The June 22 editorial in the Washington Post is a marvel. Writing about the accusation made against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, it notes that the alleged offense took place almost 50 years ago. “That it took nearly a half-century for these allegations to be dealt with illustrates the church’s wretched track record in combating clerical sex abuse.”

The average reader will no doubt conclude that the Catholic Church sat on these allegations for five decades. But that is a lie. Worse, the Washington Post knows it is a lie. How do I know?

Two paragraphs after it makes this remark, the editorial notes that the allegations “became known to the church through its Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program….” That is true. So when did the accuser come forward? In the early part of this year, after the New York Archdiocese essentially invited him to come forward. In April he testified before this panel.

Are they dunces at the Washington Post? Or just malicious?

To blame the Catholic Church for not acting on a complaint made in 2018 about an offense that occurred in 1971 is astounding. Is their animus against the Church that deep that they don’t even see their bias?

Contact Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor: Fred.Hiatt@washpost.com​

The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has published a new edition of the World Atlas of Desertification, offering a tool for decision makers to improve local responses to soil loss and land degradation.

The Atlas provides the first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of land degradation at a global level and highlights the urgency to adopt corrective measures.

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the Joint Research Centre (JRC), said: “Over the past twenty years, since the publication of the last edition of the World Atlas of Desertification, pressures on land and soil have increased dramatically. To preserve our planet for future generations, we urgently need to change the way we treat these precious resources. This new and much more advanced edition of the Atlas gives policymakers worldwide comprehensive and easily accessible insights into land degradation, its causes and potential remedies to tackle desertification and restoring degraded land.”

The Atlas provides examples of how human activity drives species to extinction, threatens food security, intensifies climate change and leads to people being displaced from their homes.

The main findings show that population growth and changes in our consumption patterns put unprecedented pressure on the planet’s natural resources. Over 75% of the Earth’s land area is already degraded, and over 90% could become degraded by 2050. Globally, a total area half of the size of the European Union (4.18 million km²) is degraded annually, with Africa and Asia being the most affected.

The economic cost of soil degradation for the EU is estimated to be in the order of tens of billions of euros annually. Land degradation and climate change are estimated to lead to a reduction of global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Most of this will occur in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, where land degradation could halve crop production.

As a consequence of accelerated deforestation it will become more difficult to mitigate the effects of climate change.

By 2050, up to 700 million people are estimated to have been displaced due to issues linked to scarce land resources. The figure could reach up to 10 billion by the end of this century.

While land degradation is a global problem, it takes place locally and requires local solutions. Greater commitment and more effective cooperation at the local level are necessary to stop land degradation and loss of biodiversity.

Further agricultural expansion, one of the main causes of land degradation, could be limited by increasing yields on existing farmland, shifting to plant-based diets, consuming animal proteins from sustainable sources and reducing food loss and waste.

The Atlas gives a clear overview of the underlying causes of degradation worldwide. It also contains a large number of facts, forecasts and global datasets that can be used to identify important biophysical and socio-economic processes that, on their own or combined, can lead to unsustainable land use and land degradation.

EMBL researchers have designed a computational method to jointly analyse multiple types of molecular data from patients in order to identify molecular signatures that distinguish individuals. The method is called Multi-Omics Factor Analysis (MOFA), and was published in Molecular Systems Biology. MOFA could be particularly useful for understanding cancer development, improving diagnosis and suggesting new directions for personalised treatment.

The researchers tested their new method on multi-omics data collected from 200 leukaemia patients. MOFA identified a series of factors that highlight the molecular variability between patients. This information could help researchers understand how cancer develops at an individual level. It could also help steer personalised treatment decisions.

“The big challenge in cancer is that each patient’s disease is different from a molecular point of view and has a unique set of molecular features that have led to its development,” said Ricard Argelaguet, Predoctoral Fellow in the Stegle group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). “Our method allows researchers to do something that couldn’t be done before – to easily integrate complex molecular data from DNA, RNA, methylation and more to build a tumour’s molecular profile. Using these profiles, the method can also stratify patients into groups that may benefit from different types of treatment.”

“Our objective was to come up with a method that could easily be used by clinical researchers, so we worked with colleagues from the field to understand their needs and challenges,” continued Britta Velten, Predoctoral Fellow in the Huber group at EMBL Heidelberg. “We combined expertise from maths, statistics, machine learning, biology and clinical medicine to come up with a robust and practical method, which will hopefully help researchers in a clinical setting to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

In a second application, the researchers also used MOFA to analyse multi-omics data at single-cell resolution. They are currently working on further improving the method so that it can cope with even larger data sets and additional experimental designs.

What is multiomics data?

Multi-omics approaches integrate data from the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, metabolome, and other molecular data. These data types have different properties and dimensions and are difficult to integrate into a comprehensive analysis to build an individual’s molecular profile.

However, by combining multiple molecular data types (multi-omics), researchers can identify biomarkers – naturally occurring molecules, genes or molecular characteristics associated with a particular disease. Biomarkers are essential for clinical research and can be used to classify patients into different patient groups. By measuring biomarkers, we can understand a patient’s disease better and estimate what kind of treatment they will respond to best.

Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: usually scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language.

But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves?

A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger.

Building off the team’s past work focused on simple binary-choice activities, the new work expands the scope to multiple-choice tasks, opening up new possibilities for how human workers could manage teams of robots.

By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to execute.

The team demonstrated the system on a task in which a robot moves a power drill to one of three possible targets on the body of a mock plane. Importantly, they showed that the system works on people it’s never seen before, meaning that organizations could deploy it in real-world settings without needing to train it on users.

“This work combining EEG and EMG feedback enables natural human-robot interactions for a broader set of applications than we’ve been able to do before using only EEG feedback,” said CSAIL director Daniela Rus, who supervised the work. “By including muscle feedback, we can use gestures to command the robot spatially, with much more nuance and specificity.”

PhD candidate Joseph DelPreto was lead author on a paper about the project alongside Rus, former CSAIL postdoctoral associate Andres F. Salazar-Gomez, former CSAIL research scientist Stephanie Gil, research scholar Ramin M. Hasani, and Boston University professor Frank H. Guenther. The paper will be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference taking place in Pittsburgh next week.

Intuitive human-robot interaction

In most previous work, systems could generally only recognize brain signals when people trained themselves to “think” in very specific but arbitrary ways and when the system was trained on such signals. For instance, a human operator might have to look at different light displays that correspond to different robot tasks during a training session.

Not surprisingly, such approaches are difficult for people to handle reliably, especially if they work in fields like construction or navigation that already require intense concentration.

Meanwhile, Rus’ team harnessed the power of brain signals called “error-related potentials” (ErrPs), which researchers have found to naturally occur when people notice mistakes. If there’s an ErrP, the system stops so the user can correct it; if not, it carries on.

“What’s great about this approach is that there’s no need to train users to think in a prescribed way,” said DelPreto. “The machine adapts to you, and not the other way around.”

For the project the team used “Baxter”, a humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics. With human supervision, the robot went from choosing the correct target 70 percent of the time to more than 97 percent of the time.

To create the system the team harnessed the power of electroencephalography (EEG) for brain activity and electromyography (EMG) for muscle activity, putting a series of electrodes on the users’ scalp and forearm.

Both metrics have some individual shortcomings: EEG signals are not always reliably detectable, while EMG signals can sometimes be difficult to map to motions that are any more specific than “move left or right.” Merging the two, however, allows for more robust bio-sensing and makes it possible for the system to work on new users without training.

“By looking at both muscle and brain signals, we can start to pick up on a person’s natural gestures along with their snap decisions about whether something is going wrong,” said DelPreto. “This helps make communicating with a robot more like communicating with another person.”

The team says that they could imagine the system one day being useful for the elderly, or workers with language disorders or limited mobility.

“We’d like to move away from a world where people have to adapt to the constraints of machines,” said Rus. “Approaches like this show that it’s very much possible to develop robotic systems that are a more natural and intuitive extension of us.”

A so-called “jumping gene” that researchers long considered either genetic junk or a pernicious parasite is actually a critical regulator of the first stages of embryonic development, according to a new study in mice led by UC San Francisco scientists and published in Cell.

Only about 1 percent of the human genome encodes proteins, and researchers have long debated what the other 99 percent is good for. Many of these non-protein coding regions are known to contain important regulatory elements that orchestrate gene activity, but others are thought to be evolutionary garbage that is just too much trouble for the genome to clean up.

For example, fully half of our DNA is made up of “transposable elements,” or “transposons,” virus-like genetic material that has the special ability of duplicating and reinserting itself in different locations in the genome, which has led researchers to dub them genetic parasites. Over the course of evolution, some transposons have left hundreds or thousands of copies of themselves scattered across the genome. While most of these stowaways are thought to be inert and inactive, others create havoc by altering or disrupting cells’ normal genetic programming and have been associated with diseases such as certain forms of cancer.

Now UCSF scientists have revealed that, far from being a freeloader or parasite, the most common transposon, called LINE1, which accounts for 20 percent or more of the human genome, is actually necessary for embryos to develop past the two-cell stage.

‘Playing with Fire’

Study senior author Miguel Ramalho-Santos, PhD, an associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive sciences and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF, has been interested in transposons since he first set up his lab as an independent UCSF Fellow in 2003.

He and others had observed that embryonic stem cells and early embryos expressed high levels of LINE1, which seemed paradoxical for a gene that was considered to be a dangerous, disease-causing parasite. “Given the standard view of transposons, these early embryos were really playing with fire,” he remembers thinking. “It just didn’t make any sense, and I wondered if something else was going on.”

The project took off when Michelle Percharde, PhD, joined the lab as a post-doctoral researcher in 2013 and was quickly caught up in Ramalho-Santos’s enthusiasm for the LINE1 paradox. “When I saw all the LINE1 RNA that’s present in the nucleus of developing cells, I agreed there must be some role it’s playing,” Percharde said. “Why let your cells make so much of this RNA if it’s either dangerous or doing nothing?”

To determine whether the high levels of LINE1 RNA expression in mouse embryos was actually important to the animals’ development, Percharde performed experiments to eliminate LINE1 RNA from mouse embryonic stem cells. To her surprise, she found that the pattern of gene expression in these cells changed, reverting to a pattern seen in two-cell embryos after the fertilized egg’s first division. The team tried eliminating LINE1 from fertilized eggs and found that the embryos completely lost their ability to progress past the two-cell phase.

“When we saw that cells were changing identity when we removed LINE1 RNA, that was our real ‘Aha!’ moment that told us we were on to something,” Percharde said.

Further experiments revealed that although the LINE1 gene is expressed in the early embryo and stem cells, its role is not to insert itself elsewhere in the genome. Instead, its RNA is trapped within the cell nucleus, where it forms a complex with gene regulatory proteins Nucleolin and Kap1. This complex is necessary to turn off the dominant genetic program that orchestrates embryos’ two-cell state — controlled by a gene called Dux — and to turn on genes that are needed for the embryo to move on with further cell divisions and development.

Duplication May Add Robustness

The research took five years to come to fruition, and required Percharde to invent several new techniques for studying transposons along the way, but has resulted in a finding that the researchers hope will convince other scientists to finally pay attention to functional roles of jumping genes.

“These genes have been with us for billions of years and have been the majority of our genomes for hundreds of millions of years,” Ramalho-Santos said. “I think it’s fair to ask if the 1.5 percent of protein-coding genes are the free-riders, and not the other way around.”

Ramalho-Santos speculates that transposons like LINE1 may make the delicate early stages of development more robust precisely because they are so ubiquitous. Because LINE1 is repeated thousands of times in the genome, it’s virtually impossible for a mutation to disrupt its function: if one copy is bad, there are thousands more to take its place.

“We now think these early embryos are playing with fire but in a very calculated way,” Ramalho-Santos said. “This could be a very robust mechanism for regulating development.”

“Scientists have done so much work on protein-coding genes, and they’re less than 2 percent of the genome, whereas transposons make up nearly 50 percent,” Percharde added. “I’m personally excited to continue exploring novel functions of these elements in development and disease.”

By Lizzy Joslyn

The feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More is observed as an optional memorial June 22. So that our readers don’t have to fish for more information, CNA has compiled a question-and-answer lowdown on their lives and legacies:

Who was St. Thomas More?

St. Thomas More (1478-1535) was a humanist and intellectual – he worked as a lawyer and explored theology through his written works, many of which were defenses of the Catholic faith against heresy. He studied at Oxford and briefly considered religious life, but he eventually followed a vocation to marriage and fatherhood.

More was appointed by King Henry VIII to be Lord Chancellor of England in 1529.

What does “Lord Chancellor” mean?

The “Lord Chancellor” was the highest ranking member of the King’s cabinet. This role was commonly filled by a clergyman. Historically, the role entailed great judicial responsibility – its influence has evolved to scale back on this particular front.

How did he manage to get on Henry VIII’s bad side?

St. Thomas More stood firmly in his Catholic faith when Henry VIII began to pull away from the Church.

The king wanted a declaration of nullity for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, but the Church, upon examination, could not find his marriage to Catherine invalid. More refused in 1530 to sign a letter asking the pope to declare the marriage null, and would not sign an oath acknowledging the monarch as the supreme head of the Church in England.

In May 1532 Henry pressured the English synod, the Convocation of Canterbury, to submit the clergy’s authority to his own. The day after the convocation agreed to Henry’s terms, More resigned as Lord Chancellor.

More wished to retire from public life, but when he refused to assent to the Act of Supremacy 1534, which repudiated the pope’s authority over the Church in England, he was imprisoned on charges of treason.

He was sentenced to execution, which took place July 6, 1535.

Why is he a saint?

More’s persistence to remain sided with the Church rather than the king, ending in martyrdom, was a testament to his tireless devotion to God’s law. He was canonized by Pius XI in 1935, and was named patron of statesmen and politicians by St. John Paul II.

I’ve heard something about his beard…?

Yes. You’re not imagining things, don’t worry.

The story with St. Thomas More’s beard is that he laid his beard outside of the execution blade’s path in one final, humorous gesture.

His last words were,“This hath not offended the King,” implying that while his head had angered Henry VIII, his beard was innocent and did not deserve to be severed.

Who was St. John Fisher?

St. John Fisher (1469-1535) was ordained a priest when he was about 22, and was appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1504. He lived an intentionally simple lifestyle and was an intellectual. He studied theology at Cambridge, where he became chancellor. Among his writings is a commentary on the seven penitential psalms.

His mission as a bishop was to perfect how the Church’s teachings were conveyed by his diocese. Fisher spent much of his time travelling to parishes with the mission of theologically correcting and realigning clergy. He also wrote various apologetic defenses in response to Martin Luther.

What did he have to do with the whole Henry VIII situation?

St. John Fisher studied Henry’s request for a declaration of nullity, but could not find grounds for such a declaration.

He refused to assent to the Succession to the Crown Act 1533, which recognized the king’s supremacy over the Church in England and declared the daughter of Catherine of Aragon illegitimate, and was imprisoned for treason in April 1534.

Fisher was jailed, starved and deprived of all sacraments, but he didn’t budge on his position.

Fisher was made a cardinal in May 1535, in the hopes that Henry would not dare execute a prince of the Church.

Please don’t tell me it ended like More’s story…

It didn’t. There was no beard on the line.

However, Fisher was executed, head on the chopping block and all. He removed his hair shirt, and said the Te Deum and Psalm 31 right before giving his life for the kingdom of God and the honor of the Church, June 22, 1535. He is the only cardinal to have been martyred.

Why is Fisher a saint?

Same deal as More – he stuck to what he knew to be the truth and died for it. He was canonized with More in 1935 by Pius XI.

But he’s not nearly as well-known as St. Thomas More!

No, he’s not. St. Thomas Fisher’s grave, which also contains the bones of More, doesn’t even bear his name. But he did it for the glory of God.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and relying on intuition or “gut instinct” isn’t an accurate way to determine what they’re thinking or feeling,” said researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the University of Chicago and Northeastern University.

“We incorrectly presume that taking someone else’s perspective will help us understand and improve interpersonal relationships,” they said in a new study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “If you want an accurate understanding of what someone is thinking or feeling, don’t make assumptions, just ask.”

The researchers debunk the theories canonized in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People that assuming you understand someone else’s thoughts, feelings, attitude, or mental state is a correct approach to interpersonal insight.

The study included an exhaustive series of 25 experiments designed to separate accuracy from egotism. The researchers asked participants to adopt another person’s perspective and predict their emotions based on facial expressions and body postures, identify fake versus genuine smiles, spot when someone is lying or telling the truth, and even predict a spouse’s activity preferences and consumer attitudes.

“Initially a large majority of participants believed that taking someone else’s perspective would help them achieve more accurate interpersonal insight,” the researchers said. “However, test results showed that their predictive assumptions were not generally accurate, although it did make them feel more confident about their judgement and reduced egocentric biases.”

Ultimately, the researchers confirmed gaining perspective directly through conversation is the most accurate approach.

Many animals have evolved fur or feather colors to blend in with the environment and hide from predators. But how do animals stay camouflaged when their environment changes with each new season? Researchers at the University of Montana recently discovered that hybridization played an important role in snowshoe hares’ ability to match their environment.

An international scientific team led by UM Associate Professor Jeffrey Good and graduate student Matthew Jones set out to discover how snowshoe hares have evolved to molt to a white coat in areas with prolonged winter snow cover while populations from mild coastal environments of the Pacific Northwest retain brown fur year-round.

“Like other seasonal traits, the autumn molt in snowshoe hares is triggered by changes in day length,” Good said. “But the color of their winter coat is determined by genetic variation that has been shaped by evolution to match the local presence or absence of snow.”

In a new article published in the journal Science, Good’s team discovered that the development of brown or white winter coats in snowshoe hares is controlled by genetic variation at a single pigmentation gene that is activated during the autumn molt.

“This result is exciting because it shows that critical adaptive shifts in seasonal camouflage can evolve through changes in the regulation of a single gene,” Jones said.

The genetic discovery came with a surprising twist.

“When we looked at the same gene in other closely related species,” Jones said, “we found that the brown version of the gene in snowshoe hares was recently acquired from interbreeding with black-tail jackrabbits, another North American species that remains brown in the winter.”

Hybridization between species has played a key role in the development of many domestic plants and animals, and recent research suggests that it is also surprisingly common in nature. In snowshoe hares, hybridization with black-tailed jackrabbits provided critical coat color variation needed to adapt to coastal areas where winter snow is ephemeral or absent. But what does this mean for snowshoe hares going forward?

“Brown winter coats are currently rare across the range of snowshoe hares,” Good said. “If snow cover continues to decrease due to climate change, brown winter coats may become more common in the future and play a critical role in the resilience of this species. These discoveries are helping us understand how organisms adapt to rapidly changing environments.”

Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte met Friday with Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, during his visit to Italy.

At the beginning of the meeting, Al -Thani conveyed greetings of Qatar’s Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to the Italian Prime Minister, wishing the Italian people more progress and prosperity.

For his part, Conte wished the Amir health and happiness and the Qatari people further progress, development and prosperity.

Discussions during the meeting dealt with bilateral relations and means of boosting them, as well as issues of common interest.

As we enter another wildfire season in California, attention will turn to the inevitable fires and efforts to extinguish them. After these fires burn, land managers are tasked with deciding how, where, and when to act to manage these new conditions. It is vital that land managers use the latest science to understand the effects that fire has on the ecosystem and the wildlife species that inhabit them.

New research Point Blue Conservation Science explores these effects, looking at impacts of the severity of fire on birds and how that changes as the time since fire increases. Scientists looked across 10 fires up to 15 years after they burned through forests in the northern Sierra Nevada. Key among the findings is the observation that wildfire had a strong effect on the density of many of the bird species that were studied.

However, the severity of the fires affected different bird species differently. Of the 44 species studied, 18 reached their maximum densities after high-severity fire, 10 in moderate-severity, and 16 in areas affected by low-severity fire.

Over the last century humans have reduced the influence of fire across this ecosystem, but as the climate warms and the amount of fuels in these forests increase, the area burning annually and the severity of fires has been increasing. Understanding how species that rely on these forests respond to such fires can help inform management of fires and post-fire environments.

“One of the most important things we found was how varied the response was between areas that burned at different levels of severity as well the time after the fire it took for different species to reach their peak abundance,” said lead author Dr. Paul Taillie who was a field technician on the project with Point Blue and is now a researcher at North Carolina State University. “This reinforces the idea that mixed severity fires are crucial to sustaining a diversity of bird life in Sierra forests and that these burned landscapes are providing important habitat for decades after they burn.”

In addition to comparing the effects of different burn severities and the amount of time since fire, researchers also investigated more complex and nuanced responses of birds to fire than has been investigated in fire-prone western forests. Rather than simply increasing or decreasing consistently across the 15-year post-fire period, many species exhibited more complex patterns, for example increasing rapidly but reaching a plateau and then declining again. Other species’ responses to burn severity varied across the 15 year post-fire period investigated.

The researchers also compared bird populations in post-fire forests to populations in unburned forests. Of the species studied, 30 percent had higher densities in burned forest, with all but one of those in areas of high severity fires. Just 11 percent reached greater densities in unburned forest.

“Our findings really illustrate how dynamic the avian community is after these fires. Many of the species peaked in density during a narrow window of time after fire in a specific burn severity class. We just don’t see this rapid change in the bird community in green forests even after mechanical fuel reductions. It suggests we be cautious in prescribing post-fire management actions that alter the trajectory of these forests,” said researcher Ryan Burnett, Sierra Nevada Director at Point Blue. “We hope this research helps land managers make informed decisions about managing these dynamic post-fire bird habitats.”

Spring is coming earlier to parts of the Arctic, and so are some migratory birds. But researchers have yet to get a clear picture of how climate change is transforming tundra life. That’s starting to change as automated tools for tracking birds and other animals in remote places come online, giving researchers an earful of clues about how wildlife is adapting to hotter temperatures and more erratic weather.

In a new study in Science Advances, researchers at Columbia University describe a way to quickly sift through thousands of hours of field recordings to estimate when songbirds reached their breeding grounds on Alaska’s North Slope. They trained an algorithm on a subset of the data to pick out bird song from wind, trucks and other noise, and estimate, from the amount of time the birds spent singing and calling each day, when they had arrived en masse.

The researchers also turned the algorithm loose on their data with no training to see if it could pick out bird songs on its own and approximate an arrival date. In both cases, the computer’s estimates closely matched what human observers had noted in the field. Their unsupervised machine learning method could potentially be extended to any dataset of animal vocalizations.

“Our methods could be retooled to detect the arrival of birds and other vocal animals in highly seasonal habitats,” said the study’s lead author, Ruth Oliver, a graduate student at Columbia. “This could allow us to track largescale changes in how animals are responding to climate change.”

Though relatively simple, these tools could speed up the analysis of acoustic datasets packed with biodiversity information valuable to conservationists and others, says Andrew Farnsworth, a researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who was not involved in the study.

“An archive of acoustic recordings tells you how biodiversity is changing over time,” he said. “Understanding the dynamics of songbird arrival and breeding timing is the doorway to thinking about climate change and how temperature, weather and snowfall are affecting various species.”

Songbirds are notoriously difficult to track in the wild. Their migrations span thousands of miles and their bodies are too small to tag with GPS receivers. In a novel approach, Natalie Boelman, an ecologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and her colleagues set out microphones in the foothills of Alaska’s Brooks Range to eavesdrop on two particular species that fly in each spring to mate and raise their young: white-crowned sparrows and Lapland longspurs.

Starting in 2010, the team recorded for five seasons at regular intervals from early May through July. The hoped to pin down when the birds were arriving and if the species mix would shift as plants favoring warmer temperatures expand their range. White-crowned sparrows prefer woody shrubs, and Lapland longspurs, open grasslands. With shrubs expected to dominate the area by 2050, sparrows could end up pushing out longspurs and other tundra-adapted birds.

In the next phase of their research, the team hopes to develop the tool further to distinguish between sparrows and longspurs, among other species, to spot population-level trends.

Species-specific identification is a complex problem that other researchers are trying to crack. At Cornell, Farnsworth and his colleagues are using deep learning tools in a project called BirdVox to classify recordings of migratory bird calls at night, when there’s less competing noise to filter out. Wildlife Acoustics, a company near Boston, is building low-cost field recorders and developing software to track the comings and goings of birds, as well as frogs, bats, and whales, by the sounds they make.

“We want to know what species are present when humans are not,” says Farnsworth. “We’re trying to teach the machine to classify sound the way the human brain does.”

The longer the data set, the greater chance that a climate change signal will pop out. For Boelman, five years proved too short in a region known for big year-to-year swings in weather and temperature, which appear to be growing more extreme with climate change. In a recent study in Oecologia based on observational data, the team reported that both sparrows and longspurs appeared to time their arrival and breeding to local conditions; when a late spring delayed snowmelt by 10 days in 2013, the birds arrived 3 to 6 days later than usual, and hatched their young 4 to 10 days later.

“However, it’s still unclear how songbirds will cope if spring comes even earlier or later than it did during our study period,” said Boelman. “Species also time their migration and breeding with day length, which isn’t shifting with climate change. Species whose migratory response is hard-wired to day length alone may not adapt as well to a changing environment.”

Generally, children who experience recurrent destructive conflicts between their parents are at a higher risk of later developing mental health problems. However, a new longitudinal study published in Child Development finds that strong sibling bonds can offset the negative effects of parental strife.

Conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Notre Dame, the study finds that adolescents who witnessed high levels of acrimony between their parents had greater distressed responses to parental conflict a year later. Those responses, in turn, predicted mental health problems in the subsequent year. Yet, the researchers show that teens with strong sibling relationships are protected from experiencing this kind of distress in response to later parental disagreements and fights.

The researchers looked at 236 adolescents and their families recruited through local school districts and community centers in a moderately sized metropolitan area in the northeastern United States and a small city in the midwestern United States. The families were followed over the course of three years–with families’ being measured at three intervals when their children were first 12, then 13, and finally 14 years old. The study’s multi-method design relied on observations, semi-structured interviews with mothers about the relationship of the closest-aged siblings, and surveys.

The researchers caution that the families studied were mostly white and middle class, hence their findings should not be generalized to families of all races or socioeconomic status.

“Children may be using their siblings as sources of protection and emotional support–that is, as attachment figures,” said lead author Patrick Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

However, Davies noted, “if this were the primary reason for the protective effects, one might expect that younger siblings would benefit significantly more from being able to access support from an older sibling who is more capable as serving as a source of support. But this wasn’t the case.”

That’s why Davies and his team reason that most likely other mechanisms are at work. For example, siblings serve many of the same functions as peers. They may be involved in joint activities such as sports and introduce each other to settings and relationships outside the family that help to distract them from the distress in high conflict homes, said Davies. “Additionally, siblings may develop friendship bonds that involve shared warmth, disclosure about concerns, and support and corrective feedback–such as becoming a sounding board–for their perceptions about family life.”

In a nutshell, Davies said, “We showed that having a good relationship with a brother or sister reduced heightened vulnerability for youth exposed to conflicts between their parents by decreasing their tendencies to experience distress in response to later disagreements between their parents.”

The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, defines a good sibling relationship as one which is characterized by warmth, closeness, and problem solving, and shows low levels of antagonism, conflict, and detachment.

In order to translate these findings into effective interventions, subsequent studies should investigate whether siblings serve as attachment or parent figures who protect or support each other in times of distress, or if they act as peers who engage in shared activities that distract them from the stresses of home life. Another line of investigation, Davies notes, might be a look at whether the shared warmth between siblings helps develop a sense of solidarity that guards against experiencing distress in high-conflict homes.

A Syrian military source says that the U.S. Coalition did not bomb their forces in southern Syria in the early hours of Friday, June 22, Al-Masdar news reports.

According to the source, the attack was actually carried out by the U.S.-backed rebels of Jaysh Al-Mughawir Al-Thoura from the Al-Tanf area.

Furthermore, the source said the U.S.-backed rebels struck a Syrian Arab Army post at the town of Al-Aliyaneh in the southeastern countryside of the Homs Governorate.

One soldier was killed during the attack.

By Jim Garamone

The United States has deep interests in the Indo-Pacific and will remain engaged in the region, U.S. officials said at the Center for a New American Security conference here Thursday.

Alex N. Wong, the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, said the United States has an unmatched alliance structure in the region with treaties with Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand.

There are more forward-deployed U.S. service members in the Indo-Pacific region than anywhere else, Wong said, and they field the most advanced weapons systems in the U.S. inventory.

And, the United States does more two-way trade with Indo-Pacific countries than any other country in the world, he said, with the United States the premier foreign investor in the region.

It is clear, Wong said, the international order based on the rule of law the United States has championed in the Indo-Pacific since the end of World War II has served the region well, and Chinese attempts to change that would be bad for the nations of the region and the world.

David F. Helvey, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, said Defense Secretary James N. Mattis’ National Defense Strategy identifies the Indo-Pacific region as the priority for DoD.

‘We Have Deep Interests in the Region’

“This reflects the reality,” Helvey said. “We have deep interests in the region that span the gamut of our relationships.”

The core principles of the region’s international order based on the rule of law are long established, he said, and they include freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes and support and upholding international norms and standards for behavior.

Helvey said most nations in the Indo-Pacific region support these principles and see the benefits of them each day via trade and economic prosperity.

Since taking office, Mattis has make six trips to the Indo-Pacific region to visit with established allies, and also meeting with defense and military leaders from Indonesia, Vietnam and India, he said.

Wong said the Chinese want to replace the long-established system with One Belt, One Road — a system centered on benefiting China.

“You look at [One Belt, One Road], which was only announced in 2013 … that is a response from China to catch up to the free and open system,” Wong said. “We don’t really don’t need to respond to OBOR, we need to empower our partners in the region to say that if China wants to play in the area of regional integration … it has to play by the high standards; the best value standards that will ensure broad prosperity and ensure the sovereignty of the nations of the Indo-Pacific.”

Indo-Pacific Regional Alliances

Key to this is the network of alliances the United States maintains with the nations of the region, Helvey said, noting the American military conducts exercises each year to ensure interoperability with allied and partner nations. Many of those nations, he said, are members of the defeat-ISIS coalition and previous training has been invaluable in allowing the militaries to work together.

“To the extent that we can work together, we can operate together,” Helvey said. “We can perform different types or missions and operations seamlessly in concert with our allies and partners. It represents one of the best ways to maintain our strategic advantage.”

Helvey said the United States must pay attention to China, which is a large U.S. trading partner and an emerging super power.

“How do we manage the competition with China in a way that … ultimately redounds to our benefit?” Helvey posited. “Part of that is maintaining open and stable means of communication with our Chinese counterparts. Part of it is ensuring we are introducing and exercising the right kind of risk reduction measures — hot lines, confidence-building measures — so that when we are operating in close proximity … they are done in a safe way.”

Catalonia’s pro-independence political leaders are snubbing the Spanish King in their latest public challenge to rule from Madrid, AP reports. C

atalan President Quim Torra has said his regional government won’t invite the monarchy to any official event, nor will it send representatives to any royal event.

Barcelona says King Felipe VI refuses to discuss the possibility of the wealthy northeastern region seceding from Spain.

Torra and other leading Catalan politicians are demanding that Spain’s central government respect a unilateral declaration of independence passed by separatists in October.

“We are not subjects, we are citizens,” Torra said in an announcement on Friday. The monarch, like the national government in Madrid, has rejected Catalan secession.

(RFE/RL) — Goals by ethnic Albanians Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka led Switzerland to a 2-1 victory over Serbia, dashing the Balkan squad’s hope of quickly clinching a place in the next round in the World Cup.

Shaqiri’s goal came in the 90th minute in the rain in Kaliningrad on June 22 and allowed Switzerland to move to the top of Group E along with Brazil, both with four points.

Serbia remained with three points and still has a chance to advance when it faces Brazil on June 27. Switzerland will meet lowly Costa Rica on the same day.

Aleksandar Mitrovic had given Serbia an early lead with a powerful header in the fifth minute before Xhaka equalized in the 52nd minute with powerful left-footed shot through a crowded penalty area.

Shaqiri was born in Kosovo, while Xhaka was born in Switzerland to ethnic-Albanian parents originally from Kursumlija, Serbia.

Switzerland had a strong contingent of players with Albanian or Kosovar backgrounds — including Shaqiri, Xhaka, Valon Behrami, and Blerim Dzemaili.

Kosovo was a former Serbian province with an ethnic-Albanian majority that declared independence in 2008, a move that is not recognized by Belgrade, and relations between the two countries remain tense.

During the 1998-99 war between Kosovo’s ethnic-Albanian pro-independence groups and Serbian forces, the families of Behrami, Xhaka, and Shaqiri took refuge in Switzerland, where there are an estimated 200,000 Kosovar Albanians.

The Associated Press reported that after the match, Shaqiri and Xhaka put their open hands together with their thumbs locked and fingers outstretched to make what appeared to be the double-headed eagle displayed on Albania’s national flag.

In an earlier match on June 22, Nigeria beat Iceland 2-0 in Volgograd on two goals by Ahmed Musa.

Nigeria, Iceland, and Argentina can still qualify for the knockout round from Group D, but Iceland and Argentina need to win their next matches.

Iceland will face Croatia in their final group game on June 26 in Rostov-on-Don, while Argentina will meet Nigeria in St. Petersburg on June 26. Croatia has already advanced.

In the other match on June 22, Brazil beat Costa Rica 2-0 in St. Petersburg with two stoppage-time goals.

By Michael Sainsbury

After a long break, talks have resumed in recent weeks between China and the Vatican over a deal to normalize the appointment of bishops, according to reports coming out of Rome, with Pope Francis saying he remains committed to dialogue with the ruling Communist Party.

The first round of talks since last December was held in Rome in the second week of June, according to wire service Reuters, citing unnamed Vatican sources.

Neither side has ever confirmed the timing of talks and Rome has previously also indicated that any final agreement may not be released publicly. There have been unconfirmed reports that the target date for an initial deal was this month.

But talks might have been complicated by the case of Bishop Cui Tai, who has not been seen for two months since his abduction, and serial attacks on the church in the major Christian provinces of Henan and Hebei on the back of tough new religious regulations issued by Beijing on Feb. 1. Henan, home to more Catholics than any other Chinese province, has seen rules forbidding minors to worship in official churches, crosses removed and some places of worships shuttered.

Pope Francis spoke positively about a deal in an interview with Reuters at his residence.

“We are at a good point,” the pope told reporter Phillip Pullela, adding that “dialogue is a risk, but I prefer risk rather than the certain defeat that comes with not holding dialogue.”

He added: “As for the timing, some people say it’s Chinese time. I say it’s God’s time. Let’s move forward serenely.”

The pope described the talks as being in three parts: official dialogue, unofficial contacts between ordinary citizens “which we do not want to burn,” and cultural dialogue.

Estimates of the number of Catholics in China range from 9-12 million, with the percentage in the “official “church between 50-70 percent.

Opposition to the deal remains strong in the so-called underground church, where Catholics opposed to Beijing’s control worship in venues from their own churches to halls and private homes, often called house churches.

The main public cheerleader for the underground church is Hong Kong’s Emeritus Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who repeated his opposition to the deal in an interview in online publication Hong Kong Free Press in May.

“Some are saying maybe now there are difficulties on the Chinese side, because there are people who think that they don’t need the agreement, they can control everything. Maybe there are voices in China against the eventual agreement,” Cardinal Zen said.

“You see that there are many actions on the side of the government which show that they are tightening control on religion. And so it’s more difficult to understand how the Vatican can come to a deal at this moment, because obviously they are seen as collaborating with the government.”

Pope Francis appeared to allude to underground Catholics when he said he did not want “to burn” contact with Chinese citizens, observers said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang this week told journalists that China was sincere about improving two-way ties with the Vatican.

“We are willing to meet the Vatican side halfway and make new progress in the process of improving relations and advancing constructive bilateral dialogue,” he said.

One of the key sticking points to the deal remains how the Vatican will deal with seven so-called illicit bishops, several of whom are known to have long-term relationships with women as well as children. Some reports have indicated that these bishops have been submitting their apologies to the pope in an effort to resolve the issue.

By Gjergj Erebara

The European Council has told BIRN it has no plans to set up so-called disembarkation platforms for rescued refugees in Albania – as an often xenophobic discussion of the subject continues in the country.

In a response to a query from BIRN, it answered: “No. The regions are not yet identified as we are only talking about possibly exploring this concept,” asked whether plans exist to create the so-called “Regional Disembarkation Platforms” in Albania.

The European Council meets on 28 June to discuss a variety of issues, including the Commission’s recommendation to open EU membership negotiations with Albania and Macedonia.

However, the migration crisis is expected to be the main topic – an issue that took on new urgency when German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer suggested Germany should turn back migrants at its borders. The issue threatens to topple Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition.

A draft conclusion for the June 28 meeting, prepared by the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, called for “the development of the concept of regional disembarkation platforms in close cooperation with UNHCR and IOM.”

“Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys,” the document reads.

Media outlets have reported that both Albania and Tunisia are possible locations of such platforms.

Albania’s opposition centre-right Democratic Party has accused Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama of agreeing already to host refugee camps in Albania in exchange for the opening of negotiations.

Former Prime Minister Sali Berisha on Facebook has repeatedly accused the centre-left government of accepting “600,000 Syrian former ISIS terrorists”.

Current party leader Lulzim Basha on Tuesday said that such a plan would make Albanians a minority in their own country.

Democratic Party MP Klevis Balliu went further, claiming the government planned to banish “the people of [Albania national hero] Skanderbeg to substitute them with the people of Sultan Mehmed”.

The government has denied making any such offer. However, various politicians in EU countries, including Austria and Germany, have discussed the possibility in the media, fuelling the xenophobic debate in Albania.

In the meantime, the UK Guardian has reported that Tunisia has rejected a proposal to host a “disembarkation platform”.

The Tunisian ambassador to the EU, Tahar Cherif, told the paper that Germany and Italy had proposed the idea months ago, and Tunisia had refused.

The Organization of American States’ (OAS) member countries should strongly call on President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua to dismantle pro-government armed gangs and cease abuses, Human Rights Watch said. The ambassadors to the regional body will meet on June 22, 2018, for a session of the Permanent Council dedicated to discussing serious abuses in Nicaragua documented by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

Since protests broke out on April 18, at least 187 people have been killed and over 1,500 have been injured. Policemen and pro-government armed gangs are responsible for the vast majority of those deaths and injuries, according to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. Abuses have dramatically increased over the past month: human rights groups reported at least 95 people have been killed since the beginning of June.

“As the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presents its findings in Washington, policemen and pro-government armed gangs are killing protesters with total impunity in the streets of Nicaragua,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Democratic leaders in the Americas should urgently call on President Ortega to end the bloodbath in the country and dismantle pro-government gangs.”

After a visit to the country in May, the IACHR found that police officers have often employed excessive force against protesters and supported abusive pro-government groups. The commission found evidence of a range of abuses, including arbitrary detention, cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees, and attacks on journalists.

On June 5, during the OAS General Assembly in Washington, DC, member countries condemned the “acts of violence, intimidation, and threats directed against the general public” in Nicaragua and expressed their condolences to the victims.

“During its previous discussion on Nicaragua, the OAS members failed to call out the government’s responsibility for the abuses – it was almost as if they were describing a natural catastrophe,” Vivanco said. “But the crisis in Nicaragua merits a much stronger and clearer response from leaders across the Americas.”

On June 16, six people, including a 2-year-old girl and a 5-month-old baby boy, died when their house was set on fire in Managua. The government blamed protesters, but survivors told the media that policemen and men in civilian clothing who accompanied them were responsible for the arson. “We were in our room because we were afraid the police and the other men with them were going to shoot us, they burned us to drive us out like animals,” a survivor told local news media.

A witness told Human Rights Watch that policemen and men apparently belonging to pro-government groups shot at community members and first responders after they removed the bodies from the house. Human Rights Watch reviewed footage taken by a firefighter fleeing the scene as police started shooting at them.

At least 838 people have been detained in connection with the protests since April 18, according to the IACHR and data provided by the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH). The IACHR found that many of these detentions were arbitrary. Many detainees told rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, that police abused them while they were in detention.

Pro-government groups have abducted several people, and handed some to police authorities news media reported.

A 20-year-old student whose name is being withheld for his protection told Human Rights Watch that in late May armed men dressed in black forced him onto a truck as he was walking to a grocery store in Managua. The men held him for eight days blindfolded, with his hands and feet tied. They threatened to kill him and hit him with their guns, he said, and forced him to say in front of a camera that he had committed numerous acts of vandalism.

The men then handed him to police officers in El Chipote – the police holding cells in Managua – in the middle of the night, he said. He said that police kept him locked in a cell naked for a week, and that for four consecutive days they took him out only to beat him. He said that he was not taken before a judge or allowed to see a lawyer. His mother repeatedly asked El Chipote authorities whether he was being held there, but policemen denied it, she told Human Rights Watch. Neither the student nor his mother knew why he had been targeted.

“Policemen and pro-government groups are working together in Nicaragua to abuse and terrorize the population,” Vivanco said. “Unless the democratic leaders in the Americas strongly condemn the abuses by the Nicaraguan government, victims of these egregious abuses may never have their day in court.”

Europe is facing the most significant refugee crisis since World War II. All attempts at resolving the issue have failed, mostly because they have ignored the root causes of the problem.

On June 11, Italy’s new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, blocked the Aquarius rescue ship, carrying 629 refugees and economic migrants, from docking at its ports.

A statement by Doctors without Borders (MSF) stated that the boat was carrying 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women.

“From now on, Italy begins to say NO to the traffic of human beings, NO to the business of illegal immigration,” said Salvini, who also heads the far-right League Party.

The number of refugees was repeated in news broadcasts time and again, as a mere statistic. In reality, it is 629 precious lives at stake, each with a compelling reason why she/he has undertaken the deadly journey.

While the cruelty of refusing entry to a boat laden with desperate refugees is obvious, it has to be viewed within a larger narrative pertaining to the rapidly changing political landscape in Europe and the crises under way in the Middle East and North Africa.

Italy’s new government, a coalition of the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement and the far-right League party, seems intent on stopping the flow of refugees into the country, as promised on the campaign trail.

However, if politicians continue to ignore the root causes of the problem, the refugee crisis will not go away on its own.

The disturbing truth is this: Europe is accountable for much of the mayhem under way in the Middle East. Right-wing pundits may wish to omit that part of the debate altogether, but facts will not simply disappear when ignored.

European politicians should honestly confront the question: what are the reasons that lead millions of people to leave their homes? And fashion equally honest and humane solutions.

In 2017, an uprising-turned-civil-war in Syria led to the exodus of millions of Syrian refugees.

Ahmed is a 55-year old Syrian refugee, who fled the country with his wife and two children. His reason for leaving was no other than the grinding, deadly war.

He told the UN Refugees Agency: “I was born in Homs and I wanted to live there until the end, but this vicious war left us no other choice but to leave all behind. For the sake of my children’s future we had to take the risk.”

“I had to pay the smuggler eight thousand US dollars for each member of my family. I’ve never done anything illegal in my whole life, but there was no other solution.”

Saving his family meant breaking the rules; millions would do the same thing if confronted with the same grim dilemma. In fact, millions have.

African immigrants are often blamed for ‘taking advantage’ of the porous Libyan coastline to ‘sneak’ into Europe. Yet, many of those refugees had lived peacefully in Libya and were forced to flee following the NATO-led war on that country in March 2011.

“I’m originally from Nigeria and I had been living in Libya for five years when the war broke out,” wrote Hakim Bello in the Guardian.

“I had a good life: I was working as a tailor and I earned enough to send money home to loved ones. But after the fighting started, people like us – black people – became very vulnerable. If you went out for something to eat, a gang would stop you and ask if you supported them. They might be rebels, they might be government, you didn’t know.”

The security mayhem in Libya led not only to the persecution of many Libyans, but also millions of African workers, like Bello, as well. Many of those workers could neither go home nor stay in Libya. They, too, joined the dangerous mass escapes to Europe.

War-torn Afghanistan has served as the tragic model of the same story.

Ajmal Sadiqi escaped Afghanistan, which has been in a constant state of war for many years, a war that took a much deadlier turn since the US invasion in 2001.

Sadiqi told CNN that the vast majority of those who joined him on his journey from Afghanistan, through other countries to Turkey, Greece and other EU countries, died along the way. But, like many in his situation, he had few alternatives.

“Afghanistan has been at war for 50 years and things are never going to change,” he said.

“Here, I have nothing, but I feel safe. I can walk on the street without being afraid.”

Alas, that sense of safety is, perhaps, temporary. Many in Europe are refusing to examine their own responsibility in creating or feeding conflicts around the world, while perceiving the refugees as a threat.

Despite the obvious correlation between western-sustained wars and the EU’s refugee crisis, no moral awakening is yet to be realized. Worse still, France and Italy are now involved in exploiting the current warring factions in Libya for their own interests.

Syria is not an entirely different story. There, too, the EU is hardly innocent.

The Syria war has resulted in a massive influx of refugees, most of whom are hosted by neighboring Middle Eastern countries, but many have sailed the sea to seek safety in Europe.

“All of Europe has a responsibility to stop people from drowning. It’s partly due to their actions in Africa that people have had to leave their homes,” said Bello.

“Countries such as Britain, France, Belgium and Germany think they are far away and not responsible, but they all took part in colonizing Africa. NATO took part in the war in Libya. They’re all part of the problem.”

Expectedly, Italy’s Salvini and other like-minded politicians refuse to frame the crisis that way.

They use whichever discourse needed to guarantee votes, while ignoring the obvious fact that, without military interventions, economic exploitation and political meddling, a refugee crisis – at least one of this magnitude – could exist in the first place.

Until this fact is recognized by EU governments, the flow of refugees will continue, raising political tension and contributing to the tragic loss of lives of innocent people, whose only hope is merely to survive.

(Romana Rubeo, an Italian writer contributed to this article.)