Dogs are well known and valued for their ability to smell everything from drugs, to bombs to contraband electronics. But scientists at Lancaster University have trained them to sniff out illnesses, specifically malaria. And that could be game changing in the fight to stop the spread of the disease. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…
Month: October 2018
A new report says African nations are failing to create enough jobs for a booming young population even as some countries have seen strong economic growth.
The latest Ibrahim Index of African Governance sounds a warning for a continent where the sub-Saharan population is projected to double by 2050.
The report released Monday says Africa’s overall GDP has risen nearly 40 percent over the past decade but the continent’s average score for sustainable economic opportunity has increased just a fraction of 1 percent.
Africa is seeing the rise of young opposition leaders in countries like Uganda, Zimbabwe and Cameroon who are impatient with some of the world’s oldest or longest-serving heads of state. Earlier this month, some in East Africa said they would unite with like-minded colleagues in West and southern Africa to form a movement to challenge the misrule that has plagued the continent.
Experts warn of coming turbulence as about 60 percent of Africa’s population is under age 25, with birth rates among the highest in the world and health conditions improving for many. The United Nations says sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be the source of more than half of the world’s population growth between now and 2050, straining countries’ abilities to provide good education, jobs and health care.
“Africa has a huge challenge ahead. Its large and youthful potential workforce could transform the continent for the better, but this opportunity is close to being squandered,” Mo Ibrahim, the Sudan-born billionaire who leads the foundation behind the new report, said in a statement. “The evidence is clear — young citizens of Africa need hope, prospects and opportunities. Its leaders need to speed up job creation to sustain progress and stave off deterioration.”
Strong economic growth doesn’t necessarily lead to more opportunities, the new report says. Nigeria, Angola, Sudan and Algeria have some of the highest GDP in Africa but are among the lowest for job creation.
The report also warns that education in 27 countries across the continent is now on the decline, further hurting the young population’s future.
And “alarmingly, citizens’ political and civic space in Africa is shrinking,” the report adds, meaning less room for an increasingly connected, tech-savvy population to express concerns and seek solutions, with potentially explosive results.
…
China’s yuan sank to a 10-year low against the dollar on Monday, coming close to breaking the politically sensitive level of seven to the U.S. currency.
The yuan declined to 6.9644 per dollar at midday, passing its most recent low in 2016 before recovering slightly. It was the lowest level since May 2008.
The currency’s weakness is one of a series of elements fueling Washington’s trade complaints against Beijing. The U.S. Treasury Department declined this month to label China a currency manipulator but said it was closely watching Beijing.
Chinese authorities have promised to avoid “competitive devaluation” to boost exports amid a tariff war with U.S. President Donald Trump over Beijing’s technology policy. But they are trying to make the state-controlled exchange rate more responsive to market forces, which are pushing the yuan lower.
The level of seven yuan to the dollar has no economic significance, but could revive U.S. attention to the exchange rate.
Chinese authorities are likely to “stand their ground” and prevent a “capitulation beyond the 7 level,” Mizuho Bank said in a report Monday.
The yuan, also known as the renminbi, or “people’s money,” has declined by almost 10 percent against the dollar since April as China’s economy cooled and U.S. and Chinese interest rates went in opposite directions. That helps exporters cope with tariffs of up to 25 percent imposed by Trump on billions of dollars of Chinese goods. But it raises the risk of inflaming American complaints about Beijing’s trade tactics.
“The last thing they will do is to escalate the tension by starting a currency war amid a trade war,” Macquarie Group said in a report last week.
A Treasury report on Oct. 17 said China failed to meet criteria to be labeled a currency manipulator, a status that can trigger sanctions. But it said Beijing was, along with Japan and Germany, on a list of governments whose currency polices would be closely monitored.
A weaker yuan also might encourage an outflow of capital from the world’s second-largest economy. That would raise borrowing costs at a time when its leaders are trying to shore up cooling growth.
The People’s Bank of China has been trying to make its exchange rate mechanism more efficient by increasing the role of market forces.
The exchange rate is set each morning and allowed to fluctuate by 2 percent against the dollar during the day. The central bank can buy or sell currency — or order Chinese commercial banks to do so — to dampen price movements.
Some forecasters say Beijing’s stance might change if Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, make no progress at a possible meeting during a November gathering of the Group of 20 major economies.
The central bank tried to discourage speculation by imposing a requirement in August that traders post deposits for contracts to buy or sell yuan. That allows trading to continue but raises the cost.
Beijing imposed similar controls in October 2015 after a change in the exchange rate mechanism prompted markets to bet the yuan would fall. The currency temporarily steadied but fell the following year.
The European Union’s environmental agency says air pollution is slowly improving across the continent but still exceeds the bloc’s limits and guidelines from the U.N. health agency.
The European Environment Agency on Monday issued its 2018 report on air quality and said emissions from road traffic, agriculture, energy production, industry and households are churning out pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone.
Agency head Hans Bruyninckx said: “Air pollution is an invisible killer and we need to step up our efforts to address the causes.”
He said Europe must “redouble its efforts to reduce emissions caused by transport, energy and agriculture and invest in making them cleaner and more sustainable.”
The report was based on more than 2,500 monitoring stations across Europe in 2016, the latest available data.
The fields grow shoulder-high with weeds out the window of Bob Fitzgerald’s Ford pickup. The drive through Fitzgerald’s neighborhood in Princess Anne, Maryland, is a tour of dying forests and abandoned cropland.
“A few years ago, all of this was a good farm,” he said. “And it’s gone, as a farm.”
The land along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay has been sinking for centuries. But climate change is adding a second whammy. As the sea level rises, salt water is seeping into the water table, deeper and deeper inland. The ground is becoming too salty for crops to grow.
Maryland’s Eastern Shore is home to some of the oldest farms in America. Fitzgerald’s dates back to 1666. He’s seen big changes in his lifetime.
“You just can’t believe how it’s taking things over in the last 15 or 20 years,” Fitzgerald said. “I can show you land around here that people raised tomatoes on when I was a little boy. And now it’s gone.”
Around the world, scientists warn that coastal farms are under threat from rising seas and encroaching salt water. A World Bank report estimates rice yields in coastal areas of Bangladesh may fall by more than 15 percent by 2050. Another report found that hundreds of millions of people will likely be displaced by rising waters.
Kate Tully aims to help keep Eastern Shore farmers in business as the seas rise.
The University of Maryland agroecologist had seen the “ghost forests” of dying pine trees killed by the increasingly salty soil. When she started looking at maps, she said, “I realized that a lot of the land that was upslope wasn’t just forests, it was farms. And so I started poking around and talking to people and asking if this was an issue on farms.”
It was. But “a lot of people hadn’t really been talking about it” outside their own communities, she said.
With a new $1.1 million research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Tully and her colleagues are aiming to give farmers options.
Test plots scattered around the Eastern Shore are trying out different crops.
“One thing that I’m very pleasantly surprised about is how well the sorghum does,” Tully said. The grain crop may be a good choice to feed the roughly 600 million chickens raised in the region each year. It’s a hardy crop that can handle salt, drought and heavy rains.
Tully’s group is also testing barley to supply the growing microbrew industry; the oilseed canola; switchgrass, a possible biofuel crop; and salt-tolerant soybeans.
Just being able to grow a crop isn’t enough, though. It also has to be profitable. An economist on the team will be running the numbers.
“I never want to recommend something that would make farmers go out of business,” Tully said.
But farming the land may not be the best option. Another choice is to give in to nature and turn fields into wetlands.
Wetlands attract waterfowl. Waterfowl attract hunters.
“There’s money in duck hunting,” Tully said. Hunting clubs will pay farmers for exclusive access to wetlands on their property. “It can be a lucrative pathway.”
Tully and her colleagues are just getting started. It will be a few years before they have recommendations for what will sustain communities that have been farming this land for centuries.
“There’s a lot of history there. And as these seas rise, some of that history is going underwater,” Tully said. “And I find that to be a pretty moving, pretty motivating reason to try to figure out what we can do for these farmers.”
…
As climate change raises sea levels, salty ocean water is pushing its way inland. That’s ruining valuable farmland around the world. On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, once-productive fields are succumbing to the saline waters. So researchers are looking for ways to keep farmers in business as the land changes. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
…
In Arabic, Annisa means an unmarried woman. And in Kenya, Annisa has become the first taxi-hailing service run by women. The new service targets women who don’t feel comfortable or safe being alone with male drivers. It also gives more women an opportunity to become cab drivers. Faiza Elmasry has the story narrated by Faith Lapidus.
…
At this time of the year, people in many parts of the world observe holidays honoring the dead. In some countries the focus is on celebrating ancestors, in others the end of the harvest and beginning of the darker portion of the year. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports most of these holidays have roots in ancient folk traditions.
…
Insurance shoppers likely will have several choices for individual health coverage this fall. The bad news? There’s no guarantee they will cover certain doctors or prescriptions.
Health insurers have stopped fleeing the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces and they’ve toned down premium hikes that gouged consumers in recent years. Some are even dropping prices for 2019. But the market will still be far from ideal for many customers when open enrollment starts Thursday.
Much of the insurance left on the marketplaces limits patients to narrow networks of hospitals or doctors and provides no coverage outside those networks.
Plus these plans can still be unaffordable for people who don’t receive help from the ACA’s income-based tax credits, and they often require patients to pay several thousand dollars toward their care before most coverage starts.
“People understand that things are kind of screwed up,” said Chicago-area broker Robert Slayton. “My objective is to give them what reality is, to give them options. Their job is to choose what may work.”
The ACA expanded coverage to millions of Americans when it established state-based marketplaces where people can buy a plan if they don’t get insurance through work or qualify for government programs like Medicaid. But the expansion has been rough.
Several insurers pulled back from these markets after being swamped with higher-than-expected costs. Many that remained jacked up prices or started limiting the hospitals and doctors included in their coverage networks.
Those narrow networks give insurers leverage to negotiate better rates that can lead to lower coverage prices, and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has found that the quality of their hospitals is comparable to broader networks.
Plans with narrow networks will cover necessary specialists like cardiologists, but they often exclude out-of-state care providers or academic medical centers, which tend to be more expensive.
They can pose problems for patients who have more than one physician or want to keep a doctor covered under a previous plan.
Jodi Smith Lemacks is nervous about changing or losing her job because that could mean cutting off her 15-year-old son Joshua from heart specialists he’s seen his entire life. The Richmond, Virginia, resident said she looked last year for options on the ACA’s marketplace to trim the coverage bill she pays through work.
She didn’t find any plans that would cover his current doctors, including some at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who treat his congenital heart disease.
“The issue with kids like Joshua is, it really matters, it’s life or death where you go,” she said.
Plans with some form of a limited network made up more than half of the choices offered for 2017 on the ACA’s marketplaces, according to the latest numbers from McKinsey. That coverage was particularly common in the price range where most consumers shop, which is within 10 percent of the lowest-priced plan.
These plans grew more common from 2014 to 2017, especially in cities where insurers could choose between competing hospital networks. But that trend has since stabilized, said McKinsey’s Jim Oatman.
Even so, brokers aren’t expecting narrow networks to go away. In some markets like St. Louis, they were the only option shoppers had among 10 plan choices for this year.
The narrow networks are grouped by hospital systems, and broker Kelly Rector has several customers who see doctors in different systems. She advises them to pick their coverage based on which doctor is most important and drop the others for in-network options.
Plans with narrow networks can make it harder to simply get to the doctor, especially if it’s a specialist.
Wichita Falls, Texas, residents with individual coverage have to drive nearly two hours to see an in-network neurologist, insurance agent Kelly Fristoe said. That can be stunning to customers who buy an individual plan after having coverage through work, which tends to come with wider networks.
“They don’t like it,” Fristoe said. “They’re forced to make a change, and they have to go establish themselves with a new specialist.”
Debbie Dean lives 15 minutes from a suburban Chicago hospital, but she’ll have to travel about an hour to an in-network location if she wants surgery on her injured shoulder. Dean couldn’t find affordable coverage that included the nearby hospital when she bought her 2018 plan.
Instead, she settled on insurance that comes with a $6,000 annual deductible she has to pay before most coverage starts. That, plus the travel distance, keeps her from seeking help.
“I’m grateful that I have coverage, but it’s really cruddy coverage,” she said. “I sit here with my shoulder killing me every day.”
Narrow-network plans with their lower prices can be good for shoppers who aren’t tied to a doctor and just want protection from big medical bills, said Paul Rooney, a vice president with the online insurance broker eHealth.
“They’re younger and they’re healthier and they’re thinking, ‘I’m going to get this coverage in case I hurt my knee playing basketball,’” he said.
But it can be tough for consumers when shopping to know if there’s a decent selection of doctors nearby until they need one.
People who “have the most to lose from having a narrow-network plan are those who have something unexpected happen to them,” said Daniel Polsky, a University of Pennsylvania economist.
…
Children in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are dying from Ebola at an unprecedented rate due largely to poor sanitary practices at clinics run by traditional healers, the health ministry said on Sunday.
The impact on children has been felt acutely in the city of Beni, which has emerged as the outbreak’s new epicenter. Of 120 confirmed Ebola cases in Beni, at least 30 are under 10-years-old, and 27 of them have died, according to health ministry data.
Many children affected by an unrelated malaria outbreak near Beni are thought to have contracted Ebola at clinics run by traditional healers who have also treated Ebola patients, said Jessica Ilunga, a spokeswoman for the health ministry.
“There is an abnormally high number of children who have contracted and died of Ebola in Beni. Normally, in every Ebola epidemic, children are not as affected,” Ilunga told Reuters.
“Traditional healers use the same tools to treat everyone. And the child who has entered a traditional healer’s clinic with malaria comes out with Ebola and dies several days later,” she said.
The rate of new cases in eastern Congo has accelerated in recent weeks. An emergency World Health Organization committee said earlier this month that the outbreak was likely to worsen significantly unless the response was stepped up.
The health ministry reported nine new confirmed cases late on Saturday — seven in Beni and two in the city of Butembo — the biggest one-day day jump since the outbreak was declared on Aug. 1.
The hemorrhagic fever is believed to have killed 168 people and infected another 98 in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, where attacks by armed groups and community resistance to health officials have complicated the response.
Congo has suffered 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered near its eponymous Ebola River in 1976. The current one now ranks third in terms of number of confirmed cases.
The leaders of Japan and India are reaffirming their ties amid growing worries about trade and regional stability.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived Saturday, was meeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a resort area near Mount Fuji on Sunday. Modi is also visiting a nearby plant of major Japanese robot maker Fanuc.
Relations with China are a major issue shared by Modi and Abe, as their cooperation may balance China’s growing regional influence and military assertiveness.
“The India-Japan partnership has been fundamentally transformed and it has been strengthened as a ‘special strategic and global partnership,'” Modi told Kyodo News service. “There are no negatives but only opportunities in this relationship which are waiting to be seized.”
Modi chose Japan among the first nations to visit after taking power four years ago. He has been urging countries in the Indo-Pacific region to unite against protectionism and cross-border tensions.
In another sign of closer relations, India and Japan are also set to hold their first joint military exercises involving ground forces, starting next month.
Abe has just returned from China, where he met President Xi Jinping and agreed the two nations were “sharing more common interests and concerns.”
President Donald Trump’s policies that have targeted mostly China with tariffs, but also Japan and other nations, accusing them of unfair trade practices, are working to prod India and Japan to promote their economic ties.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry said the leaders had lunch at a hotel in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, and exchanged a wide range of views on pursuing “a free and open” Indo-Pacific region. Abe told Modi about his recent trip to China, and both sides agreed on the need to cooperate closely on getting North Korea to drop nuclear weapons development, the ministry said in a statement.
Japan’s investment in India still has room to grow. Japan is helping India build a super-fast railway system.
Abe has made bolstering and opening the nation’s economy central to his policies called “Abenomics,” and has encouraged trade, foreign investment and tourism.
Although Japan has long seen the U.S. as its main ally, especially in defense, Abe is courting other ties. He has also been vocal about free trade, which runs counter to Trump’s moves to raise tariffs.
Earlier this year, Japan signed a landmark deal with the European Union that will eliminate nearly all tariffs on products they trade. European and Japanese leaders pledged to strengthen their partnership in defense, climate change and human exchange, to send what they called a clear message against protectionism.
Abe and Modi will hold a more formal summit Monday in Tokyo.
There is no risk of contagion from Italy’s budget crisis in the European Union but the euro zone is not prepared enough to face a new economic crisis, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told daily Le Parisien on Sunday.
The European Commission rejected Italy’s draft 2019 budget earlier this week for breaking EU rules on public spending, and asked Rome to submit a new one within three weeks or face disciplinary action.
“We do not see any contagion in Europe. The European Commission has reached out to Italy, I hope Italy will seize this hand,” he said in an interview.
“But is the eurozone sufficiently armed to face a new economic or financial crisis? My answer is no. It is urgent to do what we have proposed to our partners in order to have a solid banking union and a euro zone investment budget.”
Eurozone officials have said that Rome’s unprecedented standoff with Brussels seems certain to delay the reform process and probably dilute it for good.
Le Maire also said French banks with branches in Italy had issued corporate and household loans totaling 280 billion euros ($319 billion).
“This sum is manageable but substantial,” he said.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has held plenty of grand opening ceremonies in his 15 years at Turkey’s helm. On Monday he will unveil one of his prized jewels — Istanbul New Airport —
a megaproject that has been dogged by concerns about labor rights, environmental issues and Turkey’s weakening economy.
Erdogan is opening what he claims will eventually become the world’s largest air transport hub on the 95th anniversary of Turkey’s establishment as a republic. It’s a symbolic launch, as only limited flights will begin days later and a full move won’t take place until the end of the year.
Tens of thousands of workers have been scrambling to finish the airport to meet Erdogan’s Oct. 29 deadline. Protests in September over poor working conditions and dozens of construction deaths have highlighted the human cost of the project.
Istanbul New Airport, on shores of the Black Sea, will serve 90 million passengers annually in its first phase. At its completion in ten years, it will occupy nearly 19,000 acres and serve up to 200 million travelers a year with six runways. That’s almost double the traffic at world’s biggest airport currently, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson.
“This airport is going to be the most important hub between Asia and Europe,” Kadri Samsunlu, head of the 5-company consortium Istanbul Grand Airport, told reporters Thursday.
The airport’s interiors nod to Turkish and Islamic designs and its tulip-shaped air traffic control tower won the 2016 International Architecture Award. It also uses mobile applications and artificial intelligence for customers, is energy efficient and boasts a high-tech security system.
All aviation operations will move there at the end of December when Istanbul’s main international airport, named after Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is closed down. Ataturk Airport now handles 64 million people a year. On the Asian side of the city, Sabiha Gokcen Airport handled 31 million passengers last year. It will remain open.
Erdogan is expected to announce the official name of the new airport, part of his plan to transform Turkey into a global player.
Turkish Airlines will launch its first flights out of the new airport to three local destinations: Ankara, Antalya and Izmir. It will also fly to Baku and Ercan in northern Cyprus.
Nihat Demir, head of a construction workers’ union, said the rush to meet Erdogan’s deadline has been a major cause of the accidents and deaths at the site that employs 36,000 people.
“The airport has become a cemetery,” he told The Associated Press, describing the pressure to finish as relentless and blaming long working hours for leading to “carelessness, accidents and deaths.”
The Dev-Yapi-Is union has identified 37 worker deaths at the site and claimed more than 100 dead remain unidentified.
Turkey’s Ministry of Labor has denied media reports about hundreds of airport construction deaths, saying in February that 27 workers had died at the site due to “health problems and traffic accidents.” It has not commented since then.
Airport workers in September began a strike against poor working conditions, including unpaid salaries, bedbugs, unsafe food and inadequate transport to the site. Security forces rounded up hundreds of workers and formally arrested nearly 30, among them union leaders. The company said it was working to improve conditions.
Megaprojects in northern Istanbul like the airport, the third bridge connecting Istanbul’s Asian and European shores and Erdogan’s yet-to-start plans for a man-made canal parallel to the Bosporus strait are also impacting the environment. The environmental group Northern Forests Defense said the new airport has destroyed forests, wetlands and coastal sand dunes and threatens biodiversity.
These projects are spurring additional construction of transportation networks, housing and business centers in already overpopulated Istanbul, where more than 15 million people live. Samsunlu, the airport executive, said an “airport city” for innovation and technology would also be built.
The five Turkish companies that won the $29 billion tender in 2013 under the “build-operate-transfer” model have been financing the project through capital and bank loans. IGA will operate the airport for 25 years.
Financial observers say lending has fueled much of Turkey’s growth and its construction boom, leaving the private sector with a huge $200 billion debt. With inflation and unemployment in Turkey at double digits and a national currency that has lost as much as 40 percent of its value against the dollar this year, economists say Turkey is clearly facing an economic downturn.
Despite those dark financial clouds, the airport consortium hopes the world’s growing aviation industry will generate both jobs and billions of dollars in returns.
“Istanbul New Airport will remain ambitious for growth and we will carry on mastering the challenge to be the biggest and the best. That’s our motto,” Samsunlu said.
Playwright, poet and author Ntozake Shange, whose most acclaimed theater piece is the 1975 Tony Award-nominated play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” died Saturday, according to her daughter. She was 70.
Shange’s “For Colored Girls” describes the racism, sexism, violence and rape experienced by seven black women. It has been influential to generations of progressive thinkers, from #MeToo architect Tarana Burke to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. After learning of Shange’s death, Nottage called her “our warrior poet/dramatist.”
Embodies the ‘struggle of black women’
Savannah Shange, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said Saturday that her mother died in her sleep at an assisted living facility in Bowie, Maryland. She had suffered a series of strokes in 2004.
“She spoke for, and in fact embodied, the ongoing struggle of black women and girls to live with dignity and respect in the context of systemic racism, sexism and oppression,” Savannah Shange said.
“For Colored Girls” is an interwoven series of poetic monologues set to music, Shange coined the form a “choreopoem” for it, by African-American women, each identified only by a color that she wears.
Shange used idiosyncratic punctuation and nonstandard spellings in her work, challenging conventions. One of her characters shouts, “i will raise my voice / & scream & holler / & break things & race the engine / & tell all yr secrets bout yrself to yr face.”
It played more than 750 performances on Broadway, only the second play by an African-American woman after “A Raisin in the Sun,” and was turned into a feature film by Tyler Perry starring Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington and Janet Jackson.
Born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, she went on to graduate from Barnard College and got a master’s degree from the University of Southern California. Her father, Dr. Paul T. Williams, was a surgeon. Her mother, Eloise Owens Williams, was a professor of social work. She later assumed a new Zulu name: Ntozake means “She who comes with her own things” and Shange means “She who walks like a lion.”
Plays, poetry, teaching
“For Colored Girls” opened at the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, with Shange, then 27, performing as one of the women. The New York Times reviewer called it “extraordinary and wonderful” and “a very humbling but inspiring thing for a white man to experience.” It earned Shange an Obie Award and she won a second such award in 1981 for her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” at the Public Theater.
Shange’s other 15 plays include “A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty” (1977), “Boogie Woogie Landscapes” (1977), “Spell No. 7” (1979) and “Black and White Two Dimensional Planes” (1979).
Her list of published works includes 19 poetry collections, six novels, five children’s books and three collections of essays. Some of her novels are “Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo” (1982) and “Some Sing, Some Cry,” with her sister, Ifa Bayeza. Her poetry collections include “I Live in Music” (1994) and “The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family” (2004). She appeared in an episode of “Transparent” and helped narrate the 2002 documentary “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.”
She worked with such black theater companies as the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco; the New Freedom Theater in Philadelphia; Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey; St. Louis Black Rep; Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota; and The Ensemble Theatre in Houston, Texas.
Shange taught at Brown University, Rice University, Villanova University, DePaul University, Prairie View University and Sonoma State University. She also lectured at Yale, Howard, New York University, among others.
In addition to her daughter and sister, Shange is survived by sister Bisa Williams, brother Paul T. Williams, Jr. and a granddaughter, Harriet Shange-Watkins.
…
Traditionally, the U.S. turns to all things pumpkin as Halloween approaches at the end of October. Coffeeshops sell pumpkin spiced lattes, grocery stores offer pumpkin-scented paper towels, and markets, porches, even the White House are all decorated with carved pumpkins. One California city decided to celebrate the spookiest night of the year with its own pumpkin craze: pumpkin nights! Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
…
A stallion in southwest Mississippi is bringing the first new blood in a century for a line of horses brought to America 500 years ago by Spanish conquistadors. The stallion was bred by Choctaw Indians, who were later forced out of their ancestral homelands. Faith Lapidus has the story.
…
Pancreatic cancer treatment could become more advanced with help from 13-year-old Rishab Jain. He’s created a tool for doctors to locate the hard-to-find pancreas more quickly and precisely during cancer treatment. The teen recently won a prestigious young scientist award for his potentially game-changing idea. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
…
Pearls, diamonds and history one of the most beautiful and historic jewelry collections will go to auction in November when Marie Antoinette’s jewels will be sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva. But for now, the breathtaking royal jewels are on display in New York. VOA’s Evgeny Maslov looked at a collection that hasn’t been seen in public for more than 200 years. Anna Rice narrates his story.
…