VOA News Item 1. 政治：战后多年韩国与美国检查指挥权移交The U.S. and South Korean militaries say they would fight a second Korean War, if it became necessary, side-by-side and seamlessly.For decades, their alliance has deterred a repeat of the North Korean attack of June 25th, 1950. Seoul has always agreed that U.S. forces would have command of South Korea's military if war re-ignites. But that is to change in April 2012, when Seoul assumes wartime operational control of its own forces, a step referred to as OPCON Transfer.VOA News Item 2. 社会：美国婴儿母乳喂养A new survey finds that three-quarters of U.S. newborns are breastfed beginning at birth. But the number of breastfeeding infants falls off rapidly during the first year of life.Seventy-five percent of babies started life breastfeeding, according to this latest Breastfeeding Report Card. That represents a slow but steady increase in recent years in the percentage of American infants who are breastfed.The new survey is for babies born in 2007, the most recent year available.The breastfeeding study comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A public health adviser at the agency, Carol MacGowan, says it's not enough for a new mom to want to breastfeed her baby."There's still a lot of practices that need to take place in the hospital to support the mother's decision to breastfeed." "So she may have decided to breastfeed, but if there's no support in place that helps her to continue that, then she may not even start."Hospital practices that encourage breastfeeding include putting the newborn skin-to-skin with the mother right after birth, and not offering infant formula or pacifiers.Although three out of four babies started life on their mother's milk, by the time they're six months old, just 43 percent were still breastfeeding. And by 12 months, only one baby in five was getting any breast milk.U.S. officials recommend babies be breastfed for the first year of life. The World Health Organization says breastfeeding should last two years.MacGowan says there are a number of reasons why American women don't continue breastfeeding. "Some of it is the community support; thus, we address the number of lactation professionals out there to help the women. A big barrier to women is working and breastfeeding. It's a perceived barrier in some cases. It's a real barrier in others."But despite the barriers, the underlying message is that breast milk is the right food for babies. Many studies have shown that infants who are fed breast milk are healthier." The benefits are multiple. Everything from prevention of certain infectious and chronic diseases ---respiratory, for example, being one, decreasing the severity of asthma, if they're prone to asthma---and chronic disease such as diabetes and obesity."Mothers benefit too. Breastfeeding lowers the risk of some cancers, naturally promotes spacing between pregnancies, and it costs less, too.VOA News Item 3. 政治：联合国大会致力于减少贫穷、饥饿和疾病The U.N. General Assembly's annual debate gets under way on September 23. Leaders andrepresentatives from all 192 member states are expected to address the gathering. In a long-established tradition, Brazil's president will open the debate, followed by the U.S. president as the leader of the host nation.This year's debate will be preceded by a three-day summit on the Millennium Development Goals. Some 140 presidents and prime ministers are expected to attend.The goals are meant to reduce extreme poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that with the target date just five years off, many countries are in danger of not meeting the goals, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. But he said recently that with the right strategies countries can close those gaps.VOA News Item 4. 经济：印度货币有了新标志The search for a symbol for the Indian rupee began more than a year ago, when the government decided that the currency needed an identifiable symbol.After going through 3000 entries submitted in a national competition, a panel of bankers, officials and artists chose the new symbol. It is a mix of the Roman letter "R" and its Hindi equivalent in the ancient Devanagari script.Information minister Ambika Soni said the decision to have a symbol for the rupee is significant.VOA News Item 5. 政治：巴以第二轮直接和谈结束Secretary of State Clinton met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Palestinian Authority's headquarters in Ramallah. There was no statement and no details of what, if any, progress might have been made after two days of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. President Abbas sounded positive in his remarks as he began his meeting with Mrs. Clinton.He says everyone knows that there is no alternative other than negotiating for peace.The Palestinian leader thanked the Obama administration for its commitment to mediating a peace deal. Clinton said the United States will press ahead with its efforts to bring about an agreement. “The United States and all of us led by President Obama are very committed and determined to work toward a peace agreement through direct negotiations that leads to an independent, sovereign, viable, Palestinian state that realizes the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”The talks began Tuesday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh. It was the second round of direct negotiations after a 20-month hiatus.Secretary Clinton then traveled to Amman in neighboring Jordan for a meeting and lunch with King Abdullah, before heading back to Washington.There are questions of whether the negotiations could last beyond the end of the month. The Palestinians have threatened to quit talks if Israel does not extend a self-imposed partial moratorium on construction inside Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The temporary freeze expires on September 26, and Israel has given no hint that it will extend it.The Palestinians say the presence of more than 100 Israeli settlements impede the establishment of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.Militants in the Gaza Strip, which is not under the control of President Abbas' Palestinian Authority, oppose the negotiations with the Jewish State. They stepped up their attacks this week, firing anumber of rockets into southern Israel. Israel responded by launching air attacks inside the Gaza Strip.VOA News Item 6. 健康：感冒疫苗可降低心脏病风险Getting a flu shot can help prevent influenza. But now, a large study in Britain indicates that older adults who get an annual flu vaccination are less likely to suffer a heart attack.The study involved more than 78,000 people, age 40 and older.Researcher Niroshan Siriwardena of Britain’s University of Lincoln who led the study."Our research suggests that flu shots are associated with a reduction in relative risk of heart attack in adults by about 19 percent."The reduction was even higher - 21 percent - for people who got their vaccination early in the flu season.The results were mathematically adjusted to reflect the fact that people who are at higher risk for heart attack in the first place are more likely to get a flu shot.Although Siriwardena is careful to point out that his study is one of associations, not necessarily cause-and-effect, he does offer one possible link between the seemingly unrelated conditions of influenza and heart attack.VOA News Item 7. 政治：广播电台致力于赋权予巴勒斯坦女性Halla Bazzar, an attractive woman in her 20s, begins her afternoon show. For this young professional, the job is more than just running a show. It is about giving women living in conflict a key to success. "We talk about issues that would inspire women in the future."Giving women hope for the future is one of the goals of the station, Nisaa FM, which started broadcasting this month from the West Bank town of Ramallah.Founder and manager Maysoun Odeh tells VOA the station wants to entertain, but also empower women. "We broadcast success stories of women regionally, internationally, or locally in which they can take example from, and they know that they can do something and they can achieve something regardless of the situation."The day-to-day situation for many Palestinian women living under occupation involves supporting their children while their husbands are in prison, finding housing after their homes are demolished, and navigating their way through Israeli checkpoints.Wafa Abdel Rahman, a woman's activist with the West Bank group Filastiniyat, says Palestinian women also face cultural issues."We suffer, as the rest of the women in the Arab world suffer, political Islam - the interpretation of Islam, which actually, is putting more burden on the women." "It portrays women as if they are the key to the honor of the family. If you are a good Muslim or not depends on how is your woman. Is she covered? Is she following all the instructions, etcetera. This is really hard on women."Abdel Rahman welcomes the new station. "We need a radio that brings out all those issues." "But also to take it a step further and think how we can - not only women but also men - how we can together change the status of women and make it better."The station, whose name "Nisaa" means "woman" in Arabic began operations this month with the help of Smiling Children, a Switzerland-based humanitarian foundation.VOA News Item 8. 政治：波兰期望关闭决胜投票Sunday, Polish voters are choosing their new president from between two candidates. One is the Speaker of Parliament and Acting President Bronislaw Komorowski, from the governing center-right Civic Platform party. The other is Jaroslaw Kaczynski from the far-right Law and Justice party. Neither candidate was able to win an outright majority in the first round of voting June 20th.Kaczynski is running in the place of his twin brother, the late President Lech Kaczynski, who was killed in April along with his wife Maria and 94 others in a plane crash near Smolensk, Russia. The crash moved the presidential election forward nearly four months.Before the first round of voting, opinion polls had placed Komorowksi firmly in the lead. But the results were closer than predicted, with only a five percent difference between the two men. Grzegorz Makowski of the Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs explains this surge of support for Kaczynski, saying he thinks the plane crash at Smolensk mobilized more conservative voters. If the crash had not happened, he says, Komorowski would almost certainly have won in the first round."I am almost 99 percent sure that if it didn't happen, probably Lech Kaczynski would lose these elections in the first round," "I think it had a really strong impact on those who were passive. Maybe not on those who were against Kaczynski and they dislike him, it didn't change their opinions. But it made those who were passive, and those who were potentially supporters of Kaczynski, active. Because of Smolensk, I thinkthey started thinking that maybe we should be more conservative."Kaczynski has run an effective advertising campaign, and may well have gained ground over the last two weeks.At the moment, Komorowski's Civic Platform party controls parliament. Makowski says Kaczynski has played on his status as opposition leader by arguing that it could be dangerous for the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) to control both the Parliament and the Presidency."This is a very populist argument, but it works. People in Poland have very emotional attitudes to politics, and when he is saying something like that people think, oh, we will have something like a totalitarian regime if the president is also from Platforma. "Makowski adds that the summer holiday season may also affect the vote, since wealthier Poles tend to support Komorowski and many will be leaving for vacation over the weekend.At this point, most analysts agree that the race is too close to call. Final results are expected to be announced on Monday.VOA News Item 9. 政治：据报道俄罗斯科学家在与美间谍交换中被释放A lawyer for an imprisoned Russian nuclear expert, Igor Sutyagin, says her client was released Thursday from a jail in Moscow and flown to Vienna. Other reports say he will be transferred later into British custody.His family says his release is part of an exchange for suspected Russian agents detained last month in the United States in a high-profile case. Neither U.S. nor Russian officials have confirmed the reports.Sergei Markov, a deputy in the Russian State Duma from the ruling United Russia party, said he has heard the rumors of an exchange. He tells VOA that if such a thing occurs, it represents a kind of confession from both the United States and Russia."I think most important is that by exchange, both sides recognize that those arrested people - they are spies."Sutyagin was serving a 15-year prison sentence, after being convicted of sending classified information to a British firm that Russian authorities said was a front for U.S. intelligence.He and his family have repeatedly denied his guilt. His case has been championed by human rights groups who say he was unfairly persecuted by the government. But Markov says the United States has already confirmed he was a spy."It was a very big shock for some of the Russian human rights activists who protected Sutyagin for many years, repeating many times that he is, you know, a scientist who is being arrested by the KGB, by Putin, Putin is oppressing science and so forth."Meantime, the ten members of the alleged Russian spy ring operating in the United States are charged with conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents. They are accused of seeking to infiltrate U.S. policy-making circles and to gather information on U.S. political affairs. Nine of them are also charged with money laundering.An eleventh suspected was detained briefly in Cyprus, but went missing after being released on bail.VOA News Item 10. 政治：报道称2010年海盗袭击数量下降The coast of Somalia remains a major piracy hotspot, the location of more than half this year's pirate attacks. But International Maritime Bureau Director Pottengal Mukundan says the target area is widening."The fact is that the Somali pirates are ranging further out than they have ever done before. We are talking of going 1,000 nautical miles away from the coast in order to attack ships, board them, hijack them and then bring them back into Somalia until a ransom is paid for their release."The International Maritime Bureau recorded 196 piracy incidents in the first six months of the year - about 20 percent less than the same period last year.In the Gulf of Aden there were 86 pirate attacks in the first half of 2009 and 33 so far this year. Mukundan says foreign navies, which have operated in the Gulf of Aden since 2009, have been instrumental in reigning in piracy in the area. But he says piracy is more difficult to manage in the Indian Ocean."It is a huge, huge expanse of sea, very difficult for the navies to effectively monitor it and deal with it in the way it has been successfully dealt in the Gulf of Aden."He says he thinks by the end of 2010 the number of piracy attacks may match or even exceed the 2009 total."At the moment we are seeing a lull because of the southwest monsoons in the Indian Ocean, where these small pirate skiffs cannot operate, but the southwest monsoons will subside by the end of August and then we expect the pirates to be back there trying to seize the ships."According to the International Maritime Bureau report, the first half of the year has seen one crewmember killed, 597 crewmembers taken hostage, and 16 injured.。
