Answers to Your Questions About New US Travel Order

Q: Who is subject to the suspension of entry under the Executive Order (EO)? Foreign nationals from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, who are outside the U.S. who do not have a valid visa on the effective date of this order are not eligible to enter the U.S. while the temporary suspension remains in effect. Q: Will in-transit travelers within the scope of the EO be denied entry into the U.S.? Those individuals who are traveling on valid visas and arrive at a U.S. port of entry will still be permitted to seek entry into the U.S.. Q: I am a foreign national from one of the six affected countries currently overseas and in possession of a valid visa, but I have no prior travel to the U.S.. Can I travel to the U.S.? Foreign nationals from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen who have valid visas …

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Supreme Court Returns Transgender Bathroom Case

The Supreme Court has passed a case of a transgendered high school student on bathroom access back to a lower court without ruling. The case was sent back Monday to the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in state of Virginia, the same court that last year ruled in favor of the student. High school student Gavin Grimm had sued the Gloucester County School Board for the right to use the public school’s boys bathroom.  Grimm, who was born female, but identifies as male, argued the school’s denial of his request violates federal anti-discrimination law and the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. Although Grimm won an appeals court order allowing him to use the boys’ bathroom, the Supreme Court put it on hold last August, before the school year began. The Supreme Court decision means Grimm will probably graduate with the issue unresolved and his ability to use the boys’ …

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Trump Signs New Travel Order

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a new executive order Monday, barring travelers from six countries to the United States for three months, and all refugees for four months, after federal appeals judges blocked a similar order from implementation last month. “This executive order is a vital measure for strengthening our national security,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at press conference announcing the new ban. “It is the president’s solemn duty to protect the American people.” The rollout of the new security measures amounts to an acknowledgement by the Trump administration that its original travel ban, issued January 27, was flawed. But it’s unclear whether the new order will satisfy critics, who still see the measure as a Muslim ban. WATCH: Sec of State Tillerson on new travel order In an attempt to ensure a smoother rollout of the travel ban and protect it from legal scrutiny, the new executive …

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White House Aides Defend Claim That Obama Wiretapped Trump Tower

White House aides Monday defended President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that former President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on telephones Trump used at his Trump Tower headquarters in New York. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was unwilling to accept an assertion by James Comey, the director of the country’s top law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that Obama did not order an illegal wiretap on Trump. James Clapper, Obama’s national director of intelligence, has also disputed the new president’s contention. In interviews on news talk shows, Sanders and Trump aide Kellyanne Conway both said the new president firmly believes his claim posted Saturday on Twitter, saying, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.” Trump has offered no evidence to support the claim, but Sanders, Conway and, later, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said congressional committees need …

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Nature Plays Starring Role in Florida’s Everglades

Everglades National Park, in southern Florida, includes more than half a million hectares of wetlands. National parks traveler Mikah Meyer immersed himself in the River of Grass with treks through mud-filled swamps and close encounters with some of the park’s avian and reptilian residents, and talked with VOA’s Julie Taboh about his adventure. …

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Nigeria Seeks US Immigration Clarity, Advises Against Non-Urgent Travel

Nigeria has advised its citizens against any non-urgent travel to the United States until Washington clarifies its immigration policy, after several incidents in which people with valid visas were denied entry, a presidential aide said on Monday. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, said no reasons were given for the cases over recent weeks in which Nigerians with valid multiple-entry U.S. visas had been denied entry and sent back to Nigeria. The West African country is not among a group of Muslim-majority countries from which President Donald Trump wants to suspend travel to the United States on security grounds. About  half of its 180 million inhabitants are Muslim, and half Christian. Trump is expected to sign a new executive order on Monday to implement the travel ban, after his first attempt in January was blocked in the courts. Dabiri-Erewa did not make any …

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Millennials Keep College Student Activism Alive

College students around the world have been a powerful force for change throughout history. In the United States, the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s were periods when every new generation of college students became involved in political action. They forced change on issues of war, poverty and environmental protection. Millennials is a term that describes the current generation of 18 to 35-year-olds. They have faced criticism for rejecting behavior and beliefs of previous generations. But passion for political involvement is one quality that has not been lost. In 2016, the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles reported on the opinions of over 141,000 first time college students. The study found one in 10 students expected to be involved in some kind of protest during their college career. However, not all student political involvement looks the same. Getting money out of politics Cassie Cleary is from Wakefield, …

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Accused Al-Qaida Operative Faces US Trial, Despite Refusal to Appear

An accused al-Qaida operative charged with engaging in attacks on U.S. forces that killed at least two American servicemen in Afghanistan is set to face trial on Monday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun, also known by the nom de guerre Spin Ghul, or White Rose in the Pashto language, is accused of conspiring to kill Americans and providing support to a terrorist group, among other charges. An anonymous jury will hear the case, which is not uncommon in national security trials. Harun, 47, is not expected to be in court. Since his extradition from Italy in October 2012, the Saudi-born defendant has insisted he is a “warrior” who should face a military tribunal rather than criminal proceedings and has registered his dissent through increasingly aggressive courtroom behavior. Before one appearance last May, Harun scuffled with U.S. marshals, tore off his clothes, then disrupted …

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WHO: Environmental Pollution Kills 1.7M Children Under Five Every Year

Environmental pollution kills more than 1 in 4 children under the age of five every year – that’s 1.7 million children worldwide.    The World Health Organization warns these child deaths will increase dramatically if action is not taken to reduce environmental risks. WHO examines the impact of harmful environments on children’s health and offers solutions in two new studies, “Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children’s Health and the Environment” and a companion report, “Don’t pollute my future!  The impact of the environment on children’s health.”    The authors agree that air pollution is the biggest killer and is responsible for 6.5 million premature deaths every year, including nearly 600,000 deaths among children under age five. Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, notes that young children are most at risk of dying from a polluted environment because of “their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways.”   While …

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Doctors Alarmed by Post-antibiotic Future

Unless new antibiotics are developed quickly, people will once again die from common infections. The World Health Organization has issued an urgent call for scientists to develop these new drugs, and for governments to fund the research. Dr. Trish Perl, chief of infectious diseases at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said if there are no effective antibiotics, it will affect the entire practice of medicine. “You all of a sudden understand what it was like to practice medicine maybe 50, 70, 80 years ago, when there weren’t antibiotics,” Perl said. Without antibiotics, surgery will become much more dangerous. Doctors will be unable to treat diseases caused by E. coli, a bacterium that causes urinary tract infections and diarrhea. Even a virus such as the flu, which can lead to bacterial pneumonia, will mean these viruses will ultimately claim even more lives. WATCH: Doctors Alarmed by Post-Antibiotic Future New antibiotics …

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Doctors Alarmed by a Post-Antibiotic Future

Unless new antibiotics are developed quickly, people will once again die from common infections. The World Health Organization on Feb. 27 issued an urgent call for scientists to develop these new drugs, and for governments to fund the research. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports. …

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Harvesting Power from Slow-Flowing Rivers

Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for more efficient ways to harvest energy from sustainable sources, such as the sun, wind, ocean waves and river flows. Researchers from Brown University have teamed up with a company from Rhode Island to build an innovative power generator suitable for slow-flowing rivers and tidal canals. VOA’s George Putic reports. …

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Report: Sharp Cuts Sought for Weather, Climate Agency

The Trump administration is seeking a 17 percent cut to the budget of the government’s meteorological agency that monitors the climate and issues daily weather forecasts, the Washington Post reported Friday. Citing a four-page budget memo, the Post said the proposed reductions in the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would affect research and satellite programs and eliminate funding for some smaller programs. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, whose overall budget “would be hit by an overall 18 percent reduction from its current funding level,” it said. The paper did not give a total figure for the proposed cuts, but said the White House Office of Management and Budget outline for the Commerce Department’s budget for fiscal year 2018 included sharp reductions for specific parts of NOAA. The agency’s satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the …

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For Love of Science, Students Converge in Zimbabwe

Science students from across Africa met in Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare to share their ideas and inventions at the inaugural Africa Science Buskers Festival. The event, which organizers say targets more than 20,000 students in Zimbabwe alone, aims to inspire and develop a love of science among primary and secondary schoolchildren. Among the participants in Harare is Jan-Williem Verhoef, 13, of the Hoerskool Garsfontein School in South Africa. The aspiring scientist exhibited what he says is his own discovery, inspired by his “habit of being lazy.” In 10 years, he predicts, Africa will have a self-washing car on the market. “I have a bad habit of being lazy, and every Sunday I am being pledged to wash my dad’s car and I strongly disagree with that,” he explained. “Basically, I looked into nature and found that the white flower has property of staying clean in very dirty, unclean conditions. This …

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Genetic ‘Mutational Meltdown’ Doomed Woolly Mammoths

A genetic “mutational meltdown” helped push the woolly mammoth toward extinction, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say they compared genetic material from mammoths when they were plentiful and material from when the population was in decline. What they found was “genome deterioration” that reflected the smaller population size. The findings are a warning to conservationists that keeping a small pool of endangered animals could result in inbreeding and genomic meltdown. “There is a long history of theoretical work about how genomes might change in small populations. Here we got a rare chance to look at snapshots of genomes ‘before’ and ‘after’ a population decline in a single species,” said Rebekah Rogers, who led the work as a postdoctoral scholar at Berkeley and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “The results we found were consistent with this …

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On World Wildlife Day, Campaigners Warn of Extinction Threats

Friday is U.N. World Wildlife Day, which aims to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants. This year’s theme is “Listen to the Young Voices,” but many campaigners warn that future generations may never see many of the species around today because they are on the brink of extinction, mostly because of human activity. That includes the hidden wildlife beneath the oceans, at increasing risk from the huge amount of plastics filling our seas — from microbeads in cosmetics to industrial-scale waste. “Twelve million tons of plastic is entering the oceans every year, which is about a rubbish truck’s worth of plastic every single minute,” said Louisa Casson of Greenpeace’s London office. “Plastic is entering every single level of the ocean food chain, and marine creatures from zooplankton up to blue whales are choking on plastics. They are ingesting it, and they are getting tangled up …

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Drones Being Developed for Emergency Medical Deliveries

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, better known as drones, are increasingly being used in emergency situations. But safety concerns in a congested airspace prompted the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to limit their use. Researchers from the University of Maryland hope the regulations will be eased for drones making emergency medical deliveries. VOA’s George Putic reports. …

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