Author: Dmedia

sydney — With fangs that could pierce a human fingernail, the largest male specimen of the world's most venomous arachnid has found a new home at the Australian Reptile Park where it will help save lives after a member of the public discovered it by chance. The deadly Sydney funnel-web spider dubbed Hercules was found on the Central Coast, about 50 miles north of Sydney, and was initially given to a local hospital, the Australian Reptile Park said in a statement Thursday. Spider experts from the nearby park retrieved it and soon realized it was the largest male specimen ever received from the public in Australia. The spider measured 7.9 centimeters from foot to foot, surpassing the park's previous record-holder from 2018, the male funnel-web named Colossus. Sydney funnel-web spiders usually…

NEW YORK — The flu season in the U.S. is getting worse but it's too soon to tell how much holiday gatherings contributed to a likely spike in illnesses. New government data posted Friday for last week — the holiday week between Christmas and New Year's — show 38 states with high or very high levels for respiratory illnesses with fever, cough and other symptoms. That's up from 31 states the week before. The measure likely includes people with COVID-19, RSV and other winter viruses, and not just flu. But flu seems to be increasing most dramatically, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We expect it to be elevated for several more weeks," said the CDC's Alicia Budd. So far, though, this is a moderate flu season, she…

...

WASHINGTON — At a time when growing numbers of young Americans are diagnosed with mental health conditions, media are looking at ways to cover the issue more responsibly. Data shows a rise in young adults being diagnosed with conditions such as depression or anxiety. But media reports of public incidents involving mental health sometimes use damaging language, experts say. Terms such as “unhinged” or “erratic” — language used to describe a homeless man killed on the New York subway last year — are held up as poor examples of coverage. Reporters on the health beat and experts who specialize in mental health say that such terms are damaging for those who have a medical condition and that they can be misleading. “Media plays an important role in shaping public perception of…

A busy week for SpaceX launches. NASA eyes an upcoming moon mission. And Australian buffaloes get a high-tech upgrade. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. ...

NEW YORK — More U.S. hospitals are requiring masks and limiting visitors as health officials face an expected but still nasty post-holiday spike in flu, COVID-19 and other illnesses. While many experts say this season likely won't prove to be as deadly as some other recent winters, it still could mean hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and many thousands of deaths across the country. New York City last week instituted a mask mandate for the city's 11 public hospitals. Similar measures were ordered last week at some hospitals in Los Angeles and Massachusetts. Some hospitals reinstated masking rules for employees months ago, in anticipation of a seasonal rush of sick people. Flu and COVID-19 infections have been increasing for weeks, with high levels of flu-like illness reported in 31 states just…

...

WASHINGTON — Federal officials are seizing more shipments of unauthorized electronic cigarettes at U.S. ports, but thousands of new flavored products continue pouring into the country from China, according to government and industry data reviewed by The Associated Press. The figures underscore the chaotic state of the nation's $7 billion vaping market and raise questions about how the U.S. government can stop the flow of fruit-flavored disposable e-cigarettes used by 1 in 10 American teens and adolescents.  More than 11,500 unique vaping products are being sold in U.S. stores, up 27% from 9,000 products in June, according to tightly held industry data from analytics firm Circana. "FDA whacks one product and then the manufacturers get around it and the kids get around it," said Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, a Stanford University psychologist who…

AMSTERDAM — Climate activists blocked part of the main highway around Amsterdam near the former headquarters of ING bank Saturday to protest its financing of fossil fuels. Amsterdam Municipality said in a message on X, formerly Twitter, that traffic authorities closed part of the road and diverted traffic “to prevent a life-threatening situation." Hundreds of activists walked onto the road in the latest road blockade organized by the Dutch branch of Extinction Rebellion. Earlier this year, the activist organization repeatedly blocked a highway leading into The Hague. Some of Saturday's protesters walked along the closed A10 highway carrying a banner emblazoned with the words “Change or die” as two police vans drove slowly behind them. Another person carried a handwritten banner that said: “ING get out of oil and gas now!”…

BILLINGS, Mont. — Since passage of the Endangered Species Act 50 years ago, more than 1,700 plants, mammals, fish, insects and other species in the U.S. have been listed as threatened or endangered with extinction. Yet federal government data reveals striking disparities in how much money is allocated to save various biological kingdoms. Of the roughly $1.2 billion a year spent on endangered and threatened species, about half goes toward recovery of just two types of fish: salmon and steelhead trout along the West Coast. Tens of millions of dollars go to other widely known animals including manatees, right whales, grizzly bears and spotted owls. But the large sums directed toward a handful of species means others have gone neglected, in some cases for decades, as they teeter on potential extinction.…

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — More than 700,000 immigrants living illegally in California will gain access to free health care starting Monday under one of the state's most ambitious coverage expansions in a decade. It's an effort that will eventually cost the state about $3.1 billion per year and inches California closer to Democrats' goal of providing universal health care to its roughly 39 million residents. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers agreed in 2022 to provide health care access to all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status through the state's Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. California is the most populous state to guarantee such coverage, though Oregon began doing so in July. Newsom called the expansion "a transformative step towards strengthening the health care system for all Californians" when he proposed…

MEXICO CITY — Mexico's president inaugurated a huge "super pharmacy" Friday in a bid to help patients throughout the country who are told they need a specific medicine, but their hospital doesn't have it. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country. "The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the health system," López Obrador said Friday. The pharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can't get needed medications at a local hospital, the patient, the patient's doctor or the pharmacist would be able to have it delivered from the 40,000-square-meter…

...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The U.S. military's secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than previous missions. The Falcon Heavy, composed of three rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular nighttime liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast. The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays. Three earlier countdowns were aborted due to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday's fight. It came two weeks after China launched its own robot spaceplane, known as the…

portland, oregon — As native trees in the Pacific Northwest die off due to climate change, the U.S. Forest Service, the city of Portland, Oregon, and citizen groups around Puget Sound are turning to a deceptively simple climate adaptation strategy called "assisted migration." As the world's climate warms, tree growing ranges in the Northern Hemisphere are predicted to move farther north and higher in elevation. Trees, of course, can't get up and walk to their new climatic homes. This is where assisted migration is supposed to lend a hand. The idea is that humans can help trees keep up with climate change by moving them to more favorable ecosystems faster than the trees could migrate on their own. Yet not everyone agrees on what type of assisted migration the region needs…

Kinshasa, Congo — As Congo copes with its biggest outbreak of mpox, scientists warn discrimination against gay and bisexual men on the continent could make it worse. In November, the World Health Organization reported that mpox, also known as monkeypox, was being spread via sex in Congo for the first time. That is a significant departure from previous flare-ups, where the virus mainly sickened people in contact with diseased animals. Mpox has been in parts of central and west Africa for decades, but it was not until 2022 that it was documented to spread via sex; most of the 91,00 people infected in approximately 100 countries that year were gay or bisexual men. In Africa, unwillingness to report symptoms could drive the outbreak underground, said Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseases specialist…

An out-of-this-world Christmas greeting from the past. Plus, the Sun reminds humans who's boss, and a look back at this year in the cosmos. VOA's Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. ...

Socorro, Colombia — In northeast Colombia, police guard warehouses stacked high with confiscated timber with a noble new destiny: transformation into homes for bees beleaguered by pesticides and climate change. The illegally harvested wood is used in the Santander department's "Timber Returns Home" initiative, building hives since 2021 to house the little pollinators so critical to human survival. So far, the project has seen about 200 cubic meters of wood transformed into 1,000 beehives, with another 10,000 planned for the next phase, according to the Santander environmental authority. Previously, confiscated timber was turned into sawdust, donated to municipalities for projects ... and sometimes just left to rot. Now it is being repurposed to help address the "extremely serious problem" of possible bee extinction, said biologist German Perilla, director of the Honey…

Yuma, Arizona — As the world pivots from planet-warming fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new pollution problem is rearing its head: What to do with old or worn-out solar panels?  Thousands of photovoltaic slabs are being installed across the United States every day, particularly in the sunny west and south of the country, as states like California race to toward greener energy production.  But with an expected lifespan of around 30 years, the first wave of solar installations is now coming to the end of its usefulness, sparking a rush to recycle things that might otherwise end up in the landfill.  "What is about to happen is a tsunami of solar panels coming back into the supply chain," said Adam Saghei, chief executive of Arizona-based We Recycle Solar.  "One of…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected students around the world, disrupting their studies and weakening their social skills. But the pandemic did generate some positive outcomes, say college counselors and international students who are back to in-person learning in the United States. VOA’s Laurel Bowman explores. Camera: Adam Greenbaum and Saqib Ul Islam. ...

WASHINGTON — Arnong Mungoei has farmed rice in Thailand’s Khon Kaen province for half a century.   Working land some 500 kilometers northeast of Bangkok never made her rich, but it provided a dependable livelihood.   But since February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, global geopolitical tensions and weather conditions elsewhere have upended the rice markets and by 2023, worldwide rice prices had exploded.   Yet Arnong said she made less than she has in years.  “The mills [that buy rice] don’t increase the price. What can I do? I bring rice there to sell. Whatever they offer us, we have to sell it. We won’t take the rice back because we had to pay for the truck,” said Arnong, 68. In 2023, the prices of wheat and grains such as oats and corn declined 20% to 30% as…

Tokyo, Japan — Japan's SLIM space probe entered the moon's orbit Monday in a major step toward the country's first successful lunar landing, expected next month. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the "Moon Sniper" because it is designed to land within 100 meters (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar surface. If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully landed a probe on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.   On Monday, SLIM "successfully entered the moon's orbit at 04:51 p.m. Japan time" (0751 GMT), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement released Monday evening.   "Its’ trajectory shift was achieved as originally planned, and there is nothing out of the ordinary…

Christmas for many is a time of family togetherness and good cheer, but for older adults, it can too often be one of the year’s loneliest days. Age UK, a charity group that deals with ageism and the problems of this demographic, says people can take simple steps to help. Umberto Aguiar has more from London in this report narrated by Elizabeth Cherneff. ...

...

PARIS — Bird flu is likely to spread further in the Antarctic region, causing immense damage to wildlife, according to experts on the highly contagious disease that has killed hundreds of millions of birds worldwide in recent years. The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, commonly called bird flu, to the remote southern region has raised concerns for isolated populations of species, including penguins and seals, that have never been exposed to the virus. The H5 strain of the virus was detected in the region on October 8 in a brown skua on Bird Island, part of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, according to a report by OFFLU, which gathers experts from the World Organization of Animal Health and the U.N. Food…

BLANTYRE, MALAWI — Malawi, which already is suffering from food shortages, this week banned the import of unmilled maize from Kenya and Tanzania over concerns that the spread of maize lethal necrosis disease could wipe out the staple food. The ministry of agriculture announced the ban in a statement that said the disease has no treatment and can cause up to 100% yield loss. The statement said maize can be imported only after it is milled, either as flour or grit. Henry Kamkwamba, an agriculture expert with the International Food Policy Research Institute, told VOA that if the disease were introduced into the country, it would be difficult to contain. He used the banana bunchy top virus as an example of the potential danger. “Think of how we lost all of…

SANTA FE, N.M. — Like Christmas trees, Santa and reindeer, the poinsettia has long been a ubiquitous symbol of the holiday season in the U.S. and across Europe. But now, nearly 200 years after the plant with the bright crimson leaves was introduced in the U.S., attention is once again turning to the poinsettia's origins and the checkered history of its namesake, a slaveowner and lawmaker who played a part in the forced removal of Native Americans from their land. Some people would now rather call the plant by the name of its Indigenous origin in southern Mexico. Some things to know: Where did the name poinsettia come from? The name comes from the amateur botanist and statesman Joel Roberts Poinsett, who happened upon the plant in 1828 during his tenure…

...