Year: 2022

The United Nations warned Friday that an old, neglected oil tanker carrying more than a million barrels of oil is a ticking “time bomb” at “imminent risk” of a major spill off the coast of Yemen that could cost $20 billion to clean up. “If it were to happen, the spill would unleash a massive ecological and humanitarian catastrophe centered on a country already decimated by more than seven years of war,” U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly told reporters. “The environmental damage could affect states across the Red Sea. The economic impact of disrupted shipping would be felt across the region.” The FSO Safer is one more casualty in the war between the Saudi-backed government of Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and Iranian-supported Houthi rebels. U.N. officials have been seeking access to the vessel for more than three years to assess its safety, do light repairs and eventually tow it to a safe port to remove the oil. But Houthi rebels controlling the area have repeatedly reneged on promises to allow that to happen. The tanker has had no maintenance since 2015 because of the war and only a skeleton crew is aboard the vessel. Gressly says the vessel is now beyond repair. “In March, a U.N.-led mission to the Ras Isa peninsula, near to where the Safer is anchored, confirmed that the 45-year-old supertanker is rapidly decaying,” Gressly said. “It is at imminent risk of spilling a massive amount of oil due to leakages …

As the U.S. tries to emerge from the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts and law enforcement officials are concerned about another health crisis: a sharp rise in the number of drug related overdoses attributed to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a bulletin earlier this week to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies warning of a nationwide spike in fentanyl-related mass-overdose events. Already this year, numerous mass overdose events have resulted in dozens of overdoses and deaths,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram in an email statement to VOA. Fentanyl-related mass overdose events are characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location. In February, five people died in an apartment outside Denver from overdoses of fentanyl mixed with cocaine. In another case, five West Point Military Academy cadets survived after overdosing on fentanyl-laced cocaine while on spring break in Florida last month. At least seven American cities have seen an increase in drug-related overdoses resulting in 29 deaths, according to the DEA. “Drug traffickers are driving addiction, and increasing their profits, by mixing fentanyl with other illicit drugs. Tragically, many overdose victims have no idea they are ingesting deadly fentanyl, until it’s too late,” said Milgram. Law enforcement officials believe the problem has grown worse since the government released figures last year indicating more than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending in October 2021. Sixty-six percent of those deaths were related …

Without a single dollar of the $5 billion it requested for its global COVID-19 response approved, the Biden administration’s key program to help vaccinate the world is in danger of grinding to a halt. Even as the administration marked World Health Day on Thursday with a commitment to build a safer, healthier and more equitable future around the globe, without additional funding from Congress, by September the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will no longer be able to finance Global Vax. The U.S. launched the international initiative in December to deliver shots in arms in 11 countries: Angola, Ivory Coast, Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. “Without additional funding to support getting shots into arms, USAID will have to curtail our growing efforts to turn vaccines into vaccinations — just as countries are finally gaining access to the vaccine supplies needed to protect their citizens,” a USAID spokesperson told VOA. USAID had initially requested $19 billion for its global vaccination initiatives. USAID had planned to expand Global Vax to 20 additional countries, but those plans are now on hold. Without additional funding, the U.S. will also be unable to provide oxygen and other lifesaving supplies around the world, White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters earlier this week. “And our global genomic sequencing capabilities will fall off and undermine our ability to detect any emerging variants around the world,” Zients added. On Monday, the U.S. Senate agreed to provide $10 billion …

Disease caused by the omicron variant is on average around two days shorter than the delta variant, a large study of vaccinated Britons who kept a smartphone log of their COVID-19 symptoms after breakthrough infections found. “The shorter presentation of symptoms suggests — pending confirmation from viral load studies — that the period of infectiousness might be shorter, which would in turn impact workplace health policies and public health guidance,” the study authors wrote. Based on the Zoe COVID app, which collects data on self-reported symptoms, the study also found that a symptomatic omicron infection was 25% less likely to result in hospital admission than in a case of delta. While omicron’s lesser severity has been known, the study is unique in its detailed analysis and in that it corrected for any distortions caused by differences in vaccination status by looking at vaccinated volunteers only. The researchers at King’s College London analyzed two sets of data from June 1 to Nov. 27, 2021, when the delta variant accounted for more than 70% of cases, and from Dec. 20, 2021, to Jan. 17, 2022, when omicron was more than 70% prevalent. The patients, close to 5,000 in each group, were matched and compared 1:1 with a person of the same age, sex, and vaccination dose in the other group. Omicron’s shorter symptom duration relative to delta was more pronounced in those with three vaccine doses. Symptoms lasted 7.7 days on average during the delta-dominated period, and only 4.4 days, or 3.3 …

The grand explanation physicists use to describe how the universe works may have some major new flaws to patch after a fundamental particle was found to have more mass than scientists thought. “It’s not just something is wrong,” said Dave Toback, a particle physicist at Texas A&M University and a spokesperson for the U.S. government’s Fermi National Accelerator Lab, which conducted the experiments. If replicated by other labs, “it literally means something fundamental in our understanding of nature is wrong.” The physicists at the lab crashed particles together over 10 years and measured the mass of 4 million W bosons. These subatomic particles are responsible for a fundamental force at the center of atoms, and they exist for only a fraction of a second before they decay into other particles. “They are constantly popping in and out of existence in the quantum froth of the universe,” Toback said. The difference in mass from what the prevailing theory of the universe predicts is too big to be a rounding error or anything that could be easily explained away, according to the study by a team of 400 scientists from around the world published Thursday in the journal Science. The result is so extraordinary it must be confirmed by another experiment, scientists say. If confirmed, it would present one of the biggest problems yet with scientists’ detailed rulebook for the cosmos, called the standard model. Duke University physicist Ashutosh V. Kotwal, the project leader for analysis, said it’s like discovering there’s a …

The first-ever married couple to fly on a commercial spacecraft speaks with VOA. Plus, an all-amateur flight crew prepares for a trip to the International Space Station, and a milestone in space-based racial equality. Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Lithium is a key component in electric vehicle batteries and energy storage systems, and California officials hope their state will become a major producer. Governor Gavin Newsom has said he wants California to become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” But residents of one community want some assurances first. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Lithium Valley in the California desert. Camera: Mike O’Sullivan, Roy Kim …

The World Health Organization ((WHO)) says, following a surge of new cases in early March, the number of new worldwide COVID-19 cases and deaths has fallen for a second consecutive week. In its weekly update released late Tuesday, the WHO reports the number of new cases overall fell by 16 percent during the week ending April 3, compared to the previous week. As of 3 April 2022, just over 489 million cases and over 6 million deaths had been reported globally. The agency said global deaths from COVID-19 fell sharply – by 43 percent – in the past week. The WHO attributed a sharp rise in death numbers the previous week to a change in the way deaths were counted and the addition of death numbers not previously reported in the Americas. At the country level, the highest number of new weekly cases was reported in South Korea, with more than 2,058,000 new cases, Germany, with more than 1, 371,000 and France, with nearly one million new cases. South Korea’s cases declined 16% and Germany’s declined 13 percent. In France, case numbers were up 13 percent. Across the six WHO regions, over nine million new cases and over 26,000 new deaths were reported. All the regions show decreasing trends both in the number of new weekly cases and new weekly deaths. The WHO continues to caution, however, several countries are progressively changing their COVID-19 testing strategies, resulting in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases …

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced plans to expand access to health care by proposing changes to the Affordable Care Act to allow millions of additional families to purchase health insurance and obtain tax credits to offset the cost. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports. …

Zoos across North America are moving their birds indoors and away from people and wildlife as they try to protect them from the highly contagious and potentially deadly avian influenza.  Penguins may be the only birds that visitors to many zoos can see right now, because they already are kept inside and usually protected behind glass in their exhibits, making it harder for the bird flu to reach them.  Nearly 23 million chickens and turkeys have already been killed across the United States to limit the spread of the virus, and zoos are working hard to prevent any of their birds from meeting the same fate. It would be especially upsetting for zoos to have to kill any of the endangered or threatened species in their care.  “It would be extremely devastating,” said Maria Franke, who is the manager of welfare science at Toronto Zoo, which has fewer than two dozen Loggerhead Shrike songbirds that it’s breeding with the hope of reintroducing them into the wild. “We take amazing care, and the welfare and well-being of our animals is the utmost importance. There’s a lot of staff that has close connections with the animals that they care for here at the zoo.”  Toronto Zoo workers are adding roofs to some outdoor bird exhibits and double-checking the mesh that surrounds enclosures to ensure it will keep wild birds out.   How it spreads Birds shed the virus through their droppings and nasal discharge. Experts say it can be spread through contaminated …

The Oklahoma House gave final legislative approval on Tuesday to a bill that would make performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.  With little discussion and no debate, the Republican-controlled House voted 70-14 to send the bill to Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has previously said he’d sign any anti-abortion bill that comes to his desk.  The bill is one of several anti-abortion measures still alive in Oklahoma’s Legislature this year, part of a trend of GOP-led states passing aggressive anti-abortion legislation as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court is considering ratcheting back abortion rights that have been in place for nearly 50 years.  The Oklahoma bill, which passed the Senate last year, makes an exception only for an abortion performed to save the life of the mother, said GOP state Rep. Jim Olsen, of Roland, who sponsored the bill. Under the bill, a person convicted of performing an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.  “The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman,” Olsen said.  Similar anti-abortion bills approved by the Oklahoma Legislature and in other conservative states in recent years have been stopped by the courts as unconstitutional, but anti-abortion lawmakers have been buoyed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow new Texas abortion restrictions to remain in place.   The new Texas law, the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the U.S. in decades, leaves enforcement up to private citizens, who are entitled to …

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced plans to expand access to health care by proposing changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to allow millions of additional American families to purchase health insurance plans and obtain tax credits to offset the cost. “When today’s proposed rule is finalized, starting next year, working families will get the help they need to afford full family coverage — everyone in the family,” Biden said in remarks at the White House ahead of signing an executive order to improve access to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. Biden was accompanied by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, who in March 2010 signed the ACA, the sweeping health care law known as Obamacare. This was Obama’s first return visit to the White House since he left office in 2017 after two terms with Biden as his vice president. “Joe Biden and I did a lot,” Obama said. “But nothing made me prouder than providing better health care and more protections to millions of people across this country.”    5 million affected The proposal to change the rules on ACA would fix the so-called family glitch, where, based on current regulations, family members of an individual who purchases health coverage through an employer are ineligible for a premium tax credit even though they need it to afford coverage. The glitch affects about 5 million people, according to the White House.  The proposed change applies to individuals in households that spend more than …

Amazon on Tuesday announced deals for scores of launches to deploy a “constellation” of satellites in low orbit around the Earth to provide internet service to people below. Amazon said that its contracts with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) are the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history. The overall cost and timing of launches booked to make Amazon’s Project Kuiper a reality were not disclosed. “We still have lots of work ahead, but the team has continued to hit milestone after milestone across every aspect of our satellite system,” Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp said in a statement. “Project Kuiper will provide fast, affordable broadband to tens of millions of customers in unserved and underserved communities around the world.” U.S. billionaire Elon Musk, head of the space company SpaceX, has already put more than 1,500 satellites into orbit to create a Starlink internet service network. Late last year Boeing entered the space internet race, getting U.S. authorization for satellites that will provide internet services from above. Project Kuiper aims to provide high-speed broadband internet service to households, schools, hospitals, businesses, disaster relief operations and others in places without reliable connectivity, according to Amazon. Amazon is developing Kuiper in-house, and planned to take advantage of capabilities already present in its other divisions, such as logistics operations and AWS cloud computing arm. Musk formed an alliance with Microsoft, which is Amazon’s biggest rival in the cloud computing market, to use its Azure platform to provide his …

Cases of a parasitic disease called Leishmaniasis are increasing at an alarming pace in a town in northeastern Syria called Tel Tamr. VOA’s Zana Omer has more in this story narrated by Sirwan Kajjo. Camera: Zana Omer …

Climate scientists warn the world is courting disaster if it fails to swiftly do what’s required to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The International Panel on Climate Change released a report on mitigating climate change. After two previous reports on the physical science behind climate change and on its potential impacts, the United Nation’s top climate body says changes are now causing huge disruptions in the natural world and in human well-being.  Over the last decade, the report says average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history.     However, the co-chair of the panel’s third working group, Jim Skea, says the rate of growth has slowed in the last two years along with increasing evidence of many countries taking climate action.  “Despite this progress, our assessment concludes that unless there are immediate and deep emission reductions across all sectors, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees will be beyond reach,” he said. “Now limiting warming to around two degrees still requires global emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by a quarter by 2030.”  The report says the energy sector accounts for a third of all emissions, and major transitions will be required to slow global warming. This, it says, will involve substantial reductions in fossil fuel use, widespread electrification, improved energy efficiency, and the use of alternative fuels.  The vice-chair of the third working group, Diana Urge-Vorsatz, says the right policies can result in a 40 to 70 …

The United Nations’ top climate body says drastic measures, including significant cuts in fossil fuel use, are necessary to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.  Monday’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that the world is “on a fast track to climate disaster” and that governments and organizations have engaged in “a litany of broken climate promises,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world,” he said in a video message released alongside the report. Guterres said the world’s current trajectory is global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree limit agreed at climate talks in Paris in 2015. To keep the 1.5-degree limit within reach, he said that the world would need to cut global emissions by 45% this decade.  The 2,800-page report said only such severe emissions cuts this decade could turn the situation around. Even then, it said such measures would need to be combined with governments planting more trees and developing technologies that could remove some of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. “It’s now or never,” IPCC report co-chair James Skea said in a statement with the report. “Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible,” he added. The report said that in the next three years — by 2025 — the world would need to stop greenhouse gas emissions from rising further to be …

The World Health Organization reports 13 million people die every year from environmental causes, including more than seven million who are killed each year from exposure to air pollution. New data released by the World Health Organization confirms that practically the whole world is breathing in unhealthy air. The WHO is calling for urgent action to curb the use of fossil fuels to reduce air pollution levels. This, it says threatens the health of billions of people, leading to the preventable deaths of millions. Sophie Gumy is technical officer in WHO’s department of environment, climate change and health. She says the data show air quality is poorest notably in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asian, and African regions. “Most of the seven million deaths, they come from low and middle-income countries, indeed they do,” Gumy said. “That does not mean that the high-income countries are not impacted. You know we are using mortality to calculate the impact of air pollution on health. However, we are very much aware that you should actually count for morbidity — all the disease that it creates…There are a lot of costs associated with air pollution, which are not necessarily captured in the deaths.” The WHO report says significant harm is being done by even low levels of many air pollutants. It says particulate matter can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. This can cause cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory impacts. It says nitrogen oxide or NO2 can cause asthma and other respiratory …

Cameroon observed World Autism Awareness Day Saturday with rights groups advocating for autistic children to be given an education. Supporters say autistic children often can’t go to school because autism is falsely believed to be a result of witchcraft. The Timely Performance Care Center, a school for disabled children in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, organized a campaign for parents and communities to stop the stigma that autistic kids often are subject to. The center has an enrollment of 70 autistic children. The school’s manager, Betty Nancy Fonyuy, said autistic children are frequently kept at home because of stigma. She said many communities and parents abuse the rights of autistic children by refusing to educate them or give them the freedom to socialize with other children. “We want parents to accept the children that God has given them and to be able to educate the society that these children are not a form of divine punishment for witchcraft or a class of any evil thing. These children have a lot to offer to society if given a chance. Give them the chance. The world needs to know what autism is. Accept individuals born and living with autism,” she said. Fonyuy said in January 2021, the center organized a door-to-door campaign to urge parents to send their autistic children to school. She said the response was encouraging, but that many parents still hide their autistic children at home. To mark World Autism Awareness Day on Saturday, scores of community leaders, parents of autistic …

Britain is experiencing a record number of COVID-19 cases, with almost 5 million people, or 1 person in every 13 infected, according to official data. The news of the spike in infections came on the same day that Britain stopped giving free rapid COVID tests to most of its population, as part of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “living with COVID” plan. Under Johnson’s plan, people who do not have conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID-19 must pay for tests to find out if they have been infected. The uptick is blamed on the highly contagious omicron variant BA.2, which is also causing an increase in hospitalization and death rates. However, the number of infections is expected to start decreasing this month and next month, officials say. “Any infection that spreads rapidly, peaks quickly and decreases rapidly on the other side,” Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told The Guardian. According to an Associated Press report, a University of Oxford biology professor said he believes most people in the country will be infected with the variant this summer. James Naismith said, “This is literally living with the virus by being infected with it.” Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded more than 490,000 global COVID cases and more than 6 million deaths.  Nearly 11 billion vaccines have been administered, according to Johns Hopkins. …

Irina, her husband and 4-year-old son hid in the cellar of their house in Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, for three weeks as intense fighting, including a tank battle, raged around them. “At first my son seemed to be coping okay,” she says. “But then with unrelenting stress, shelling and blasts, there was a deterioration — the boy started to become withdrawn. He became nervous. He started to stutter,” she says. Their escape from Chernihiv wasn’t gentle either. “We had to drive along a road, which we knew was mined. And we saw a lot of burned-out cars with people, families, scorched inside. We tried to ignore it all and just continue because we had our kid and just wanted to save him,” she says. She doesn’t know what her son saw, what he took in from the carnage and how it is churning inside him. He was in his booster seat in the back of their car. She hopes he slept through a lot of the dangerous and terrifying journey from Chernihiv. “I have not tried to raise anything with him about what he saw,” she added. She has heard that drawing is good therapy for traumatized children and has been encouraging him to do so. So far, he has been drawing repeatedly the yellow and blue Ukrainian colors. Many Ukrainian evacuees say they have noticed their children have changed and seemed to be displaying signs of trauma and stress, even those who did not witness at first hand horrifying …