Environmental groups sue the U.S. government over SpaceX’s launch license. Plus, a pair of spacewalks outside the International Space Station, and a glimpse at the destruction that scientists say awaits our home planet. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Corts
El Nino Expected to Raise Global Temperatures
Global temperatures are likely to reach new highs this year with the predicted onset of El Nino, a natural occurring phenomenon typically associated with the warming of the planet.
“The development of an El Nino will most likely lead to a new spike in global heating and increase the chance of breaking temperature records,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.
That is bad news for global efforts to reduce climate change. Taalas noted that the onset of El Nino follows the eight warmest years on record “even though we had a cooling La Nina for the past three years and this acted as a temporary brake on global temperature increase.”
El Nino is a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, La Nina refers to the periodic cooling of ocean surface temperatures.
The recent unusually long running La Nina event, which began in 2020 now has ended.
Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of the WMO regional climate prediction services division, said scientific models show that La Nina currently is in a neutral state and moving toward a different phase.
“The next few months from May to July, we have a 60% chance to enter into an El Nino phase. This likelihood will increase to 70% in the period of July to August, and even to 80% if we go past August,” he said. “But, of course, beyond that we cannot say much.”
He said the evolution of El Nino this year will change the weather and climate pattern worldwide compared to what existed during the past three consecutive years of La Nina.
“If we think of La Nina as a sort of break in the warming engine, La Nina corresponds to a cooling of the ocean, which normally should kind of slow down the rise of temperature, El Nino will fuel the temperature globally.
“So, we are expecting in the coming two years to have a serious increase in the global temperature,” he said.
Scientists say the concentrations of two important greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide, which lead to global warming and climate change, go up significantly during an El Nino year.
The WMO says the effect on global temperatures usually plays out in the year after El Nino’s development and likely will become apparent in 2024.
“The world should prepare for the development of El Nino, which is often associated with increased heat, drought or rainfall in different parts of the world,” said Taalas.
“It might bring respite from the drought in the Horn of Africa and other La Nina-related impacts but could also trigger more extreme weather and climate events.”
For example, the WMO said El Nino is likely to trigger heavy rainfall in parts of southern South America, the southern United States, the Horn of Africa, and central Asia.
In contrast, El Nino can cause severe droughts over Australia, Indonesia, and parts of southern Asia.
WMO chief Talaas warns the extreme weather events that will be unleashed by El Nino “highlights the need for the U.N. ‘Early Warnings for All’ initiative to keep people safe.”
Since no two El Nino events are the same and the effects depend partly on the time of year, meteorologists say the WMO and National Meteorological Hydrological Services will be closely monitoring developments.
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COVID-Related Learning Loss in US Mirrors Global Trend
Providing further proof that U.S. children suffered significant learning loss when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Assessment Governing Board released a report Wednesday that showed test scores measuring achievement in U.S. history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022.
The tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “nation’s report card,” were given to hundreds of eighth-grade students across the country. Scores on the U.S. history assessment were the lowest recorded since 1994, while the scores on the civics test fell for the first time ever.
Only 13% of students tested in U.S. history were considered proficient, meaning that they had substantially mastered the material expected of them. That was 1 percentage point lower than in 2018. Another 46% tested at the NAEP “basic” level, meaning they had partial mastery of the material, down 4 percentage points. The remaining 40% of students tested did not meet the bar for basic knowledge, an increase of 6 percentage points.
In civics, 20% of students tested qualified as proficient, and 48% had basic knowledge of the material — both down 1 percentage point from 2018. Another 31% failed to demonstrate even basic knowledge, an increase by 4 percentage points over 2018.
In both cases, declines in proficiency were concentrated among lower-performing students, while achievement among the top 25% of students was little changed.
Further breakdowns of the data indicated that declines were notably larger among racial minorities and lower-income students, indicating that the impact of the pandemic on educational achievement was not evenly distributed across the population.
Echoes of past warnings
The results issued Wednesday, like those of other NAEP assessments released last year, demonstrated that a decline in educational achievement was exacerbated by lengthy school closures during the pandemic.
In a statement, National Assessment Governing Board Chair Beverly Perdue, a former governor of North Carolina, said the results should be a call to action.
“The wake-up calls keep coming,” she said. “Education leaders and policy makers must create opportunities for students to gain the knowledge and skills they need to catch up and thrive. The students who took these tests are in high school today and will soon enter college and the workforce without the knowledge and skills they need to fully participate in civic life and our democracy.”
U.S. lags in education
Even before the pandemic took hold, experts were sounding alarms about the state of education in the U.S. In 2019, the year before pandemic-related shutdowns began, results of the Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, showed U.S. students lagging behind their peers in East Asia and Europe.
The results ranked U.S. students 13th in reading, 18th in science, and 37th in mathematics when compared to a global sample of their peers.
Consistently at the top of each category were China, where only four mainland provinces participated, and Singapore. The U.S. consistently trailed its northerly neighbor, Canada, in all three categories. It also lagged the English-speaking United Kingdom and Australia in all categories except reading.
‘New human crisis’
The U.S. was not the only country where learning suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic. In January, the World Bank issued a report describing pandemic-related learning loss as a “mass casualty event” that, at one time or another, forced 1.4 billion students around the world to miss significant time in the classroom.
Stephen Heyneman, professor emeritus of international education policy at Vanderbilt University and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Educational Development, told VOA that the pandemic-related education crisis is “the worst we’ve had in my lifetime.”
In an editorial published in the May edition of the journal, an editorial board made up of nine researchers from universities worldwide assessed evidence of the pandemic’s impact on education and concluded that the world “is on the verge of a new human crisis.”
The researchers confirmed that in the relatively wealthy industrialized countries, known as the Global North, the poor felt pandemic-related educational impacts most deeply, while financially well-off families often could mitigate much of the impact on students.
The news was worse for the relatively poorer countries, often referred to as the Global South.
“In the Global South, the learning challenges have proved multi-dimensional and much harder to tackle, given the triple burden of schooling deprivation, learning inequality and learning poverty,” they found.
The disparities, first noted early in the pandemic, have continued, the researchers found. “The consensus view is that, despite many promising innovations, learning shortfalls have persisted or even increased, three years into the pandemic.”
Frustration
Asked how the U.S. had performed during the pandemic compared with other developed nations, Heyneman said that “comparison evidence, so far, is too little for me to make any generalizations.”
However, he said, he and his colleagues have noticed — and been frustrated by — a common practice that has been adopted by most public school systems around the world as they have reopened.
Rather than assessing where students had pandemic-related deficits and working to correct them before continuing on with standard curriculums, schools have consistently attempted to simply restart, placing students in the classes and grade levels that correspond to their ages rather than to their actual educational attainment.
“They have not tested the learning loss in any systematic way, and when they have tested, they often haven’t released the scores,” he said. “And whether or not they have tested, they have not treated the results as an emergency. That makes me furious.”
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WHO Experts Weigh Whether World Ready to End COVID Emergency
A panel of global health experts will meet Thursday to decide if COVID-19 is still an emergency under the World Health Organization’s rules, a status that helps maintain international focus on the pandemic.
The WHO first gave COVID its highest level of alert on Jan. 30, 2020, and the panel has continued to apply the label ever since, at meetings held every three months.
However, several countries have recently begun lifting their domestic states of emergency, such as the United States.
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said he hopes to end the international emergency this year.
There is no consensus yet on which way the panel may rule, advisers to the WHO and external experts told Reuters.
“It is possible that the emergency may end, but it is critical to communicate that COVID remains a complex public health challenge,” said professor Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is on the WHO panel. She declined to speculate further ahead of the discussions, which are confidential.
One source close to negotiations said lifting the “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, label could impact global funding or collaboration efforts. Another said that the unpredictability of the virus made it hard to call at this stage.
“We are not out of the pandemic, but we have reached a different stage,” said professor Salim Abdool Karim, a leading COVID expert who previously advised the South African government on its response.
Karim, who is not on the WHO panel, said if the emergency status is lifted, governments should still maintain testing, vaccination and treatment programs.
Others said it was time to move to living with COVID as an ongoing health threat, like HIV or tuberculosis.
“All emergencies must come to an end,” said Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University in the United States who follows the WHO.
“I expect WHO to end the public health emergency of international concern. If WHO does not end it… [this time], then certainly the next time the emergency committee meets.”
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As Sales Decline, Adidas Faces Pressure to Find Yeezy Fix
Adidas is set to update investors Friday about the unsold Yeezy shoes that have put the German sportswear giant in a predicament since it cut ties with Kanye West over his antisemitic comments late last year.
Executives are expected to tackle the issue when the company reports first-quarter results Friday which will likely show a 4% decline in net sales to $5.07 billion, according to a company-compiled consensus.
Investors have high hopes new CEO Bjorn Gulden can turn Adidas around: the stock has gained around 65% since Nov. 4 when the former Puma CEO was first floated as a successor to Kasper Rorsted, despite Adidas warning it could make a $700 million loss this year if it writes the Yeezy shoes off entirely.
Adidas has been in discussions over the footwear, including with people who “have been hurt” by West’s antisemitic comments, Gulden said in March, but there are no easy fixes.
The value of Yeezy shoes in the resale market has rocketed since Adidas stopped producing them, with some models more than doubling in price, but the company has yet to decide what to do with its unsold stock.
If Adidas decides to sell the shoes, any proceeds should go towards efforts to fight antisemitism, said Holly Huffnagle, U.S. Director for Combating Antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, a non-governmental organization.
“The challenge is if these shoes are going to be out there and be worn by people, we must ensure that the antisemitic messaging of the shoes’ creator doesn’t spread,” she said.
Gulden in March said the company could donate the proceeds of the Yeezy sale to charities, but Adidas has given no updates since. “We continue to evaluate options for the use of the existing Yeezy inventory,” an Adidas spokesperson said, declining to comment on the possible timeline for a decision.
The market would welcome a resolution, but it may be too early given the complexities involved, said Geoff Lowery, analyst at Redburn in London, who sees a donation to charities as the most likely outcome.
The Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in New York, told Reuters it “stands ready and prepared to work with Adidas.”
Adidas in November donated more than $1 million to the organization.
The American Jewish Committee met with Adidas executives in December to discuss their commitment to reject antisemitism.
Adidas said it continues to “stand with the Jewish community in the fight against antisemitism and with all communities around the world facing injustice and discrimination.”
Shareholders want Adidas to draw a line under the Yeezy episode and develop ways to reboot the brand.
“Being successful with Yeezy probably made Adidas lazy on finding other growth drivers,” said Cedric Rossi, nextgen consumer analyst at Bryan Garnier in Paris.
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After Decades of Attempts, US Approves 1st Vaccine for RSV
The United States approved the first vaccine for RSV on Wednesday, shots to protect older adults against a respiratory virus that’s most notorious for attacking babies but endangers their grandparents, too.
The Food and Drug Administration decision makes GSK’s shot, called Arexvy, the first of several potential vaccines in the pipeline for RSV to be licensed anywhere.
The move sets the stage for adults 60 and older to get vaccinated this fall — but first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must decide if every senior really needs RSV protection or only those considered at high risk from the respiratory syncytial virus. CDC’s advisers will debate that question in June.
After decades of failure in the quest for an RSV vaccine, doctors are eager to finally have something to offer — especially after a virus surge that strained hospitals last fall.
“This is a great first step … to protect older persons from serious RSV disease,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, who wasn’t involved with its development. Next, “we’re going to be working our way down the age ladder” for what’s expected to be a string of new protections.
The FDA is considering competitor Pfizer’s similar vaccine for older adults. Pfizer also is seeking approval to vaccinate pregnant women so their babies are born with some of their mothers’ protection.
There isn’t a vaccine for kids yet, but high-risk infants often get monthly doses of a protective drug during RSV season — and European regulators recently approved the first one-dose option. The FDA also is considering whether to approve Sanofi and AstraZeneca’s one-shot medicine.
“This is a very exciting time with multiple potential RSV solutions coming out after years of really nothing,” said Dr. Phil Dormitzer, chief of vaccine research and development for GSK, formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline.
Potentially life-threatening
RSV is a cold-like nuisance for most people, but can be life-threatening for the very young, the elderly, and people with certain high-risk health problems. It can impede babies’ breathing by inflaming their tiny airways, or creep deep into seniors’ lungs to cause pneumonia.
In the U.S., about 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year and several hundred die. Among older adults, as many as 177,000 are hospitalized with RSV and up to 14,000 die annually.
Why has it taken so long to come up with a vaccine? The field suffered a major setback in the 1960s when an experimental shot worsened infections in children. Scientists finally figured out a better way to develop these vaccines — although modern candidates still were first tested with adults.
Study shows high effectiveness rates
GSK’s new vaccine for older adults trains the immune system to recognize a protein on RSV’s surface, and contains an ingredient called an adjuvant to further rev up that immune reaction.
In an international study of about 25,000 people 60 and older, one dose of the vaccine was nearly 83% effective at preventing RSV lung infections and reduced the risk of severe infections by 94%.
To see how long protection lasts, GSK is tracking study participants for three years, comparing some who get just one vaccination during that time and others given a yearly booster.
Shot reactions were typical of vaccinations, such as muscle pain and fatigue.
There was a hint of a rare but serious risk — one case of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can cause usually temporary paralysis, and two cases of a type of brain and spinal cord inflammation. The FDA said it was requiring the company to continue studying if there really is a link to the vaccine.
If the CDC ultimately recommends the vaccination for some or even all seniors, it will add another shot for the fall along with their yearly flu vaccine — and maybe another COVID-19 booster.
“We’ll have to educate the population that this virus that not everyone has heard about is actually an important threat to their health in the wintertime,” said Schaffner, an infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
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Taliban Singsongs Thrive in Music-Less Afghanistan
The recording studios at Afghanistan national radio and television where generations of male and female musicians and singers produced songs and melodies have gone silent for nearly two years.
The country’s Islamist Taliban regime does not air music on the national broadcasting network because their extreme interpretation of Islam considers it forbidden. Instead, they run so-called singsongs, which sound like chants with no music.
Known as the Taliban songs and nasheeds, the singsongs, voiced only by men, are mostly tributes to Taliban leaders, Islamic jihad and Afghanistan as a graveyard of foreign interventionists.
Many Taliban listen to these singsongs on their phones, in their cars and elsewhere as a source of entertainment, attachment and inspiration.
“Since the Taliban are religious zealots, they use songs for entertainment as well. It’s a form of competition for young Taliban to show off their voices. Songs are also designed to add some pleasure to an otherwise puritanical way of life,” said Wahed Faqiri, an Afghan analyst.
“[The Taliban] play it on radios and so, if you are in your car at that time and it’s on the radio, you listen to it because it’s kind of a captive/trapped audience,” Ali Latifi, a Kabul-based independent journalist, told VOA by email. “When I see Taliban playing them it’s usually on their phones (even little Nokia ones) while they’re standing or walking down the street (less often).”
Since the Taliban’s ascent to power in Afghanistan, the group’s singsongs have increasingly found their way to digital platforms where they are accessible to global audiences. Social media companies often prohibit official Taliban accounts and groups, but the group’s sympathizers have maintained a presence under pseudonyms.
Given the group’s longstanding disapproval of television, pro-Taliban songs loaded to YouTube carry only still images of Taliban leaders and symbols. During their first reign in 1994-2001, the Taliban completely banned television and the group’s morality police broke down private TV sets and displayed them on poles to deter the public from watching television even in their homes.
As an insurgent group, the Taliban ran sophisticated digital propaganda campaigns including videos of violent attacks on Afghan and foreign soldiers.
‘Genocide of music’
The Taliban’s swift return to power in 2021 saw an exodus of artists, singers, musicians and journalists from Afghanistan.
Over the past 20 months, about 3,000 artists and singers have sought relocation outside Afghanistan, according to Artistic Freedom Initiative, an organization that offers free immigration and resettlement assistance for artists at risk.
The country’s National Institute of Music (ANIM) has been closed as all of its trainers, students and personnel were evacuated to Europe in 2021.
“We are witnessing a termination of the rich musical heritage of Afghanistan,” Ahmad Sarmast, ANIM director, told VOA while describing the many ways musicians and artists suffer under the Taliban rule.
While most popular Afghan musicians and singers reside abroad, those left in the country have reportedly quit music and have resorted to other jobs.
Sarmast said his ANIM staff and other artists are trying to keep the Afghan music alive in exile by organizing concerts and events in different parts of the world.
For many Afghans caught in recurring cycles of brutal wars, extreme and widespread poverty, and many social and cultural restrictions, music is a source of spiritual strength and a means to mental and psychological healing, experts say.
“The Taliban’s anti-music policies are turning Afghans into a mentally impaired nation,” warned Sarmast, who said the Taliban’s singsongs are praising and promoting violence.
A Taliban spokesperson received VOA’s request for comment on the regime’s policies about music but did not respond.
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Brazil Forest Bill Aims to Unlock Carbon Credit Market
Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by its Congress this week that marks a first step in regulating the country’s voluntary carbon market.
Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions’ appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream.
“This is an economic activity that will boost others that can be done in forestry concessions,” said Jacqueline Ferreira, a portfolio manager at Instituto Escolhas, an environmental nonprofit involved in consultations on the bill.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who now must sign or veto parts or all of the bill within 15 days, has made reining in deforestation a priority as he seeks to reverse the policies of his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
Forest leased to private firms in Brazil can only be used for logging under a sustainable system that allows the land to regenerate.
Potential to generate millions
Set up in 2006, the leasing program has had limited success, data shows, with only about 1 million hectares of Brazil’s 43 million hectares of eligible public forest leased.
Studying a typical concession in the Amazon state of Rondonia, Escolhas estimated that carbon credit sales could boost its revenue by 43%.
A wider study by the nonprofit of 37 areas that could be leased in the Amazon region estimated that they could generate about $24 million per year from carbon credits in total.
“This was very conservative math, based on carbon credit prices below the (current) market price,” Ferreira said. She noted that further regulation would be needed to detail the mechanism for generating carbon credits.
She said it would likely take at least a year for the first concessions to be leased that include the ability to issue carbon credits.
The current number of carbon credit projects in Brazil are “small in comparison to the unique potential of the country’s forested area,” said Daniel Vargas, coordinator of the Bioeconomy Observatory within Brazil’s FGV university.
Carbon credits face scrutiny
The bill, however, comes as carbon credits generated by forestry projects in the Amazon region and elsewhere face scrutiny because of land rights issues and a lack of benefits for local communities.
“A growing body of research indicates that no real additional protection is being offered by many of the (carbon credit) projects,” said Eugenio Pantoja, a director at IPAM, a nonprofit that works on sustainability in the Amazon.
The voluntary carbon credit market in Brazil is still unregulated, and while the new bill is a step in that direction, broader legislation will be needed, Pantoja said.
The bill should make concessions more profitable, but a major hurdle for legal logging is stiff competition from illegal, deforested timber, said Suely Araujo, senior expert in public policy at Brazil’s Climate Observatory.
“What is truly hindering (forest concessions) is their difficulty in competing with crime,” Araujo said.
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Star Gobbles Up Planet in One Big Bite
For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet — not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.
Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet.
It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets.
“If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
This galactic feast happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation when the star was around 10 billion years old. As the planet went down the stellar hatch, there was a swift hot outburst of light, followed by a long-lasting stream of dust shining brightly in cold infrared energy, the researchers said.
While there had been previous signs of other stars nibbling at planets and their digestive aftermath, this was the first time the swallow itself was observed, according to the study appearing in the journal Nature.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Kishalay De spotted the luminous outburst in 2020 while reviewing sky scans taken by the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory. It took additional observations and data-crunching to unravel the mystery: Instead of a star gobbling up its companion star, this one had devoured its planet.
Given a star’s lifetime of billions of years, the swallow itself was quite brief — occurring in essentially one fell swoop, said Caltech’s Mansi Kasliwal, who was part of the study.
The findings are “very plausible,” said Carole Haswell, an astrophysicist at Britain’s Open University, who had no role in the research. Haswell led a team in 2010 that used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the star WASP-12 in the process of eating its planet.
“This is a different sort of eating. This star gobbled a whole planet in one gulp,” Haswell said in an email. “In contrast, WASP-12 b and the other hot Jupiters we have previously studied are being delicately licked and nibbled.”
Astronomers don’t know if more planets are circling this star at a safer distance. If so, De said they may have thousands of years before becoming the star’s second or third course.
Now that they know what to look for, the researchers will be on the lookout for more cosmic gulps. They suspect thousands of planets around other stars will suffer the same fate as this one did and, eventually, so will our solar system.
“All that we see around us, all the stuff that we’ve built around us, this will all be gone in a flash,” De said.
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Fountain Pens Continue to Draw Writers
The fountain pen is a writing instrument declared obsolete numerous times by technological innovations — the ballpoint pen, the typewriter, the computer keyboard, and now by rendering our voices into text on mobile phones. But the 19th-century invention is still evolving, thanks in part to an American mechanical engineer. VOA’s chief national correspondent Steve Herman reports from Philadelphia.
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258 Million Needed Urgent Food Aid in 2022: UN
Some 258 million people needed emergency food aid last year because of conflict, economic shocks and climate disasters, a U.N. report said Wednesday, a sharp rise from 193 million the previous year.
“More than a quarter of a billion people are now facing acute levels of hunger, and some are on the brink of starvation. That’s unconscionable,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
It was “a stinging indictment of humanity’s failure to make progress… to end hunger, and achieve food security and improved nutrition for all,” he said.
More than 40% of those in serious need of food lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen, the U.N. report said.
“Conflicts and mass displacement continue to drive global hunger,” Guterres said.
“Rising poverty, deepening inequalities, rampant underdevelopment, the climate crisis and natural disasters also contribute to food insecurity.”
In 2022, 258 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 58 countries or territories, up from 193 million in 53 countries the previous year, the report said.
This overall figure has now increased for the fourth year in a row.
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Writers Strike Looks to be a Long Fight, as Hollywood Braces
Hollywood writers picketing to preserve pay and job security outside major studios and streamers braced for a long fight at the outbreak of a strike that immediately forced late-night shows into hiatus, put other productions on pause and had the entire industry slowing its roll.
The first Hollywood strike in 15 years commenced Tuesday as the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America stopped working when their contract expired.
The union is seeking higher minimum pay, more writers per show and less exclusivity on single projects, among other demands — all conditions it says have been diminished in the content boom of the streaming era.
“Everything’s changed, but the money has changed in the wrong direction,” said Kelly Galuska, 39, a writer for “The Bear” on FX and “Big Mouth” on Netflix, who picketed at Fox Studios in Los Angeles with her 3-week-old daughter. “It’s a turning point in the industry right now. And if we don’t get back to even, we never will.”
The last Hollywood strike, from the same union in 2007 and 2008, took three months to resolve. With no talks or even plans to talk pending between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios and productions companies, there is no telling how long writers will have to go without pay, or how many major productions will be delayed, shortened or scrapped.
“We’ll stay out as long as it takes,” Josh Gad, a writer for shows including “Central Park” and an actor in films including “Frozen,” said from the Fox picket line.
The AMPTP said in a statement that it presented an offer with “generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals” and was prepared to improve its offer “but was unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the guild continues to insist upon.”
The writers were well aware that a stoppage was likely. Yet the breakoff of contractual talks hours before a deadline that negotiations in previous years have sailed past for hours or even days, and the sudden reality of a strike, left some surprised, some worried, some determined.
“When I saw the refusals to counter and the refusing to even negotiate by the AMPTP, I was like on fire to get out here and stand up for what we deserve,” Jonterri Gadson, a writer whose credits include “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” said on a picket line at Amazon Studios as she held a sign that read, “I hate it here.”
All of the top late-night shows, which are staffed by writers that pen monologues and jokes for their hosts, immediately went dark. NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live,” CBS’ “The Late Show” and NBC’s “Late Night” all made plans for reruns through the week.
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which had been scheduled to air a new episode Saturday, will also go dark and air a rerun, and the two remaining episodes in the season are in jeopardy.
The strike’s impact on scripted series and films will likely take longer to notice — though some shows, including Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” have already paused production on forthcoming seasons.
If a strike persisted through the summer, fall TV schedules could be upended. In the meantime, those with finished scripts are permitted to continue shooting.
Union members also picketed in New York, where less known writers were joined by more prominent peers like playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner (“The Fabelmans”) and “Dopesick” creator Danny Strong.
Some actors including Rob Lowe joined the picket lines in support in Los Angeles. Many striking writers, like Gad, are hybrids who combine writing with other roles.
Speaking from his acting side, Gad said of his fellow writers, “We are nothing without their words. We have nothing without them. And so it’s imperative that we resolve this in a way that benefits the brilliance that comes out of each of these people.”
The other side of his hyphenated role could be in the same space soon, with many of the same issues at the center of negotiations for both the actors union SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America. Contracts for both expire in June.
Streaming has exploded the number of series and films that are annually made, meaning more jobs for writers. But writers say they’ve been made to make less under shifting and insecure conditions that the WGA called “a gig economy inside a union workforce.”
The union is seeking more compensation for writers up front, because many of the payments writers have historically profited from on the back end — like syndication and international licensing — have been largely phased out by the onset of streaming.
Galuska said she is among the writers who have never seen those kind of once common benefits.
“I’ve had the opportunity to write on great shows that are very, very popular and not really seen the compensation for that, unfortunately,” she said.
The AMPTP said sticking points to a deal revolved around so-called mini-rooms — the guild is seeking a minimum number of scribes per writer room — and the duration of employment contracts.
Writers are also seeking more regulation around the use of artificial intelligence, which the WGA’s writers say could give producers a shortcut to finishing their work.
“The fact that the companies have refused to deal with us on that fact means that I’m even more scared about it today than I was a week ago. They obviously have a plan. The things they say no to, are the things they’re planning to do tomorrow.”
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US Announces Massive Crackdown on Darknet Fentanyl Trafficking
In a massive global crackdown on fentanyl trafficking on the darknet, U.S. and international law enforcement agencies have arrested nearly 300 suspects and seized a large cache of drugs, cash, virtual currency and weapons, officials announced on Tuesday.
The law enforcement action dubbed Operation SpecTor spanned three continents and involved the collaboration of eight countries. It was part of a Justice Department initiative led by the FBI known as JCODE, which aims to dismantle online drug markets.
The operation netted 281 arrests, 850 kilograms of drugs, including 64 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, $53.4 million in cash and virtual currencies and 117 firearms.
The total number of arrests was the most ever for any JCODE operation and more than double that of the previous operation, officials said.
The Justice Department described the takedown as “the largest international law enforcement operation targeting fentanyl and opioid traffickers on the darknet.”
“Our message to criminals on the dark web is this: You can try to hide in the furthest reaches of the internet, but the Justice Department will find you and hold you accountable for your crimes,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference in Washington.
Officials said they collaborated with law enforcement agencies in eight countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Brazil and the United Kingdom.
The operation is part of a broader effort by U.S. law enforcement agencies to curb fentanyl trafficking.
Last month, the Justice Department announced changes against the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious drug trafficking organization based in Sinaloa, Mexico, and its facilitators around the world.
Garland described the cartel’s fentanyl trafficking operation as “the largest, most violent, and most prolific” in the world.
The Sinaloa is one of two major Mexican cartels that dominate the U.S. fentanyl market. The other one is known as the Jalisco cartel.
Law enforcement officials say the Sinaloa cartel has been flooding drugs into the United States for more than 15 years.
Officials say the cartels cook fentanyl using precursor chemicals imported from China.
The announcement comes at a time when the U.S. is grappling with an opioid overdose crisis that claimed more than 100,000 American lives in the 12-month period ending in August 2022.
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl were behind more than two-thirds of the deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The alarming spike in fentanyl deaths has prompted Republican demands that the Biden administration label the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and unleash the full force of the law against them.
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Loneliness Poses Risks as Deadly as Smoking, US Surgeon General Says
Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking a dozen cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said Tuesday in declaring the latest public health epidemic.
About half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in a report from his office.
“We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told The Associated Press in an interview. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right. That’s why I issued this advisory to pull back the curtain on a struggle that too many people are experiencing.”
The declaration is intended to raise awareness around loneliness but won’t unlock federal funding or programming devoted to combatting the issue.
Research shows that Americans, who have become less engaged with worship houses, community organizations and even their own family members in recent decades, have steadily reported an increase in feelings of loneliness. The number of single households has also doubled over the last 60 years.
But the crisis deeply worsened when COVID-19 spread, prompting schools and workplaces to shut their doors and sending millions of Americans to isolate at home away from relatives or friends.
People culled their friend groups during the coronavirus pandemic and reduced time spent with those friends, the surgeon general’s report finds. Americans spent about 20 minutes a day in person with friends in 2020, down from 60 minutes daily nearly two decades earlier.
The loneliness epidemic is hitting young people, ages 15 to 24, especially hard. The age group reported a 70% drop in time spent with friends during the same period.
Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by nearly 30%, with the report revealing that those with poor social relationships also had a greater risk of stroke and heart disease. Isolation also elevates a person’s likelihood for experiencing depression, anxiety and dementia.
The surgeon general is calling on workplaces, schools, technology companies, community organizations, parents and other people to make changes that will boost the country’s connectedness. He advises people to join community groups and put down their phones when they’re catching up with friends; employers to think carefully about their remote work policies; and health systems to provide training for doctors to recognize the health risks of loneliness.
Technology has rapidly exacerbated the loneliness problem, with one study cited in the report finding that people who used social media for two hours or more daily were more than twice as likely to report feeling socially isolated than those who were on such apps for less than 30 minutes a day.
Murthy said social media is driving the increase in loneliness in particular. His report suggests that technology companies roll out protections for children especially around their social media behavior.
“There’s really no substitute for in-person interaction,” Murthy said. “As we shifted to use technology more and more for our communication, we lost out on a lot of that in-person interaction. How do we design technology that strengthens our relationships as opposed to weaken them?”
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US Film and Television Writers Begin Strike
The union that represents U.S. film and television writers sent their members on strike Tuesday after failing to reach an agreement with studios and production companies over a new labor contract.
The Writers Guild of America announced late Monday that their 11,500 members would put down their pens and turn off their computers at midnight Los Angeles time ((Tuesday 3:00 a.m. Washington time, 0700 GMT)) when their current contract expires.
The union has been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for increased pay and stronger employment guarantees on episodic television shows as more and more scripted series are being shown on Internet-based or “streaming” platforms.
In a statement announcing the strike, the WGA said major studios such as Walt Disney and Netflix have “created a gig economy inside a union workforce,” a reference to the growing trend of people taking on freelance jobs as opposed to permanent, full-time work.
Streaming television platforms have transformed the entertainment industry in recent years, offering more opportunities for writers but for lesser pay on shows that run fewer episodes per season than traditional broadcast networks.
Artificial intelligence is another issue for WGA members. The union wants to prevent studios from using AI to create scripts based on writers’ previous work. It also doesn’t want writers to be asked to work on scripts generated by AI.
SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan
The AMPTP issued a statement saying it was prepared to offer higher pay and better royalty payments for writers for streaming shows, but that it was “unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table.” The alliance says a major point of contention is a union proposal for a show to maintain a certain number of staff writers “whether needed or not.”
The strike is the first by the WGA in 15 years. The last walkout began in late 2007 and stretched 100 days into the next year, costing the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion. Late night talk and variety shows such as “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and “Saturday Night Live” will go off the air immediately as their writing staffs are members of the WGA.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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Canadian Folk Singer Gordon Lightfoot Dies at 84
Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s legendary folk singer-songwriter whose hits including “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” told a tale of Canadian identity that was exported worldwide, died on Monday. He was 84.
Representative Victoria Lord said the musician died at a Toronto hospital. His cause of death was not immediately available.
Considered one of the most renowned voices to emerge from Toronto’s Yorkville folk club scene in the 1960s, Lightfoot went on to record 20 studio albums and pen hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway” and “Sundown.”
Once called a “rare talent” by Bob Dylan, dozens of artists have covered his work, including Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray, Jane’s Addiction and Sarah McLachlan.
Most of his songs are deeply autobiographical with lyrics that probe his own experiences in a frank manner and explore issues surrounding the Canadian national identity.
His 1975 song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” chronicled the demise of a Great Lakes ore freighter, and 1966’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” depicted the construction of the railway.
“I simply write the songs about where I am and where I’m from,” he once said. “I take situations and write poems about them.”
Often described as a poetic storyteller, Lightfoot remained keenly aware of his cultural influence. It was a role he took very seriously.
“I just like to stay there and be a part of the totem pole and look after the responsibilities I’ve acquired over the years,” he said in a 2001 interview.
While Lightfoot’s parents recognized his musical talents early on, he didn’t set out to become a renowned balladeer.
He began singing in his church choir and dreamed of becoming a jazz musician. At age 13, the soprano won a talent contest at the Kiwanis Music Festival, held at Toronto’s Massey Hall.
“I remember the thrill of being in front of the crowd,” Lightfoot said in a 2018 interview. “It was a steppingstone for me…”
The appeal of those early days stuck and in high school, his barbershop quartet, The Collegiate Four, won a CBC talent competition. He strummed his first guitar in 1956 and began to dabble in songwriting in the months that followed. Perhaps distracted by his taste for music, he flunked algebra the first time. After taking the class again, he graduated in 1957.
By then, Lightfoot had already penned his first serious composition — “The Hula Hoop Song,” inspired by the popular kids’ toy that was sweeping the culture. Attempts to sell the song went nowhere so at 18, he headed to the U.S. to study music for a year. The trip was funded in part by money saved from a job delivering linens to resorts around his hometown.
Life in Hollywood wasn’t a good fit, however, and it wasn’t long before Lightfoot returned to Canada. He pledged to move to Toronto to pursue his musical ambitions, taking any job available, including a position at a bank before landing a gig as a square dancer on CBC’s “Country Hoedown.”
His first gig was at Fran’s Restaurant, a downtown family-owned diner that warmed to his folk sensibilities. It was there he met fellow musician Ronnie Hawkins.
The singer was living with a few buddies in a condemned building in Yorkville, then a bohemian area where future stars including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell would learn their trade at smoke-filled clubs.
Lightfoot made his popular radio debut with the single “(Remember Me) I’m the One” in 1962, which led to a number of hit songs and partnerships with other local musicians. When he started playing the Mariposa Folk Festival in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario that same year, Lightfoot forged a relationship that made him the festival’s most loyal returning performer.
By 1964, he was garnering positive word-of-mouth around town and audiences were starting to gather in growing numbers. By the next year, Lightfoot’s song “I’m Not Sayin'” was a hit in Canada, which helped spread his name in the United States.
A couple of covers by other artists didn’t hurt either. Marty Robbins’ 1965 recording of “Ribbon of Darkness” reached No. 1 on U.S. country charts, while Peter, Paul and Mary took Lightfoot’s composition, “For Lovin’ Me,” into the U.S. Top 30. The song, which Dylan once said he wished he’d recorded, has since been covered by hundreds of other musicians.
That summer, Lightfoot performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the same year Dylan rattled audiences when he shed his folkie persona by playing an electric guitar.
As the folk music boom came to an end in the late 1960s, Lightfoot was already making his transition to pop music with ease.
In 1971, he made his first appearance on the Billboard chart with “If You Could Read My Mind.” It reached No. 5 and has since spawned scores of covers.
Lightfoot’s popularity peaked in the mid-1970s when both his single and album, “Sundown,” topped the Billboard charts, his first and only time doing so.
During his career, Lightfoot collected 12 Juno Awards, including one in 1970 when it was called the Gold Leaf.
In 1986, he was inducted into the Canadian Recording Industry Hall of Fame, now the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He received the Governor General’s award in 1997 and was ushered into the Canadian Country Music Hall Of Fame in 2001.
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Hollywood Writers, Studios Talk as Midnight Strike Deadline Looms
Negotiators for Hollywood writers and film and television studios engaged in 11th-hour contract talks on Monday to try to avert a strike that would disrupt TV production across an industry grappling with seismic changes.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) could call a work stoppage as early as Tuesday if it cannot reach a deal with companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc. A strike would be the first by the WGA in 15 years.
Writers say they have suffered financially during the streaming TV boom, in part due to shorter seasons and smaller residual payments. They are seeking pay increases and changes to industry practices that they say force them to work more for less money.
Half of TV series writers now work at minimum salary levels, compared with one-third in the 2013-14 season, according to Guild statistics. Median pay for scribes at the higher writer/producer level has fallen 4% over the last decade.
“The way that it’s looking now is that there won’t be a middle class in Hollywood,” said Caroline Renard, a Guild liaison and writer whose credits include the Disney Channel’s “Secrets of Sulphur Springs.”
Artificial intelligence is another issue at the bargaining table. The WGA wants safeguards to prevent studios from using AI to generate new scripts from writers’ previous work. Writers also want to ensure they are not asked to rewrite draft scripts created by AI.
SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan
The negotiations take place against a difficult economic backdrop for the industry. Entertainment conglomerates are under pressure from Wall Street to make their streaming services profitable, after investing billions of dollars in content to attract subscribers.
They also are contending with declining television ad revenue, as traditional TV audiences shrink and advertisers go elsewhere. The threat of a recession also looms.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents Comcast Corp., Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Netflix and hundreds of production companies, has said it is committed to reaching a fair agreement.
“It’ll affect every part of the industry and people beyond the industry,” actor and director Olivia Wilde said on the red carpet at the star-studded Met Gala, just hours ahead of the midnight Pacific time expiration of the current Writers Guild contract. “But you know, we have to stand up for our rights.” Wilde added.
“They’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what they deserve,” Wilde said. “I wish it didn’t have to come to this, but tonight at midnight, we’ll see.”
Actor Penelope Cruz, also at the Met Gala, offered a similar sentiment: “It will affect the rhythm of things, but sometimes things have to be done to be heard.”
Late night will take a hit
If a strike is called, late-night shows such as “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” and “Saturday Night Live,” which use teams of writers to craft topical jokes, are expected to immediately stop production.
That means new episodes will not be available during their traditional TV time slots or on the streaming services that make them available the next day.
Soap operas and other daytime shows such as “The View” will likely be disrupted. News programs would not be interrupted because those writers are members of a different union.
Further ahead, the strike could lead to a delay of the fall TV season. Writing for fall shows normally starts in May or June. If the work stoppage becomes protracted, the networks will increasingly fill their programming lineups with unscripted reality shows, news magazines and reruns.
Netflix may be insulated from any immediate impact because of its global focus and access to production facilities outside of the U.S.
The last WGA strike in 2007 and 2008 lasted 100 days. The action cost the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion as productions shut down and out-of-work writers, actors and producers cut back spending.
Studios do not want another disruption after the COVID-19 pandemic halted production worldwide for months. But budgets are tight, and a new era of fiscal austerity has dawned in Hollywood, with studios laying off thousands of employees and curtailing spending on content.
“The writers have legitimate issues here,” said one talent agent close to the bargaining process. “But the studios and the producers have very legitimate issues also. Their stock prices are down. They’ve overspent on content. They need to show profits to their shareholders.”
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Scientists Use Brain Scans and AI to ‘Decode’ Thoughts
Scientists said Monday they have found a way to use brain scans and artificial intelligence modeling to transcribe “the gist” of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading.
While the main goal of the language decoder is to help people who have lost the ability to communicate, the U.S. scientists acknowledged that the technology raised questions about “mental privacy.”
Aiming to assuage such fears, they ran tests showing that their decoder could not be used on anyone who had not allowed it to be trained on their brain activity over long hours inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.
Previous research has shown that a brain implant can enable people who can no longer speak or type to spell out words or even sentences.
These “brain-computer interfaces” focus on the part of the brain that controls the mouth when it tries to form words.
Alexander Huth, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of a new study, said his team’s language decoder “works at a very different level.”
“Our system really works at the level of ideas, of semantics, of meaning,” Huth told an online press conference.
It is the first system to be able to reconstruct continuous language without an invasive brain implant, according to the study in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
‘Deeper than language’
For the study, three people spent a total of 16 hours inside an fMRI machine listening to spoken narrative stories, mostly podcasts such as The New York Times’ “Modern Love.”
This allowed the researchers to map out how words, phrases and meanings prompted responses in the regions of the brain known to process language.
They fed this data into a neural network language model that uses GPT-1, the predecessor of the AI technology later deployed in the hugely popular ChatGPT.
The model was trained to predict how each person’s brain would respond to perceived speech, then narrow down the options until it found the closest response.
To test the model’s accuracy, each participant then listened to a new story in the fMRI machine.
The study’s first author, Jerry Tang, said the decoder could “recover the gist of what the user was hearing.”
For example, when the participant heard the phrase, “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” the model came back with, “She has not even started to learn to drive yet.”
The decoder struggled with personal pronouns such as “I” or “she,” the researchers admitted.
But even when the participants thought up their own stories — or viewed silent movies — the decoder was still able to grasp the “gist,” they said.
This showed that “we are decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language,” Huth said.
Because fMRI scanning is too slow to capture individual words, it collects a “mishmash, an agglomeration of information over a few seconds,” Huth said. “So, we can see how the idea evolves, even though the exact words get lost.”
Ethical warning
David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain’s Granada University, which is not involved in the research, said it went beyond what had been achieved by previous brain-computer interfaces.
This brings us closer to a future in which machines are “able to read minds and transcribe thought,” he said, warning this could possibly take place against people’s will, such as when they are sleeping.
The researchers anticipated such concerns.
They ran tests showing that the decoder did not work on a person if it had not already been trained on their own particular brain activity.
The three participants were also able to easily foil the decoder.
While listening to one of the podcasts, the users were told to count by sevens, name and imagine animals or tell a different story in their mind. All these tactics “sabotaged” the decoder, the researchers said.
Next, the team hopes to speed up the process so they can decode the brain scans in real time.
They also called for regulations to protect mental privacy.
“Our mind has so far been the guardian of our privacy,” Rodriguez-Arias said. “This discovery could be a first step towards compromising that freedom in the future.”
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Report: One-Third of US Nurses Plan to Quit Profession
Almost a third of the nurses in the United States are considering leaving their profession after the COVID-19 pandemic left them overwhelmed and fatigued, according to a survey.
The survey of over 18,000 nurses, conducted in January by AMN Healthcare Services Inc., showed on Monday that 30% of the participants are looking to quit their career, up 7 percentage points over 2021, when the pandemic-triggered wave of resignations began.
The survey also showed that 36% of the nurses plan to continue working in the sector but may change workplaces.
“This really underscores the continued mental health and well-being challenges the nursing workforce experiences post pandemic,” AMN Healthcare CEO Cary Grace told Reuters in an interview.
The survey showed there are various changes needed, with 69% of nurses seeking increased salaries and 63% of them seeking a safer working environment to reduce their stress.
This comes at a time that hospital operator and sector bellwether HCA Healthcare Inc. indicated a recovery in the staffing situation.
While a shortage of staff in hospitals has been an issue for a couple of years, it gained traction globally in late 2021 and hit a peak early last year following a large number of resignations due to burnout.
The staffing crisis drove up costs at hospital operators, while boosting profits at medical staffing providers such as AMN Healthcare.
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Aerosmith Announces Farewell Tour Starting in September
Aerosmith will be touring a city near you for the last time to celebrate the rock band’s 50-plus years together.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band announced Monday the dates for their farewell tour called “Peace Out” starting Sept. 2 in Philadelphia. The 40-date run of shows, which includes a stop in the band’s hometown of Boston on New Year’s Eve, will end Jan. 26 in Montreal.
“I think it’s about time,” guitarist Joe Perry said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Perry said the group, with frontman Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton, drummer Joey Kramer and guitarist Brad Whitford, learned from the staging and production from their recent Las Vegas residency shows.
Perry believes the time to say goodbye is now, especially with every founding band member over the age of 70. Tyler, 75, is the oldest in the group.
“It’s kind of a chance to celebrate the 50 years we’ve been out here,” Perry said. “You never know how much longer everybody’s going to be healthy to do this. … It’s been a while since we’ve actually done a real tour. We did that run in Vegas, which was great. It was fun, but (we’re) kind of anxious to get back on the road.”
Tyler and Perry said the band is looking forward to digging into their lengthy catalog of the group’s rock classics including “Crazy,” “Janie’s Got a Gun” and “Livin’ on the Edge.”
Over the years, Aerosmith, which formed in 1970, has collected four Grammys. The band broke boundaries intersecting rock and hip-hop with their epic collaboration with Run-DMC for “Walk This Way.”
Aerosmith performed the Super Bowl halftime show in 2001 and even had their own theme park attraction in 1999 at Disney World in Florida and later in Paris with the launch of the “Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith” ride.
“We’re opening up Pandora’s Box one last time to present our fans with the Peace Out tour,” Tyler said in a statement to the AP. His “Pandora’s Box” reference calls out Aerosmith’s 1991 three-disc compilation album that covered the band’s output from the 1970s to the early 1980s.
“Be there or beware as we bring all the toys out of the attic. Get ready,” Tyler added.
The band said Kramer decided to not take part in the current dates on the upcoming tour. He’s still a part of the group, but the drummer has been on leave to “focus his attention on his family and health” since their Vegas residency last year. Drummer John Douglas will continue to play in his place.
Perry called Kramer their brother. The band said his “legendary presence behind the drum kit will be sorely missed.”
Before the 40-date tour wraps, Perry said other cities domestically and internationally could be added.
“It’s the final farewell tour, but I have a feeling it will go on for a while,” he said. “But I don’t know how many times we’ll be coming back to the same cities. It could very possibly be the last time.”
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Native American Photographer Tells Indigenous Tribes’ Stories
Ten years ago, Native American photographer Matika Wilbur embarked on a road trip with an ambitious goal to document all 562 federally recognized Indigenous tribes. Her multiyear work culminated in a new book aiming to change the way people see Native Americans. She launched her book tour in her home state of Washington. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya has more from Seattle.
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Study Points to Better Care for Babies Born to Opioid Users
Babies born to opioid users had shorter hospital stays and needed less medication when their care emphasized parent involvement, skin-to-skin contact and a quiet environment, researchers reported Sunday.
Newborns were ready to go home about a week earlier compared to those getting standard care. Fewer received opioid medications to reduce withdrawal symptoms such as tremors and hard-to-soothe crying, about 20% compared to 52% of the standard-care babies.
Babies born to opioid users, including mothers in treatment with medications such as methadone, can develop withdrawal symptoms after exposure in the womb.
Typically, hospitals use a scoring system to decide which babies need medicine to ease withdrawal, which means treatment in newborn intensive care units.
“The mom is sitting there anxiously waiting for the score,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Leslie Young of the University of Vermont’s children’s hospital. “This would be really stressful for families.”
In the new approach — called Eat, Sleep, Console — nurses involve mothers as they evaluate together whether rocking, breastfeeding or swaddling can calm the baby, Young said. Medicine is an option, but the environment is considered too.
“Is the TV on in the room? Do we need to turn that off? Are the lights on? Do we need to turn those down?” Young said.
About 5,000 nurses were trained during the study, published Sunday by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers studied the care of 1,300 newborns at 26 U.S. hospitals. Babies born before training were compared to babies born after.
The National Institutes of Health funded the work as part of an initiative to address the U.S. opioid addiction crisis.
“One of the great strengths of the study is its geographic diversity,” said Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the branch that researches child health and human development. “We’ve had newborns enrolled from sites as varied as Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Kansas City, Missouri; and Spartanburg, South Carolina.”
Many U.S. hospitals have adopted the new approach, Bianchi said, adding she hopes the research will lead to recommendations from pediatrics groups.
Researchers followed the babies for three months and found no difference in urgent care or emergency room visits or hospitalizations — reassuring evidence about the safety of shorter hospital stays.
The new approach could yield “tremendous savings” in hospital resources, Young said, although the study didn’t estimate cost.
Researchers will follow the babies until age 2 to monitor their health.
Mothers want to be involved, Young said.
“For the first time, they feel like their role as a mom is valued and like they’re important,” she said. “We know that those first moments of a mom and a baby being together are really critical to bonding.”
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