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Nation & World Briefs

U.S. to spend $750M on Central America hardships

WASHINGTON - The year-end spending bill that passed Congress on Friday contains $750 million to help El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras fight poverty and gang violence, improve security and reform their governments, far more than the Senate and especially the House had initially allocated. Though the administration had asked for $1 billion, senior officials hailed the money they did get as a big win, saying it will aid their efforts to keep children from those countries at home.

In October and November, more than 10,500 children crossed the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, the vast majority from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to Department of Homeland Security data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. The surge, a 106 percent increase over the same period last year, has sparked concerns that the new influx of children could eventually approach the levels that last year prompted the Obama administration to declare a humanitarian crisis.

Ancient human femur discovered in China

According to research published recently in PLOS ONE, a femur found in Southwest China could mean that a species of early human – one from a lineage other than the one that resulted in humans alive today – survived as recently as 14,000 years ago.

Study author Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales admits in his commentary that a single bone does not a mysterious lineage of pre-modern humans make. But this single femur is part of a growing body of evidence.

The owner of the newly analyzed femur would have weighed just about 110 pounds, but we don’t know much else. If the dating of these bones is accurate, there are a lot of questions to be answered. For starters, how did a smaller, more primitive species survive so long in the age of modern man?

UPS, FedEx rush to deliver online-bought holiday gifts

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – As more gift-givers shop online, there are more packages to ship. Online sales now account for 10 percent of all shopping and 15 percent during the holidays, according to research firm Forrester. That leaves FedEx and UPS with a combined 947 million packages to deliver between Black Friday and Christmas Eve – up 8 percent from last holiday season’s forecasts.

For UPS, the key to getting all those last-second orders delivered on time is Worldport, a massive sorting facility located between the Louisville airport’s two main runways. On a typical night, 1.6 million packages pass through. Just before Christmas, there can be 4 million, peaking on Monday night.

U.S. moves to protect lion species from trophy hunters

WASHINGTON – The U.S. will protect lions in Africa under the Endangered Species Act, the Obama administration announced Monday, a move that would make it harder for American big-game hunters to bring a lion head or hide into the country.

The effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service comes five months after the killing of “Cecil,” a lion in Zimbabwe, by a Minnesota dentist caused an international uproar and shed a spotlight on trophy hunting. The hope is that classifying the two breeds of African lions as threatened or endangered will encourage African countries to improve conversation efforts.

The Humane Society of the United States projects American trophy hunters imported 5,647 lions in the past decade.

Associated Press & Washington Post



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