Author: Sellheal

The big beasts of the telecom industry kicked off their most important annual get-together in Barcelona on Monday, promising to lead a “tsunami of innovation”, as they try to shrug off a major slump across the technology sector. Some 80,000 delegates are expected at the four-day Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is back to near full strength following years of pandemic-related disruption. Industrial titans like Huawei, Nokia and Samsung are set to showcase their latest innovations, flanked by smartphone makers like Oppo and Xiaomi and network operators like Orange, Verizon and China Mobile. “We are at the doors of a new change of era driven by the intersection of Telco, Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Web3,” said Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, boss of Spanish operator Telefonica and current chairman of industry body GSMA, which organizes the Barcelona event. He promised the telecoms industry would be at the forefront of the “tsunami of innovation”, adding: “Without telcos there is no digital future.” But many of the firms are more concerned with finding a path back to profit as the global economy stutters and the wider tech sector slashes thousands of jobs. In the first clear sign that the ills of the wider tech sector are reaching telecoms, equipment maker Ericsson announced 8,500 layoffs last week. Overall sales of smartphones last year slumped by 11.3 percent compared with 2021, according to the IDC consultancy. Research firm Gartner reckons sales of smartphones, tablets and computers will fall again by four percent this year. And network …

Two experts appointed by the World Health Organization to investigate allegations that some of its staffers sexually abused women during an Ebola outbreak in Congo have dismissed the U.N. agency’s own efforts to excuse its handling of such misconduct as “an absurdity.” Some of the victimized women say — nearly four years later — they are still waiting for WHO to fire those responsible or be offered any financial compensation. In October 2020, Aichatou Mindaoudou and Julienne Lusenge were named by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to head a panel investigating reports that some WHO staffers sexually abused or exploited women in a conflict-ridden region of Congo during the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak. Their review found there were at least 83 perpetrators of abuse who worked for WHO and partners, including complaints of rape, forced abortions and the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, in the biggest known sex abuse scandal in the U.N. health agency’s history. The panel also found that three WHO managers mismanaged a sexual misconduct case first reported by the Associated Press, involving a U.N. doctor signing a contract to buy land for a woman he allegedly impregnated. A confidential U.N. report submitted to WHO last month concluded that the managers’ handling of that case didn’t violate WHO’s sexual exploitation policies, because the woman wasn’t considered a “beneficiary” of WHO aid, since she didn’t receive any humanitarian assistance. “The restrictive approach favored by WHO is an absurdity,” Mindaoudou and Lusenge said in a statement, adding that beneficiaries …

NASA and SpaceX postponed a planned Monday launch of a four-member crew to the International Space Station due to a ground systems issue.  The decision came less than three minutes before the spacecraft was due to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.  A backup launch date had already been set for early Tuesday.  The four-person crew includes two Americans, one Russian and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.  NASA said their planned six-month mission includes a range of scientific experiments including studying how materials burn in microgravity, collecting microbial samples from outside the space station and “tissue chip research on heart, brain, and cartilage functions.”  …

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX was set to launch early Monday the International Space Station’s next long-duration team into orbit, with an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and a Russian cosmonaut joining two NASA crewmates for the flight. The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, was set for liftoff at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The four-member crew should reach the International Space Station (ISS) about 25 hours later, Tuesday morning, to begin a six-month mission in microgravity aboard the orbiting laboratory some 250 miles (420 km) above Earth. Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk – billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter – began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020. NASA said the mission’s launch readiness review was completed Saturday, and that the flight was given a “go” to proceed to liftoff as planned. “All systems and weather are looking good for launch,” Musk wrote on Twitter Sunday. The latest ISS crew is led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime U.S. Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks. Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as …

A man in Spain who was suspected of having the deadly Marburg disease tested negative Saturday and does not have the virus, the health ministry said. Health authorities in Valencia earlier said they had detected the country’s first suspected case of the infectious disease that has led to the quarantining of more than 200 people in Equatorial Guinea. The 34-year-old man, who had recently been in Equatorial Guinea, had been given the all-clear but would be tested again in the coming weeks, officials said. He had been transferred from a private hospital to an isolation unit at the Hospital La Fe in Valencia while tests were being conducted, the Valencian regional health authorities said. Three health staff who are treating the man were also isolated as a precautionary measure, authorities said. Marburg virus can have a fatality rate of up to 88%, according to the World Health Organization. There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat it. Equatorial Guinea quarantined more than 200 people and restricted movement February 13 in its Kie-Ntem province, where the hemorrhagic fever was first detected. The small central African country has so far reported nine deaths as well as 16 suspected cases of the disease, with symptoms including fever, fatigue, blood-stained vomit and diarrhea, according to the WHO. Cameroonian authorities detected two suspected cases of Marburg disease February 13 in Olamze, a commune on the border with Equatorial Guinea, the public health delegate for the region, Robert Mathurin Bidjang, said February 14. Cameroon …

Spain has identified its first suspected case of Marburg disease.  The Spanish patient is a 34-year-old man who had recently traveled to the Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea.  He was in a private hospital but has been transferred to an isolation unit at Hospital La Fe in Valencia for further tests, regional medical officials said. Marburg virus disease, or MVD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “is a rare but severe hemorrhagic fever which affects both people and non-human primates … Primates [including people] can become infected with Marburg virus, and may develop serious disease with high mortality.”  Spanish health officials said Saturday that more than 200 people in Equatorial Guinea have recently been quarantined because of Marburg disease.   Earlier this month, two suspected cases of Marburg were detected in Cameroon near its border with Equatorial Guinea.   The World Health Organization says that the “highly virulent disease” can have “a fatality ratio of up to 88%” and “is in the same family as the virus that causes Ebola virus disease.”  There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments for Marburg. …

Uber Technologies Inc. said on Friday plans by the local government in India’s Delhi city to only allow electric vehicles to function as bike taxis would risk “finishing off the sector” and impact the mobility needs of millions. Delhi’s plans, part of a new policy to regulate vehicles used by ride-hailing companies like Uber and rival Ola, are being finalized and will be rolled out soon, the Economic Times reported earlier this week. Reuters could not immediately confirm those plans. If implemented, this would mark an aggressive step towards the country’s ambitions to ramp up the transition to vehicles that run on clean energy to reduce oil imports and curb pollution. Uber, in a blogpost, said any such move would put at risk the livelihood of over 100,000 drivers in the city. “Steep and infeasible EV mandates risk finishing off the sector as we know it. The impact of such a decision on the livelihoods and mobility needs of millions of Delhiites is clear,” San Francisco-headquartered Uber said, urging the government to initiate industry dialog. Uber has set a 2040 target for 100% of its rides to be in zero-emission vehicles, public transport or with micro-mobility, including in India. Earlier this month, Uber announced plans to introduce 25,000 EVs over three years in India. Electric cars will however still be a fraction of Uber’s current overall active fleet of 300,000 vehicles in India. On Sunday, the Delhi government in newspaper ads said digital platforms offering two-wheeler bike taxi rides should …

The Biden administration is preparing for a worst-case scenario if a conservative federal judge rules in favor of a lawsuit seeking to restrict access to one of the two drugs typically used to induce a medicated abortion. Two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, can be taken by women at home and are used for just over half of U.S. abortions. But that could be quickly changed by a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion group in Texas that claims the Food and Drug Administration wrongly approved mifepristone for use more than 23 years ago. The case is before a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump. A ruling in favor of the abortion opponents could immediately shut down the sale of the drug, but women would still have access to medicated abortions with a regimen of misoprostol. Vice President Kamala Harris promised on Friday that the White House would push back on efforts to ban the drug, as she gathered a group of nearly a dozen doctors and abortion rights advocates to discuss a plan for responding to the looming threat to access to medical abortions. “There are now partisan and political attacks attempting to question the legitimacy of a group of scientists and doctors who have studied the significance of this drug,” Harris said. “There is now an attempt by politicians to remove it from the ability of doctors to prescribe and the ability of people to receive.” The lawsuit against mifepristone was filed by the Alliance for Defending Freedom, …

The trickle-down effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine are still being felt on food prices in vulnerable places, nearly one year after Moscow invaded the neighboring country. …

Federal wildlife officials on Wednesday announced a proposal to classify one of two dwindling California spotted owl populations as endangered after a lawsuit by conservation groups required the government to reassess a Trump administration decision not to protect the brown and white birds. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that California spotted owls that have their habitats in coastal and Southern California be protected under the Endangered Species Act. That population “does not have a strong ability to withstand normal variations in environmental conditions, persist through catastrophic events, or adapt to new environmental conditions throughout its range,” which led the agency to propose listing it as endangered, wildlife officials said. The other California spotted owl population, which lives in Sierra Nevada forests in California and western Nevada, would be classified as threatened, the agency said. The habitat of the medium-sized brown owl with white spots on its head and chest and a barred tail is under serious threat from current logging practices and climate change, including increased drought, disease and more extreme wildfires. Most California spotted owls live on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. How much the population has declined since conservation groups started their effort to protect it more than 20 years ago is unclear. The only available demographic data on spotted owls living in coastal and Southern California was collected in San Bernardino National Forest and shows a decline of 9%, the federal wildlife service said. The Sierra Nevada …

A new report by four leading United Nations agencies and the World Bank estimates every two minutes, one woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth, mostly from preventable causes. The report, “Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020,” was produced by WHO, UNICEF, and the UNFPA, along with the World Bank Group and UNDESA/Population Division. Health officials say the data presented in the report should be a wakeup call for world leaders to take action to end maternal deaths by investing in health care systems and closing the widening social and economic inequities that contribute to these deaths. “While pregnancy should be a time of immense hope and a positive experience for all women, it is tragically still a shockingly dangerous experience for millions around the world,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general. “These new statistics reveal the urgent need to ensure every woman and girl has access to critical health services before, during and after childbirth,” he said, “And that they can fully exercise their reproductive rights.” The report finds an estimated 287,000 women around the world died from a maternal cause in 2020.  That is equivalent to 800 deaths a day, or one death every two minutes. “These numbers show persistent inequities between countries which are undermining women’s rights.,” said Anshu Banerjee, assistant director general for universal health coverage at WHO.  “There is over a hundred-fold risk of dying depending on where a woman delivers her baby, particularly in low-income countries compared to high income countries,” …

Zimbabweans living on the border with Zambia are increasingly taking advantage of their neighbor’s superior health care. But Zambian officials say they are also draining resources as nearly one-third of patients in some clinics and hospitals are Zimbabweans. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Lusaka, Zambia. VOA footage by Blessing Chigwenhembe. …

Overdose deaths from the drug fentanyl have communities across the United States scrambling to respond. In Washington state, librarians are becoming unlikely first responders in this latest wave of the US opioid crisis. Natasha Mozgovaya has our story …

To address the relatively high cost of health care in Africa, a Kenyan mobile application lets users pay for medical services by selling their personal data through blockchain technology. Officials say Snark Health’s Hippocratic Coins have attracted more than 300 doctors and 4,000 users.  Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo. …

An organization that trains young people for conservation jobs is recycling dead trees and replacing them with new ones, salvaging valuable lumber in the process. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Long Beach, California. …

A controversial Chinese biophysicist, who had been imprisoned after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies, had his Hong Kong work visa revoked after immigration officials suspected he lied on an application form for a talent scheme. He Jiankui, who sparked an international scientific and ethical debate in 2018 when he revealed he had created the world’s first “gene-edited” babies resistant to HIV, said at the time at an international conference in Hong Kong that he had modified two embryos before they were placed in their mother’s womb. The scientist said he used a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls before birth. He said he had targeted a gene known as CCR5 and edited it in a way he believed would protect the girls from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It later emerged that a third gene-edited baby had been born. The former associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology — who has since been fired — was later accused of having forged approval documents from ethics boards. He was sentenced by a Chinese court to three years in prison in late 2019 for illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing intended for reproduction. He was released in April 2022. The scientist posted on the Chinese social media platform WeChat on Saturday that he had been granted the visa on February 11 under the talent scheme. It was aimed at attracting people with rich work experience and good academic qualifications …

Researchers in Kenya say they’ve detected an invasive mosquito that can transmit malaria in different climates, threatening progress to fight the parasitic disease. Kenya’s Medical Research Institute this week urged the public to use mosquito nets and clean up areas where mosquitos can breed. Kenya has detected the presence of a new malaria carrier, which was first discovered in the region in Djibouti in 2012. The new carrier, the Anopheles stephensi mosquito, transmits plasmodium vivax, the parasite the causes the deadliest type of malaria. Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He says it was only a matter of time before the mosquito was discovered in the country after it appeared in Ethiopia and South Sudan. “We’ve not been able to pick plasmodium vivax which is found in Asia and Kenya. It’s there in Ethiopia and this vector can also transmit it,” said Ogutu. “So that will also look at whether we might have plasmodium vivax in coming up with this new vector showing in our place. Vivax is more difficult to treat in that you can get treated and real up because it keeps staying in the body and the liver.” Malaria affects over 229 million people each year and kills over 400,000 people, according to the World Health Organization. More than a quarter of a million children die in Africa each year as a result of the mosquito-borne disease, including over 10,000 in Kenya. Ogutu expresses concern for urban residents, saying that the new …

Decades of violence and humanitarian crises have left many Somali people traumatized, according to a health study by the U.N. and Somali organizations. Harun Maruf reported from Washington and Abdulkadir Zubeyr in Mogadishu spoke to mental health doctors and patients in the country. They have this report narrated by Salem Solomon. Camera: Abdulkadir Zubeyr. Video editor Betty Ayoub. …

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft. Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September. The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule. Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That leak has been blamed by officials on an “external impact.” Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were joined on the ISS in October by four astronauts brought by a SpaceX capsule: two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese. The space station will become even more crowded next week when another four person crew, including an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is set to arrive. Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse. …

The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000.   Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months. The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak. In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi, including 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers who are at the highest risk in the outbreak. The current outbreak started in March last year and has spread to all 29 districts of Malawi. Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi, told reporters Monday that more assistance is needed to stop the outbreak. “So much work has been done but a lot more needs to be done,” she said. “We have focused on health, we have focused on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). The two are very important but there are also other sectors like nutrition, protection and even logistics because we need to be able to move supplies from one point to the other.” Adda-Dontoh said the needed assistance would complement what various donor partners have already contributed. “The U.N. itself has mobilized already close to $10 million,” she said. “You heard the EU; you heard the U.K. here saying …

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home. Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19. She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment. Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and even diabetes. There are no proven treatments but research is underway. People infected later in the pandemic had the benefit of vaccination, which “protects at least to some degree” from long COVID, said Dr. Bruce Levy, a Harvard pulmonologist and a co-principal investigator of the National Institute of Health’s $1.15 billion U.S. RECOVER trial, which aims to characterize and find cures for the disease. “The initial variant of the virus caused a more severe illness than we’re seeing currently in most patients,” he said. According to the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two …

Two 16th-century sculptures, jewels of French Renaissance art, have been on display since 1908 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But thanks to modern technology and an unusual agreement, precise 3D copies will be made and installed in the French castle where the originals long resided. The facsimiles plan is the fruit of a rare partnership between the Met, as the New York museum is known, and the Dordogne department in southwestern France. The statues, both from the early 1500s and by an anonymous sculptor, represent Biblical scenes entitled “Entombment of Christ” and “Pieta With Donors.” A tourism promotion agency in the Dordogne, Semitour, will be working with the Atelier of Fac-Similes Perigord (AFSP) to make the replicas over the coming months. For nearly 400 years, the originals graced the chapel of the Biron chateau in the Dordogne. Built on a strategic promontory, the sprawling fortress comprises buildings from different eras, including a dungeon dating to the 12th century. Damaged and rebuilt repeatedly through the centuries, the chateau has belonged since 1978 to the Dordogne department, which declared it a historic monument, Dordogne president Germinal Peiro said during a visit to the Met. Digital copy The technology to be employed in copying the sculptures was described to AFP by Francis Rigenbach, who heads the Perigord atelier, and C. Griffith Mann, the Met’s medieval art curator. Using 3D scanners to make digital images of the sculptures, artisans will be able to create replicas without having to move or disturb the …

United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity.  Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impact.  The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty.  “The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said.  The U.N. talks will focus on key questions, including: How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities, such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules?  “This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who follows the negotiations for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.”  The …

The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders. “I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP. “There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.” And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA). That agency, established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states. It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ Exclusive Economic Zones (which extend up to 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from coastlines). But conservation groups say the ISA has two glaringly contradictory missions: protecting the sea floors under the high seas while organizing the activities of industries eager to mine untapped resources on the ocean floor. For now, some 30 research centers and enterprises have been approved to explore — but not exploit — limited areas. Mining activities are not supposed to begin before negotiators adopt a mining code, already under discussion for nearly a decade. Making waves But the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, impatient with the plodding pace of …