Hope is the thing with feathers, poet Emily Dickinson wrote. For Richard Thorns, the feathers are pink.   Thorns’ hope? To prove that a colorful duck is not extinct. This week, he launches a seventh expedition into the inaccessible wilds of Myanmar to search for the pink-headed duck that hasn’t been seen alive since 1949, and that was in India. No one has seen the bird alive in Myanmar in more than a century.   Thorns, a British writer who quit his shop clerk job 20 years ago after reading …

There are only two places in the entire world where children have caught polio this year: Afghanistan and Pakistan. In these countries, the virus is not circulating throughout, but only in very remote or very small areas. Nearly 30 years ago, the polio virus paralyzed 1,000 children a day in 125 countries. The numbers have dropped so dramatically thanks to a global effort to wipe out the polio virus. Carol Pandak of Rotary International calls the effort “herculean.” “Hundreds of thousands of frontline health care workers are out there every …

A US government bunker, originally built in case of nuclear war, is now offering protection for a happier purpose. VOA’s Karina Bafradzhian shows us how America’s entertainment history is preserved in an underground space near Washington. … From: MeNeedIt