Month: July 2020

U.S. President Donald Trump has unveiled a top-to-bottom overhaul of the review process for infrastructure projects that critics contend causes major cracks in bedrock conservations laws.  “This is something that nobody thought was possible,” Trump said on the outskirts of Atlanta’s airport on Wednesday, contending that “horrible roadblocks” due to environmental regulations had cost “trillions of dollars” over the years.  The president said his new rule “completely modernizes the approval review process under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,” which will cut the timeline for major projects, including highways, from up to 20 years down to two years or less.  “You’re not going to devote a lifetime to doing a project that doesn’t get approved,” Trump said of the streamlined process. “It’s going to be very quick — yes or no, after study.” In his remarks at the Hapeville Airport Hub of United Parcel Service, Trump discussed how he had personally experienced frustration with “mountains and mountains of red tape” over the decades in the real estate industry.  He remarked how “years and years of litigation and tumult” in the maze-like approval process had caused massive delays for his projects and those of other developers.  Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at McGregor Industries in Dunmore, Pa., July 9, 2020.For the second day in a row, Trump pivoted from a presidential announcement to attacking his opponent in this year’s election, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden.  “Our past vice president opposes all of our permitting reforms,” the Republican president said.  The rollbacks to the act, known by its acronym, NEPA, could be removed with a simple majority vote in Congress and the president’s signature, something the opposition party is almost certain to attempt, depending on the outcome of the November election.  A number of major polls now give Biden a significant lead over Trump, and some forecast the Democrats could win enough seats in the Senate to take control of both chambers of Congress. FILE – In this March 5, 2020, file photo, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks to the media outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., after she dropped out of the Democratic presidential race.“Trump is once again selling out and silencing communities in favor of giant corporate polluters,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, who unsuccessfully vied for this year’s Democratic Party nomination to take on Trump.   More than 100 Democrat lawmakers wrote to the administration last week, opposing the planned changes to NEPA, noting that communities facing environment inequality “have been targeted for projects, and, in turn, continue to experience negative environmental and health impacts.”   “NEPA was created to give a voice to those who are often rendered voiceless and has successfully allowed impacted populations to challenge projects that negatively affect their water quality, air quality, economic prosperity, and overall health and safety,” the lawmakers added, predicting the changes will threaten and undermine “years of hard-fought progress.” The changes made by Trump’s administration are dangerous, costly and short-sighted, said Cheryl Wasserman, a former policy official with the enforcement and compliance assurance division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  NEPA is a “look and listen before you leap” law, she explained, directing “all federal agencies to work together to assess environmental and social impacts of proposed actions and to explore alternatives to avoid irreparable harm to natural and human resources, to avoid adverse and to enhance beneficial outcomes. Wednesday’s announcement by the president, however, is being praised by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).  “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to strengthen U.S. manufacturing capabilities and operations. Onshoring manufacturing requires first establishing basic infrastructure — from water and energy delivery to transportation — before ground can ever be broken on a major facility. Obtaining permits for these items can take years, especially when environmental reviews are piecemeal,” Rachel Jones, NAM’s vice president of energy and resources policy, said.  The “bold steps” announced today “utilize existing authority to strengthen reviews, reduce the time necessary to obtain permits and set the stage to incentivize job creation and investment in America,” she added.  
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There has been an alarming decline in the number of children getting vaccinated for such preventable diseases as diphtheria, tetanus and measles, the United Nations warned Wednesday. The U.N.’s World Health Organization and UNICEF blame the decline on the disruption of routine health care caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of World Health Organization, attends the virtual 73rd World Health Assembly in Geneva, May 18, 2020.“Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools in the history of public health, and more children are now being immunized than ever before,” WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “But the pandemic has put those gains at risk. The avoidable suffering and death caused by children missing out on routine immunizations could be far greater than COVID-19 itself.” The WHO and UNICEF said that even when vaccines are available, many children who need them are afraid to leave their homes because of the coronavirus or the difficulties of traveling because of COVID-19 restrictions.  But even before the pandemic hit, the agencies said, progress in vaccinating children was slipping. They said nearly 14 million children did not get shots against measles and pertussis in 2019. Most of these children live in Africa. Economic hardships also prevented children in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan and the Philippines from getting necessary vaccines. “COVID-19 has made previously routine vaccination a daunting challenge,” UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said. “We must prevent a further deterioration in vaccine coverage and urgently resume vaccination programs before children’s lives are threatened by other diseases. We cannot trade one health crisis for another.”
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A wave of tweets in apparent hacking swept through Twitter on Wednesday, with more than half a dozen high-profile accounts – belonging to U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, billionaire Bill Gates, and rapper Kanye West, among others – used to solicit bitcoin donations.The cause of the breach was not immediately clear, but the scale and the scope of the problem suggested that it was not limited to a single account or service.Shares of Twitter tumbled nearly 4% in trading after the market close.Twitter said in an email that it was looking into the matter and would issue a statement shortly.Some of the tweets were swiftly deleted but there appeared to be a struggle to regain control of the accounts. In the case of billionaire Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, for example, one tweet soliciting cryptocurrency was removed and, sometime later, another one appeared.Among the others affected: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the corporate accounts for Uber and Apple.A spokesman for Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tesla was not immediately available for comment.Publicly available blockchain records show that the apparent scammers have already received more than $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
 
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Researchers believe they have identified the area of the brain that determines a preference for alcohol, perhaps the first step in an eventual treatment for alcoholism.In a study published Monday in the Society for Neuroscience journal eNeuro, researchers said they were trying to determine why some people can consume alcohol every day without developing dependence while less frequent drinkers develop a dependence.The researchers, from the University of Massachusetts, offered a test group of rats intermittent access to a 20 percent alcohol solution, then trained them to self-administer both 10 and 20 percent solutions of alcohol, as well as a sugar solution as a reward. They then were able to determine which rats were high or low alcohol consumers and divide them accordingly.The researchers monitored the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity in rats as they consumed the alcohol. The OFC is the brain region associated with impulsivity, reward and decision-making. They found OFC activity in spiked in rats that preferred to consume higher levels of alcohol when they consumed it than in rats who did not prefer it as much.The researchers said the strength of the OFC activity was directly linked to how much the rats preferred drinking the stronger alcohol solution, suggesting the OFC is the portion of the brain that encodes individual preferences for alcohol.The researchers stressed that further human research was needed to determine whether these findings would translate exactly to people. And they have not yet determined the root developmental, environmental and genetic causes driving these preferences for alcohol.But they said understanding the underlying mechanisms in the brain had the potential to target more precisely what happens when a person has problems controlling alcohol consumption.
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NASA plans to launch its newest Mars rover by the end of the month after a hardware issue scrapped an earlier launch.  The space agency has until the middle of August to complete a successful launch before planetary alignment issues force a costly delay to the mission.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF are calling for a renewed push for vaccinations, as the numbers of vaccinations fall due to the coronavirus pandemic.In a statement issued Wednesday, the non-profits say child vaccination rates plateaued at 85 percent in the decade prior to the outbreak, with an estimate that at least 14 million infants were not vaccinated each of those years.“Vaccines are one of the most powerful tools in the history of public health, and more children are now being immunized than ever before,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.But the pandemic has slowed production of the vital preventative vaccines, and stay-at-home orders, economic hardships and other obstacles have hindered access to doctor’s offices and clinics.For example, new data released by the WHO indicates the first four months of 2020 saw a significant drop in in children completing the recommended number of vaccination doses against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP3). Such a decline would be the first in nearly three decades, the WHO said.In a poll conducted in June by the WHO, UNICEF and Garvi, in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, three-quarters of 82 countries that responded reported COVID-19-related disruptions in their immunization services.A majority of the countries reporting disruptions were located in Africa, the Americas and the Eastern Mediterranean, the data shows.UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore urged governments to continue to support their vaccination programs, even as scientists race to discover a treatment and vaccine for COVID-19.“We must prevent a further deterioration in vaccine coverage and urgently resume vaccination programs before children’s lives are threatened by other diseases. We cannot trade one health crisis for another,” she said. 
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