Month: April 2022

Farmers across the country and around the world might one day leave the confines of their tractor cabs and operate autonomous tractors remotely through an app. But will farmers, big and small, be willing to trust the technology? VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. …

Palestinian militants fired a rocket into southern Israel for the first time in months on Monday, in another escalation after clashes at a sensitive holy site in Jerusalem, a series of deadly attacks inside Israel and military raids across the occupied West Bank. Israel said it intercepted the rocket, and there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage. Israel holds Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers responsible for all such projectiles and usually launches airstrikes in their wake. It was the first such rocket fire since New Year’s Eve. Early Tuesday, Israeli fighter jets carried out a series of airstrikes in southern Gaza Strip, targeting a “weapons manufacturing site” for Hamas, the Israeli military said. There were no reports of injuries. Hours earlier, the leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group, which boasts an arsenal of rockets, had issued a brief, cryptic warning, condemning Israeli “violations” in Jerusalem. Ziad al-Nakhala, who is based outside the Palestinian territories, said threats to tighten an Israeli-Egyptian blockade on Gaza imposed after Hamas seized power 15 years ago “can’t silence us from what’s happening in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.” However, no Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. Palestinians and Israeli police clashed over the weekend in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, which has long been an epicenter of Israeli- Palestinian violence. It is the third holiest site in Islam and the holiest for Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount because the mosque stands on a …

The flight debut of NASA’s mega moon rocket faces additional delays following a string of failed fueling tests.  Officials said Monday it will be challenging to meet a launch window in early to mid-June. The next opportunity to send an empty capsule to the moon on a test flight would be at the end of June or July.  The 30-story Space Launch System rocket has been on the pad at Kennedy Space Center for the past month. It will return to the hangar next week for valve and fuel leak repairs. The problems cropped up earlier this month, preventing NASA from filling the rocket’s fuel tanks for a critical dress rehearsal.  The rocket will likely spend weeks in the hangar before heading back to the pad for a testing redo, said launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.  Managers are considering various options for getting back on track.  “It’s just a matter of what’s the right time, what’s the right way to do that,” said Tom Whitmeyer, a NASA deputy associate administrator.  NASA wants this test flight under its belt before putting astronauts on board for the second launch, a lunar flyaround targeted for 2024. The third mission would attempt to land astronauts on the moon around 2025, more than a half-century after NASA’s Apollo moonshots.  …

Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard their country’s newest orbital station in the longest crewed mission to date for China’s ambitious space program. The Shenzhou 13 space capsule landed in the Gobi desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, shown live on state TV. During the mission, astronaut Wang Yaping carried out the first spacewalk by a Chinese woman. Wang and crewmates Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu beamed back physics lessons for high school students. China launched its first astronaut into space in 2003 and landed robot rovers on the moon in 2013 and on Mars last year. Officials have discussed a possible crewed mission to the moon. On Saturday, state TV showed images from inside the capsule as it traveled at 200 meters per second over Africa before entering the atmosphere. The trio were the second crew aboard Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace. Its core module, Tianhe, was launched in April 2021. Plans call for completing construction this year by adding two more modules. Authorities have yet to announce a date for launching the next Tiangong crew. China is excluded from the International Space Station due to U.S. unease that its space program is run by the ruling Communist Party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army. China was the third nation to launch an astronaut into space on its own after the former Soviet Union and the United States. Tiangong is China’s third space station following predecessors launched in 2011 and 2016. The …

The World Health Organization says a variety of crises are adversely impacting the health of millions and blocking needed humanitarian aid in war-torn hotspots around the world.    War, climate disasters, and COVID-19 are threatening global health and undermining the capacity to build and maintain economically viable and stable societies.  These multiple crises are most pronounced in war-torn countries. Ukraine, a once thriving society, is now shattered. Since Russia invaded 51 days ago, thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed or injured. The WHO has confirmed 119 attacks on health care personnel and facilities since the start of the war there.  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health services are severely disrupted, particularly in the east of the country, now the epicenter of the fighting. “For the sake of humanity, I urge Russia to come back to the table and to work for peace,” he said. “In the meantime, humanitarian corridors must be established so that medical supplies, food, and water can be delivered, and civilians can move to safety.”   On another front, the World Food Program says 4.6 million people in the embattled Tigray province of northern Ethiopia are suffering from acute hunger.  Hundreds of thousands reportedly are on the verge of famine. The Ethiopian government called a humanitarian truce three weeks ago.  Despite this, WHO chief Tedros said a blockade, one of the longest in the country’s history, continues. Few life-saving supplies, he said, are reaching Tigray. “In effect, the siege by the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces continues,” …

The first all-private charter to the International Space Station. Plus, a look back in history at a moon mission gone wrong, and an auction offering some of the most-expensive dust on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into law Thursday as the state joined a growing conservative push to restrict access ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could limit the procedure nationwide. The new law marks a significant blow to abortion access in the South, where Florida has provided wider access to the procedure than its regional neighbors. The new law, which takes effect July 1, contains exceptions if the abortion is necessary to save a mother’s life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Under current law, Florida allows abortions up to 24 weeks. “This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation,” DeSantis said as he signed the bill at the “Nación de Fe” (“Nation of Faith”), an evangelical church in the city of Kissimmee that serves members of the Latino population. DeSantis, a Republican rising star and potential 2024 presidential candidate, signed the measure after several women delivered speeches about how they chose not to have abortions or, in the case of one, regretted having done so. Some of the people in attendance, including young children, stood behind the speakers holding signs saying “Choose life,” while those who spoke stood at a podium to which was affixed a sign displaying an infant’s feet and a heartbeat reading, “Protect Life.” Debate over …

Climate change will accelerate at an unprecedented pace if governments don’t act soon, according to a recent report by the United Nations. For many people, such news can spur conflicting emotions. Hopelessness that it’s all too late? A sense of urgency to do something? VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a few young people about their concerns for the fate of the planet. …

The pandemic plunged 77 million more people into extreme poverty last year and many developing countries can’t recover because of the crippling cost of debt repayments — and that was before the added impact of the war in Ukraine, a U.N. report said Tuesday. The report said rich countries could support their recovery from pandemic slumps with record amounts borrowed at ultra-low interest rates. But the poorest countries spent billions of dollars servicing their debts and faced much higher borrowing costs, preventing them from spending on improving education and health care, protecting the environment and reducing inequality. According to the U.N., 812 million people lived in extreme poverty — on $1.90 a day or less — in 2019, and by 2021 amid the pandemic the number had risen to 889 million. The report is on financing to achieve U.N. development goals for 2030, including ending poverty, ensuring quality education for all young people and achieving gender equality. U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said at a news conference that the effort “is coming at a critical moment for humanity, adding to the compounding crises of climate assaults on our natural systems and the protracted COVID-19 pandemic.” Added to this, she said, is the global impact of the war in Ukraine. A U.N. analysis indicates “1.7 billion people are faced with exposure to spiking food, energy and fertilizer costs as a result of the war in Ukraine,” Mohammed said. The report estimates that GDP per capita in 20% of developing countries will …

2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad.  The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics.  The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020’s record-setting total.  Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available.  “We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.  COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large number of Americans refused to get vaccinated or were hesitant to wear masks, experts said.  The coronavirus is not solely to blame. Preliminary CDC data also shows the crude death rate for cancer rose slightly, and rates continued to increase for diabetes, chronic liver disease and stroke.  Overdose deaths Drug overdose deaths also continued to rise. The CDC does not yet have a tally for 2021 overdose deaths, because it can take weeks of lab work and investigation to identify them. But provisional data through October suggests the nation is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021 — up from 93,000 the year …

The U.S. said on Tuesday it had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and at the same time unsealed charges against the website’s founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho. Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Justice Department said. The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol. Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit cards information, log-in credentials and social security numbers. In a parallel statement, Europol also lauded the takedown saying the RaidForums online marketplace had been seized in an operation known as “Operation Tourniquet,” that helped coordinate investigations by authorities from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Romania. In addition to Coelho, it said two of his alleged accomplices were also in custody. It did not provide further details about the other two people arrested. Coelho is facing a six-count indictment, charging him with conspiracy, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. It alleges that between Jan. 1, 2015 and his arrest in January 2022, he controlled and served as chief administrator of the site. “To profit from the illicit activity on the platform, …

The World Health Organization said on Monday it is tracking a few dozen cases of two new sub-variants of the highly transmissible omicron strain of the coronavirus to assess whether they are more infectious or dangerous. It has added BA.4 and BA.5, sister variants of the original BA.1 omicron variant, to its list for monitoring. It is already tracking BA.1 and BA.2 — now globally dominant — as well as BA.1.1 and BA.3. The WHO said it had begun tracking them because of their “additional mutations that need to be further studied to understand their impact on immune escape potential.” Viruses mutate all the time but only some mutations affect their ability to spread or evade prior immunity from vaccination or infection, or the severity of disease they cause. For instance, BA.2 now represents nearly 94% of all sequenced cases and is more transmissible than its siblings, but the evidence so far suggests it is no more likely to cause severe disease. Only a few dozen cases of BA.4 and BA.5 have been reported to the global GISAID database, according to WHO. The UK’s Health Security Agency said last week BA.4 had been found in South Africa, Denmark, Botswana, Scotland and England from Jan. 10 to March 30. All the BA.5 cases were in South Africa as of last week, but on Monday Botswana’s health ministry said it had identified four cases of BA.4 and BA.5, all among people aged 30 to 50 who were fully vaccinated and experiencing mild symptoms. …