World

CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward broadcast shocking video of a 9-year-old girl being sold by her family to an old man in Afghanistan.

"It is important to note that parents gave us full access and permission to speak to the children and show their faces because they say they cannot change the practice themselves," Ward reported.

Wasps have a reputation for being jerks because of their perceived aggressiveness and ability to sting repeatedly. They're often negatively compared with the honey production and agricultural pollination of bees.

If wasps are jerks, however, they are positively saintly compared to their parasitic brethren.

Parasitic wasps sting to inject their eggs into a host, often accompanied by venom and a virus. Their larvae grow and eventually emerge from the unwitting host — usually killing it. Then they becoming adults and fly off to continue the cycle.

Some wasps go further, controlling their host's behaviour, effectively “zombifying" them to help the larva survive. After studying the behaviour of ichneumon wasps, which lay their eggs in moth larvae, naturalist Charles Darwin wrote that they were so evil that they were proof against the idea that God was directing evolution:

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."

While no wasps are known to lay eggs in humans (although some flies do), they have inspired films like the Alien franchise and the recently released monster survival video game House of Ashes.

Ridley Scott's 1979 movie 'Alien' centred on a parasitic alien species.

But whether inspiring horror or metaphysical questions, parasitic wasps also save millions of human lives.

Parasitic wasps to the rescue

In the 1970s, the cassava mealybug (Phenacoccus manihoti) entered Western and Central Africa as an invasive pest species from Brazil. It rapidly spread across cassava fields causing crop losses as high as 80 per cent. The cassava plant is a staple food crop because it is drought-resistant. The mealybug invasion threatened the food base of 200 million people.

The Swiss entomologist Hans Rudolf Herren, who was conducting research in the area, found a wasp parasitizing the mealybug (Epidinocarsis lopezi). The parasitic wasp posed little risk to sub-Saharan species.

After rearing the wasps and gathering funding, Herren bought planes and co-ordinated strategic airdrops and ground release of wasp cocoons to areas affected by the mealybug. From those locations, the wasp populations grew and spread on their own, reducing the mealybug population to manageable levels for years.

This effort saved an estimated 20 million lives, billions in crops and avoided the use of pesticides. Herren received the World Food Prize in 1995 for his efforts.

David Attenborough describes the habits of parasitic wasps for BBC Earth.

Biocontrol heroes

Biocontrol is the use of one organism to combat a pest, and this was far from the only successful case of wasps as biocontrol. Wasps have successfully defended against many crop pests in Chinese agriculture.

The samurai wasp (Trissolcus japonicus) was being studied for potential use against the brown marmorated stinkbug, a threat to many crops across the continental United States. However, the wasp preempted this, moving into stinkbug territories on its own.

Wasps are even being deployed to prevent moths from damaging historical sites and their artifacts. Here in Canada, at least four wasp species have been released to control the emerald ash borer, a cause of deforestation across Canada.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro met Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini Tuesday in a ceremony for Brazilians killed in World War II, on a visit to Italy marred by controversy.

The Brazilian far-right leader chose to skip UN climate talks in Glasgow after the G20 summit in Rome to instead spend two days in northern and central Italy.

Donald Trump was the focus of a new analysis published online by The Washington Post on Tuesday.

"Some men use words like a scalpel, leveraging their power incisively and conservatively. Others use words the way Wile E. Coyote uses a boulder perched at the edge of a cliff. Former president Donald Trump is more of a push-the-boulder kind of guy, and one of the boulders he likes to push is the word 'hoax.' Trump used it nearly 800 times as he was first running for and then serving as president, generally as a way of undergirding his incessant claims that everyone but him was being dishonest about things. Every time someone criticized him, it was a 'hoax,' to the point that the word lost any real meaning," Philip Bump wrote.

Dozens of countries on Tuesday joined a United States and European Union pledge to cut emissions of methane -- the most potent greenhouse gas -- by 30 percent this decade, in the most significant climate commitment so far at COP26.

The initiative, which experts say could have a powerful short-term impact on global heating, followed an announcement earlier Tuesday in which more than 100 nations agreed to end deforestation by 2030.

On Tuesday, VICE reported that investigators are looking into the role of Armslist.com, a Craigslist-like website used to facilitate private gun sales, in funneling guns to Mexican drug cartels.

"The role of Armslist and other similar online marketplaces as a source of weapons that end up in the hands of criminals on both sides of the border is growing, law enforcement sources told VICE News," reported Keegan Hamilton. "While federal regulations require stores and licensed firearms dealers to perform background checks on prospective buyers, Armslist connects users for private transactions that can be done with virtually no questions asked, making it easily exploited for 'straw purchases' done on behalf of cartels."

President Joe Biden is facing yet another foreign policy confrontation as China is reportedly making major military moves.

"Rapid construction at three suspected silo fields in China -- which could eventually be capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles -- appears to indicate that Beijing is putting substantial efforts and resources into the development of its nuclear capabilities, according to analysis of new commercial satellite images. Experts from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a nonpartisan national security research and advocacy organization, found that China has made significant progress on suspected silo fields in the western part of the country," CNN reported Tuesday.

Five million people have died worldwide from Covid-19 since the disease first emerged in China nearly two years ago, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP.

Monday's milestone, nearly four months after four million deaths were registered, came even as mortality rates slow thanks to a global vaccine rollout that has seen billions of people injected.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that climate change is a hoax on Monday -- and then ranted about the 2020 election and the assorted scandals he faced during his four years as president.

In a discombobulated statement emailed to reporters after Trump's ban from social media, he repeated "Russia" and "Ukraine" three times as other hoaxes, along with his "Big Lie" of election fraud, his two impeachments and the Mueller report.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby apologized on Monday for suggesting that the impact of climate change would be worse than Nazi genocide.

Welby, the most senior cleric in the Church of England and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, made the comments in an interview with the BBC at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.