May 2018 - Page 3 of 26

Ebola Vaccination Campaign Launches in DR Congo

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Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo began a vaccination drive to control an Ebola outbreak that has infected more than 50 people and killed as many as 25. But as aid workers and health experts say this vaccination drive is a careful, methodical process in which trust is a key element. Health officials in the rural corner of northwest Congo that has been hit with Ebola say workers are seeking out those at the highest risk to vaccinate, a move that tries to cut off the virus at the pass while also making good use of the limited supply of the vaccine. At the moment, officials have only 7,500 doses of the experimental vaccine. World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic explained the campaign, which began this week in the rural communities of Bikoro and Iboko. “This is not a general mass immunization, as is being done for some …

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The Supreme Court is allowing Arkansas to put in effect restrictions on how abortion pills are administered. Critics of a challenged state law say it could effectively end medication abortions in the state. The justices did not comment Tuesday in rejecting an appeal from the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Arkansas that asked the court to review an appeals court ruling and reinstate a lower court order that had blocked the law from taking effect. The law says doctors who provide abortion pills must hold a contract with another physician who has admitting privileges at a hospital and who would agree to handle complications. The law is similar to a provision in Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the court order barring enforcement of the law, but put its ruling on hold while Planned Parenthood appealed to the Supreme …

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U.S. President Donald Trump contended Tuesday that prosecutors investigating his 2016 campaign’s links to Russia “will be MEDDLING” in November’s congressional elections. Trump offered no explanation how he thinks the legal team of special counsel Robert Mueller would interfere with the voting for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and a third of those in the 100-member Senate. Last week he suggested that the length of Mueller’s year-long investigation could turn voters against candidates he favors and “put some hurt on the Republican Party.” Trump, in a string of Twitter comments, ignored the conclusion last week by his new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, that U.S. officials expect “continued efforts” by Russia to interfere with the congressional elections, just as the U.S. intelligence community concluded it did in the presidential election two years ago to help Trump win. With the congressional campaigns now in their early stages in …

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Every morning, Asma’u Muhammadu removes the wet sheets from her bed and sets them out to dry. She opens the door to let in the fresh breezes that will air out the smell of urine in the mud-walled room. Along with the sheets, she brings out wet rags she uses to line her inner garments. “I am dealing with yoyon fitsari. I don’t know when the urine pours out from my body until I see it leaking down the sides of my legs,” says the 27-year-old woman. Yoyon fitsari is the term used in the Hausa language to describe vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), a medical condition in which a hole between the birth canal and bladder leaves women unable to control their urine. Women with a hole between the birth canal and the rectum, rectovaginal fistula (RVF) experience uncontrollable leakage of stool. Some women have both VVF and RVF. Some women …

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U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed a top North Korean official is to visit New York for talks related to a planned summit between Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. “Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Twitter. Hours earlier, news reports said Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling party and former military intelligence chief, was at the Beijing airport. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said Kim planned to fly Wednesday to New York. Trump sent a letter last week to Kim Jong Un saying the summit scheduled for June 12 would not happen, blaming what he said was “tremendous anger and open hostility” shown in a statement by the North Korean leader. But negotiations between the two countries have continued, including talks Sunday at the Korean demilitarized zone. “We have put a great …

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The U.S. Supreme Court is entering the last month of its 2017-2018 session. All the cases before the top U.S. court have been argued; only decisions remain to be handed down, including for major issues such as gay rights, abortion, President Donald Trump’s travel ban, gerrymandering, voting rolls and labor unions. Here are some of the biggest cases awaiting the court’s decision before the end of June. Religious rights vs. LGBTQ rights One of the biggest high-profile cases before the court deals with the religious rights of individual business owners versus the anti-discriminations laws of a state. A Colorado case pits the rights of cake shop owner Jack Phillips, a Christian who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, against a state law that prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Similar cases are pending in 21 states with anti-discrimination …

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A computer was better than human dermatologists at detecting skin cancer in a study that pitted human against machine in the quest for better, faster diagnostics, researchers said Tuesday. A team from Germany, the United States and France taught an artificial intelligence system to distinguish dangerous skin lesions from benign ones, showing it more than 100,000 images. The machine — a deep learning convolutional neural network or CNN — was then tested against 58 dermatologists from 17 countries, shown photos of malignant melanomas and benign moles. Just over half the dermatologists were at “expert” level with more than five years of experience, 19 percent had between two and five years’ experience, and 29 percent were beginners with less than two years under their belt. “Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN,” the research team wrote in a paper published in the journal Annals of Oncology. On average, flesh and blood …

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The World Trade Organization is being slowly strangled to death, a retiring trade judge whose replacement has been blocked by the United States said in his farewell speech, delivering a thinly-veiled rebuke to the Donald Trump administration. Ricardo Ramirez-Hernandez served two terms as a judge on the WTO’s Appellate Body, which acts as the final court for trade disputes between countries. Since his departure last year, the United States has been blocking the process to replace him and other judges, throwing the WTO into crisis. “This institution does not deserve to die through asphyxiation,” Ramirez-Hernandez said. “You have an obligation to decide whether you want to kill it or keep it alive.” In a speech introducing Ramirez-Hernandez, WTO Deputy Director-General Karl Brauner said there was “no movement in sight” to unblocking appointments. “This is frightening,” he said, adding that it was an illusion to believe the WTO could manage without …

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The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is urging engagement with Venezuela’s socialist government after he traveled to the South American nation to bring home a Utah man jailed for two years without a trial. Joshua Holt is scheduled to return to Salt Lake City on Monday night after receiving medical care and visiting President Donald Trump in Washington. He was released over the weekend following secret, backchannel negotiations between members of the U.S. Congress and Venezuelan officials. Corker meets with Maduro Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee traveled to Caracas on Friday to seal the deal with President Nicolas Maduro that would bring Holt home. Corker stressed in an interview Monday with The Associated Press that “nothing was asked, and nothing was given” in exchange for Holt’s freedom. But he said the 26-year-old’s release as a goodwill gesture by Maduro shows what can be achieved through dialogue with …

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Hundreds of women’s rights activist rallied in Belfast on Monday to put pressure on British Prime Minister Theresa May to reform Northern Ireland’s highly restrictive abortion rules after neighboring Ireland’s vote to liberalize its laws. Voters in Ireland on Friday backed the removal of a constitutional abortion ban by two-to-one. That leaves British-ruled Northern Ireland as the only part of the British Isles with a restrictive abortion regime, and May on Sunday faced calls from within her cabinet and the opposition to scrap Northern Ireland’s strict rules. Not May’s call? A spokeswoman for May said on Sunday changing the rules should only be undertaken by a government in Northern Ireland. The province, divided between unionists who favor continued British rule and nationalists who want to unify with Ireland, has had no devolved regional government since January last year after a power-sharing agreement collapsed between the two communities’ main parties. Activists …

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Officials began vaccinating health workers and others on Monday in Bikoro, where Congo’s current Ebola outbreak was first declared at the beginning of May. Congo’s Health Minister Oly Ilunga traveled to oversee the Ebola vaccinations of at least 10 people in Bikoro, where at least five of 12 Ebola deaths have happened. Bikoro Hospital director Dr. Serge Ngalebato said he and other health officials were vaccinated for protection when treating Ebola patients. “We who are on the front lines of caring for the sick. We are reassured,” he told The Associated Press by telephone. Monday’s vaccinations included three doctors at Bikoro Hospital, two health experts, two nurses, one representative of women in the community and one pygmy representative, he said. The procedure, which is voluntary, will take time and follow up to make sure there is a positive response, Ngalebato said. Congo’s vaccination campaign, which began in Mbandaka last week, …

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Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, under severe stress in a warmer, more acidic ocean, has returned from near-extinction five times in the past 30,000 years, researchers said Monday. And while this suggests the reef may be more resilient than once thought, it has likely never faced an onslaught quite as severe as today, they added. “I have grave concerns about the ability of the reef in its current form to survive the pace of change caused by the many current stresses and those projected into the near future,” said Jody Webster of the University of Sydney, who co-authored a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience. In the past, the reef shifted along the sea floor to deal with changes in its environment — either seaward or landward depending on whether the level of the ocean was rising or falling, the research team found. Based on fossil data from cores drilled into …

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More than three million cases of dengue fever, the world’s fastest-spreading tropical disease, could be avoided annually if global warming is capped at 1.5C, said a study that purports to be the first to show the health benefits of a cooler planet. The mosquito-borne viral infection causes flu-like symptoms and can be fatal if it develops into severe hemorrhagic form. The annual number of cases has increased 30-fold in the last 50 years, says the World Health Organization (WHO). Using computer models, researchers from the University of East Anglia in Britain found that capping warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) could cut annual dengue cases in Latin America and the Caribbean by up to 2.8 million by the end of the century. A further half a million cases could be prevented if the rise in global temperatures is kept down to 1.5C, the report said, with parts of South …

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Archaeologists using drones have discovered more than 25 geoglyphs etched into a swath of coastal desert in southern Peru near the Nazca Lines, a culture ministry official said Monday. Most of the newly found geoglyphs, which include figures of a killer whale and a woman dancing, appear to have been made by the Paracas culture more than 2,000 years ago, hundreds of years before the Nazca people created similar giant drawings nearby, said Johny Isla, an archaeologist who heads the culture ministry’s conservation efforts in the region. An additional 25 geoglyphs that had previously been spotted by local residents have also been mapped with drones, Isla said. Drones “have allowed us to broaden our documentation and discover new groups of figures,” Isla said on a tour of the geoglyphs in the province of Palpa. But unlike the Nazca lines, most of which can only be seen by flying above them, …

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President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plan to hold face-to-face discussions before a planned summit between Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. “We agreed to meet before the U.S.-North Korea summit,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo following his Monday telephone call with Trump. In the call, Trump and Abe also “affirmed the shared imperative of achieving the complete and permanent dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missile programs,” according to a White House statement. Both Trump and Abe are set to attend the Group of Seven economic summit June 8-9 in Canada, but the two may meet at the White House prior to that, according to officials in Washington and Tokyo. The two leaders spoke Monday as American officials were in North Korea and Singapore to discuss arrangements for the prospective talks. The phone conversation took place before Trump went …

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President Donald Trump paid tribute Monday — Memorial Day in the United States — to generations of the country’s fallen warriors. “Theirs was a love more deep and more pure than most will ever know,” Trump said at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington. “They marched into hell so that Americans could know the blessings of peace. They died so that freedom could live.” He said the pride of family members in their loved ones is “shared by one really and truly grateful nation. Today, our whole country thanks you, embraces you and pledges to you, we will never forget our heroes.” “To every family member of the fallen, I want you to know that the legacy of those you lost does not fade with time, but grows only more powerful,” he said. “Their legacy does not, like a voice in the distance, become a faint echo, but instead their legacy grows deeper, spreading further, …

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As they fight allegations that Connecticut FBI agents retaliated against employees for whistleblowing, federal government officials are refusing to release details of a legal settlement with a special agent and asking a judge to throw out another employee’s lawsuit. Special Agent Kurt Siuzdak’s lawsuit, filed in 2014, exposed allegations of internal strife and dysfunction within the FBI’s main Connecticut office in New Haven. It also disclosed a 2013 visit to the New Haven office by then-Director James Comey, who apologized to employees for “the failure of the FBI’s executive management to correct the leadership failures” in Connecticut. Siuzdak’s lawsuit was reported settled in court documents filed in March, but the FBI and Justice Department have declined to release the details and rejected recent requests under public records laws by The Associated Press for a copy of the deal. Officials would say only that there was no admission of wrongdoing in …

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Residents of Ellicott City, in the eastern U.S. state of Maryland, are surveying the damage from flash flooding Sunday that raged down the town’s main street. It’s a deja vu for the historic town as it is the second time in as many years that an intense rainstorm triggered catastrophic flooding in it. People were seen climbing to upper floors of their shops and homes for safety, with emergency workers urging them to wait for rescue personnel. Ellicott City is located in a valley that collects rainfall from the surrounding countryside. Local resident Ken Kessler said that following the floods in 2016 many business owners chose to clean up and reopen. This time, he said, he’s not sure how many will do it again. “It was incredible, so many of the businesses did come back and some did not. Now, with this happening so close again, we are going …

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Starbucks will close more than 8,000 stores nationwide Tuesday to conduct anti-bias training, the next of many steps the company is taking in an effort to restore its tarnished diversity-friendly image. The coffee chain’s leaders reached out to bias training experts after the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks last month. The plan has brought attention to the little-known world of “unconscious bias training” used by corporations, police departments and other organizations. It’s designed to get people to open up about implicit biases and stereotypes in encountering people of color, gender or other identities. A video previewing the training says it will include recorded remarks from Starbucks executives as well as rapper and activist Common. From there, the company says, employees will “move into a real and honest exploration of bias.” …

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In an effort to stem the outcry over the arrest of two black men at one of its stores, Starbucks will close 8,000 U.S. stores Tuesday afternoon for anti-bias training for its employees. On April 12, two black men went to a Philadelphia store and did not buy anything; instead, they told the store manager they were waiting for a friend to join them. They were asked to leave and an employee called police, which led to their arrest, prompting protests and accusations of racism. A video of the incident that was posted on social media became a major embarrassment for the coffee chain. Soon after, Starbucks announced a policy change, welcoming anyone to sit in its cafes or use its restrooms, even if they don’t buy anything. Previously, it was left to individual store managers to decide whether people could access Starbucks premises without making a purchase. “We are …

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In Kenya and many parts of the world, family planning is mostly considered a woman’s responsibility. Procedures that affect men, like vasectomies, are often shunned and stigmatized. But in Kenya, vasectomies are slowly gaining acceptance. In April, a group of doctors performed about 70 free vasectomies on men in Nairobi. Dr. Charles Ochieng was part of the team. He says 70 seemed like a low turnout, but that figure indicated progress. “Vasectomy is not very popular, not just in Kenya but in sub-Saharan Africa. I think the prevalence rate could be now at 1.4 percent so we are trying to create awareness so that more men can be able to adopt it,” Ochieng said. A vasectomy involves closing the tubes that carry sperm from the man’s testicles. This means there is no sperm to fertilize the woman’s egg during sex. The procedure takes about 15 minutes, and is one of …

US Observes Memorial Day

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Observances around the country and in Washington are planned for the day. President Donald Trump will participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. The three-day weekend is seen as the unofficial start of the summer vacation season. Many families have picnics or make trips to beaches, parks or campgrounds. …

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U.S. and North Korean officials met again Monday at the demilitarized zone to talk about a possible summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. After calling off the talks Thursday, Trump said the June 12 summit in Singapore may very well take place as scheduled. “I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial nation one day,” Trump said Sunday on Twitter. “Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen.” Sung Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and former envoy to South Korea, is leading the U.S. delegation at the preparation talks. Reports say the meetings are expected to last until Tuesday. “We can be successful in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, that would be a great thing for North Korea, it would be a great thing for South Korea, it would be …

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Elton John, on a visit to Ukraine to raise awareness about AIDS, said Ireland’s vote to liberalize its abortion laws showed how mindsets can change. The 71-year-old singer has traveled regularly to Ukraine and spoken out for gay rights in the eastern European country, including at an AIDS charity concert in Kiev during the Euro soccer championships in 2012. “Believe me, I love this country. We will do everything we can to continue the fight against AIDS,” he said at an event organized by the Elena Pinchuk Foundation. “It takes a long time for things to happen as I said,” he said. “Look what just happened in Ireland: the vote for abortion. Things change. People … they change their mind. And with a younger generation coming up, they are different kind of people, and they’re our future.” Voters in Ireland, a once deeply Catholic nation, on Friday backed a change …

Month: May 2018

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