Why Are Pandas Black and White?
Humans have always wondered why certain animals, such as tigers or pandas, have such unusual color patterns. Folklore usually explained it as a consequence of some dramatic event. But scientists say it has to do with the animal’s natural habitat, which is also the answer for panda’s black and white fur. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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American Singer-songwriter Dylan Accepts Nobel Prize
American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan accepted his Nobel Prize in literature Saturday in Stockholm, members of the Swedish Academy and local media reported.
Dylan received his Nobel diploma and medal during a small ceremony at a hotel near where he performed later Saturday, Klas Ostergren, a member of the Swedish Academy, told The Associated Press.
Academy member Horace Engdahl simply answered “yes” when asked by Swedish public broadcaster SVT whether Dylan had accepted his award.
He performed a concert later Saturday but made no reference to the Nobel award. He plans a second concert Sunday.
‘New poetic expressions’
The academy cited Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” in awarding him the 2016 Nobel. He was the first songwriter to be awarded the literature prize. Previous winners include authors Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Doris Lessing.
The American icon, 75, did not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony December 10, citing other commitments.
In a speech read on his behalf at December’s award ceremony, Dylan expressed his surprise at becoming a Nobel laureate.
“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon,” he said.
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Acclaimed Russian Poet Yevtushenko Dies in Oklahoma
Acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and denounced anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84.
Ginny Hensley, a spokeswoman for Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, confirmed Yevtushenko’s death. Roger Blais, provost at the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko was a longtime faculty member, said he was told Yevtushenko had died Saturday morning.
“He died a few minutes ago surrounded by relatives and close friends,” his widow, Maria Novikova, was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. She said he’d died peacefully in his sleep of heart failure.
Yevtushenko gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s, with poetry denouncing Josef Stalin. He gained international acclaim as a young revolutionary with “Babi Yar,” the unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union.
Heard by huge crowds
At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his works in packed soccer stadiums and arenas, including to a crowd of 200,000 in 1991 that came to listen during a failed coup attempt in Russia. He also attracted large audiences on tours of the West.
With his tall, rangy body, chiseled visage and declaratory style, he was a compelling presence on stages when reading his works.
“He’s more like a rock star than some sort of bespectacled, quiet poet,” said former University of Tulsa President Robert Donaldson, who specialized in Soviet policy during his academic years at Harvard.
Until “Babi Yar” was published, the history of the massacre was shrouded in the fog of the Cold War.
“I don’t call it political poetry, I call it human rights poetry, the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value,” Yevtushenko, who had been splitting his time between Oklahoma and Moscow, said during a 2007 interview with The Associated Press at his home in Tulsa.
Yevtushenko said he wrote the poem after visiting the site of the mass killings in Kyiv, Ukraine, and searching for something memorializing what happened there — a sign, a tombstone, some kind of historical marker — but finding nothing.
“I was so shocked. I was absolutely shocked when I saw it, that people didn’t keep a memory about it,” he said.
It took him two hours to write the poem that begins, “No monument stands over Babi Yar. A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. I am afraid.”
Native of Zima
Yevtushenko was born in the Siberian town of Zima, a name that translates to winter. He rose to prominence during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule.
His poetry was outspoken and drew on the passion for poetry that is characteristic of Russia, where poetry is more widely revered than in the West. Some considered it risky, though others said he was only a showpiece dissident whose public views never went beyond the limits of what officials would permit.
Dissident exile poet Joseph Brodsky was especially critical, saying, “He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved.” Brodsky resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member.
Donaldson invited Yevtushenko to teach at the university in 1992.
“I like very much the University of Tulsa,” Yevtushenko said in a 1995 interview with the AP. “My students are sons of ranchers, even cowboys, oil engineers. They are different people, but they are very gifted. They are closer to Mother Nature than the big city. They are more sensitive.”
He was also touched after the 1995 bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. He recalled one woman in his class who lost a relative in the blast, then commented that Russian women must have endured such suffering all their lives.
“This was the greatest compliment for me,” he said.
Blais, the university provost, said Yevtushenko remained an active professor at the time of his death. His poetry classes were perennially popular and featured football players and teenagers from small towns reading from the stage.
“He had a hard time giving bad grades to students because he liked the students so much,” Blais said.
Lauded in Russia
Yevtushenko’s death inspired tributes from his homeland.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on the Russian social media site Vkontakte: “He knew how to find the key to the souls of people, to find surprisingly accurate words that were in harmony with many.”
A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said the poet’s legacy would remain “part of Russian culture.”
Natalia Solzhenitsyna, widow of the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said on Russian state television that Yevtushenko “lived by his own formula.”
“A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” she said. “And he really was more than a poet — he was a citizen with a pronounced civic position.”
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Researchers Study Early Development Through Lab-Grown Embryos
Scientists working at Cambridge University in England have coaxed a collection of mouse stem cells to turn into a mouse embryo. This breakthrough could change the way scientists study early development and how it can go wrong early in a pregnancy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Argonne Lab Breakthrough Could Revolutionize Oil Spill Cleanup
If you were a casual observer watching Argonne National Laboratory scientist Seth Darling work, it would be easy to miss the low-tech but groundbreaking invention he’s concocted in his brightly lit workspace.
It doesn’t have wires or circuitry, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t do much of anything. It is in fact, at least at first glance, simply a sponge.
“It looks real simple when you demonstrate it, right?” Darling explained as he lowered the small, dark-colored foam sponges into a bowl of water mixed with blue oil. “I mean, you just stick it down there and it works. But behind that is a lot of work.”
Darling explains that what we can see with the human eye — these dark-colored pieces of foam, or sponges — isn’t the major breakthrough.
It’s what’s in, and on, the sponges that is revolutionary.
“After we do our treatment to it, and we create this Oleo Sponge, you put it on there and it’s got a voracious appetite for oil. It just soaks that oil right up,” he said.
Cleaning, saving oil
While the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago is best known for its contributions to nuclear energy development, it is also an incubator for technological innovation and discovery, the very environment where Darling created the Oleo Sponge.
“So we’ve been working on this Oleo Sponge project for almost two years,” Darling told VOA. “The underlying technology is something that we’ve been working on for much longer.”
He explains the treatment that gives the Oleo Sponge that “voracious appetite” is the real innovation developed at Argonne — something Darling and his associates call Sequential Infiltration Synthesis, or SIS.
“It was just a new way to make materials,” Darling said.
SIS works at the nano level. When hard metal oxide atoms “with complicated nanostructures” are infused throughout the fibers of the foam, it gives it the extremely effective quality of allowing the foam to bind with the oil in the water, essentially separating the two liquids.
The breakthrough could dramatically change cleanup of oil spills, particularly the more difficult task of retrieving oil below the surface of the water.
“Once it all goes down below the surface of the water and you have clouds of droplets under the surface, I’m not aware of any technology today that can actually clean those up. And Oleo Sponge can,” Darling said.
But the Oleo Sponge doesn’t just clean up the oil — it saves it.
Oil spilled into water is usually burned off or unusable after cleanup efforts, but the Oleo Sponge can collect, separate and deposit the oil for further use.
Flood of interest
The sponge itself can also be re-used and recycled, all qualities that have brought a flood of interest to Argonne’s doors.
“It’s a wide variety of companies that are interested in it,” said Hemant Bhimnathwala, with Argonne Laboratory’s Business Development Group. “We’ve got inquiries from about 100-plus companies in the last few days … who want to be partners in a slew of things from manufacturing the foam to distribution.”
While oil spill cleanup in bodies of water is the most clearly identifiable use for the Oleo Sponge, the SIS technology behind it could offer breakthroughs in a variety of other ways, yet to be discovered.
“This application is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bhimnathwala said.
It is an iceberg Seth Darling and other scientists at Argonne are still delving into, while the Oleo Sponge continues to make its journey into the wider market — and hopefully the world’s bodies of water — in the coming years.
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For Crowell, Music a Commitment That Deepened With Time
Rodney Crowell’s tender lyrics about a woman with “hair two shades of foxtail red” in a song that features ex-wife Rosanne Cash makes it an easy leap to assume that he’s singing about her. It’s not like the thought didn’t cross her mind.
“If I’m totally honest,” she said. “Yeah, a little bit.”
But Crowell, whose new album “Close Ties” is sure to be one of the year’s cornerstone releases in the Americana genre, insists he had others in mind while writing “It Ain’t Over Yet.” He was thinking about old friends Susanna and Guy Clark, who both died in recent years.
That’s fortunate, since he sings: “Takes the right kind of woman to help you put it all in place. It only happened once in my life, but man you should have seen.” It might have made for awkward dinner conversation with Crowell’s current wife, Claudia Church.
“Rosanne was a wonderful period in my life,” Crowell said, “but the ‘one’ woman is the one I’m with now.”
Susanna Clark was a straight-talking muse for many aspiring Nashville songwriters in the 1970s who figured if she liked one of their songs, they must be on to something, Crowell explained.
Crowell understands why people might think he was talking about Cash, who appears on record with her for only the second time since their 12-year marriage broke up in 1992 (he sang backup on a song on her most recent album). They were once Country music’s First Couple, taking turns at the top of the charts, and for both their artistry has deepened as the spotlight moved on.
They’re both also of the school that appreciate listeners who can take their own meanings from songs.
Another song on “Close Ties,” out Friday, was actually written with Cash in mind. More specifically, “Forgive Me Annabelle” is about Crowell’s own actions during their breakup. After an inevitably bitter period, they’re friends now.
“I passed through a period where I simply did not like myself,” Crowell said. “If you don’t like yourself, you’re not liking anybody else. You’re pretty miserable. And that’s what the narrator is apologizing for. It’s saying, ‘Forgive me for who I was then.’ But, of course, I was already forgiven.”
Crowell recalls pawing through some albums at home and coming upon his own “Diamonds and Dirt” from 1988, which yielded five No. 1 Country singles. He and his wife laughed at the mullet-haired guy on the cover.
“I wanted to be like Dwight Yoakam,” he said. “He definitely owned ‘cool’ at that moment.”
He’s fueled by a “look back with bemusement” attitude now. After taking five years off at the turn of the century, Crowell returned as a focused writer, digging deep into his heart and leaving few wasted words. He learned to take his art more seriously than himself. In “I Don’t Care Anymore” he sings: “All those party dolls and favors that I savored from day one add up to next to nothing after all is said and done.”
The funny “Nashville 1972” recalls his first meeting, at age 22, with Willie Nelson. At a party, of course. “There was hippies and reefer and God knows what all, I was drinking pretty hard,” he sings. “I played him this shitty song I wrote and puked out in the yard.”
Like most people his age, 66, Crowell is affected by loved ones lost — the Clarks, Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen — and it’s reflected in his music. He’s also recently rewritten some of his old songs, notably “Shame on the Moon,” a 1982 hit for Bob Seger, where he wanted another crack at a verse he didn’t like.
“He’s actually writing the best songs of his life after 45 years, or however long it is,” Cash said. “His level of commitment has deepened, and as his level of commitment has deepened, his songs have gotten better. That’s very inspiring. He’s not a dilettante. He’s not just out there showing up at the next gig. He’s completely devoted to his work and his songwriting and it shows.
“As Leonard Cohen said, he’s completely employed in the tower of song.”
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Latin Singer Maluma Eyes English Music Crossover With Upcoming Album
Already one of the biggest names in Latin music, Colombian pop star Maluma is hoping to cross over to a wider audience with an upcoming album of Spanish and English music.
Maluma, the 23-year-old singer from Medellin, Colombia, has already collaborated with some of Latin music’s most successful cross over talents, such as Shakira and Ricky Martin.
“I’m trying to find the balance and do like, ‘Spanglish’ music or some songs in Spanish and others in English or do a translation,” Maluma told Reuters at the end of his U.S. tour in Los Angeles.
Maluma’s second album, “Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy,” was released in 2015 and became his breakout record, with hit singles “Borro Cassette” and “Sin Contrato.”
So far, his native Spanish has already garnered him a legion of fans on social media. Maluma, whose real name is Juan Luis Londono Arias, is the most-followed Latin male artist on Instagram with more than 22 million fans.
“That connection that I have with my fans is really special and every time when I have moments, when I have free time, the only thing that I think about is what I’m going to post, what I’m going to say to my fans,” he said.
“I think that’s the key to being a success right now,” he added.
It was Maluma’s social media presence that brought him to the attention of pop star Selena Gomez, whom Maluma invited to collaborate on a new song.
“I found out that she was following me and I tried to be in touch with her to make some music but we can’t do it … maybe because she’s a busy girl and me too, I’m a really busy man, and maybe next time we can do something,” he said.
Maluma’s world tour next takes him to Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.
“I have a lot of surprises in store,” Maluma teased of his upcoming shows, although he remained tight-lipped about whether any special guest stars might join him on stage.
“I like to prepare each tour in a different way. Now that I’m heading to Mexico, I’m preparing something special for my fans in Mexico.”
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Extra Portion of SpaceX Rocket Recovered from Launch, Musk Says
Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday salvaged half of the $6 million nosecone of its rocket, in what the space entrepreneur deemed an important feat in the drive to recover more of its launch hardware and cut the cost of space flights.
Shortly after the main section of SpaceX’s first recycled Falcon 9 booster landed itself on a platform in the ocean, half of the rocket’s nosecone, which protected a communications satellite during launch, splashed down via parachute nearby.
“That was the cherry on the cake,” Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, told reporters after launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Measuring 43 feet (13 meters) long and 17 feet (5 meters) in diameter, the nosecone is big enough to hold a school bus. It separates into two pieces, exposing the satellite, about 4 minutes after liftoff.
As a test, SpaceX outfitted the fairing with thrusters and a steerable parachute.
“It’s its own little spacecraft,” Musk said. “The thrusters maintain its orientation as it re-enters and then … the parachute steers it to a particular location.”
SpaceX has focused most of its efforts and more than $1 billion into developing technologies to recover the Falcon 9’s main section, which accounts for about 75 percent of the $62 million rocket. Musk’s goal is to cut the cost of spaceflight so that humanity can migrate beyond Earth.
“I hope people will start to think about it as a real goal to establish a civilization on Mars,” he said.
Landing on ‘bouncy castle’
After some debate about whether the nosecone could be recovered, Musk said he told his engineering team, “Imagine you had $6 million in cash on a pallet flying through the air that’s just going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that? Yes, you would.”
Musk envisions deploying a kind of “bouncy castle” for the fairing to land on so it can be recovered intact and reused.
The company plans up to six more flights of recycled boosters this year, including two that will strapped alongside a third, new first stage for the debut test flight of a heavy-lift rocket.
Originally slated to fly in 2013, Falcon Heavy is now expected to fly late this summer.
“At first it sounded easy: We’ll just take two first stages and use them as strap-on boosters,” Musk said. “It was actually shockingly difficult to go from single core to a triple-core vehicle.”
SpaceX also may try to land the rocket’s upper-stage section, a feat the company has never attempted. “Odds of success low, but maybe worth a shot,” Musk wrote Friday on Twitter.
Privately owned SpaceX also is developing a commercial space taxi to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a venture to send two space tourists on a trip around the moon and a Mars lander that is slated to launch in 2020.
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Zika Vaccine Trials Enter Next Phase
U.S. researchers have begun enrolling people in the next phase of testing for a vaccine to protect against Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that can cause birth defects in pregnant women.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told reporters Friday that the Zika vaccine had cleared preliminary safety hurdles and would now be tested on human volunteers to see whether it is effective.
In the study, funded by the U.S. government, researchers aim to enroll more than 2,400 healthy volunteers from areas where mosquitoes carry the Zika virus — parts of the southern United States, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Panama and Mexico.
Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the trial would begin with a small number of people testing different doses or strengths of vaccine. Once the dosage is decided, the larger part of the study could begin by June, when the volunteers will receive either the vaccine or a placebo.
Participants will be monitored for two years to see whether the vaccine protects against Zika infection.
The vaccine being tested is a new type, called a DNA vaccine. Traditionally, vaccines are made using killed or weakened viruses, which increase the recipients’ ability to fight off an active infection.
The DNA vaccine contains no actual virus, but has genes extracted from Zika viruses. Once inside the body, the genes form particles resembling Zika that cannot cause infection. If all goes well, the gene particles should induce volunteers’ immune systems to produce antibodies capable of repelling the full virus.
NIH researchers also are studying more traditional Zika vaccines, but those are not yet ready for human trials.
The DNA vaccine trial is expected to cost $100 million, but Fauci said the government was in talks with pharmaceutical companies to share the costs of the final stage of testing, in return for rights to manufacture the vaccine in the future.
Zika typically causes no symptoms or only mild ones, such as fever and body aches. If the virus infects a pregnant woman, however, it can result in birth defects in newborns, including microcephaly, which is characterized by an abnormally small head and brain, accompanied by marked developmental disorders.
Zika is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes, but it can also be transmitted via sexual contact.
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Snapchat Adds More Accessible Search Feature
Snap Inc. said Friday that its Snapchat messaging app would add an option for users to search through photos and videos that users have posted to the public.
The move came days after larger rival Facebook Inc. stepped up efforts to encourage users to take more photos and edit them with digital stickers that show the influence of Snapchat.
Snapchat will enable users to search for photos and videos known as “Snaps” posted to the “Our Story” option on the app, by creating new “Stories” using machine learning technology, the company said in a blog post.
The “Our Story” option is derived from Snap’s widely copied “Stories” feature that is a slideshow of user content that disappears after 24 hours.
“Our Story” allows users to post their Snaps as part of a larger public collection, which users will be able to search through with the latest update.
For instance, users can use the search feature to find “Snaps” related to events such as local basketball games and topics such as puppies.
The search feature, which was rolled out in some cities Friday, is an addition to curated “Stories,” where public “Snaps” about major events like Wimbledon or the Coachella music festival already appear.
Snapchat popularized the sharing of digitally decorated photographs on social media, especially among teenagers, but faces intense competition from larger Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.
Users will now be able to search for over 1 million “Stories” on Snapchat, Snap said, making the app more accessible.
Snap’s shares were up 1.5 percent in afternoon trading, while Facebook’s stock was down marginally.
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Georgian Entrepreneurs Look to Silicon Valley for Funding
Boris Kiknadze, chief executive of Pawwwn, took a deep breath as he looked out to the crowd of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and began his pitch.
With just 10 minutes to speak, Kiknadze rapidly described his business idea — Pawwwn, an online payment and management system to make transactions easier for pawnshop owners and their customers. The pain point for pawn shops is payment. Pawwwn takes away that pain, he said.
For months, Kiknadze and his co-founder had developed Pawwwn in his home country of Georgia before getting on a plane for San Francisco. Since the firm launched in March, Kiknadze has had 20 customers trying out the service.
But with 1,400 pawnshops in Georgia and 12,000 more in the U.S., Kiknadze saw a big opportunity. And to achieve that, he needs cash — $1 million, which he said he would use to launch Pawwwn in the U.S.
Competing for investors
Kiknadze is part of Startup Georgia, a project administered by Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency, that connects U.S. experts and investors with startups in Georgia.
More than 250 entrepreneurs tried out in Georgia to qualify for a week of training in Tbilisi, the nation’s capital. Among those 50 who participated in the training, 20 were selected for seed funding and three months of additional training with a Silicon Valley expert with weekly videoconferencing meetings.
Of those, eight were chosen to travel to the U.S. for a boot camp and to pitch to investors directly.
Georgia, a country of fewer than 4 million people, is looking to the success of small countries, such as Estonia and Israel, to pitch itself as a burgeoning tech hub, said Mark Iwanowski, founder and president of Global Visions-Silicon Valley, which provided the U.S. support for the program.
For U.S. investors, typically reluctant to invest beyond U.S. tech hubs, there is an opportunity to get more value in overseas companies, where labor costs are lower, he said. To attract these investors, foreign companies need to incorporate in the U.S. and set up a team here.
Over the past week in Silicon Valley, the Georgian entrepreneurs received one-on-one mentorship training as they refined their pitches. They heard from lawyers on protecting intellectual property and listened to venture capitalists talk about how to approach investors.
“If a venture capitalist says they love it, it kind of doesn’t mean anything,” said Steve Goldberg, operating partner at Venrock, a venture firm. “My advice is to have people on the team who understand venture-speak.”
“Understand what the investor is looking for,” said Ron Weissman of Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest seed fund. He suggested approaching investors seeking a conversation — “I’m not here to raise money. I’m here to get a sense of what it would take to interest you.”
Tech’s next ‘unicorn’?
That is the kind of approach honed by Vamekh Kherkheulidze, founder and medical adviser to ORsim, a Georgian operating room virtual reality simulator.
By slipping on a virtual reality headset and a special glove that gives all the sensations of holding instruments and operating on a person, medical students can better learn how to become surgeons, Kherkheulidze said. And that’s important, because there’s a shortage of surgeons both in the U.S. and worldwide.
From potential investors, ORsim is looking “for supporters,” he said. “We promote new ways of education and we want investors who understand that.”
Still, his ambition is big. “We want to expand and expand fast,” Kherkheulidze said. Already, ORsim, with $35,000 in pre-seed funding from Startup Georgia, has an appendectomy simulator.
“Our hope is to be a unicorn,” Kherkheulidze said, referring to the term used to describe startups worth more than $1 billion in valuation. But in addition to greatly improving surgical training worldwide, he sees his company as a way to help his home country.
“If we are worth $1 billion, you can increase the economy. What was Skype’s influence in Estonia?” he said, referring to the Estonian internet communication service bought by Microsoft for more than $8 billion.
After the pitches, the entrepreneurs mingled with investors. No one got investment on the spot, but most are hopeful and are following up with meetings next week.
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British Robot Helps Autistic Children With Social Skills
“This is nice, it tickles me,” Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.
Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings songs, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions, aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.
If Finn gets too rough, the similarly sized Kaspar cries: “Ouch, that hurt me.” A therapist is on hand to encourage the child to rectify his behavior by tickling the robot’s feet.
Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.
But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark World Autism Day on Sunday, the university want Kaspar to help more people.
“Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to,” Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.
Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.
TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early-years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.
“We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues,” said deputy principal Alice Lynch. “We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he’s started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So, things like that are just a massive progression.”
Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar’s designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy-to-process features.
Autism support groups have been impressed.
“Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too,” Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society’s Centre for Autism, told Reuters.
“This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum.”
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Trump Set to Overturn Online Privacy Protections, Stirring Debate
U.S. President Donald Trump is poised to sign legislation overturning privacy protections for Internet users, a move supporters say will level the playing field for providers but critics argue will hurt consumers.
The bill eliminates Obama-era regulations that required Internet service providers, or ISPs, to get permission before collecting or selling sensitive user data, such as Internet browsing history.
Supporters say the bill will create a more even field for ISPs, which are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Other Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google, are managed by the Federal Trade Commission, which places fewer restrictions on how they can collect and sell user data.
“Having two privacy cops on the beat will create confusion within the Internet ecosystem and will end up harming consumers,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, on Tuesday.
Democrats, groups object
Supporters also argue that the reaction has been overblown, noting that the Obama-era FCC rules, which had been approved in December, hadn’t even been put in place yet.
The bill passed Congress this week with the overwhelming support of Republicans. White House officials have previously said Trump will sign the legislation, despite objections from Democrats and privacy advocate groups.
“This legislation will seriously undermine the privacy protections of the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that their private information should be just that — private — and not for sale without their knowledge,” a group of 46 Democratic lawmakers said this week in a letter urging Trump to veto the bill.
Tom Wheeler, the former head of the FCC, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times calling the repeal a “dream for cable and telephone companies, which want to capitalize on the value of such personal information.”
U.S. Internet companies have long profited from U.S. privacy regulations, which are generally considered weaker than those in parts of the developed world, such as the European Union.
Big companies make big money from data
Companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon “profit heavily from the mining of consumer data,” says Evan Swarztrauber with the Internet privacy advocacy group TechFreedom.
“It’s at least arguable that the U.S. has more successful tech firms than the EU because the U.S. has a more relaxed privacy framework, which allows for more innovation and experimentation,” he says.
But profit should not be the only consideration, according to critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.
“Should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways,” Ernesto Falcon, a legislative counsel at EFF, said in an online post.
Bill has limited international impact
Falcon slammed lawmakers who “have decided to give our personal information to an already highly profitable cable and telephone industry so that they can increase their profits with our data.”
The bill itself has limited international impact. Falcon says the bigger concern for global web users is state-sponsored surveillance, such as that conducted by the NSA.
“No real amount of commercial deregulation or regulation would offset the loss of privacy rights that state-sponsored surveillance violates in terms of international issues,” he told VOA.
your ad hereHow Ebola Impacted Liberia’s Appetite for Bushmeat
When Ebola struck Liberia, consumption of bushmeat dropped dramatically. But in an odd twist, poorer households cut their consumption much more than well-to-do households.
The findings have implications for public health, as well as wildlife conservation. Education campaigns about the risks and consequences of bushmeat hunting have focused on rural villagers near protected nature reserves.
But, it turns out, the more tenacious consumers may be the wealthier city-dwellers.
Bushmeat — wild animals like monkeys, duikers and pangolins — is an essential protein source for many rural West Africans, but it’s also a favorite of urbanites.
Satisfying that demand has created, in some places, “empty forests” that are otherwise pristine but are devoid of critical wildlife.
In addition, bushmeat can spread diseases like Ebola because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “human infections have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing meat from infected animals.”
Before the 2015 Ebola outbreak, Jessica Junker and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology based in Leipzig, Germany, had studied Liberians’ preferences for bushmeat compared to chicken or fish.
Tradition, taste
“We asked people, ‘If you were at a party and you could choose the type of meat you could eat there, what would you like to eat?'” Junker told VOA. That scenario aimed to take cost out of the equation.
Bushmeat often topped the list.
People prefer the taste, Junker said. Bushmeat also is often cheaper than domesticated meat. Plus, it’s a traditional part of their diet.
“Many people have told me, ‘Well, we’ve always eaten bushmeat. Our fathers have eaten bushmeat,'” Junker said.
When Ebola hit, she decided it would be a good time to see how attitudes toward eating wildlife had changed.
Bushmeat consumption dropped, as expected. However, it dropped less among wealthier people.
Rich or poor, before Ebola, people said they ate bushmeat every other day on average. During the outbreak, that dropped to once a month among the lowest-income survey respondents, but once a week among the highest-income respondents.
It’s not clear why that should be, but Junker notes that poorer people hunt bushmeat themselves. “During the Ebola crisis, a lot of people didn’t leave their houses,” she said.
In the cities, it was illegal to sell bushmeat. But “there was an underground bushmeat market,” she said. “If you wanted to get bushmeat, you could still get it,” as long as you had money.
Awareness campaigns
The study was published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
It presents a challenge for those seeking to preserve wildlife or protect public health.
“If you really like something, you’re not very likely to change that,” Junker said. “Ebola is quite a drastic event, but it doesn’t change your preference. You stop eating it because it’s dangerous.”
She says her group would like to repeat the survey now that the crisis is over. They suspect that people have gone back to their old eating habits.
And, she notes, the study suggests education efforts may need a change in focus.
“Most of the awareness campaigns nowadays are centered around protected areas where the animals actually live. But maybe those are not the people who then consume the bushmeat,” she noted. “It might be people much farther away in the urban centers and who need to be educated about the impact this has.”
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Oculus Co-founder Palmer Luckey Leaves Facebook
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Facebook’s Oculus virtual-reality business, is leaving the company.
Facebook didn’t give a reason for Luckey’s departure. His last day is Friday.
Luckey, who is 24, is leaving Facebook in the heels of controversies. Earlier this year, a federal jury found that Oculus, Luckey and co-founder Brendan Iribe violating the intellectual property rights of video-game maker ZeniMax Media. The jury awarded $500 million in damages, including $50 million from Luckey.
Luckey was also criticized for a donation of $10,000 to a pro-Donald Trump group called Nimble America, which created offensive memes online during the 2016 election season.
Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion. Oculus makes the stand-alone Rift virtual-reality headset along with the Gear VR headset for Samsung.
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Top 5 Songs for Week Ending April 1
We’re lighting up the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending April 1, 2017.
As has been the case, we welcome one new song this week…and it’s a big jumper.
Number 5: The Weeknd & Daft Punk “I Feel It Coming”
The Weeknd and Daft Punk surge seven slots to fifth place with “I Feel It Coming.”
Here’s an item to pique your curiosity: on March 14, mastering engineer Rob Small went on social media to publicize an upcoming Daft Punk release. It’s about nine weeks away. It will appear on a French label and it will be available on vinyl.
Number 4: Zayn & Taylor Swift “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever”
Meanwhile, our next artist is dealing with a family tragedy.
Zayn and Taylor Swift tread water in fourth place with “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.” Please join me in sending condolences to Zayn and his family, following the death of his five-year-old cousin, Arshiya. She reportedly succumbed to a brain tumor on Tuesday. Zayn was said to be close to his cousin, and has yet to comment.
Number 3: Migos Featuring Lil Uzi Vert “Bad And Boujee”
Slipping a slot to third place go Migos and Lil Uzi Vert, with with their former Hot 100 champ “Bad And Boujee.”
Record Store Day happens on April 22 – it’s a day dedicated to independent music retailers. Lil Uzi Vert is offering his 2016 mix tape “Lil Uzi Vert Vs the World” in a deluxe purple vinyl edition limited to 2,700 copies.
Number 2: Bruno Mars “That’s What I Like”
Bruno Mars jumps into the runner-up slot with “That’s What I Like,” and as he eyes a possible championship, it’s time to ask: do you remember when he last hit the jackpot with a solo single?
Mars last topped the Hot 100 in 2014 with “Uptown Funk,” but that was Mark Ronson’s release and Mars was a featured artist. When did Mars last hit the top as a solo artist? It happened back in early 2013, with “When I Was Your Man.”
Number 1: Ed Sheeran ” Shape of You”
Your man at the top continues to be Ed Sheeran, posting an eighth total week at number one with “Shape Of You.”
A woman in England has been jailed for eight weeks, after using “Shape Of You” in a campaign of noise harassment against her neighbors. Sonia Bryce, 36, reportedly played the song on repeat at high volume, but defended herself in court by saying she really doesn’t like Sheeran that much.
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Tourists Drawn to California Desert ‘Super Bloom’
Rain-fed wildflowers have been sprouting from California’s desert sands after lying dormant for years — producing a spectacular display that has drawn record crowds and traffic jams to tiny towns like Borrego Springs.
An estimated 150,000 people in the past month have converged on this town of about 3,500, roughly 85 miles (135 kilometers) northeast of San Diego, for the so-called super bloom.
Wildflowers are springing up in different landscapes across the state and the western United States thanks to a wet winter. In the Antelope Valley, an arid plateau northeast of Los Angeles, blazing orange poppies are lighting up the ground.
What is a super bloom?
But a “super bloom” is a term for when a mass amount of desert plants bloom at one time. In California, that happens about once in a decade in a given area. It has been occurring less frequently with the drought. Last year, the right amount of rainfall and warm temperatures produced carpets of flowers in Death Valley.
So far this year, the natural show has been concentrated in the 640,000-acre (1,000-square-mile) Anza Borrego State Park that abuts Borrego Springs.
It is expected to roll along through May, with different species blooming at different elevations and in different areas of the park. Anza Borrego is California’s largest state park with hundreds of species of plants, including desert lilies, blazing stars and the flaming tall, spiny Ocotillo.
‘Flowergeddon’
Deputies were brought in to handle the traffic jams as Borrego Springs saw its population triple in a single day.
On one particularly packed weekend in mid-March, motorists were stuck in traffic for five hours, restaurants ran out of food, and some visitors relieved themselves in the fields. Officials have since set up an army of Port-A-Pottys, and eateries have stocked up. The craze has been dubbed “Flowergeddon.”
Locals call those who view the tiny wildflowers from their cars “flower peepers.” Thousands of others have left their vehicles to traipse across the desert and analyze the array of delicate yellow, orange, purple and magenta blooms up close in the park. Many carting cameras have taken care to step around the plants.
Tour groups from as far as Japan and Hong Kong have flown in to catch the display before it fades away with the rising temperatures.
Rare sightings tracked
Wildflower enthusiasts worldwide track the blooms online and arrive for rare sightings like this year’s Bigelow’s Monkey flower, some of which have grown to 8 inches (203 millimeters) in height. The National Park Service has even pitched in with a 24-hour wildflower hotline to find the best spots at the state park.
“We’ve seen everything from people in normal hiking attire to people in designer flip-flops to women in sundresses and strappy heels hike out there to get their picture. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh no. Please don’t go out there with those shoes on,’” laughed Linda Haddock, head of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce.
On a recent day, a young woman sat among knee-high desert sunflowers and shot selfies against the backdrop of yellow blooms that looked almost neon in contrast to the brown landscape. A mother jumped in the air as her daughter snapped her photo among yellow brittlebushes.
Blooms draw insects, birds
The blooms are attracting hungry sphinx moth caterpillars that munch through acres. The caterpillars in turn are attracting droves of Swainson hawks on their annual 6,000-mile (9,656-kilometer) migration from Argentina.
“It’s an amazing burst in the cycle of life in the desert that has come because of a freakish event like a super bloom,” Haddock said. “It’s exciting. This is going to be so huge for our economy.”
Desert super blooms always draw crowds, but lifetime residents said they’ve never seen the natural wonder attract tens of thousands like this time. The park is about a two-hour drive from San Diego and three hours from Los Angeles.
A lot of rain, a lot of blooms
This year’s display has been especially stunning, experts say. The region received 6½ inches (165 millimeters) of rain from December to February, followed by almost two weeks of 90-degree temperatures, setting the conditions for the super bloom. Five years of drought made the seeds ready to pop.
Humans also helped. Park staff, volunteers and female prisoners have been removing the Saharan Mustard plant, an invasive species believed brought to California in the 1920s with another plant, the date palm. Saharan Mustard stole the thunder of another super bloom six years ago, said Jim Dice, research manager at the Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center.
“It completely took over the usual wildflower fields and starved out the wildflowers so what we had were giant fields of ugly mustard plant,” Dice said. “That galvanized the community, which depends on tourism largely brought in during the good wildflower years.”
Lia Wathen, a 35-year-old investigator in San Diego, took a Monday off from work so she wouldn’t miss the desert flowers.
“Any single color that you can think of, you’re going to find it right here,” said Wathen, walking with her Maltese dogs, Romeo and Roxy, before stopping to examine a magenta bloom on a spikey Cholla cactus.
Sandra Reel and her husband drove hundreds of miles out of their way when they heard about the super bloom.
“It is absolutely phenomenal to see this many blooming desert plants all at the same time,” she said. “I think it’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
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Research Bridges Spinal Cord Injury, Restores Some Movement
Researchers in a pilot clinical trial have made it possible for a paralyzed man to move his arm. As Bronwyn Benito reports, it is a critical step toward restoring mobility to people with paralysis.
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‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ Looks at Heroism in Face of Persecution
During World War II, the Warsaw Zoo in Poland’s capital became a hideout for Jews escaping Nazi persecution. Niki Caro’s film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, chronicles this true story, highlighting the courage and compassion of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a couple who risked their lives and the life of their son to protect those in danger.
The film opens with Antonina Zabinski, an empathetic animal lover, making her morning rounds in the zoo to check on the animals. Dark clouds of war are gathering over Poland.
Watch: ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ a Tale of Heroism During the Holocaust
The idyllic life of the zookeepers ends abruptly with a Nazi air raid over Warsaw, which hits the zoo and kills the majority of its animals. Filmmaker Niki Caro delivers a powerful scene of helpless caged animals dismembered and killed by the bombing. This heart-breaking waste of life is a forewarning of the Nazi attacks on human life.
Nazis invade
The Nazis invaded Poland September 1, 1939, and immediately started rounding up Jewish inhabitants in Warsaw, placing them in a ghetto to be starved, harassed, and exposed to the elements.
The film, script written by Angela Workman, is based on Diane Ackerman’s novel by the same title. The novel, a more detailed account of the zookeepers’ struggle was a challenge to condense to a two-hour film, Workman said.
She says the film was a labor of love by a team of women.
“Kim Zubek, our lead producer, was a person who carried this on her shoulders for years to get this made,” Workman said. “She worked really hard. I was involved with it for eight or nine years. Niki has been involved with it for years. Jessica (Chastain) stuck around when we didn’t know whether we’d be able to get it made. We’ve had some really fierce women working on this. I’m very proud of that.”
The largely female cast reflects the feminine point of view, said novelist Ackerman, who made Antonina Zabinski her central character.
“She endangered her own life, the life of her child, but she felt it was the right thing to do.” Ackerman said. “Her husband was heroic in more traditional ways. He was head of an underground cell. She risked her life every single day, but she didn’t hold a gun and shoot at anybody. Her form of heroism was compassionate heroism. It’s something that I think people do every single day on our war-torn planet, but we don’t hear about it.”
Filmmaker Niki Caro echoes Ackerman’s viewpoint.
“Femininity has often been equated with weakness,” she said. “But a character like Antonina shows us that you can be both very soft and very strong.”
Manipulating Nazis to save Jews
The story pivots on Nazi official Lutz Heck, who’s eyeing the remaining rare zoo animals and Antonina.
Guided by greed and lust, Heck, played by Daniel Bruhl, offers assistance to Antonina by offering to take the remaining animals to Germany for safekeeping. And Heck is an historic figure.
“He was Hitler’s chief zoologist,” Workman said. “His family, I think, still breeds Heck cattle, and everything we see in the movie about him is true. He has feelings for Antonina; he would walk in whenever he wanted (in the zoo.) He controlled them. He had very strong animal instincts, and I think that he was a predator in a way.”
Though fearful, Antonina manipulated Heck’s feelings to convince him to let her and her husband keep the zoo open. Under Heck’s nose, Antonina and her husband smuggled about 300 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto using the vaults of the zoo as a way station for the refugees throughout the war.
Jessica Chastain interprets Antonina and the “gift she had in being able to communicate with all living creatures.
“Actually, we tried to showcase that in our film,” Chastain said, “and the idea what it means to possess another living thing. What does it mean to be in a cage?”
At a red carpet event at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Workman said that though her script is based on Ackerman’s novel, it was also informed by her own family history.
“I am so emotional to be in this museum because I spent an enormous amount of time here when I was writing. I feel like my family’s faces are on the walls of this museum. It’s such an honor to be here.”
Message for today
Chastain said the film sends a message about today’s refugee crisis.
“I was shocked to learn that Anne Frank’s family was denied a visa to the United States twice,” she said. “Antonina was a refugee. She was born and raised in Russia, and she found her safe place in Warsaw and then from there she created a sanctuary for others. I hope that people will see the film and be inspired by her compassion and kindness, and will do what they can to help others.”
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‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ a Tale of Heroism During the Holocaust
During WWII, the Warsaw Zoo became a refuge for Jews hiding from Nazi persecution. Niki Caro’s film “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” chronicles this true story, highlighting the courage and compassion of zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a couple who risked their lives and the life of their son to protect those in danger. VOA’s Penelope Poulou has more.
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Afghans Find Distraction From War in Mixed Martial Arts
In a custom-built arena in Kabul, crowds cheered as young Afghan men punched, kicked and wrestled in the country’s first professional mixed martial arts league, a welcome distraction to the violence besetting the country.
While cricket and football more commonly grab public attention in Afghanistan, fighters and fans see martial arts not just as entertainment but as a constructive pastime for youths in a country torn by war and economic malaise.
Against a soundtrack of booming music and shouts of encouragement, sweat and blood mixed inside the cage. Each match, however, ended in a hug.
Outlet for frustration
“I think it provides a very good platform for the social frustrations that we have here in Afghanistan,” said Kakal Noristani, who a year and a half ago helped found the Snow Leopard Fighting Championship.
To date, only men have competed in the handful of competitions, but organizers say they are training women fighters. The walls of the club feature posters of American martial arts competitor Ronda Rousey.
Noristani and his partners want to develop mixed martial arts as a professional sport in Afghanistan, hoping to host foreign fighters and send Afghan competitors abroad.
“We’ve just begun here in Afghanistan,” Noristani said. “The professional structure was nonexistent before this.”
That’s helped some fighters dream of national and international glory.
“This is the wish of every fighter: To reach the highest level and be able to fight abroad,” said Mir Baba Nadery, who won his match that night.
Diversion from the war
Outside the cage, spectators expressed gratitude for a diversion from the country’s woes.
“Coming to these kind of events takes your mind off of our problems,” said Nadia Sina. “We are happy to see such an organization encouraging sportsmen and improving the sport in the country.”
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US Art Houses Program Protest as ‘1984’ Heads Back to Theaters
On Tuesday, it will be “1984” again in movie theaters across the country.
About 190 art-house theaters have banded together to show the 1984 big-screen adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece as a pointed comment on the presidency of Donald Trump, whose “alternative facts” administration has already sent “1984” back up the bestseller lists .
“It’s what’s in the air. People want to do something,” said Dylan Skolnick, an organizer of the event and co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York. “This started with a conversation about: We need to do something. Well, what do we do? We show movies. So the obvious answer was: We should show a movie.”
New resonance
Cinemas around the country are increasingly programming with political protest in mind, playing movies that have newfound resonance for those who disagree with the policies of the Republican president. In May, 60 theaters are planning to screen films from the predominantly Muslim nations targeted by Trump’s proposed travel ban. That initiative has been dubbed the Seventh Art Stand and billed as “an act of cinematic solidarity against Islamophobia.”
Cinemas, particularly independent ones, are places to gather and connect, and they are finding under Trump a renewed sense of mission that goes beyond the usual arguments for the big-screen experience over Netflix.
“To really genuinely connect with other people — which seems to be a consistent theme our country is struggling with — it’s all about being in a corporeal public sphere together, and doing that in and around art,” said Courtney Sheehan, executive director of Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum and an organizer of the Seventh Art Stand. “We’re not just an ancillary component of social change conversation. This is ground zero for action.”
A Trump effect has already been partially seen in the recent box-office success of Jordan Peele’s horror hit “Get Out” and Raoul Peck’s James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” — movies that offer a straight talk on racial issues that might be lacking in Washington. On the small screen, Turner Classic Movies more cheekily programmed Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd,” with Andy Griffith as a populist radio personality who rises to political demagogue, to air on Inauguration Day.
“1984,” the second movie version starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, will play in 175 cities and 44 states, as well as a few internationally in Canada, England and Sweden. The event has been organized under the name United States of Cinema; its website lists the participating theaters. April 4 was selected because that’s when Orwell’s Winston Smith begins his forbidden diary as a rebellion against his oppressive government.
“It’s just a work that has a lot of resonance with what’s going on. It hits a lot of crucial notes,” Skolnick said. “Orwell wrote about and the film talks about the essential thing of being able to say two plus two equals four, even if the government says, ‘No, two plus two equals five.’ ”
A similar motivation fueled Richard Abramowitz, founder and president of the indie film distributor Abramorama. He and Sheehan began discussing organizing something at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and their plan has attracted the support of Steve Buscemi, Jonathan Demme, Woody Harrelson and others. Other companies have joined, as well; the online video hub Vimeo will show shorts focused on refugee stories.
Since the Seventh Art Stand was announced two weeks ago, Sheehan said, participating theaters have doubled from 30 to about 60. The state with the largest number, she said, is Indiana. Theaters have a long list of films from which to choose from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. (The most recent version of the travel ban has thus far been blocked by the courts.) Most notable is Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning “The Salesman.” The celebrated filmmaker boycotted February’s Academy Awards, where he won his second Oscar, because of the travel ban.
Abramowitz calls the movie theater “a safe space now,” where people can experience other cultures “that are being more threatened now than before.”
“We recognize that there are far more people that are welcoming in this country than not. And we wanted to try to create spaces all over the country where people could recognize this,” he said. “We thought maybe this would be a good way to engage the community rather than sit around and fume.”
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US Senate Kills Family-planning Rule; Pence Breaks Tie
Vice President Mike Pence took the rare step of breaking a tie in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, casting the deciding vote to roll back protections for reproductive health funds.
Using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to repeal recently minted regulations, senators killed a rule intended to keep federal grants flowing to clinics that provide contraception and other services in states that want to block the funding.
The rule was enacted in the final weeks of former President Barack Obama’s administration, giving lawmakers the opening to nullify it under the review law.
In recent years, states such as Texas have kept some health care providers from receiving the grants as part of the country’s longstanding fight over abortion.
It was the second time on Thursday that Pence used his role as the chamber’s president to end a deadlock. He was called to the capitol earlier to carry the resolution through a procedural vote.
Saying the rule usurps states’ rights, Republicans argued local lawmakers should decide how health care money is distributed.
Their main concern is that federal money is being used to provide abortions, although the grants are specifically barred from funding those procedures. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, generally oppose abortion.
“This regulation is an unnecessary restriction on states that know their residents’ own needs best,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Democrats said the resolution was an attack on women’s health, contending the rollback will make it harder for low-income and rural women to obtain screenings for cancer and other diseases, as well as contraception.
Most resolutions killing recent Obama-era regulations have sailed through the Republican-controlled Congress. They need to win only simple majorities in both chambers to go to the president for signing.
The congressional review law was used only once successfully until this year. The family-planning resolution marked the 13th time it has been deployed effectively since the beginning of February, as well as the first time a resolution has come within a hair’s breadth of failing.
“Republicans didn’t listen to us,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the health committee. “They didn’t listen to women across the country who made it clear that restricting women’s access to the full range of reproductive care is unacceptable.”
The nonprofit Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions and many other health and contraception services, receives some of the federal funding.
Noting the recent collapse of the Republican health care bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Thursday’s votes were close because “people are sick and tired of politicians making it even harder for them to access health care.”
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SpaceX Launches its First Recycled Rocket in Historic Leap
SpaceX launched its first recycled rocket Thursday, the biggest leap yet in its bid to drive down costs and speed up flights.
The Falcon 9 blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, hoisting a broadcasting satellite into the early evening clear sky on the historic rocket reflight. It was the first time SpaceX founder Elon Musk tried to fly a booster that soared before on an orbital mission.
This particular first stage landed on an ocean platform almost exactly a year ago after a space station launch for NASA. SpaceX refurbished and tested the 15-foot booster, still sporting its nine original engines. It aimed for another vertical landing at sea once it was finished boosting the satellite for the SES company of Luxembourg.
Longtime customer SES got a discount for agreeing to use a salvaged rocket, but wouldn’t say how much. It’s not just about the savings, said chief technology officer Martin Halliwell.
Halliwell called it “a big step for everybody – something that’s never, ever been done before.”
SpaceX granted SES insight into the entire process of getting the booster ready to fly again, Halliwell said, providing confidence everything would go well. SES, in fact, is considering more launches later this year on reused Falcon boosters.
“Someone has to go first,” Halliwell said at a news conference earlier in the week.
Boosters typically are discarded following liftoff, sinking into the Atlantic. SpaceX began flying back the Falcon’s first-stage, kerosene-fueled boosters in 2015; it’s since landed eight, three at Cape Canaveral and five on ocean platforms. The company is working on a plan to recycle even more Falcon parts, like the satellite enclosure. For now, the second stage used to get the satellite into the proper, high orbit is abandoned.
Blue Origin, an aerospace company started by another tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos, already has reflown a rocket. One of his New Shepard rockets, in fact, has soared five times from Texas. These flights, however, were suborbital; in other words, nothing went into orbit.
NASA also has shared the quest for rocket reusability. During the space shuttle program, the twin booster rockets dropped away two minutes into flight and parachuted into the Atlantic for recovery. The booster segments were mixed and matched for each flight.
As for this SpaceX reused booster, Halliwell said engineers went through it with a fine-toothed comb following its liftoff in April 2016. He wasn’t so sure, though, about the cleaning job.
“It’s a bit sooty,” he said with a smile.
SES has a long history with SpaceX. A SES satellite was on board for SpaceX’s first commercial launch in 2013.
SpaceX – which aims to launch up to six reused boosters this year – is familiar with uncharted territory.
Besides becoming the first commercial cargo hauler to the International Space Station, SpaceX is building a capsule to launch NASA astronauts as soon as next year. It’s also working to fly two paying customers to the moon next year, and is developing the Red Dragon, a robotic spacecraft intended to launch to Mars in 2020 and land. Musk’s ultimate goal is to establish a human settlement on Mars.
Key to all of this, according to Musk, is the rapid, repeating turnaround of rockets.
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