In Afghanistan, Preparing for a Threat to Wheat Plants

• Special English

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report. Farmers in Afghanistan already struggle with the effects of drought and years of conflict. Now there is worry about a new threat headed in their direction in the wind -- a fungus that destroys wheat crops. The disease is a form of stem rust named for its discovery in Uganda ten years ago. Ug99 is now in one of Afghanistan's neighbors, Iran.

The disease kills wheat plants by robbing them of water and nutrients. Stem rust produces reddish-brown spots on the stems of infected plants. The weakened stems break easily. The world's last major outbreak of stem rust took place in the nineteen fifties.

Agriculture -- excluding opium production -- represents about one-third of the Afghan economy. But agriculture employs eighty percent of the country's workers. And almost all Afghan farmers grow wheat to feed their families or to sell. Afghanistan has a population estimated at almost thirty-four million people.

Mahmoud Solh directs the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, in Aleppo, Syria. He says it took a few years for Ug99 to show its destructive power. Then, in Kenya, it destroyed anywhere from twenty to eighty percent of wheat crops.

And before long, he says, winds carried the disease from Kenya to Ethiopia. Ug99 has also affected Sudan and more recently has moved into Asia, spreading to Yemen and Iran.

Mahmoud Solh says the disease now threatens Afghanistan and South Asia. But he also calls it a global threat to food security. Most of the commercial varieties of wheat are at risk from Ug99, he says. These include varieties grown in the United States, Canada and Europe.

The expert urges Afghan farmers to tell agriculture officials immediately if they suspect stem rust in their fields. He says the fields will be treated to kill the fungus and to stop it from spreading. Farmers will get new seeds that resist Ug99.

Researchers have developed these seeds for the conditions in Afghanistan. Organizations of village farmers are working to expand the supplies of the improved seeds. They are receiving guidance from ICARDA and money from international groups.

The goal is to replace at least ten percent of Afghanistan's wheat fields with the new seeds each year. The effort will begin with areas along the border with Iran.

And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson with Steve Baragona. I'm Faith Lapidus.

'Non-Formal' Schools Aim to Fill Need in Kenya's Slums

This is the VOA Special English Development Report. In two thousand three, the government of Kenya established a program of free primary education for all children. But there are not enough public schools for all the children who live in the crowded slums of Nairobi.

Instead, some of these children attend what are known as non-formal or informal schools. These are supported by communities, religious groups and other organizations.

Informal schools use the national curriculum taught in public schools. But they operate largely with limited resources and without trained teachers. Education activists say the Ministry of Education rarely inspects their teaching quality, lesson notes or examination records.

They say the presence of informal schools means that Kenya has two levels of education: One for children from the slums, another for children from better conditions.

Activists say Kenya has at least one thousand six hundred of these non-formal schools. Susan Munuhe is an Education Ministry official. She says only about two hundred informal schools across the country receive money for materials under the free primary education program.

She says one slum in Nairobi, Mathari, has only about three public primary schools nearby. These can serve two thousand children at most. But she says the Mathari slum alone has more than three hundred thousand children of school age.

Diana Atieno Tujuh volunteers as a teacher at the Saint Christine's Community Center in the Kibera slum, one of the largest in Africa. She says the government has provided books for her school only one time during the past few years. Many parents do not have the money to buy books, so sometimes the teachers pay for them.

She says many students are sleepy and unable to pay attention in class because there is not enough food for them at home. For the children at Saint Christine's, the mid-day meal they are served might be their only meal all day.

A government spokesman says the government is trying to discourage informal schools. Alfred Mutua says every child in Kenya has the ability to get the same education. The government, he says, has never rejected a child from a public school. He also says the government is building more schools, but it will take time.

And that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by Jerilyn Watson with Cathy Majtenyi in Nairobi. Transcripts and podcasts of our reports are at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

Microsoft, Google Take Aim at Each Other

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report. Google, the Internet search leader, will now offer a free operating system for personal computers. The company hopes to loosen Microsoft's hold on the market. Microsoft Windows is on more than ninety percent of PCs.

Google is basing the new product on its Chrome Web browser and the Linux open-source operating system. The Google Chrome OS is expected to be available in the second half of next year.

At first, it will be aimed at netbooks. These are smaller, simpler machines designed mainly for Internet use.

Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, says Chrome will pay for itself. It will do that, he says, by reducing the cost of computers and increasing the number of people who search the Internet. Google earns most of its money from sales of advertising on its search engine.

But the recession has hurt the advertising market. And now Microsoft has targeted Google's main business. Microsoft says its new Bing search engine offers a better way to search the Internet. Ads for it make fun of how Web searches often give people a lot of useless results.

COMMERCIAL: "Find a cure at bing.com. It's not just a search engine. It's the first-ever decision engine. From Microsoft."

A Web traffic report last Friday from StatCounter said Bing twice passed Yahoo in usage in the United States in its first few weeks. Yahoo is the second biggest search engine.

But no one has the answer to how much market share Bing will claim from Yahoo or Google in the long term. Microsoft, in its struggle against Google, tried unsuccessfully last year to buy Yahoo for more than forty billion dollars.

Google and Microsoft are also competing in business software. Google offers Google Docs. These applications are free and on the Web. They compete with Microsoft Office, a hugely popular product. Next year, Microsoft plans a new version of Office that is both Web-based and free.

Also, Microsoft plans to launch its seventh version of Windows this October. And the company is preparing to open its own stores, like its competitor Apple. In fact, some Microsoft stores could open right next to Apple stores in the coming months.

The recession has cut sales of PCs and software. But there may be hopeful signs for the industry. Intel is the leading maker of computer processors. This week Intel reported that its results for the past three months were better than expected. And it predicted more good news in the current quarter.

And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report, written by Mario Ritter. Transcripts and MP3s are at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

Authors of Medical Studies Not Always Who They Seem

• Special English

This is the VOA Special English Education Report. Medical journals are an important part of continuing education for doctors and other health providers. Journals say they do their best to publish high quality studies by trusted authors.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors says: "An 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study ... "

In other words, someone who did much of the work.
Credit is to be based on three conditions. The first involves designing the study and gathering and analyzing the data. The second involves preparing the article. And the third involves final approval of the version to be published.

Readers may have no way to know who did what when studies list several authors. And not all studies list all their authors.

The Public Library of Science, or PLoS, is a nonprofit organization based in California. Its journals are available free online. The editors of PLoS Medicine ask authors if anyone from a company or public relations agency suggested or paid for their article.

They also ask if a professional writer helped with the article and to what extent. And they ask if the article is similar to articles published in other journals.

By asking these questions, the editors try to guard against the use of ghost authors. A ghost author is someone who had a lot to do with an article but is not given credit.

Drug companies have been known to pay researchers to place articles in journals to support their products.

Not all ghost authors, though, are paid. And there may be nothing scientifically wrong with a study involving paid authors who are not identified. But journal editors say everyone who worked on a study needs to take responsibility.

Another issue is the honorary author. Unlike a ghost author, an honorary author gets credit in the article but had little if anything to do with it. Authors sometimes add a well-known name to increase the chances that an article will be published. For example, the person may be the head of the university department that did the study.

The chief editor of PLoS Medicine says honorary authors are a more common problem than ghost authors. Virginia Barbour says the pressure in higher education to get published may be responsible for some of this. But she says any kind of dishonesty can shake people's faith in the medical profession.

We'll have more on this subject next week. And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. I'm Steve Ember.

Click here to listen!