Month: July 2023

OceanGate, the U.S.-based company that managed the tourist submersible that imploded during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, has suspended all exploration and commercial operations, its website showed on Thursday.   The company did not elaborate beyond a red banner at the top of its website: “OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.”  OceanGate had planned two expeditions to the century-old Titanic ruins, located in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, for June 2024, its website showed.   U.S. and Canadian authorities are investigating the cause of the June undersea implosion, which killed all five people aboard and raised questions about the unregulated nature of such expeditions.  The U.S. Coast Guard last week recovered presumed human remains and debris from the submersible, known as the Titan, after searching the ocean floor. Examination of the debris is expected to shed more light on the cause of the implosion.   The Titan lost contact with its support vessel during its descent on June 18. Its remains were found four days later, littering the seabed about 488 meters from the bow of the Titanic wreck.  …

Europe’s workhorse Ariane 5 rocket blasted off for a final time on Wednesday, with its farewell flight after 27 years of launches coming at a difficult time for European space efforts.    Faced with soaring global competition, the continent has unexpectedly found itself without a way to independently launch heavy missions into space due to delays to the next-generation Ariane 6 and Russia withdrawing its rockets.  The 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 rocket took place around 2200 GMT on Wednesday from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.  The launch had been postponed twice. It was originally scheduled on June 16, but was called off because of problems with pyrotechnical lines in the rocket’s booster, which have since been replaced.  Then Tuesday’s launch was delayed by bad weather.  The Wednesday night flight went off without a hitch, watched by hundreds of spectators, including former French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, and was greeted with applause.  Marie-Anne Clair, the director of the Guiana Space Centre, told AFP that the final flight of Ariane 5 was “charged with emotion” for the teams in Kourou, where the rocket’s launches have punctuated life for nearly three decades.  The final payload on Ariane 5 is a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite.   The satellite “marks a major turning point for our armed forces: better performance and greater resistance to jamming,” French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu tweeted.   Though it would become a reliable rocket, Ariane 5 had a difficult start. …

The planet’s temperature spiked on Tuesday to its hottest day in at least 44 years and likely much longer. Wednesday could become the third straight day that Earth unofficially marks a new record high, the latest in a series of climate-change extremes that alarm but don’t surprise scientists. The globe’s average temperature reached 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool based on satellite data and computer simulations and used by climate scientists for a glimpse of the world’s condition. On Monday, the average temperature was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius), breaking a record that lasted only 24 hours. While it is not an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration record, “this is showing us an indication of where we are right now,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick said. Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, she said that given other data, it’s likely the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.” The previous hottest day was in August 2021, Kapnick said. “A record like this is another piece of evidence for the now massively supported proposition that global warming is pushing us into a hotter future,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who was not part of the calculations. With many places seeing temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius), the new average temperatures might not seem very hot. But Tuesday’s global high was nearly 1.8 …

Health organizations in Sudan’s White Nile state said at least 13 children have died over the past week due to a suspected measles outbreak. An official with the Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said Sudan’s conflict and the approach of the rainy season could make the situation much worse. Officials with the international medical organization MSF say they remain concerned about an increase of suspected measles cases among children in Sudan’s White Nile state. Speaking to VOA via a messaging application from Nairobi, Mitchell Sangma, MSF’s health advisor, says MSF’s ground team have documented more than 200 suspected cases of measles among children in the last month. He says out of that number, 72 were admitted to hospitals and 13 died. “We are also seeing an increasing number of suspected measles in our other projects such as in Blue Nile state in Sudan. And in Renk, on the other side of the border in South Sudan, we are also seeing increasing measles cases in our measles isolation wards. So, the situation for people fleeing the conflict is desperately concerning,” he said. The MSF official says the nearly three-month-old conflict in Sudan between the army and a rival paramilitary group has created a huge medical need and intense pressure on health care facilities all over the country. Sangma says MSF and other aid agencies are concerned about the collapsing health system. He says health centers still in operation are struggling to cope with limited supplies and staff. …

Deeply loved but wracked by crisis, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) on Wednesday marks 75 years since it was founded as the Western world’s first universal, free health care system. In a secular age, the NHS is the closest thing Britain has to a national religion — devoutly cherished, with levels of public support higher than the royal family or any other British institution. It was founded three years after World War II by a pioneering Labour government on the principle that everyone should access top-quality health care funded by general taxation, free at the point of care. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose parents were an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, paid tribute last week as he outlined a 15-year plan aimed at recruiting hundreds of thousands of new health staff. “For every minute of every day of every one of those 75 years, the NHS has been kept going by the millions of people who’ve worked for it. To them on behalf of a grateful nation, I want to say: thank you,” he said. “I feel a powerful sense of responsibility to make sure that their legacy endures. And to make sure the NHS is there for our children and grandchildren, just as it was there for us.” Like Sunak’s parents, immigrant staff were pivotal to the NHS’s early growth, helping to remake the face of Britain itself in the decades after the war. Its centrality to national life was underscored in a memorable dance sequence featuring NHS staff …

London’s expansion of a fiercely debated scheme that charges the most polluting vehicles in the city should be blocked, local authorities bringing a legal challenge over the plan argued on Tuesday. The British capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) levies a $16 daily charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles, in order to tackle pollution and improve air quality. London Mayor Sadiq Khan last year decided to extend the scheme to cover almost all of the Greater London area, encompassing an extra five million people in leafier and less-connected outer boroughs, from the end of next month. The decision has pitched Khan and health campaigners against those who say they cannot tolerate another economic hit at a time of soaring living costs. Khan, who is running for a third four-year term in the 2024 London mayoral election, has said he is determined to face down his critics. But his plan, which echoes hundreds of others in place in traffic-choked cities across Europe, came under challenge at London’s High Court on Tuesday as five local authorities argued the decision to expand ULEZ into their areas was unlawful. London’s transport authority – Transport for London (TfL) – had launched a public consultation on the plan, which said 91% of vehicles driven in outer London would not be affected. However, the local authorities’ lawyers argue that TfL provided no detail on how it calculated the 91% figure, which they say was fundamental to justifying the expansion. The local authorities are also challenging Khan’s decision …

Maternal deaths across the United States more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally.  Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. Some states — and racial or ethnic groups within them – fared worse than others.  The findings were laid out in a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019 — but not the pandemic spike — for every state and five racial and ethnic groups.  “It’s a call to action to all of us to understand the root causes — to understand that some of it is about health care and access to health care, but a lot of it is about structural racism and the policies and procedures and things that we have in place that may keep people from being healthy,” said Dr. Allison Bryant, one of the study’s authors and a senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham.  Among wealthy nations, the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose.  Bryant and her colleagues at Mass General Brigham and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington started with national vital statistics data on deaths and live …

The head of the United Nations called Monday for maritime nations to agree on a course for the shipping industry to reduce its climate-harming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century at the latest. The appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at the start of a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London that’s seen as key for helping achieve the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). “Shipping, which accounts for almost 3% of global emissions, will be vital,” Guterres said. He urged delegates to agree a new greenhouse gas strategy for shipping that includes “ambitious science-based targets starting in 2030 – both on absolute emissions reductions and the use of clean fuels.” The IMO’s current target is for the shipping industry to cut its emissions by at least half from 2008 to 2050. Guterres said the new targets should include all greenhouse gas emissions caused by the industry and backed the idea of introducing a carbon price for shipping. Campaigners have suggested that funds generated from a levy on emissions could be used to help poor nations tackle climate change, though the industry wants the money to go toward the development of clean technologies. …

Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that there is a suspected outbreak of measles in an internal displacement camp in Sudan. The international humanitarian organization said 13 children have died recently in the suspected outbreak at the camp in Sudan’s White Nile state. “We are receiving sick children with suspected measles every day, most with complications,” the organization posted in a tweet. A steady stream of people is coming to the camp as they flee the fighting between the country’s two warring factions. Doctors Without Borders has two clinics in White Nile. The organization says it had over 3,000 patients in June and needs to “increase assistance, scale up services like vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, water and sanitation.” …

The head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Qu Dongyu, was re-elected Sunday for a second term as head of the U.N. agency. He was the only candidate standing for the role of FAO director-general and received 168 out of 182 votes in a ballot in Rome on Sunday. Qu, a former Chinese government minister who was nominated for the post by Beijing, will serve a new four-year term from August 1. His appointment is seen as a part of a drive by Beijing to get more Chinese figures into senior jobs at international bodies. Qu, a biologist by training, was vice-minister of agriculture before taking over as head of the U.N. agency in 2019. FAO directors can hold the role for a maximum of two consecutive terms. The vote came during the FAO Conference, which runs until July 7. …

Following an outbreak of anthrax disease in the West African nation of Ghana, Nigerian authorities have urged citizens to halt consumption of cooked animal hides, a delicacy also known as “pomo” in the country. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria, narrated by Salem Solomon. …

NAIROBI, Kenya — Nowhere in the world has a higher rate of unsafe abortions or unintended pregnancies than sub-Saharan Africa, where women often face scorn for becoming pregnant before marriage. Efforts to legalize and make abortions safer in Africa were shaken when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to an abortion a year ago. Within days, Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio declared that his government would decriminalize abortion “at a time when sexual and reproductive health rights for women are being either overturned or threatened.” But some U.S.-based organizations active in Africa were emboldened, especially in largely Christian countries. One is Family Watch International, a nonprofit Christian conservative organization whose anti-LGBTQ+ stance, anti-abortion activities and “intense focus on Africa” led to its designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In April, Family Watch International helped to develop a “family values and sovereignty” meeting at Uganda’s presidential offices with lawmakers and other delegates from more than 20 African countries. The organization’s Africa director also is advocating for his country, Ethiopia, to revoke a 2005 law that expanded abortion access and dramatically reduced maternal mortality. “It’s kind of like the gloves are off,” Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at U.K.-based MSI Reproductive Choices, an international provider of reproductive health services, said in an interview. In a September speech to the African Bar Association, the president of Family Watch International, Sharon Slater, alleged that donor countries were attempting a “sexual social recolonization of Africa” by smuggling …

The only break much of America can hope for soon from eye-watering, dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada would be brief bouts of shirt-soaking, sweltering heat and humidity from a deadly, Southern heat wave, forecasters say. And then the smoke will likely return to the Midwest and East. Here’s why: Neither the 235 out-of-control Canadian wildfires nor the weather pattern that’s responsible for this mess of meteorological maladies are showing signs of relenting for the next week or longer, according to meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center. First, the weather pattern made abnormally hot and dry conditions for Canada to burn at off-the-chart record levels. Then it created a setup where the only relief comes when low pressure systems roll through, which means areas on one side get smoky air from the north and the other gets sweltering air from the south. Smoke or heat. “Pick your poison,” said prediction center forecast operations chief Greg Carbin. “The conditions are not going to be very favorable. “As long as those fires keep burning up there, that’s going to be a problem for us,” Carbin said. “As long as there’s something to burn, there will be smoke we have to deal with.” Take St. Louis. The city had two days of unhealthy air Tuesday and Wednesday, but for Thursday “they’ll get an improvement of air quality with the very hot and humid heat,” said weather prediction center meteorologist Bryan Jackson. The forecast is for temperatures that feel like …

Researchers say they are detecting a dramatic spike in ocean surface temperatures around the world — reaching as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in the North Atlantic — and they could rise even higher. “It is very alarming, and as temperatures keep spiking, this is not unexpected,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island. As the oceans get warmer each year, scientists say they are triggering chaotic weather patterns around the world, including torrential downpours and intense heat waves that cause flooding and severe drought. Climate scientists attribute much of the warming to so-called greenhouse gases and say that to prevent the most severe consequences, the use of fossil fuels must be cut in half by 2030. The most recent increase has caused the most extreme ocean heat wave in the British Isles in 170 years, according to the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service. “This is an off-the-charts heat wave in the oceans,” said John Abraham, a climate change scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. “The temperatures we are seeing this year are a remarkable excursion from normal temperatures.” Oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth, have a huge impact on weather. “When the air blows over the oceans, the air warms up and gets more humid and that drives storms,” Abraham told VOA. “The water vapor amplifies warming by trapping outgoing radiation from escaping and …

Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies.  The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.   New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets.  The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits.  “Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement.  Twitter would soon raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said.  Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.   The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.  Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site.  In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.  “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, …

Need Plan B? Tap your credit card and enter B6.  Since last November, a library at the University of Washington has featured a different kind of vending machine, one that’s become more popular on campuses around the country since the U.S. Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion last year. It’s stocked with ibuprofen, pregnancy tests and the morning-after pill.  With some states enacting abortion bans and others enshrining protections and expanding access to birth control, the machines are part of a push on college campuses to ensure emergency contraceptives are cheap, discreet and widely available.  There are now 39 universities in 17 states with emergency contraceptive vending machines, and at least 20 more considering them, according to the American Society for Emergency Contraception. Some, such as the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, are in states where abortion is largely banned.  Over-the-counter purchase of Plan B and generic forms is legal in all 50 states.  The 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade “is putting people’s lives at stake, so it makes pregnancy prevention all the more urgent,” said Kelly Cleland, the ASEC’s executive director. “If you live in a state where you cannot get an abortion and you can’t get an abortion anywhere near you, the stakes are so much higher than they’ve ever been before.”  Washington this year became first U.S. state to set aside money — $200,000 to fund $10,000 grants that colleges can obtain next year through an application process — to expand access to emergency contraceptives …

WASHINGTON – Long time, no speak: NASA has re-established contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars Helicopter after more than two months of radio silence, the space agency said Friday.  The mini rotorcraft, which hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover in early 2021, has survived well beyond its initial 30-day mission to prove the feasibility of its technology in five test flights.  Since then, it has been deployed dozens of times, acting as an aerial scout to assist its wheeled companion in searching for signs of ancient microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter and warmer than today.   Ingenuity’s 52nd flight launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended to the surface following its two minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) hop.  The loss of communications was expected, because a hill stood between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which acts as a relay between the drone and Earth.   Nonetheless, “this has been the longest we’ve gone without hearing from Ingenuity so far in the mission,” Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, told AFP.  “Ingenuity is designed to take care of itself when communication gaps like this occur, but we all still had a sense of relief finally hearing back.”  Data so far indicate that the helicopter is in good shape. If further health checks also come back normal, Ingenuity will be all set for its next flight, westward toward a rocky outcrop …