunities that support EPA’s high priority research topics, including children’s health research,” spokesman James Hewitt said, while declining to answer questions on the future for the national research projects.
Children’s centers at universities around the country typically get joint funding from the EPA and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in three- and five-year packages, with most packages running out in 2018 and 2019. With no word on future funding, researchers overall “have been kind of scrambling to find a way to continue that work which is so important,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the children’s center at the University of California at San Francisco.
Woodruff’s federally funded work includes looking at how flame-retardant chemicals and PFAS compounds – a kind of stain-resistant, nonstick industrial compound – affect the placenta during pregnancy. The Trump EPA has come under increasing pressure from states to regulate PFAS as it shows up in more water supplies around the country.
With no news from the EPA on any more funding in the future, “we’ve been winding down for about a year” on work funded through those grants, Woodruff said.
On Tuesday, a banner across a website home page for the overall children’s research declared “EPA will no longer fund children’s health research.”
The EPA and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences have jointly funded the children’s environmental health research since 1997, through grants to at least two dozen children’s environmental research centers around the country. The annual grants averaged $15 million through 2017. In the current fiscal year, the EPA contributed $1.6 million, agency spokeswoman Maggie Sauerhage said.
The research often involves enrolling women while they are still pregnant and then following their children for years, to study environmental exposures and their effects as children grow, said Barbara Morrissey, a toxicologist and chairwoman of the EPA’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee.
The long-term projects often produce much stronger results overall than one-off studies do, Morrissey said.
Each children’s center funded by the grants also works to spread information about environmental threats to local health workers and to families.
The institute is under the National Institutes of Health, which has numerous other children’s environmental research studies underway but said with the EPA joint program left hanging, it was considering a new program to put lessons learned about pediatric risks into practice in communities.
EPA’s funding for the grants comes from the agency’s Science To Achieve Results, or STAR, program for research into environmental threats.
The Trump administration 2020 budget request sought to eliminate funding for the STAR grants, and sought a nearly one-third cut in the EPA’s budget overall.
A House Appropriations subcommittee released its own budget proposal Tuesday to restore funding for the STAR grants and boost the agency’s overall budget from last year by 8%, rejecting the administration’s requests for cuts.
EPA spokespeople did not respond when asked why the EPA had asked Congress to end funding for the grant program, and whether the agency would commit to continuing the children’s health research if Congress overrides the EPA and restores funding for the grants, as expected.
The science journal Nature first reported funding concerns for the program.
In a statement Tuesday, Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group said “crippling research to protect children’s health, while bowing to the agenda of the chemical industry, is the calling card of the EPA in the Trump administration.”
Even if the administration restores funding to previous levels, for one year or several years, the time span of grant cycles and grant-funded work means that uncertainty over continued federal support is making the intended multiyear research untenable, researchers and program supporters said.
“The whole point of these children’s centers is to be following children over time,” Morrissey, the chairwoman of the advisory committee to the EPA, said. “That’s why it’s so high-quality.”
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Jamie Oliver’s British Restaurant Chain Collapses
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s restaurant chain in Britain has filed for bankruptcy protection, closing 22 of its 25 eateries and leaving some 1,000 people out of work.
The remaining outlets, two Jamie’s Italian restaurants and a Jamie’s Diner at Gatwick Airport outside London, will stay open, the financial firm KPMG, which will oversee the process, said in a statement Tuesday.
Oliver said on Twitter he was “devastated that our much-loved UK restaurants have gone into administration,” a form of bankruptcy protection, and thanked people “who have put their hearts and souls into this business over the years.”
Oliver gained fame as “The Naked Chef” on television, which aired in dozens of countries, after premiering in Britain some 20 years ago. The television success was followed by a number of cookbooks. The restaurant chain included Jamie’s Italian, Jamie Oliver’s Diner and Barbecoa steakhouses.
Five branches of the Australian arm of Jamie’s Italian have also been sold and another put into administration.
Oliver’s restaurants started to lose revenue in 2016. Business got so bad for the restaurant group that Oliver injected millions of dollars of his own money in an effort to turn the tide.
“The current trading environment for companies across the casual dining sector is as tough as I’ve ever seen,” Will Wright, an administrator at KPMG, said in a statement. “The directors at Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group have worked tirelessly to stabilize the business against a backdrop of rising costs and brittle consumer confidence.”
Other British chains have also had to close outlets. Earlier this year, cafe chain Patisserie Valerie was forced to close 70 outlets, at the cost of 920 jobs.
Celebrity chefs in the U.S. have also fallen on hard times. Thomas Keller closed Bouchon in Beverly Hills in 2017, saying it couldn’t remain profitable. That same year, Guy Fieri closed Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in New York’s Times Square and Daniel Boulud closed DBGB Kitchen and Bar in New York, saying it didn’t get enough business during the week.
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On World Bee Day, Worrying Developments for the World’s Pollinators
As the world marks Bee Day this week (May 20), it’s a good opportunity to check in on these industrious insects that are responsible for about 80 percent of all pollination worldwide. But something is wrong with the world’s bees and our existence might depend on figuring out why. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A New Robot Promises to Meet Your Internet Needs, Handsfree, at Home
A new personal home robot follows you around your home, navigating past obstacles, so you can multitask while staying connected. Deana Mitchell takes a tour.
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Germany Hands Israel Thousands of Kafka Confidant’s Papers
German authorities on Tuesday handed over to Israel some 5,000 documents kept by a confidant of Franz Kafka, a trove whose plight could have been plucked from one of the author’s surreal stories.
The papers returned include a postcard from Kafka from 1910 and personal documents kept by Max Brod, which experts say provide a window into Europe’s literary and cultural scene in the early 20th century.
They are among some 40,000 documents, including manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks and other writings that once belonged to Brod, which are being brought together again in Israel’s National Library. They had ended up in bank vaults in Switzerland and Tel Aviv, a Tel Aviv apartment and in a storage facility in Wiesbaden, Germany, where police found them tucked among forged Russian avant-garde artworks.
`I think he [Kafka] would really be amused,” said National Library archivist and humanities collection curator Stefan Litt, who helped identify the papers recovered in Germany. “He couldn’t invent by himself a better plot.”
The documents recovered in Wiesbaden have little to do with Kafka himself, but make the Brod collection complete and shine a light on Brod and his circle, which included Kafka and other writers, Litt said.
“This is an important chapter in Max Brod’s estate,” Litt said. “And it’s always good for researchers to have as complete a picture as possible.”
Kafka, a Bohemian Jew from Prague who lived for a while in Berlin, was close friends with Brod, himself an accomplished writer. Shortly before his untimely death at 40 of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka bequeathed his writings to Brod, reportedly telling him to burn them all unread.
Instead, Brod published much of the collection, including the novels “The Trial,” The Castle,” and “Amerika,” helping to posthumously establish Kafka as one of the great authors of the 20th century. He also brought “Kafkaesque” into the English language to describe a situation evoking a bizarre, illogical or nightmarish situation like the ones Kafka wrote about.
After the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Brod fled to escape persecution with the entire collection to what was then British-ruled Palestine.When Brod died, he left his personal secretary Esther Hoffe in charge of his literary estate and instructed her to transfer the Kafka papers to an academic institution.
Instead, she kept the documents for the next four decades and sold some, like the original manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which fetched $1.8 million at auction in 1988. She kept some of the items in a bank vault in Tel Aviv, some in Switzerland, and others at her apartment in Tel Aviv.
When she died in 2008, the collection went to her two daughters, who fought to keep it but eventually lost a battle in Israel’s Supreme Court in 2016. The court sided with the country’s National Library, whose lawyers had argued the Kafka papers were “cultural assets” that belonged to the Jewish people.
Both daughters have now died, and the documents stored in Israel have already been transferred to the National Library’s care. The documents held in Switzerland should be on their way soon after the National Library won a court case in Zurich last month, which upheld the Israeli verdict and ordered that several safe deposit boxes be opened and their contents shipped to the institution in Jerusalem.
But that left the documents in Germany, which had been stolen from Hoffe’s apartment about a decade ago.
They ended up with an Israeli dealer, who tried in 2013 to sell them to the German Literature Archive in Marbach — the same institution that bought “The Trial” manuscript at auction in 1988. The German archive instead reported the offer to Israel’s National Library, which then got authorities involved, Litt said.
The documents resurfaced at the Wiesbaden storage facility of an international forgery ring that produced and sold millions of euros [dollars] worth of forged paintings, which was taken down by German authorities that same year, Litt said. Since then, they have been stored by German authorities as Litt and others sought to confirm their provenance.
Those being returned include correspondence between Brod and his wife, and even some of his notebooks from high school, Litt said.
“There’s no doubt these materials were part of his papers,” he said.
The manuscript of “The Trial,” however, was properly purchased by the German Literature Archive in the 1988 Sotheby’s auction, and the National Library has no claim on it, he said.
“We’re happy it’s in safe hands,” Litt said.
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Playing Music to Ease Pain, Nourish Social Connections
Music has long helped people express their emotions and connect with one another. Over the years, medical studies have proved that music has many health benefits, too. They range from facilitating regular breathing and lifting mood to improving emotional function and motor control in patients. Faiza Elmasry tells us more about music therapy. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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WHO: Ebola Strategies Need Adjusting in Congo
A panel of World Health Organization experts says strategies must be strengthened to combat the worsening Ebola epidemic in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The WHO’s latest report counted 1,738 cases of Ebola in Congo, including 1,218 deaths.
Congo’s minister of health, Oly Ilungo, likened the Ebola epidemic to a multi-headed dragon. Speaking through an interpreter, he said the epidemic began in one place, Mangina, but keeps popping up elsewhere.
“Our response, therefore, needs to continually adapt itself to the situation,” said Ilungo. “We need to continually adapt and change our strategy bearing in mind lessons learned.”
He said prevention measures, surveillance, the tracing of infected people, timely treatment and safe burial practices must be maintained. At the same time, he said old tools need to be refreshed and improved.
He proposed setting up a data-driven system, which compiles all the information produced in the response effort.
“Increasingly, it manages to carry out analyses that allow us to get ahead of the problem and we can identify the danger areas where there might be a greater risk of the virus spreading and we can get ahead of the problem,” he added.
The WHO regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, finds the increasing number of new Ebola cases extremely worrying and challenging. She warned the risk of the disease spreading beyond Congo’s borders is very high.
She said the DRC’s nine neighboring countries are aware of the dangers and, with the help of the WHO, have taken many steps to prepare for that possibility.
“We have 16 Ebola-treatment centers and units having been established across the nine countries,” she said. “And, in addition over 4,500 health workers have been trained to be able to detect and manage Ebola cases.The countries have continued to engage with communities to raise their awareness in all high-risk areas.”
WHO officials are appealing for intensified international political engagement and financial support to combat Ebola. They warn the further spread of the dangerous disease would have serious social and economic regional implications and would trigger an even greater crisis.
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Vaccine Chief: Vaccine Doubts Online Spread Like Disease, Must Be Taken Down
Doubts about vaccines have spread across social media like a disease and false information that “kills people” should be taken down by the companies running digital platforms, the head of global vaccine alliance Gavi said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a U.S.-sponsored event on the sidelines of the World Health Organization’s annual assembly in Geneva, Gavi CEO Seth Berkley said there was a strong scientific consensus about the safety of vaccines.
But social media algorithms favored sensational content over scientific facts, rapidly convincing people who had never seen family members die from preventable illness.
“We have to think about it as a disease. This is a disease,” Berkley said. “This spreads at the speed of light, literally.”
WHO says poor vaccination coverage is causing measles outbreaks globally, with numbers spiking in countries that were previously almost free of the disease, including the United States.
Misinformation about vaccines, which the WHO says save two million lives annually, was not a freedom of speech issue and social media firms need to take it offline, Berkley said. “I remind people that this kills people,” he said.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said complacency, misunderstanding and misinformation were causing vaccination rates to decline globally, with tragic results.
“In my country, social media conspiracy groups confuse well-meaning parents so they hesitate to get the recommended vaccinations,” Azar said.
He rejected any criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump, who repeatedly and erroneously tweeted about links between vaccines and autism in the years before he became president.
“A study says @Autism is out of control — a 78% increase in 10 years. Stop giving monstrous combined vaccinations,” Trump tweeted in 2012.
Azar said Trump was “extremely firm” in support of vaccination.
“If you had been paying attention in the last month, you would know that the President of the United States, President Trump, was very clear and emphatic: get your shots, get your kids vaccinated, vaccines are safe,” Azar said.
Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam said health authorities needed to “up our game,” adding that she was working with Twitter, Facebook, Google and other tech companies.
“You’ve got to get into the trenches … and begin to get engaged much more on a personal and emotional level, because people don’t understand statistics and data. If you do that
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