GM mosquitoes show fever promise

Pakistan is the latest country to see a dengue outbreak, with thousands of cases in Lahore alone

Genetically modified mosquitoes could prove effective in tackling dengue fever and other insect-borne diseases, a UK-based scientific team has shown.

The male mosquitoes are modified so their offspring die before reproducing.

In a dengue-affected part of the Cayman Islands, researchers found the

GM males mated successfully with wild females.

In Nature Biotechnology journal, they say such mating has not before been proven in the wild, and could cut the number of disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Dengue is caused by a virus transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito as it bites.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that there may be 50 million cases each year, and the incidence is rising, with some countries reporting what the WHO terms “explosive” outbreaks.

As yet, there is no vaccine.
Radiation damage

As far back as the 1940s, it was realised that releasing sterile males into the wild could control insects that carried disease or were agricultural pests.

The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry dengue cannot be curbed by bednets or indoor spraying

When females breed with the sterile males rather than wild fertile ones, there will be no viable offspring, meaning there are fewer mosquitoes around to transmit the disease.

In the 1950s, the screwworm fly was eradicated from the Caribbean island of Curacao using males sterilised by radiation.

But the technology has not worked so well with disease-carrying insects.

Generally, the sterilising process weakens the males so much that they struggle to mate; the wild males are dominant.

Oxitec, a company spun off from Oxford University, uses a genetic engineering approach.

Offspring of their GM males live through the larval stage but die as pupae, before reaching adulthood.

In the latest study, the research group – which includes scientists from Imperial College London and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine – released batches of GM mosquitoes in 2009 in an area of the Cayman Islands where Aedes aegypti are common, and dengue sometimes present.

A proportion of the eggs collected from the study area in subsequent weeks carried the introduced gene, meaning the biotech mosquitoes had mated successfully.

The GM males made up 16% of males in the study area, and fathered 10% of the larvae; so they were not quite as successful as the wild males, but not significantly worse.

“We were really surprised how well they did,” said Luke Alphey, Oxitec’s chief scientific officer and a visiting professor at Oxford University.

“For this method, you just need to get a reasonable proportion of the females to mate with GM males – you’ll never get the males as competitive as the wild ones, but they don’t have to be, they just have to be reasonably good.”

The GM larvae also carry a fluorescent gene that distinguishes them from wild relatives

“This study is the first to show that the mosquito population could be suppressed this way,” said Dr Raman Velayudhan, a WHO dengue expert.

“The fitness level is much better [compared with previous attempts] – it is almost the same as in wild mosquitoes,” he told BBC News.

Cognizant that genetic engineering is a technology that carries the potential for risks as well as benefits, the WHO is finalising guidance on how GM insects should be deployed in developing countries, which it expects to release by the end of the year.

The "death gene" is turned off during rearing in Oxford - and turned on in the field

The field seems to be hotting up, with other research groups recently creating Anopheles mosquitoes that are immune to the malaria parasite they normally carry, and making male Anopheles that lack sperm.

Malaria is a prime target for these approaches simply because it is such an important disease; but arguably it is more needed in diseases such as dengue where there are few alternatives.

“For malaria, there are effective alternatives like bednets, but they won’t work for dengue because the mosquitoes bite during daytime,” said Dr Alphey.

“We don’t advocate [GM mosquitoes] as a ‘magic bullet’ that will solve all dengue in one go, so the question is how it fits in as part of an integrated programme – and for dengue, it would be a huge component of an integrated programme.”

Funding for the Oxitec approach has come from a number of sources including private investors, charities, Oxford University and governments, and the Cayman Islands authorities were willing to take part in the field trial.

Death by feedback

The genetic approach used to create the mosquitoes is a system known as tetracycline-controlled transcriptional activation (tTA).

The tTA gene is spliced into the insect’s genome in such a way that the protein it makes increases the gene’s activity – a positive feedback loop.

The cells make more and more tTA protein – and in doing so, have little capacity for making any other proteins. Eventually, this kills the insects.

When the male larvae are reared at Oxitec, this process is turned off by keeping them in water containing the antibiotic tetracycline, which inhibits the feedback process.

When the males breed in the wild, however, tTA genes in their offspring are fully active.

In principle, a process that allows larvae to hatch and stay alive for many days should be more advantageous that the traditional approach of producing infertile eggs, as the larvae will consume food that could otherwise be used by viable larvae from the union of wild males and females.

The next step in the work is to demonstrate that deploying GM males does suppress the insect population enough that it is likely to have an impact on dengue incidence.

Dr Alphey said results from a project last year in the Cayman Islands suggested this had been achieved.

Vocabulary

dengue

insect-borne diseases

outbreaks

proportion

Brazil Makes Its Own Manhattan

Cristiana Arcangeli, an entrepreneur in the health-and-beauty industry, relaxes in one of the swinging chairs in her home in Jardim Europa.

By SIMON ROMERO

São Paulo is almost beyond the imagination — a drizzle-shrouded megacity of almost 20 million that sprawls like Los Angeles and boasts enough skyscrapers to vie with New York. The gritty financial engine of the new Brazil, São Paulo exerts influence over commerce, media and culture. The Brazilian writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo calls it an “urban labyrinth that reaches toward the infinite.” It might not have the palm-fringed glamour of Rio de Janeiro, but in the view of urbane Paulistanos, Brazil has only one truly global city: theirs.
São Paulo’s Luxury Real Estate Boom

As Brazil’s economy soars — partly as a result of China’s great appetite for its commodities, like iron ore and soybeans, not to mention the oil recently found in abundance offshore — São Paulo prospers. A surge in deal-making and the resilience of Brazil’s currency, the real, has attracted foreign investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. Well-educated Brazilians are returning from abroad. Compensation in some executive suites now rivals the pay on Wall Street.

All these people need a place to live. Even though jackhammers often awaken Paulistanos at dawn, buildings aren’t going up fast enough to satisfy the population, and a housing deficit persists. For the poor with dreams of joining the growing middle class, this means living cheek by jowl in favelas. For the rich seeking to avoid the infamous traffic jams, it means surreal competition for apartments that can be downright ordinary in prestigious and strategically located neighborhoods. The market-research firm IBOPE Inteligência found that prices for newly constructed apartments across São Paulo climbed 31 percent from a year ago. Prices for existing properties in some coveted neighborhoods surged even higher: apartments in Jardins were up 81 percent; Itaim Bibi rose 59 percent.

“The market’s getting a little out of hand,” says Marcos Faria Lamacchia, a banker who bought his apartment in Jardim América two years ago and was recently offered a price in the millions of dollars, double what he paid. “I’d rather put my money in Miami, where it’s still possible to buy low.”

Despite such concerns, renting or buying real estate in São Paulo has become a contact sport. A furnished penthouse apartment in the well-heeled Jardins district might rent for as much as $20,000 a month, a sum unimaginable a short time ago. The penthouse in the new Daniel Libeskind building going up in the ritzy Itaim Bibi area recently sold for $12 million. An apartment owned by the heiress Athina Onassis in the Chateau Margaux building in Vila Nova Conceição, near Ibirapuera Park, sold for about $20 million last year.

Broader access to credit fuels a lot of the buying. Traditionally, Brazilians bought homes without much bank financing, often putting up cash and bartering other properties or even automobiles as part of each deal. Or they simply rented. But economic stability now gives Brazilians access to loans with interest rates in the neighborhood of 12 percent. While that rate might be unthinkable to Americans, it is a big shift for Brazilians happy to have any type of home loan in a country with a history of hyperinflation and high interest rates. Apartment flipping, especially at the high end, is growing more common.

The surge in real estate prices dominates conversation at São Paulo’s restaurants just as it did in New York City before the financial collapse. Many of the new luxury buildings are sleek, rec­tangular affairs, but smog-darkened high-rises from earlier booms still occupy big swaths of São Paulo. Rarer are the elegant districts that have preserved their allure, like Jardim Europa, with its winding streets and shady pitanga trees. One aesthetic that hasn’t changed much in the latest boom involves security. While São Paulo’s once-horrific homicide rate has declined, crime — robberies and home invasions — remains a preoccupation. Guarding those elegant mansions in Jardim Europa are towering walls with gunmen at their sentry posts.

Cristiana Arcangeli, an entrepreneur, lives in one such home with a courtyard, lap pool and upstairs gym. The streets outside are lined with meticulously groomed trees and sidewalks, luxuries in a city where cars rule. But living in such an exclusive spot does not yet seem to have much to do with reclaiming the urban right to stroll around without fear of assault. “São Paulo is still a risky place,” Arcangeli says. “There’s a restaurant a couple of blocks from my house, but I’ve never walked there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/magazine/key-brazil-makes-its-own-manhattan.html?_r=1&ref=brazil

El Chavo del 8

The shows traces back to June 20, 1971, where it appeared as a sketch in the “Chespirito” show, broadcast on Mexico’s channel 8.  In 1973, El Chavo moved to Televisa and became a weekly half-hour series. The show was cancelled in 1980 , but shorts were still produced in “Chespirito” from that year until 1992 .

At its peak of popularity during the mid-1970′s, El Chavo, having 350 million viewers worldwide, was the most-watched show in Mexican television. The frequent occurrence of Mexican idiomatic expressions makes El Chavo very hard to translate into other languages. An exception is the Portuguese language which is very similar to Spanish. Thus the Portuguese-spoken version of El Chavo is still very popular in Brazil, where the series is known as Chaves and is still broadcast by SBT.

Production and setting

Chaves or Chavo del Ocho is set in “La Vecindad“, a typical Mexican townhouse neighborhood, which is owned by Mr. Barriga who constantly comes to collect due rent, especially from Don Ramon (Seu Madruga, in the brazilian version). The sitcom explores, in a comic manner, the problems that many homeless children face on a daily basis, such as hunger, sadness and not having someone responsible to watch over them.

El Patio, the central courtyard, is the setting for most of the episodes. Surrounding the patio, are the homes of Jaimito or Jaiminho  ”El Cartero”, Doña Florinda, Doña Cleotilde, and Seu Madruga. The hallway on the right leads to another courtyard (“el otro patio”), the other courtyard, which has a fountain in the middle. On the street facade at the left, La tienda de la esquina and a barber shop are shown adjacent to the neighborhood’s entry.

In the later seasons, sometimes an unnamed park was shown. Several episodes are set at a school classroom, where Professor Girafales teaches, all the child characters in the sitcom attend the same classroom. Others are set inside Doña Florinda’s restaurant. Two episodes were filmed in Acapulco, which also served as a vacation for the entire cast.

10 Reasons Latinos Are Taking Over Hollywood!

By Lee Hernandez / Latina Magazine

Tom Hanks’ appearance on the Spanish-language show, Despierta America this morning had quite a few people saying “que?” Why is a major American movie star like Hanks (who doesn’t even speak Spanish) visiting a morning show on a Spanish-language network? The answer is an easy one: Latinos have arrived in Hollywood! Don’t believe us? Here are 10 reasons Latinos are taking over Hollywood!

1. We’re the Most Beautiful

In April, People Magazine named Jennifer Lopez (not Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston or Megan Fox), the most beautiful woman in the world. La Lopez looked positively radiant on the cover of the magazine’s annual most beautiful issue and more importantly, for once the most beautiful face in America is one that Latinas will recognize as one of their own.

2. We Bring the Funny

We don’t know about you, but our favorite scenes from FOX’s hit show, Glee are the hilarious one-liners that Puerto Rican actress, Naya Rivera cold-heartedly delivers week after week as the uber-bitchy cheerio-turned-gleek,

3. We Have the Biggest Teen Stars on Earth

Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Victoria Justice, and Bella Thorne — they’re the biggest female teen stars on the planet right now, and they’re all Latinas!

4. We’re the New American Idol!

Over the last ten years, we’ve come close to winning FOX’s American Idol several times (David Archuleta, Alison Iraheta, Syesha Mercado), but in 2011 — with a superstar Latina (Jennifer Lopez) at the judges table — part-Puerto Rican country singer, Scotty McCreery finally made history when he became the first Latino ever to win the hit FOX competition.

5. We Are Ratings Gold

La Reina del Sur is a bad title for Kate Del Castillo’s Telemundo telenovela. It ought to be called, La Reina de Televisión. In March, the primetime Spanish-language soap beat ALL English language programing in major cities like New York and LA in the ratings and regularly beat the major networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) among adults 18-34.

6. We’re Getting More TV Channels in Español

Encore! Encore! People love Latinos on television so much, whether it’s in English or Spanish, that they’re asking for more of us, and with recent census data showing that 1 in 6 adults (and 1 in 4 children) in America is Latino, networks are beginning to target the fast growing U.S. Hispanic population.

7. We’ll Be the Judge!

the superstar Latinas get top billing on TV’s biggest singing competitions — often getting the last word over their male counterparts. Hollywood is clearly leaving the judging to us!

8. We’re Getting Our Stories Told

In the last two or three years, there have been more Latino-centric story lines on TV, both on cable and network shows. The second season of HBO’s Eastbound & Down was set in Mexico and welcomed Latino stars Ana de la Reguera and Michael Pena.

9. We’re Making It Easier to Shoot in Puerto Rico & The DR

Don’t be surprised if more and more films start shooting in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In March, Governor Luis G. Fortuño of Puerto Rico approved new legislation that revamps its program, offering the U.S. tax rebates along with a 20 % rebate for non-residents including the pre-existing 40% rebate for residents. The new incentives are likely to prompt film producers in Hollywood to shoot their films on the Puerto Rican island. In a similar move, the Dominican Republic is officially launching its own production incentive program this month in an effort to lure more productions to the Caribbean.

10. We’re Raking in the Cash

In 2010, Cameron Diaz was the second highest paid actress in Hollywood (behind Sandra Bullock), while Eva Longoria was the highest paid Latina on television, pulling in an impressive $400,000 for each episode of ABC’s Desperate Housewives. But it’s not just Latina actresses who command big salaries — Latina supermodels also rake in big salaries. In fact, Gisele Bundchen, and Adriana Lima are currently the highest paid models in the industry.

Can Positive Thoughts Help Heal Another Person?

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty / NPR

Click here to listen to the story

Ninety percent of Americans say they pray — for their health, or their love life or their final exams. But does prayer do any good?

For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results. Now some scientists are fording new — and controversial — territory.

Mind Over Body

When I first meet Sheri Kaplan, she is perched on a plastic chair at a Miami clinic, holding out her arm as a researcher draws several vials of blood.

“I’m quite excited about my blood work this time,” she says. “I’ve got no stress and I’m proud of it.”

Kaplan is tanned and freckled, with wavy red hair and a cocky laugh. She is defiantly healthy for a person who has lived with HIV for the past 15 years.

“God didn’t want me to die or even get sick,” she asserts. “I’ve never had any opportunistic infections, because I had no time to be down.”

Kaplan’s faith is unorthodox, but it’s central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the virus at bay and that her faith is the reason she’s alive today.

“Everything starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction,” she says. “And I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level.”

For the past decade, Kaplan has been coming every few months to see Gail Ironson, a professor at the University of Miami. Ironson, an AIDS researcher, runs down a battery of questions.

“During this time have you had any HIV- or AIDS-related symptoms?” Ironson asks.

“Nope,” Kaplan says. “Nothing.”

“What percent of your well-being do you think is due to your own attitudes and behaviors versus medical care?” Ironson continues.

Kaplan laughs: “110 percent.”

Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not progressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS). In the mid-1990s, when having HIV was akin to a death sentence, Ironson noticed that a number of patients like Kaplan never got sick. Ironson wanted to know why. And she found something surprising.

“If you ask people what’s kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people would say spirituality,” she says. “It was something that just kept coming up in the interviews, and that’s why I decided to look at it.”

Happiness, Hope Inspire Miami Pop Artist

by Greg Allen, npr news, All Things Considered

Click here to listen to the story

There is no artist who is better known or more popular in Miami than Romero     Britto. His huge, cartoon-like drawings tower over shopping mall entrances and grin happily from billboards. One even clambers up the side of a downtown condo building.

Britto is a Brazilian-born artist whose simple drawings of children, butterflies and flowers have decorated everything from commercial Absolut Vodka ads to a 45-foot-high pyramid in London.

And Miami developers are some of his biggest fans. You can find Britto’s work at shopping malls throughout Miami. Recently, three more of his pieces were unveiled at a shopping center downtown — a heart, a butterfly and an 11-foot dancing boy.

“Romero has managed to create contemporary masterpieces that invoke a spirit of hope,” developer John Kokinchak said at the ceremony.

The bold outlines, bright colors and simple images of Britto’s art appeal to children, public officials and art collectors alike. Britto says there’s a reason his work is so popular: It makes people happy.

“Some people in the arts, they really still believe that art is really only important if you talk about something that’s disgusting or horrible or depressing,” he says. “I think happiness is not a shallow feeling. It’s a very deep feeling.”

UK riots: Fewer than one in 10 arrested were gang members

Most police forces found that fewer than one in 10 of those arrested over the August riots were gang members and gangs “generally did not play a pivotal role” in the disturbances, figures showed today.

Even in London, where gang membership among those arrested was highest at 19%, most of those held were not in gangs, the Home Office figures showed.

“In terms of the role gangs played in the disorder, most forces perceived that where gang members were involved, they generally did not play a pivotal role,” officials said.

But more than a third of young people aged 10 to 17 who were involved in the riots had been excluded from school during 2009/10, other figures released by the Ministry of Justice showed.

This compared with just 6% of all Year 11 pupils.

Two-thirds of young people in the riots also had special educational needs, compared with a fifth of all pupils.

And two-fifths were in receipt of free school meals, compared with less than a fifth of secondary school pupils, the figures showed.

The figures, which were based on matching Ministry of Justice (MoJ) records with those from the national pupil database held by the Department for Education, showed 36% of young people – some 139 10-17-year-olds – appearing before the courts over the violence and looting had received one or more fixed-term exclusions in 2009/10, compared with just 5.6% of all pupils aged 15.

A total of 11, 3% of young people appearing before courts over the riots, had been permanently excluded, compared with 0.1% of all those children aged 15 at the start of the 2009/10 academic year.

Of all the young people appearing before the courts, three in 10 (30%) were persistent absentees from school, compared with just four per cent – less than one in 20 – of all pupils in maintained secondary schools, the figures showed.

Overall absence rates were also higher for those young people involved in the riots, up to 18.6% compared with 8.4% for all pupils in school year 11.

Iain Duncan Smith

The findings appear to contradict Iain Duncan Smith’s claim earlier this month that gangs played a “significant part” in August’s riots.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said tackling Britain’s “violent gang culture” was vital, and restoring the economy went “hand in hand with restoring society”.

He told the Conservative Party conference in Manchester he believed the riots “provided a moment of clarity for us all, a reminder that a strong economy requires a strong social settlement, with stable families ready to play a productive role in their communities”.

Mr Duncan Smith accused Labour of overseeing the establishment of a British underclass which exploded onto the streets over five nights two months ago.

He said the riots were a “wake-up call” which showed “containing” the underclass had failed.

“The scenes of young people ransacking local businesses, displaying stolen goods on the internet, spoke to a damaging culture on the rise in recent years,” he said.

“Gang members were not the sole perpetrators of the riots but they played a significant part.”

Today’s figures showed most of those involved in the riots were aged under 20, with 26% aged 10 to 17 and 27% aged 18 to 20, the figures showed.

A British riot policeman stands guard in front of a burning building and burnt out car in Croydon

Of the adults involved, 35% were claiming an out-of-work benefit at the time, compared with 12% of the general working age population in England and 45% of all offenders sentenced for an indictable offence last year.

Three-quarters of all those who appeared in court had a previous conviction or caution.

MoJ officials said: “It is clear that compared to population averages, those brought before the courts were more likely to be in receipt of free school meals or benefits, were more likely to have had special educational needs and be absent from school, and are more likely to have some form of criminal history.

“This pattern held across all areas looked at.”

In terms of ethnicity, 46% of those appearing in court were from black or mixed black backgrounds, 42% were white, 7% were Asian and 5% were classified as “other”.

In Haringey, north London, Nottingham, and Birmingham – three key scenes of August’s riots – the proportion of those brought before the courts over the riots who were white was significantly lower, and those from a black and mixed black background significantly higher, than the proportion in the resident population.

However in other areas, such as Salford, the ethnicity breakdown mostly reflected that of the resident population.

In Haringey, 55% of defendants were from a black or mixed black background and 34% were white, compared with 17% and 62% respectively of the resident population under 40.

In Nottingham, 62% of defendants were from a black or mixed black background and 32% were white, compared with 9% and 71% respectively of the resident population under 40.

And in Birmingham, 46% of defendants were from a black or mixed black background, 33% were white and 15% from an Asian background, compared with 9%, 58% and 30% respectively of the resident population under 40.

For the first time, the detailed figures showed one in eight of all crimes committed during the disturbances were muggings.

A total of 664 individuals were targeted, with victims being robbed or injured, accounting for some 13% of the 5,326 crimes recorded.

More than 2,500 shops and businesses were targeted by the looters and vandals, with more than 230 homes being targeted by burglars or vandals.

Vocabulary

pivotal

perceived

involved

compared

exclusion

persistent

underclass

significant

looters

vandals

LOVE THAT WOLVERINE! Here’s more…

Wolverine (gulo gulo) 

Fun Fact:
Snow is a good insulator because snow crystals trap air.
Air does not conduct heat very well, so objects surrounded by snow-trapped air stay warm.

Despite its name, the wolverine is not related to the wolf. The wolverine is very clever like a wolf, but he is much more resourceful than a wolf. The wolverine is related to the weasel.  They are known to be very shy; and like most weasels, the wolverine is scarcely seen. There are people who have spent years in the Alaskan wild and (have) never seen one. Although you may not see them, you can smell them because like most weasels, the wolverine has glands that it often uses to mark (his) territory. Even though they have a shy nature, those who have seen the wolverine attest to (his) their feistiness. The wolverine is also very fierce, fearless, and protective of its young. The wolverine inherited the weasel’s powerful back and legs.

The wolverine is always on the move and is always trying different ways to get the job done. Sometimes in order to do that, he uses rocks or his body as a wedge.  He might use his head to push up his obstacle.  If he can’t push an obstacle, he will literally stand on his head to see if that will move his obstacle. Because of his work and eating ethics, I consider him one of the most resourceful animals in the Arctic.

Characteristics and Physical Features of the Wolverine –
Identification:

Length: 3-4 ft.
Weight: 30-40 lbs.
Color: Brown

Distinguishing Characteristics: Two pale stripes down its back.

Breeding: Once a year.

Habitat –
Range: The Arctic mainland of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.
Diet: Carrion (dead animals)

Does the wolverine deserve his name?
The name “wolverine” means “glutton.” The wolverine doesn’t eat more than he needs. If he kills a caribou or bear, he will spray it with musk and bury it. Later he will come back and finish it.

Is the wolverine fast?
The wolverine has two speeds:  fast and stop. If the wolverine is not “sprinting,” it is at a complete stop; therefore, to catch prey, the wolverine must ambush, pounce, or find a slower animal.

Why do wolverines go at their top speed?
Going as fast as possible helps the wolverine stay on top of the snow. This MUST be done, or it can’t cover the distance it has to for finding food.

What does the wolverine do if he is slower than his prey? 
To attack prey, the wolverine will climb to the top of a rock or a tall stump; then, when a deer of some other medium-to-large animal comes along, the wolverine will jump squarely on the unfortunate animal’s back, breaking or severing vital organs.

Why are big feet helpful for the wolverine?
The wolverine’s big, furry feet act as snowshoes in the winter, allowing the wolverine to bound along on the top of the snow and chase caribou, moose, or other large animals. The prey exhausts itself, whereas the wolverine can move quickly.

Does the wolverine have any handicaps?
The wolverine has bad eyesight, is slow and clumsy. The wolverine’s bad eyesight and slow pace requires it to hunt in an ambush-type way, and the clumsiness doesn’t help any either.

How big is a wolverine’s territory?
The wolverine’s territory can be quiet large, sometimes reaching 200 square miles. It will leave its scent on hills and on rocks to say to other wolverines, “Back off; this is my spot!”

How do arctic people benefit from the wolverine?
Although the Alaska natives don’t let any part of the wolverine go to waste, they prize the soft, warm fur to keep them warm in subzero temperatures. This fur is used in making ruff for parkas (the lining of the face opening on the hood). Wolverine fur has a durability rating of 100, which means its hairs do not break off, so it lasts for years. It is used around the face because frost will not form on it.

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/wolverine/

NOTE from Professora Susan:
All articles posted by me are proofread for punctuation and spelling errors.  (How did you just pronounce the word “proofread”?
Can you identify any other errors that I might have missed?  If so, please speak up and discuss them with your class professor!

GREAT CHALLENGES (even to native English speakers and writers):
Why is it NOT CORRECT to write “it’s” as the possessive form of “it”?
What IS “it’s”?

To form the possessive of the word “wolverine,” should you write “wolverines” or “wolverine’s”?

Can you offer suggestions to make this sentence “read more clearly”? –
“This MUST be done, or it can’t cover the distance it has to for finding food.”

VOCABULARY:
“Back off, this is my spot!”
scent
ruff
prey
ambush
glutton

China’s Great Wall eaten away by mining

BY REUTERS.

Cultural protection experts say that more than 70 percent of the Wall lies in ruins.

China’s Great Wall is falling victim to development as legal and illegal mines tear vast chunks out of the hills below the landmark, conservationists are warning.

Voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the 4,000-mile wall snakes its way across 11 Chinese provinces and draws millions of tourists every year, mostly to restored sections near the capital, Beijing.

Away from the tourist trail, however, some parts of the wall are being allowed to crumble away.

About 124 miles southwest of Beijing, in rural Laiyuan county in Hebei province, dozens of small mines are threatening the stability of the centuries-old wall as prospectors dig for copper, iron, molybdenum and nickel, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Some mines have excavated within about 100 yards of the wall.

‘Mess’
But since many of these mines have legal permits, there is nothing conservationists can do, said Dong Yaohui, Vice Chairman of the Great Wall Society. “The exploitation of the mineral resources falls under the jurisdiction of the Land Resources Bureau, so if the bureau issues mining permits to the mining companies, they can legally extract the mineral resources within areas designated in the contract,” Dong said. “But in this process the Land Resources Bureau does not take into consideration the Great Wall as a factor, or consult the opinion of the Department of Cultural Heritage as there is no rule requiring a consultation as such. So this creates the mess in organization.”

The Laiyuan Land Resources Bureau blames the destruction on small, illegal mines, and Xinhua quoted them as saying that operators of such mines use sophisticated communication devices to dodge law enforcement.

taken from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44985854/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/#.TqFnkZvBZT-

Delays cloud Brazil’s 2014 World Cup preparations

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5SCkqUG-kY

By Paulo Cabral / BBC News Sao Paulo

No one doubts that the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the country of football and the nation of partying, will be memorable. But there are doubts over how well organised it will be.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva reacted angrily to concerns voiced by officials from football’s governing body Fifa, after the end of this year’s World Cup, that Brazil was still far from ready to host the tournament in four years’ time.

“There are already people asking where are Brazil’s airports, buses, railways and stadiums? They talk as if we were a bunch of idiots who don’t know what we have to do nor how to define priorities”, said President Lula at the launch of a high-speed train set to link Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

But the fact is that Brazil does not have much to show more than 30 months after it learned it would host the 2014 World Cup.

There have been severe delays in all 12 cities chosen to stage matches, particularly in the construction of stadiums and upgrading of airports.

Brazil is experiencing one of its best economic periods in decades, so there are resources to carry out the necessary works.

However, there is a lot of red tape to cut through, as well as politics, as most of the investment will be made with public money.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10698973