Two men have been arrested and charged in a shooting Sunday at an Ohio fraternity house that killed one student and injured 11 people near Youngstown State University, police said Sunday. According to Youngstown police Chief Jimmy Hughes, the duo got into an argument at the party and left the house.

More than 55 homes have been destroyed by bushfires that have swept through neighbourhoods of the western Australian city of Perth. The most serious blaze in the Roleystone area began around midday on Sunday and is thought to have been sparked by someone using a mechanical grinder.

A five-star hotel has caught fire in China after a fireworks display to mark the new year. The blaze in Shenyang, the capital of China’s Liaoning Province, is believed to have started in an apartment complex before spreading to the hotel.

An explosion has ripped through an underground coal mine in Colombia, killing 21 workers. The blast happened at La Preciosa mine in Sardinata, about 400 kilometres north-east of the capital, Bogota, early Wednesday morning local time.

The Moscow police are investigating the explosion at Domodedovo International Airport. Investigators found the head of an Arab male on the site of the accident. It is not ruled out that it was him, who detonated the bomb

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been informed about the explosion at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport. Most likely, it was a suicide terrorist, who conducted the explosion at the airport

Correction attachedThis is the VOA Special English Development Report.<!– IMAGE –>A
new study in West Africa shows how farm irrigation systems powered by the sun can
produce more food and money for villagers. The study in Benin found that solar-powered
pumps are effective in supplying water, especially during the long dry season.Sub-Saharan Africa is the part of the
world with the least food security. The United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization estimates that more than one billion of the world's people faced
hunger last year. Around two hundred sixty-five million of them live south of
the Sahara Desert. Lack of rainfall is one of their main causes of food
shortages.Jennifer Burney from Stanford University in California led
the study. The research team helped build three solar-powered drip irrigation
systems in northern Benin.Between thirty and thirty-five
women used each system to pump water from the ground or a stream. Each woman
was responsible for farming her own one hundred twenty square meters of land. They
also farmed other land collectively.The solar-powered irrigation systems produced an
average of nearly two metric tons of vegetables per month. During the first
year, the women kept a monthly average of almost nine kilograms of vegetables
for home use.They sold the surplus produce at local markets.
The earnings greatly increased their ability to buy food during the dry season
which can last six to nine months.People in the two villages with
the systems were able to eat three to five more servings of vegetables per day.
But making the surplus available at markets also had a wider effect.The
study compared the villages with two others where women farmed with traditional
methods like carrying water in buckets. The amount of vegetables eaten in those
villages also increased, though not as much.The researchers note that only
four percent of the cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated. Using solar
power to pump water has higher costs at first. But the study says it can be
more economical in the long term than using fuels like gasoline, diesel or kerosene.
And solar power is  environmentally
friendly.The
study appears this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.And
that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by June Simms. You
can post comments and learn about other issues in the developing world at
voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember. ___Correction: Stanford researchers studied the impact of the irrigation systems but did not build them, as this story suggested. The project was financed and built by the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), a nongovernmental organization.

Now the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.
A nickname is a shortened form of a person’s name. A nickname also can be a descriptive name for a person, place or thing. Many American cities have nicknames. These can help establish an identity, spread pride among citizens and build unity.
A few years ago, some marketing and advertising experts were asked to name the best nickname for an American city. The winner was the nation’s largest city, New York. The top nickname was The Big Apple.
You might wonder how New York got this nickname.In the early nineteen seventies, the city had many problems. The number of visitors was falling.So a campaign was launched to give the city a new image. The head of the New York Conventions and Visitors Bureau decided to call the city, The Big Apple.
There are several explanations for where this name came from. Language expert Barry Popik studied the question and wrote about it on his Web site. He says John Fitz Gerald, a writer for a New York newspaper, used the name the Big Apple to mean New York in the nineteen twenties. Mister Fitz Gerald wrote about horse races. He heard the name used by men who worked at a racetrack in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Mister Fitz Gerald wrote: “The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.” 
In horse racing, the expression meant “the big time,” the place where large amounts of money could be won. The Big Apple became the name of a night club in the Harlem area of New York City in nineteen thirty-four. It also was the name of a popular dance and a hit song in the nineteen thirties.
But it is not the only nickname for America’s largest city. Barry Popik’s web site lists almost one hundred nicknames that describe New York. The best known are the Capital of the World. Empire City. Gotham. The City So Nice They Named it Twice. And the City That Never Sleeps. You can hear about the city in the song, “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra.
(MUSIC)
This program was written by Shelley Gollust. I’m Barbara Klein. You can find more WORDS AND THEIR STORIES at voaspecialenglish.com.

<!– IMAGE –>
AA: I’m Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our guest is English professor Jack Lynch, author of the new book “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.”RS: “Why did you write this book?”JACK LYNCH: “Well, because I have a number of guides to grammar and style and things like that on the World Wide Web, I get messages from strangers all the time, asking me various grammatical and stylistic questions. But one came up in many variations many times, and it always took the form ‘When I was in school, I was taught such-and-such and now I hear so-and-so. Have the rules changed?’ “And I realized I don’t even know how to begin answering that, because the rules of the language aren’t some official set of guidelines that are voted on by a committee or something like that. It’s more an organic set of habits and superstitions and prejudices that all come together into the collective practices of the group.”RS: “The subtitle of your book is ‘The Evolution of “Proper” English from Shakespeare to “South Park.”‘ And proper is in quotes.”JACK LYNCH: “Yes.”RS: “Why did you put that in quotes?”JACK LYNCH: “In fact, I wrestled with my editors a little bit because I had many more quotations around proper and correct throughout the book, and they said ‘Can we do it in just a few strategic places and remove the rest?’”AA: “You’re trying to be sarcastic, obviously.”JACK LYNCH: “Well, not necessarily sarcastic. But I want people to understand that when we talk about ‘proper’ English, we’re really talking about one variety of English. It’s a very important variety of English. It’s the one that gives you access to the corridors of power, and it’s the way you make money and so on. “You have to learn a variety of English. But the mistake is assuming that that is the only correct English and any departure from it is wrong. And I wanted people to understand there are many Englishes, and the rules that we use to distinguish among the different kinds of English aren’t like rules of gravity or even laws against murder or something like this. They’re more like table manners or fashion. They are just sets of conventions that are shared by a group of people.”AA: “And widely criticized, right, in all three cases? Manners and fashion.”JACK LYNCH: “Well, criticized, but also argued over. At least with manners and so on, table manners and so on, we recognize that what we’re doing is a social convention and we all agree to behave this way.”RS: “Where did that start?”JACK LYNCH: “People have been speaking something we can call English for about fifteen hundred years. Now, fifteen hundred years ago it sounded nothing like modern English. It would sound a lot more like German to a modern speaker. For the first thousand years, the first maybe twelve hundred years of the language’s history, no one was particularly upset about how the majority of people spoke. “Now, everyone’s recognized some people speak better than others, just as some people dress better than others and dance and sing better than others. But there was no sense that most people don’t know their own language. It was only around the year seventeen hundred that people began getting concerned about that and began instituting rules for the way everyone must speak. And that’s the story I try to tell, from about seventeen hundred to the present.”AA: “Now before we get that, I’m curious, I mean how does this compare to other languages out there?”JACK LYNCH: “Well, some languages have never been bothered with this sort of thing at all. They don’t have any systematic sense of what’s official. But many of the major European languages have gone much further than English in that there are official, government-sponsored academies that determine what the proper form of the language is. There’s nothing like that in any English-speaking country.”RS: “Well, how do you account for, then, the changes in culture and language that come into a language, no matter what language it is?”JACK LYNCH: “Well, every language changes all the time. That’s simply a fact of life and you can like that or you can be upset about it, but you have to accept it. Language always changes. Every language has always changed. When scholars in the seventeenth century started looking back at Latin and Greek, they thought ‘Ah, these are the perfect, unchanging languages, and our modern barbarous English must be degenerate because it’s changing all the time.’ “Well, the only reason Latin and Greek seemed to be constant is because moderns just didn’t have enough information about it. We now know Latin and Greek changed just as much as every language. They always change and trying to figure out the reasons is close to impossible. When you ask about any particular example, linguists will often say ‘historical reasons,’ which is just an elaborate way of saying ‘It just is, that’s all.’”AA: Jack Lynch is an English professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Next week he explains just what he means by the title of his latest book, “The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.”RS: And that’s WORDMASTER for this week. With Avi Arditti, I’m Rosanne Skirble.

This is the VOA Special English Development Report.<!– IMAGE –>Snakes
bite an estimated five and a half million people worldwide each year. Experts
say tens of thousands of people die from venom poisoning.An untreated or incorrectly treated bite might require
the removal of a bitten foot, for example, or an arm. Each year around four
hundred thousand amputations are the result of snakebites.Last
year, for the first time, the World Health Organization added snakebites to its
list of “neglected tropical diseases.” This recognition aims to bring
greater attention to the problem.Scientists
know of about three thousand kinds of snakes. About six hundred of them are
venomous. These are most often found in rural areas in tropical climates.Asia
and Africa have the highest number of snakebites — together about four million
a year. Latin America and islands in the South Pacific follow.The highest number of victims are agricultural workers.
Snakebites are also common among fishermen, hunters and children. Many victims
live in areas with poor or non-existent health care systems and where antivenom
treatments are often not available.Antivenom is the only cure. But experts say antivenom
technologies and their use need to be improved. Problems include a shortage of
manufacturers and the high cost of treatment.Also,
there is a widespread lack of knowledge among local health workers about how to
use antivenoms. The treatments can cause dangerous and even deadly reactions if
not used carefully.Antivenom
contains proteins from animals such as horses or sheep. The animals are
injected repeatedly with one or more different snake venoms to produce
immunity.The Lancet medical journal recently published a series
of reports on snakebite prevention and treatment. David Warrell at the
University of Oxford in England co-wrote one of them. He praised efforts by the
W.H.O. to establish common practices for the production, regulation and control
of antivenom. But he says more must be done.The authors say community
education programs could help prevent snakebites by teaching people how to
avoid them. They also suggest actions like providing protective boots to wear
while working in fields, and not sleeping on the ground.Also
important is providing information about where dangerous snakes are most likely
to live and when they are most active.And
that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by June Simms. MP3s,
transcripts and broadcasts of our reports are available at
voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Christopher Cruise.