Year: 2022

North Korea said Friday it was achieving “good results” in its fight against its first confirmed COVID-19 outbreak, as the number of people with fever symptoms rose past 2 million. A wave of COVID infections, which North Korea first confirmed last week, has fanned worry about a lack of medical resources and vaccines in the isolated country heavily sanctioned for its nuclear weapons program. North Korea has not responded to offers from its old enemies, South Korea and the United States, to send help, a South Korean official said. South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and U.S. President Joe Biden, who arrived in South Korea on a visit Friday, are expected to discuss help. North Korea reported 263,370 more people with fever symptoms, and two more deaths, taking its total fever caseload since late April to 2.24 million as of Thursday evening, including 65 deaths, according to its KCNA state news agency. North Korea lacks COVID testing capacity and it has not specified how many of those people with fever have been confirmed to have contracted COVID. Despite the caseload, the North has said farming continues and factories are working. It is also planning a state funeral for a retired general. “Even under the maximum emergency epidemic prevention situation, normal production is kept at key industrial sectors and large-scale construction projects are propelled without let-up,” KCNA reported. “Good results are reported steadily in the ongoing anti-epidemic war,” it said. The U.N. human rights agency has warned of the “devastating” …

Boeing’s crew capsule rocketed into orbit Thursday on a repeat test flight without astronauts, after years of being grounded by flaws that could have doomed the spacecraft. Only a test dummy was aboard. If the capsule reaches the International Space Station on Friday and everything else goes well, two or three NASA test pilots could strap in by the end of this year or early next for the company’s first crew flight. It’s Boeing’s third shot at the high-stakes flight demo. At least this time, Starliner made it to the proper orbit, quickly giving chase to the space station. But the all-important rendezvous and docking loomed. Starliner’s first test flight in 2019 was stricken by software errors so severe that the capsule ended up in the wrong orbit and had to skip the space station. The spacecraft came close to being destroyed as ground controllers hastily cut short the mission. After dozens of safety fixes, Boeing returned a different capsule to the launch pad last summer. Corroded valves halted the countdown, resulting in another round of repairs. The drawn-out test flight program has cost Boeing about $600 million. “We’re not going to fly (crews) unless we feel like we’ve bought down the risk,” NASA space operations chief Kathy Lueders stressed on the eve of liftoff. Boeing is seeking redemption as it attempts to catch up with SpaceX, NASA’s other contracted taxi service. Elon Musk’s company has been flying astronauts to and from the space station for two years and delivering …

The U.S. Defense Department declassifies evidence of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. One Mars rover ramps up while another winds down, and a look behind the phenomenon of a “blood moon.” VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

The right of American women to have an abortion will be severely restricted if the Supreme Court reverses its 1973 decision to legalize the procedure. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias spoke to activists on three continents and found grave concern about what impact a U.S. ruling overturning Roe v. Wade could have around the world. Videographer/Video editor: Veronica Balderas Iglesias …

European and American health authorities have identified a number of monkeypox cases in recent days, mostly in young men. It’s a surprising outbreak of disease that rarely appears outside Africa. Health officials around the world are keeping watch for more cases because, for the first time, the disease appears to be spreading among people who didn’t travel to Africa. They stress, however, that the risk to the general population is low. What is monkeypox? Monkeypox is a virus that originates in wild animals like rodents and primates, and occasionally jumps to people. Most human cases have been in central and west Africa, where the disease is endemic. The illness was first identified by scientists in 1958 when there were two outbreaks of a “pox-like” disease in research monkeys — thus the name monkeypox. The first known human infection was in 1970, in a 9-year-old boy in a remote part of Congo. What are the symptoms and how is it treated? Monkeypox belongs to the same virus family as smallpox but causes milder symptoms. Most patients only experience fever, body aches, chills and fatigue. People with more serious illness may develop a rash and lesions on the face and hands that can spread to other parts of the body. The incubation period is from about five days to three weeks. Most people recover within about two to four weeks without needing to be hospitalized. Monkeypox can be fatal for up to one in 10 people and is thought to be more …

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Wednesday said it had confirmed a single case of monkeypox virus infection in a man who had recently traveled to Canada. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its labs confirmed the infection to be monkeypox on Wednesday afternoon. The state agency said it was working with CDC and relevant local boards of health to carry out contact tracing, adding that “the case poses no risk to the public, and the individual is hospitalized and in good condition.” The Public Health Agency of Canada late on Wednesday issued a statement saying it is aware of the monkeypox cases in Europe and is closely monitoring the current situation, adding no cases have been reported at this time. Monkeypox, which mostly occurs in west and central Africa, is a rare viral infection similar to human smallpox, though milder. It was first recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1970s. The number of cases in West Africa has increased in the last decade. Symptoms include fever, headaches and skin rashes starting on the face and spreading to the rest of the body. The Massachusetts agency said the virus does not spread easily between people, but transmission can occur through contact with body fluids, monkeypox sores, items such as bedding or clothing that have been contaminated with fluids or sores, or through respiratory droplets following prolonged face-to-face contact. It said no monkeypox cases had previously been identified in the United States this …

The World Health Organization says authorities in Mozambique have declared an outbreak of wild poliovirus type 1 after confirming that a child in the country’s northeastern Tete province has contracted the disease. It becomes the second case of wild poliovirus confirmed in southern Africa this year, following a case in Malawi in mid-February. In a statement, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, called the outbreak of poliovirus in Mozambique “greatly concerning.” She added that efforts were underway to help strengthen disease surveillance in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, with plans to reach 23 million children ages five and below with the polio vaccine in the coming weeks. Dr. Ndoutabe Modjirom, the interim polio program coordinator for the WHO Africa Region, said that the first step is to carry out a quality vaccination campaign.  “The second measure is to reinforce the surveillance in all our countries so that they will be able to detect very, very quickly all poliovirus circulating in our region,” he said. “We have to extend to all other countries the measure of surveillance. So that measure we have to take very, very quickly to address this situation.” Dr. Norman Matara, head of the Zimbabwe Association for Doctors for Human Rights, said the outbreaks of diseases may have resulted from the lockdowns that countries around the world instituted while fighting COVID-19.  “You know with the pandemic, the lockdowns and clinics shutting down, there is a probability some infants and children might have missed their immunizations …

The United Nations chief on Wednesday launched a five-point plan to jump-start broader use of renewable energies, hoping to revive world attention on climate change as the U.N.’s weather agency reported that greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification reached record highs last year. “We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition before we incinerate our only home,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Time is running out.” His latest stark warning about possible environmental disaster comes after the World Meteorological Organization issued its State of the Climate Report for 2021, which said the last seven years were the seven hottest on record. The impacts of extreme weather have led to deaths and disease, migration, and economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars — and the fallout is continuing this year, WMO said. “Today’s State of the Climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption,” Guterres said. “The global energy system is broken and bringing us ever closer to climate catastrophe.” In his plan, which leans into the next U.N. climate conference taking place in Egypt in November, Guterres called for fostering technology transfer and lifting of intellectual property protections in renewable technologies, like battery storage. Such ambitions – as with his call for transfers of technologies aimed to fight COVID-19 – can cause innovators and their financial backers to bristle: They want to reap the benefits of their knowledge, investments and discoveries — not just give …

 The U.S. government has often ignored the possibility of unidentified flying objects, even after decades of unexplained sightings, including by U.S. military pilots who sometimes filmed the UFOs, some of which moved with lightning speed and incredible agility.  On Tuesday, a congressional hearing focused on UFOs for the first time in 50 years, this time looking at their threat to national security — not from people from other worlds, but from potential international adversaries on Earth.   The hearing came nearly a year after a government report documented more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, that U.S. military pilots had observed since 2004.  “They are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated,” said Representative André Carson, chair of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation. During his testimony, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie said, “We’re open to all hypotheses. We’re open to any conclusions that we may encounter.”   “The stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did,” Carson said. “Today we know better.”  Moultrie, who oversees the Pentagon-based UAP investigation team, added that “because UAP pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins.”     The hearing focused on possible foreign adversaries of the U.S. developing secret technologies that could be construed as UFOs and prove detrimental to …

Working to achieve sustainability in textile production is one of the projects of the U.N. Environment Programme for this year as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. In Ghana, an entrepreneur is supporting this agenda by recycling waste textiles and rubber into shoes. Senanu Tord has details from Takoradi, Ghana. Videographer: Senanu Tord Produced by: Rob Raffaele …

As cases of coronavirus continue to decline in the United States, many businesses have told their employees it’s time to return to the office.   Some people are already doing the daily grind, while others are splitting their time between home and the office as part of a hybrid plan.   The office routine was normal for millions of Americans before the pandemic. Now, some two years later, it is regarded as a new normal, after those employees worked full-time from their residences.  Morning Consult, a global business intelligence company, has been polling U.S. consumers about returning to the workplace.   Charlotte Principato, a financial services analyst for the organization, said the latest poll showed 73% of remote workers felt comfortable returning to the office. The remaining 27% wanted to remain at home where, they said, they work more efficiently.   “The return to the office is experienced differently depending on each person’s situation,” and introverts may have a harder time getting used to it than extroverts, said Debra Kaplan, a therapist in Tucson, Arizona.   She told VOA many people will experience stress adjusting to an office environment after working from home.  Mark Gerald, a psychoanalyst in New York, likens it to a child going to school for the first time.   There’s almost childlike anxiety that’s related to change and fears of going into the world, he said.  The fears include contracting the coronavirus, as well as being away from family during the workday.  That’s true for Imani Harris, a federal government employee in …

Abortion rights supporters will protest in cities across the United States on Saturday, kicking off what organizers said would be “a summer of rage” if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide. Planned Parenthood, Women’s March and other abortion rights groups organized more than 300 “Bans Off Our Bodies” marches for Saturday, with the largest turnouts expected in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago. The demonstrations are in response to the May 2 leak of a draft opinion showing the court’s conservative majority ready to reverse the 1973 landmark decision that established a federal constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. The court’s final ruling, which could give states the power to ban abortion, is expected in June. About half of U.S. states could ban or severely restrict abortion soon after a ruling vacating Roe.   Organizers said they anticipated hundreds of thousands of people to participate in Saturday’s events, which they said would be the first of many coordinated protests around the Supreme Court’s decision. “For the women of this country, this will be a summer of rage,” said Rachel Carmona, president of Women’s March. “We will be ungovernable until this government starts working for us, until the attacks on our bodies let up, until the right to an abortion is codified into law.” Democrats, who currently hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, hope that backlash to the Supreme Court decision will carry their party’s candidates to victory …

New Zealand’s prime minister has tested positive for COVID. Jacinda Ardern’s office said in a statement Saturday that she has mild symptoms and has been in isolation since Sunday, when her partner, Clarke Gayford, tested positive. Ardern is required to be in isolation until May 21, preventing her from being in Parliament for the release of the Government’s Emissions Reduction Plan on Monday and the country’s budget on Thursday. “This is a milestone week for the government, and I’m gutted I can’t be there for it,” Ardern said. Meanwhile, an Associated Press report says that four U.S. Air Force Academy cadets may not graduate or receive a military commission because they have refused COVID-19 vaccinations. AP reports that Air Force officials say the cadets may also have to “pay back thousands of dollars in tuition costs.” The Asian Football Confederation announced Saturday that the Chinese Football Association will not be able to host the 2023 AFC Asian Cup. The confederation said in a statement that it “acknowledges the exceptional circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the relinquishment by China PR of its hosting rights.” China maintains a zero-COVID policy that has forced thousands of people to go into quarantine for long periods of time. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported more than 520 million COVID-19 cases early Saturday and over 6 million deaths. …

The deaths of four storm chasers in car crashes over the last two weeks have underscored the dangers of pursuing severe weather events as more people clog back roads and highways searching for a glimpse of a lightning bolt or tornado, meteorologists and chasers say. Martha Llanos Rodriguez of Mexico City died Wednesday when a semitrailer plowed into her vehicle from behind on Interstate 90 in southwestern Minnesota. The car’s driver, Diego Campos, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he and Rodriguez and two other weather experts had been chasing violent weather and were hit after he stopped for downed power lines on the road. More people are hopping into their cars and racing off after storms, jamming up roads, running stop signs and paying more attention to the sky than traffic, said Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia. “There is such a volume of chasers out there on some storms sometimes that it creates potential traffic and other hazards,” Shepherd said. “Seeing storms within their natural context has scientific and broader value so I am not anti-chasing, however, there are elements that have become a little wild, wild West-ish.” Popularized in the 1996 movie “Twister,” storm chasing involves pursuing severe weather events such as electrical storms and tornadoes, often in cars or on foot. Some are researchers looking to gather data, such as verifying computer models predicting storm behavior. Some are looking to get in touch with nature. Others are photographers. And …

A group of Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish leaders is asking Starbucks to stop charging extra for vegan milk alternatives, saying the practice amounts to a tax on people who have embraced plant-based lifestyles. In a statement issued Friday, an interfaith coalition led by Nevada-based Hindu activist Rajan Zed pressed the coffee chain to end the surcharges it called “unethical and unfair.” “A coffee company should not be in the business of taxing individuals who had chosen the plant-based lifestyle,” said Zed’s statement, which was also signed by Thomas W. Blake, an Episcopal priest; Greek Orthodox clergyman Stephen R. Karcher; Buddhist priest Matthew Fisher; and Jewish rabbi ElizaBeth Webb Beyer. The religious leaders cited numerous reasons why some Starbucks customers prefer alternatives to dairy, including dietary restrictions, ethical issues, environmental concerns, lactose intolerance, milk allergies and animal welfare. Those who want plant-based milk should not have to pay more, they said, calling on the Seattle-based company’s CEO, Howard Schultz, and board chair Mellody Hobson to immediately drop the surcharge. Starbucks outlets in the United States typically charge 50 cents to a dollar more for drinks made with plant-based milks. …

The Canadian government is amending its criminal law to include any crimes committed by citizens who one day go to the moon. While the move seems far-fetched, experts say that because of the growing interest in and feasibility of space tourism, countries should begin thinking about how crimes committed in space will be adjudicated, and they suggest the coming Canadian legislation could become a model for other countries. Legal procedures are already in place to deal with crimes committed aboard the International Space Station, which is divided into different sections controlled by individual countries. If two Americans were involved in a crime in the American part of the station, it would be prosecutable under U.S. law. If an astronaut of one nationality was accused of a crime against a one of a different nationality, the two countries would have to negotiate which would prosecute or possibly extradite the suspect. Now Canada is looking beyond the laws governing low Earth orbit and considering legal scenarios on another celestial object — in this case, the moon. Language buried deep within the 443 pages of this year’s budget implementation bill stipulates that any Canadian crew member who commits an offense in space is deemed to have committed it in Canada. Steven Freeland, a professor emeritus of international law at Western Sydney University in Australia, says current laws on the space station will not work for something more complex, such as a lunar settlement. Freeland, who has been involved extensively with space law for …

One of the three companies that make baby formula in the U.S. has halted production, adding to what was already a baby formula shortage due to supply chain issues and other factors. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it is doing everything in its power to ensure that an adequate supply of the product is available. And even the White House says it’s taking steps to alleviate the crisis. VOA’s Laurel Bowman has more.  …

A total lunar eclipse will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual thrills for stargazers across North and South America.  The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about one-and-a-half hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade. It will be the first so-called blood moon in a year.  Observers in the eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America will have prime seats for the whole show, weather permitting. Partial stages of the eclipse will be visible across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Left out: Alaska, Asia and Australia.   “This is really an eclipse for the Americas,” said NASA’s Noah Petro, a planetary geologist who specializes in the moon. “It’s going to be a treat.”  All you need, he noted, are “patience and eyeballs.”  A total eclipse occurs when Earth passes directly between the moon and the sun and casts a shadow on our constant, cosmic companion. The moon will be 362,000 kilometers (225,000 miles) away at the peak of the eclipse — around midnight on the U.S. East Coast.  “This is this gradual, slow, wonderful event that as long as it’s clear where you are, you get to see it,” Petro said.  If not, NASA will provide a livestream of the eclipse from various locations; so will the Slooh network of observatories.  There’ll be another lengthy total lunar eclipse …