Temperatures soared 10 degrees Celsius above average across much of permafrost-laden Siberia last month, which was tied for the warmest June on record globally, the European Union’s climate monitoring network said Tuesday. The 12-month period to June 2020 was also tied for the warmest to date across the planet, on a par with the ones ending in May 2020 and September 2016, an exceptional El Nino year, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported.That means Earth’s average surface temperature for July 2019-June 2020 was 1.3C above pre-industrial levels, the standard benchmark for global warming. The 2015 Paris climate treaty calls for capping the rise in temperature to “well below” 2C.  In 2018, however, the UN’s climate science panel (IPCC) concluded in a landmark report that 1.5C — only two-tenths of a degree above the new 12-month high — is a far safer guardrail. In the Arctic, meanwhile, an hourly temperature record for June — 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — was set on the 21st near Verkhoyansk in northeastern Russia, where a weather station logged a blistering 38C on the same day.    The previously registered Arctic hourly highs in 1969 and 1973 were at least a full degree Celsius cooler. ‘Zombie’ firesFreakishly warm weather across large swathes of Siberia since January, combined with low soil moisture, have contributed to a resurgence of wildfires that devastated the region last summer, C3S reported. FILE – An aerial view shows the Taiga wood burning near the village of Boguchany, about 560 km (348 miles) northeast of Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, June 2, 2011.Both the number and intensity of fires in Siberia and parts of Alaska have increased since mid-June, resulting in the highest carbon emissions for the month — 59 million tonnes of CO2 — since records began in 2003. “Last year was already by far an unusual, and record, summer for fires in the Arctic Circle,” said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), warning of “intense activity” in the coming weeks. Copernicus has said that “zombie” blazes that smouldered through the winter may have reignited. Globally, June 2020 was more than half a degree Celsius warmer than the 1981-2010 average for the same month, and on a par with June 2019 as the warmest ever registered. Siberia and the Arctic Circle are prone to large year-on-year temperature fluctuations, but the persistence of this year’s warm spell is very unusual, said C3S director Carlo Buontempo.  “What is worrisome is that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world,” he said in a statement. Across the Arctic region, average temperatures have risen by more than two degrees Celsius since the mid-19th century, twice the global average. Despite lower-than-average temperatures in its western reaches, the whole of Siberia — larger than the United States and Mexico combined — was more than 5C above normal for June, according to C3S satellite data. Permafrost ‘carbon bomb’The softening of once solid permafrost — stretching across Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada — has upended indigenous communities and threatens industrial infrastructure, especially in Russia. A massive diesel spill into rivers near the city of Norilsk, Russia, resulted when a tank at a power plant built on melting permafrost collapsed in late May. “Widespread permafrost thaw is projected for this century,” the UN’s climate science panel, the IPCC, said in a landmark report last year on the world’s cryosphere, or frozen zones. “The majority of Arctic infrastructure is located in regions where permafrost thaw is projected to intensify by mid-century.” Soils in the permafrost region across Russia, Alaska and Canada hold twice as much carbon — mostly in the form of methane and CO2 — as the atmosphere, more than 1.4 trillion tonnes.  One tonne of carbon is equivalent to 3.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide. 
 
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Experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) Tuesday acknowledged there is growing evidence the coronavirus can spread through the air and said they are preparing a brief on the subject.At the U.N. agency’s regular briefing in Geneva, WHO technical committee head Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said the WHO was contacted in April by a group of than 200 scientists who have called for the world body and others to acknowledge that the coronavirus can spread in the air.Kerkhove said her committee is working with the group and are producing a scientific brief to summarize what they know about the nature of air-borne transmission of virus.WHO Under Fire Over COVID-19 Transmission Route Critics say agency moves too slowly to acknowledge airborne transmission, but science not settledThe WHO coordinator of infection prevention and control, Professor Benedetta Allegranzi, noted that while there is emerging evidence about the airborne nature of the virus, it is not definitive.  Both officials said that the evidence does suggest it takes a comprehensive prevention package to stop COVID transmission, including physical distancing and the wearing of masks, particularly inside.WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed the pandemic continues to accelerate and said it has not yet reached its peak. He noted that it took 12 weeks for the world to reach 400,000 COVID cases, and this past weekend there were more than 400,000 cases across the globe. 
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Doctors in Brazil say an experimental treatment given to a man known as the Sao Paulo Patient may have cured him of HIV.  
 
The man, who was subjected to intensive anti-retroviral drug therapy with the purpose of removing all traces of the AIDS virus from his body, shows no signs of the virus after more than a year since he stopped receiving the treatment.
 
In an interview with The Associated Press, the patient said he was “very moved, because it’s something that millions of people want. It’s a gift of life, a second chance to live.”
 
The only other two known cases of HIV cures have been through bone marrow transplants, which gave patients new immune systems that were better equipped to respond to the virus.  
 
Bone marrow transplants are prohibitively expensive, though, and they come with life-threatening side effects, leading experts to disregard them as a viable option.
 
Although the treatment the Sao Paulo Patient received appears to be a much better alternative, he represents only a single case that requires more research and experimentation.  
 
“These are exciting findings but they’re very preliminary,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an AIDS expert at the University of California, San Francisco. “This has happened to one person, and one person only.”
 
Gandhi noted the four others in the same experiment did not respond similarly to the treatment.
 
If the Sao Paulo Patient’s case can be shown to work on a broader spectrum, it would be a huge breakthrough, as people with HIV currently are forced to stay on a treatment plan for the rest of their lives.  
 
HIV is difficult to treat because it lies dormant for long periods of time, during which it cannot be eliminated by medicines or the body’s normal immune response. Patients must stay on drugs to keep the virus dormant and prevent it from becoming active again. 
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A Russian court on Tuesday fined a coronavirus-denying monk who has challenged Kremlin lockdown orders for spreading false information about the pandemic.The court in the Ural Mountains region ordered Father Sergiy to pay 90,000 rubles ($1,250). The 65-year-old monk, who has attracted nationwide attention by urging followers to disobey church leadership and ignore church closures during the pandemic, didn’t attend the court hearing.On Friday, a Russian Orthodox Church panel in Yekaterinburg ruled to defrock Father Sergiy for breaking monastic rules. He didn’t show up at the session and dismissed the verdict, urging his backers to come to defend the Sredneuralsk women’s monastery where he has holed up since last month.In Friday’s video posted by his supporters, Father Sergiy denounced President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the Motherland” serving a Satanic “world government” and dismissed Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill and other top clerics as “heretics” who must be “thrown out.”Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin wasn’t following developments regarding the rebel monk.  When contagion engulfed Russia, Father Sergiy declared the coronavirus non-existent and denounced government efforts to stem the outbreak as “Satan’s electronic camp.” The monk has described the vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plot to control the masses via chips.He urged believers to disobey the closure of churches during the nationwide lockdown. Orthodox churches across Russia were closed on April 13 amid a quick rise in COVID-19 cases and were allowed to reopen in early June as authorities eased restrictions.The church banned the monk from ministry in April, but he has continued preaching and last month took charge of the monastery outside Yekaterinburg that he had founded years ago. Dozens of burly volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, helped enforce his rules, while the prioress and several nuns have left.The police visited the monastery last month a day after Father Sergiy took over, but found no violations of public order. Facing stiff resistance by his supporters, church officials have appeared indecisive, lacking the means to enforce their ruling and evict the rebellious monk by force. 
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