Year: 2021

Thousands of people gathered Tuesday outside of New Zealand’s parliament building in the capital, Wellington, to protest the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates and lockdowns intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 protesters marched through central Wellington carrying signs displaying various anti-mandate slogans, with many waving campaign flags of former U.S. president Donald Trump. Security personnel closed nearly all entrances to the parliament campus and its iconic “Beehive” building during the demonstrations. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters inside parliament, “What we saw today was not representative of the vast bulk of New Zealanders.” The nation of 5 million people has been among the best in the world at containing the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, largely because New Zealand closed its borders for most of the last 18 months to non-residents. The strategy to eliminate COVID-19 worked for the most part, with the nation reporting only 28 deaths over the course of the pandemic. Earlier this year, much of the country had all but returned to normal. But New Zealand has been battling a rise of new infections triggered by the Delta variant since August, prompting Prime Minister Ardern to impose new lockdowns in Auckland, its largest city, and other parts of the country. The new outbreaks also have forced Ardern to change from a strategy of total elimination of COVID-19 to controlling the virus through mass vaccinations. The government announced a new goal for all doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other health care workers to be fully vaccinated by December, with teachers and other education workers required to be fully vaccinated by January. Additionally, the government …

Four astronauts returned to Earth on Monday, riding home with SpaceX to end a 200-day space station mission that began last spring. Their capsule streaked through the late night sky like a dazzling meteor before parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Recovery boats quickly moved in with spotlights. “On behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to Planet Earth,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. Within an hour, all four astronauts were out of the capsule, exchanging fist bumps with the team on the recovery ship. Their homecoming — coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station — paved the way for SpaceX’s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night. The newcomers were scheduled to launch first, but NASA switched the order because of bad weather and an astronaut’s undisclosed medical condition. The welcoming duties will now fall to the lone American and two Russians left behind at the space station. Before Monday afternoon’s undocking, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who’s waiting to launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted it was a shame the two crews wouldn’t overlap at the space station but “we trust you’ll leave everything nice and tidy.” His will be SpaceX’s fourth crew flight for NASA in just 1 1/2 years. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and France’s Thomas Pesquet should have been back Monday morning, but high wind in the recovery zone delayed their return. “One more night with this magical view. Who could …

Asian countries with some of the world’s largest yearly tropical forest losses have either not joined a new global pact to halt forest loss by the end of the decade or sparked doubts about their commitment after signing up.    More than 120 countries joined the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use on November 2 at the United Nations’ COP26 climate conference in Scotland.    The non-binding agreement commits them to “working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation” — a major cause of global warming — by 2030, with some $19 billion in public and private financing in the works to help developing countries follow through.  Collectively, Southeast Asia hosts nearly 15% of the world’s tropical forests, prized by climate activists for the volumes of world-warming carbon they can lock up. But most countries in the region have yet to join the COP26 pact, including Laos and Malaysia; both ranked among the top 10 countries in the world for primary tropical forest loss last year, according to the World Resources Institute, a U.S. research group. Cambodia, 11th on WRI’s list, has also not signed up.  Malaysia signals  After drawing rebuke from local opposition parties and rights groups for its absence from the pledge, Malaysia announced Friday it will be joining the deal, but did not say when.    After the declaration was announced without Malaysia on November 3, a local lawmaker, Charles Santiago, called the country’s absence a “tragedy” in a Twitter post. Speaking with VOA, he said it was crucial that the government now make good on its promise to sign up, blaming the country’s mounting forest …

The World Food Program says it is seeking $65 million to ease food insecurity in Zimbabwe. The U.N. agency says its assessment shows that more than 5 million people in the southern African nation are looking at food shortages in coming months.  Belinda Popovska, the WFP Zimbabwe spokeswoman, told VOA on Monday that the U.N. agency had started looking for funds to import food for those in need.  “The latest 2021 rural Zimbabwe vulnerability assessment committee rural report indicates that 2.9 million people in rural areas – that’s 27% of rural households – continue to be food insecure during the peak lean season between January and March 2022. In urban areas up to 2.4 million people are expected to be food insecure according to the latest 2021 urban livelihoods assessment,” Popovska said. The government says Zimbabwe experienced a bumper harvest this year, but the lack of food in rural areas indicates the harvest was in fact disappointing.   Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa says Zimbabwe’s perennial food shortages will end with more production in the farms in the coming 2021/2022 season, which is expected to start anytime now.   She says the government will make sure farmers have the supplies and money they need to meet national requirements for both human consumption and industrial use.    “The strategy will result in more area being put to crop production as evidenced by the proposed increases of the following crops: maize, sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, soybeans and tobacco. The financing of the summer cropping and livestock will be through the private and public sector as well as development partners,” Mutsvangwa said. Zimbabwe, once …

Former U.S. President Barack Obama told the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on Monday that most nations failed to meet their commitments made in the 2015 Paris Climate Conference agreement and the world is nowhere near where it needs to be in confronting climate change. Speaking during the second full week of the talks — known as COP26 — Obama said that while the Paris conference and subsequent agreement showed what is possible and created a framework from which to address the challenges of the climate crisis, most nations failed to be as ambitious as they needed to be. “The escalation, the ratcheting up of ambition that we anticipated in Paris six years ago has not been uniformly realized,” Obama said. He called it “particularly discouraging” that the leaders of China and Russia — two of the largest emitters — declined to even attend the conference, and both nations have demonstrated what he said “appears to be a dangerous lack of urgency” on climate change. China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter. Its president, Xi Jinping, last week called on other nations to “step up cooperation” and act on climate targets. Xi, however, offered no new commitments. The comments came in a statement to the conference. Obama said advanced economies like the United States and Europe need to be leading on this issue, but so do China, Russia and India. He said, “We can’t afford anybody on the sidelines.” Addressing young people, Obama encouraged them to “vote like your …

At least 89 people, including 17 children, have tested positive for the Zika virus in a surge of cases in the Indian city of Kanpur, its health department said on Monday. First discovered in 1947, the mosquito-borne virus Zika virus reached epidemic proportions in Brazil in 2015, when thousands of babies were born with microcephaly, a disorder that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains. “There has been a surge in cases of the Zika virus and the health department has formed several teams to contain the spread,” Dr. Nepal Singh, chief medical officer of Kanpur district in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, told Reuters. “There is one woman who is pregnant, and we are paying special attention towards her.” Cases have been reported in several Indian states in recent years, though Amit Mohan Prasad, Uttar Pradesh’s top government bureaucrat for health and family welfare, told Reuters this was the first outbreak in the state. The first Zika case in the industrial city of Kanpur was detected on Oct. 23 and the number of cases has increased over the past week. “People are testing positive because we are doing very aggressive contact tracing,” said Prasad. Authorities were increasing their surveillance of the outbreak and eliminating breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that transmit the virus, Singh said. …

More than 100,000 climate-action activists from across the world gathered in Glasgow Saturday to protest the agreements and promises made so far at the COP26 climate talks. According to protesters, the new pledges made during the summit — to cut carbon and methane emissions, end deforestation, phase out coal and provide more financing for poorer countries most vulnerable to extreme weather — are just “eye candy,” falling far short of what’s needed to curb global warming.    Teenage activist Greta Thunberg has described the two-week summit as more “blah blah blah” and called it a “failure.” She told clamorous youth protesters outside the venue that the conference has turned into “a global North Greenwash Festival.”   Others worry, though, that in the rush to make climate-action pledges, Western governments may be going too fast with decarbonizing and risk losing the support of their own populations by failing to take into account the economic impact of the monumental shifts being envisaged. Opinion polls suggest that across the globe, overwhelming majorities of people see climate change as an emergency requiring dramatic action. But some polls in recent weeks have also suggested that when people are told what the costs might be for them to help curb global warming, they are reluctant to shoulder the financial burden. A survey in Britain published Sunday suggested that less than half of the British population are willing to pay thousands of pounds to make their homes greener to help meet net-zero emission goals outlined by Prime Minister …

A study by Monash University researchers in Australia has found that moderate drinking of alcohol is associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and a lowering of death from all causes — when compared to zero alcohol consumption. More than 18,000 people over the age of 70 in the United States and Australia took part in the research. It is the first study to investigate the heart health implications of drinking alcohol.  It found that the consumption of modest amounts of alcohol was associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. Robyn Woods is an associate professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University.     “Taking or consuming five to ten alcoholic beverages a week, which is quite modest gave better outcomes than those who were completely teetotal. It seemed to be associated with a reduced cardiovascular disease risk and also of all-cause mortality,” Woods said. Researchers have said their findings should be interpreted with caution because participants in the study were healthy with no previous heart or other severe diseases.They could also have been more physically and socially active than the wider ageing population.   Exactly how modest alcohol consumption can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and other causes of death is unknown.    Associate professor Woods says more research is needed.  “There is some evidence that modest alcohol intake has vascular properties that could be beneficial. But there is also the potential for social benefits. So, you know, consuming alcohol with friends, family, etcetera may well have a benefit,” Woods said. The Monash University, Melbourne, research is published in the European Journal of …

Medically assisted dying is now legal in New Zealand. The End of Life Choice Act has come into effect one year after almost two-thirds of New Zealanders voted in favor of it.  Supporters believe the assisted dying laws will give New Zealanders who are “suffering terribly at the end of their lives” choice, compassion and dignity.     To be eligible, a person must have a terminal illness that is likely to end their life within six months. They must also be able to make an informed decision.   The legislation came into force Sunday, a year after a binding referendum.    Brooke van Velden is the deputy leader of the small ACT New Zealand party, which promoted the voluntary euthanasia law.  She told Radio New Zealand the measures will benefit the South Pacific country of 5 million people.   “This weekend New Zealand became a kinder, more compassionate and humane society for allowing people who are struggling and suffering in those last few days with their terminal illness choice and compassion on how and when they go,” Velden said. However, some critics insist that patients with chronic conditions might feel obliged to use euthanasia to avoid being a burden on their families.   They also believe that “inadequate palliative care services” need to be better resourced, so that terminally ill patients receive better care.   Some senior Church leaders have said that while they oppose the “deliberate taking of human life,” they would still offer care and advice to those who choose “assisted dying” under the new laws.  The government has appointed three experts, including a medical ethicist, to monitor the legislation. New Zealand’s …

Wang Yaping has become the first Chinese woman to conduct a spacewalk as part of a six-month mission to the country’s space station.   Wang and fellow astronaut Zhai Zhigang left the station’s main module on Sunday evening, spending more than six hours outside installing equipment and carrying out tests alongside the station’s robotic service arm, according to the China Manned Space agency.   The third member of the crew, Ye Guangfu, assisted from inside the station, CMS said on its website.   Wang, 41, and Zhai, 55, had both traveled to China’s now-retired experimental space stations, and Zhai conducted China’s first spacewalk 13 years ago.   The three are the second crew on the permanent station, and the mission that began with their arrival Oct. 16 is scheduled to be the longest stretch of time in space yet for Chinese astronauts.   The Tianhe module of the station will be connected next year to two more sections named Mengtian and Wentian. The completed station will weigh about 66 tons, much smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 450 tons.  Three spacewalks are planned to install equipment in preparation for the station’s expansion, while the crew will also assess living conditions in the Tianhe module and conduct experiments in space medicine and other fields.       China’s military-run space program plans to send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.  …

Workplace mandates requiring vaccination against COVID-19 continue to be controversial in the U.S. The Biden administration is expected to respond this week to a recent federal court decision to temporarily halt federal vaccine mandate rules for large employers. Michelle Quinn reports. …

High wind off the Florida coast have prompted SpaceX to delay the return of four space station astronauts who have been in orbit since spring. The U.S., French and Japanese astronauts were supposed to leave the International Space Station on Sunday, with their capsule splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday morning. But with gusts exceeding safety limits, SpaceX bumped the departure to Monday afternoon, with a nighttime return to conclude their six-month mission.  The good news is that their trip home will now last eight hours, less than half as long as before. The toilet in their capsule is broken, and so the four will need to rely on diapers while flying home.  SpaceX still is aiming for a Wednesday night launch, at the earliest, of their replacements. This flight also has been delayed by bad weather, as well as an astronaut’s undisclosed medical issue. The issue, described as minor, should be resolved by launch time, officials said.  Last week, SpaceX and NASA flipped the order of the launch and landing because of the deteriorating weather and the looming deadline to get the capsule back from the space station. SpaceX capsules are certified for a maximum 210 days in orbit, and the one there now is approaching 200 days.  …

Poland’s Health Ministry issued instructions Sunday to doctors confirming that it is legal to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s health or life is in danger, a directive that comes amid apparent confusion over a new restriction to the country’s abortion law.  The document addressed to obstetricians comes in reaction to the hospital death of a 30-year-old mother whose pregnancy was in its 22nd week. The woman died in September but her death became widely known this month. Doctors at the hospital in Pszczyna, in southern Poland, held off terminating her pregnancy despite the fact that her fetus lacked enough amniotic fluid to survive, her family and a lawyer say. The doctors have been suspended and prosecutors are investigating.  Angered Poles held massive nationwide protests over the weekend, blaming the woman’s death on Poland’s restrictive abortion law. Women’s rights activists say it has a chilling effect on doctors in this predominantly Roman Catholic nation. The ministry stressed it is in line with the law to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s health is in danger, even more so in case of threat to her life. It included guidance in case of premature loss of the amniotic fluid. “It should be clearly stressed that doctors must not be afraid to take evident decisions. stemming from their experience and the available medical knowledge,” the ministry said. Until a year ago, women in Poland could have abortions in three cases: if the pregnancy resulted from a crime like rape, if the woman’s health …

The Taliban-run Afghan public health ministry announced Sunday the start of a four-day nationwide polio vaccination campaign aimed at inoculating children younger than 5. For the past three years before taking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban had barred U.N.-organized vaccination teams from doing door-to-door campaigns in parts of the country under their control. The group apparently was suspicious the team members could be spies for the previous government or the West. Because of the ban and ongoing fighting, some 3.3 million children over the past three years have not been vaccinated. “Without any doubt polio is a disease that without treatment will either kill our children or cause them with permanent disability, so in this case the only way is to implement the vaccination,” said Dr. Qalandar Ebad, the Taliban’s acting public health minister. Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan are the only countries in the world where polio remains endemic, and the disease can cause partial paralysis in children. Since 2010, the country has been carrying out regular inoculation campaigns in which workers go door to door, giving the vaccine to children. Most of the workers are women, since they can get better access to mothers and children. The four-day campaign will start Monday and take place countrywide, Ebad said. The estimated target population is Afghanistan’s 10 million children younger than 5, including the more than 3.3 million who could not be reached since 2018. “Vaccination of [children] less than five years of age in the country during the national immunization days …

Jesse Readlynn, a father of two from Rochester, New York, breathed a huge sigh of relief this week. “My children getting coronavirus was one of my biggest fears,” he told VOA.“Finally, this worry and uncertainty I’ve been living with can begin to relax.” Readlynn’s relief comes after last week’s U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that children 5-11 years old be vaccinated with a pediatric version of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. The guidance makes 28 million American children eligible for a vaccine that has proved overwhelmingly effective in slowing the spread of coronavirus. For many parents like Readlynn, the development is highly welcome news. When his 7-year-old receives his first dose of the vaccine next week, and his 4-year-old receives a version of the vaccine in a clinical study, Readlynn is hopeful life can return closer to what it was in the years before the coronavirus pandemic. “Playdates, having real birthday parties, eating inside restaurants, going to museums,” he listed as things he’s looking forward to doing once his children are vaccinated.“Visiting family we have to fly to and just exploring the big, wide, exciting world again! It’s going to bring a normalcy to our lives that we haven’t had in two years.” Uncertainty for some According to an October survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly three in 10 parents (27%) are eager to get a vaccine for their child, 5-11 years old. A slightly higher number (30%) said they will definitely not get the vaccine …

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said Sunday it has recorded 249.5 million global COVID cases and more than 5 million deaths. The center said 7.2 billion COVID vaccines have been administered. A northern California town’s city council has declared itself a “constitutional republic” as a way to express its displeasure with what it considers state and federal overreach in the issuing of mandates, such as for mask wearing, designed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Legal experts say Oroville’s city council’s move, however, does not allow Oroville to opt out of the mandates. The fully vaccinated in Australia’s New South Wales state are on the verge of having a number of COVID restrictions eased Monday, including elimination of limits on the number of home visitors. Health professionals in India are bracing for a surge in coronavirus cases following Diwali, the annual festival of lights, that began Thursday. Dr. Prakash Singh, a virologist, told The New York Times, “For this Diwali, people almost forgot the virus is still here and killing people.” Johns Hopkins reports that India has 34.4 million COVID infections, but public health experts say the tally is likely undercounted. Only the United States has more COVID cases, with 46.5 million. Fire swept through a newly built hospital ward for coronavirus patients in western India Saturday, killing at least 10 coronavirus patients. Officials said about two dozen patients were in the intensive care unit of the hospital in the western city of Ahmednagar when the fire broke out. It …

When a rotten egg smell rises from the mangrove swamps of southeast Mexico, something is going well. It means that this key coastal habitat for blunting hurricane impacts has recovered and is capturing carbon dioxide — the main ingredient of global warming. While world leaders seek ways to stop the climate crisis at a United Nations conference in Scotland this month, one front in the battle to save the planet’s mangroves is thousands of kilometers away on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Decades ago, mangroves lined these shores, but today there are only thin green bands of trees beside the sea, interrupted by urbanized areas and reddish segments killed by too much salt and by dead branches poking from the water. A few dozen fishermen and women villagers have made building on what’s left of the mangroves part of their lives. Their work is supported by academics and donations to environmental groups, and government funds help train villagers to organize their efforts.  The first time they came to the swamp for seasonal restoration work was more than a decade ago with Jorge Alfredo Herrera, a researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the Mexican Polytechnic Institute in Yucatan. He told them the mangroves needed a network of interlaced canals where fresh and salt water would mingle. To dig them was a hard work and paid only $4 a day. Men from Chelem, a fishing village of Progreso, turned down the job but a group of women took it on, believing they could accomplish …

The astronauts who will depart the International Space Station on Sunday will be stuck using diapers on the way home because of their capsule’s broken toilet. NASA astronaut Megan McArthur described the situation Friday as “suboptimal” but manageable. She and her three crewmates will spend 20 hours in their SpaceX capsule, from the time the hatches are closed until Monday morning’s planned splashdown. “Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges,” she said during a news conference from orbit. “This is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we’re not too worried about it.” After a series of meetings Friday, mission managers decided to bring McArthur and the rest of her crew home before launching their replacements. That SpaceX launch already had been delayed more than a week by bad weather and an undisclosed medical issue involving one of the crew. SpaceX is now targeting liftoff for Wednesday night at the earliest. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who will return with McArthur, told reporters that the past six months have been intense up there. The astronauts conducted a series of spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power grid, endured inadvertent thruster firings by docked Russian vehicles that sent the station into brief spins, and hosted a private Russian film crew — a space station first. They also had to deal with the toilet leak, pulling up panels in their SpaceX capsule and discovering pools of urine. The problem was first noted during SpaceX’s private flight …

Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, called Friday for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for anyone who was fully vaccinated at least six months ago, as the nation faces a fourth wave of coronavirus infections.  Speaking to reporters following a two-day summit in Bavaria with health ministers from the 16 German states, Spahn said Germany’s COVID-19 situation is entering a very difficult period, as the country’s Robert Koch Institute reported a record 37,120 new daily cases Friday.  Spahn said the “fourth wave” is not only here, but it has “been here for a long time,” and is gaining strength “and has clearly accelerated.” The minister said some German state leaders have warned the country may need a new lockdown if urgent action is not taken.  The surge in Germany is part of a rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths in Europe that have made the region the new epicenter of the pandemic, Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Europe regional director, said Thursday. At a regular COVID-19 briefing at the agency headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and other experts discussed the surge in Europe, where cases have risen 55% in the past four weeks, despite an ample supply of vaccines.  “Let me be very clear: This should not be happening. We have all the tools to prevent COVID-19 transmission and save lives, and we continue to call on all countries to use those tools,” Tedros said.  The WHO chief also decried the fact that the world’s low-income nations …

U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced Friday its new COVID-19 pill showed an 89% reduction in risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization or death in clinical trials and they plan to submit the drug to U.S. regulators for emergency use approval. In a release Friday, Pfizer said the latest clinical trials of its pill, Paxlovid, featured a randomized, double-blind study of non-hospitalized adult patients with COVID-19 who are at high risk of progressing to severe illness.  The company said interim analysis of the oral antiviral showed an 89% reduction in risk compared to a placebo in patients treated within three days of symptom onset.  Pfizer said it has received an independent data monitoring committee recommendation to pause enrollment in the Phase 3 trial due to the overwhelming efficacy demonstrated in the latest results.  The company plans to submit the data as part of its ongoing application to the FDA for Emergency Use Authorization as soon as possible.  Pfizer is now the second drug manufacturer to develop an oral treatment for COVID-19. U.S. company Merck last month introduced its COVID-19 pill, which clinical studies showed to provide a 50% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19. It has been submitted to the FDA, and the federal agency is scheduled to rule on it late this month.  Currently, all COVID-19 treatments approved in the United States require injection or intravenous drip. Pills have the advantage of being distributed by pharmacies and taken at home.  Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approved Merck’s pill, …

Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch. Leaders talk global warming in Glasgow  — World leaders met in Glasgow, Scotland, this week to try to halt global warming. But with some of the world’s biggest emitters like China and Russia skipping the conference, known as COP26, hopes dimmed that leaders will find a way to keep the world from warming more than the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius this century. Hope Eroding as COP26 Climate Pledges Fall Short — Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change. Phasing out its use between 2030 and 2040 is one of the United Nation’s most ambitious appeals. More than 40 countries made coal-related pledges on Thursday at COP26. COP26: Britain Hails Global Deals to End Coal but Plans New Mine — The world’s youth have the most at stake as the planet warms, and they have been vocal advocates for change. On Friday, they took center stage during Youth and Public Empowerment Day at COP26. ‘It’s Our Lives on the Line’, Young Marchers Tell UN Climate Talks  War crimes committed in northern Ethiopia — The conflict between the Ethiopian federal army and Tigrayan fighters in northern Ethiopia reached the one-year milestone this week. A report written by a joint investigative team from the United Nations and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission was published Wednesday, saying all belligerents have committed atrocities during the …