Mexican officials and the conservation group Sea Shepherd said Monday that experts would set out in two ships in a bid to locate the few remaining vaquita marina, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. 

Mexico’s environment secretary said experts from the United States, Canada and Mexico will use binoculars, sighting devices and acoustic monitors to try to pinpoint the location of the tiny elusive porpoises. The species cannot be captured, held or bred in captivity. 

The trip will start Wednesday and run to May 26 in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, the only place the vaquita lives. The group will travel in a Sea Shepherd vessel and a Mexican boat and try to sight vaquitas. As few as eight of the creatures are believed to remain. 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Annika Hammerschlag

Illegal gillnet fishing traps and kills the vaquita. Fishermen set the nets to catch totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China and can fetch thousands of dollars per pound (0.45 kilograms). 

Sea Shepherd has been working in the Gulf alongside the Mexican navy to discourage illegal fishing in the one area where vaquitas were last seen. The area is known as the “zero tolerance” zone, and fishing is supposedly not allowed there. However, illegal fishing boats are regularly seen there, and so Mexico has been unable to completely stop them. 

Pritam Singh, Sea Shepherd’s chairman, said that a combination of patrols and the Mexican navy’s sinking of concrete blocks with hooks to snare illegal nets has reduced the number of hours that fishing boats spend in the restricted zone by 79% in 2022, compared with the previous year. 

Singh said that “the last 18 months have been incredibly impactful and encouraging,” while noting that “the road ahead for saving this species is long.” 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Henry Wilkins

The last such sighting expedition in 2021 yielded probable sightings of between five and 13 vaquitas, a decline from the previous survey in 2019. The porpoises are so small and so elusive, and are usually seen from so far away, that it is hard for observers to be certain that they saw a vaquita, count how many they saw or determine whether they saw the same animal twice. 

Illegal fishing itself has impeded population calculations in the past. 

According to a report published in 2022, both the 2019 and 2021 surveys “were hindered by the presence of many illegal fishing boats with gillnets in the water. Some areas could not be surveyed at all on some days due to the density of illegal fishing.” 

The government’s protection efforts have been uneven, at best, and often face violent opposition from local fishermen. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration has largely declined to spend money to compensate fishermen for staying out of the vaquita refuge and not using gillnets, or to monitor the fishing boats or the areas they launch from. 
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Funding for a global initiative aimed at creating more environmentally friendly and climate-resilient farming has grown to $13 billion, co-leaders the United States and the United Arab Emirates said Monday.

That money means the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate, launched in 2021, now exceeds its $10 billion target for the COP28 climate talks, to be hosted by the UAE in November and December.

“Climate change continues to impact longstanding agricultural practices in every country and a strong global commitment is necessary to face the challenges of climate change head-on,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Vilsack and his Emirati counterpart Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, the UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment, are co-hosting an AIM for Climate Summit in Washington this week.

“I think the beauty of this is that of the $13 billion, $10 billion comes from the government and three billion is coming from the private sector,” said Almheiri.

Between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse emissions come from food systems, from factors like deforestation to make way for agricultural land, methane emissions from livestock, the energy costs associated with supply chains and energy used by consumers to store and prepare food.

At the same time, the changing climate is threatening food security across the world, as global warming increases the frequency of punishing heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events.

Projects underway include developing newer, greener fertilizers that use less fossil fuels to create, and returning to so-called “regenerative agriculture” practices that restore soil biodiversity, thus improving both yield and carbon sequestration while reducing the need for fertilization.

Artificial intelligence-enhanced tools meanwhile are being developed to take data from sources including satellites and ground sensors to then accurately estimate how carbon-rich any given plot of land is, which could help farmers boost soil health or enable the creation of a viable carbon offset market.

Also on the group’s agenda are efforts to adopt more efficient farming techniques and to switch to growing crops that require less water in some climate-impacted areas.

“Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, low-income farmers, they need access to this innovation as well,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and climate activist told the summit’s opening meeting.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, as well as ministers from Britain, the European Commission, Australia, Kenya, Mexico and Panama are all set to address the conference.
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For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much.

The grant provides more than $5 million over four years to New York University and Brown University to study two sites in New York City and one opening next year in Providence, Rhode Island.

Researchers hope to enroll 1,000 adult drug users to study the effectiveness of the sites to prevent overdoses, to estimate their costs and to gauge potential savings for the health care and criminal justice systems.

The universities announced the grant Monday. The money will not be used to operate the sites, the universities said.

With U.S. drug overdose deaths reaching nearly 107,000 in 2021, supporters contend safe injection sites, also called overdose preventions centers, can save lives and connect people with addiction treatment, mental health services and medical care.

Opponents worry the sites encourage drug use and that they will lead to the deterioration of surrounding neighborhoods.

“There is a lot of discussion about overdose prevention centers, but ultimately, we need data to see if they are working or not, and what impact they may have on the community,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which awarded the grant.

Sites operate in 14 countries, including Canada, Australia and France, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working for decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

In the U.S., New York City opened the first publicly recognized safe injection site in 2021, and Rhode Island became the first state to authorize them that year.

States including Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico have considered allowing them. The governors of California and Vermont vetoed bills allowing safe injection sites last year, and Pennsylvania’s Senate last week voted for a ban on them.

The grant marks another move by the Biden administration toward what is known as harm reduction, a strategy focused on preventing death and illness in drug users while helping them get care, as opposed to punishment.

The White House’s drug control strategy is the first to emphasize harm reduction, and the Justice Department has signaled it will allow safe injection sites.

In December, the National Institutes of Health established a harm reduction research network to study programs providing services and supplies, including naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses, and materials to test drugs for fentanyl, a powerful opioid driving record numbers of overdoses. The new study on safe injection sites will be part of that project.
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Most Democrats and Republicans agree that the federal government should better regulate the biggest technology companies, particularly social media platforms. But there is little consensus on how it should be done. 

Concerns have skyrocketed about China’s ownership of TikTok, and parents have grown increasingly worried about what their children are seeing online. Lawmakers have introduced a slew of bipartisan bills, boosting hopes of compromise. But any effort to regulate the mammoth industry would face major obstacles as technology companies have fought interference. 

Noting that many young people are struggling, President Joe Biden said in his February State of the Union address that “it’s time” to pass bipartisan legislation to impose stricter limits on the collection of personal data and ban targeted advertising to children. 

“We must finally hold social media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit,” Biden said.

A look at some of the areas of potential regulation: 

Children’s safety

Several House and Senate bills would try to make social media, and the internet in general, safer for children who will inevitably be online. Lawmakers cite numerous examples of teenagers who have taken their own lives after cyberbullying or have died engaging in dangerous behavior encouraged on social media. 

In the Senate, at least two bills are focused on children’s online safety. Legislation by Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, approved by the chamber’s Commerce Committee last year would require social media companies to be more transparent about their operations and enable child safety settings by default. Minors would have the option to disable addictive product features and algorithms that push certain content. 

The idea, the senators say, is that platforms should be “safe by design.” The legislation, which Blumenthal and Blackburn reintroduced last week, would also obligate social media companies to prevent certain dangers to minors — including promotion of suicide, disordered eating, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and other illegal behaviors. 

A second bill introduced last month by four senators — Democratic Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Katie Britt of Alabama — would take a more aggressive approach, prohibiting children under 13 from using social media platforms and requiring parental consent for teenagers. It would also prohibit companies from recommending content through algorithms for users under 18.

Critics of the bills, including some civil rights groups and advocacy groups aligned with tech companies, say the proposals could threaten teens’ online privacy and prevent them from accessing content that could help them, such as resources for those considering suicide or grappling with their sexual and gender identity. 

“Lawmakers should focus on educating and empowering families to control their online experience,” said Carl Szabo of NetChoice, a group aligned with Meta, TikTok, Google and Amazon, among other companies. 

Data privacy 

Biden’s State of the Union remarks appeared to be a nod toward legislation by Senators Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, that would expand child privacy protections online, prohibiting companies from collecting personal data from younger teenagers and banning targeted advertising to children and teens. The bill, also reintroduced last week, would create an “eraser button” allowing parents and kids to eliminate personal data, when possible. 

A broader House effort would attempt to give adults as well as children more control over their data with what lawmakers call a “national privacy standard.” Legislation that passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee last year would try to minimize data collected and make it illegal to target ads to children, usurping state laws that have tried to put privacy restrictions in place. But the bill, which would have also given consumers more rights to sue over privacy violations, never reached the House floor. 

Prospects for the House legislation are unclear now that Republicans have the majority.

 

TikTok, China 

Lawmakers introduced a raft of bills to either ban TikTok or make it easier to ban it after a combative March House hearing in which lawmakers from both parties grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew over his company’s ties to China’s communist government, data security and harmful content on the app. 

Chew attempted to assure lawmakers that the hugely popular video-sharing app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned because of its Chinese connections. But the testimony gave new momentum to the efforts. 

Soon after the hearing, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, tried to force a Senate vote on legislation that would ban TikTok from operating in the United States. But he was blocked by a fellow Republican, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who said that a ban would violate the Constitution and anger the millions of voters who use the app. 

Another bill sponsored by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida would, like Hawley’s bill, ban U.S. economic transactions with TikTok, but it would also create a new framework for the executive branch to block any foreign apps deemed hostile. His bill is co-sponsored by Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, and Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican. 

There is broad Senate support for bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and South Dakota Senatpr John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, that does not specifically call out TikTok but would give the Commerce Department power to review and potentially restrict foreign threats to technology platforms. 

The White House has signaled it would back that bill, but its prospects are uncertain. 

Artificial intelligence 

A newer question for Congress is whether lawmakers should move to regulate artificial intelligence as rapidly developing and potentially revolutionary products like AI chatbot ChatGPT begin to enter the marketplace and can in many ways mimic human behavior. 

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York has made the emerging technology a priority, arguing that the United States needs to stay ahead of China and other countries that are eyeing regulations on AI products. He has been working with AI experts and has released a general framework of what regulation could look like, including increased disclosure of the people and data involved in developing the technology, more transparency and explanation for how the bots arrive at responses.

The White House has been focused on the issue as well, with a recent announcement of a $140 million investment to establish seven new AI research institutes. Vice President Kamala Harris met Thursday with the heads of Google, Microsoft and other companies developing AI products.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in Washington state in a series that today explores how stigmas about fentanyl abuse complicate treatment for addicts.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States, says U.S. law enforcement. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in a series from the state of Washington that concludes by showing how breaking free from addiction can be a lifelong journey.
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“Being in hospitals during the early days of COVID-19 was terrifying, like I was going to war. But as far as I’m concerned, those days are done, Danielle King, a nurse working in Luling, Louisiana, told VOA.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the pandemic was over a year ago,” she added. “The government’s lagging behind that reality, so maybe they’ll finally catch up.”

The U.S. government will take a big step in that direction Thursday as Washington officially declares an end to the coronavirus pandemic by allowing the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) to expire.

The emergency was first instituted more than three years ago to provide funding and resources that would keep Americans safe during the then-growing global pandemic.

While many health care officials agree the time is right to end the national emergency and let state and local governments allocate resources to the COVID-19 response, some worry the move will harm Americans — particularly the impoverished — who will be less likely to afford vaccinations and risk being dropped from government programs such as Medicaid.

“It’s regrettable, but we have no certainty on what impact the PHE’s end will have on the public,” said Amy Pisani, CEO of Vaccinate Your Family, a national nonprofit organization.

“Public health advocates haven’t had a seat at the table to discuss how the end of the PHE declaration will look,” she said. “We know, for example, that COVID-19 vaccinations have been essential in keeping us safe, but how will uninsured adults access and afford the vaccines when the PHE is done? How long will free vaccines be available? Will it vary from region to region? We have no idea. All we know is it’s going to affect a lot of people.”

‘No longer a threat’

The PHE was first declared in January 2020 by former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Since entering office in 2021, President Joe Biden has repeatedly extended the emergency. Many public health officials, including Dr. Jeffrey Elder, associate chief medical officer for emergency management at LCMC Health in New Orleans, Louisiana, believe the emergency allowed the government to take sweeping steps to support the country’s economic, health and welfare systems throughout the crisis.

“The PHE supported and funded nationwide coronavirus testing, the research and distribution of vaccinations and treatments, telehealth services, disaster responses, hospital-at-home services, nurse aide training for nursing homes and so much more,” Elder told VOA.

“And it gave our patients the comfort of knowing they couldn’t be kicked off their Medicaid insurance coverage during the emergency,” he added. “It was invaluable.”

Most public health officials, however, acknowledge the coronavirus no longer presents the crisis it once did, and the PHE may no longer be necessary.

“While we continue to see illness and deaths from COVID-19, it is no longer the threat it once was, thanks to testing, vaccines and treatment,” said Dr. Susan Kansagra, director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Division of Public Health.

She believes COVID-19 will soon be treated as routinely as other respiratory illnesses the country regularly faces.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said this is a good thing.

“To call this an emergency is to elevate it above other viruses that are causing basically the same number of hospitalizations and deaths,” he said.

“I think there’s a danger to that, and I see that danger with some of my friends,” Offit said. “When their 8-year-old is sick they say, ‘Oh, I hope it’s not COVID,’ and then they test them. If they test negative, they just send them to school or to their grandparents or wherever they are going, as if it’s OK to pass on whatever disease they do have. Maybe putting coronavirus on the level of these other diseases will encourage us to take their spread all a little more seriously, as well.”

‘Wide-ranging chaos’

Coronavirus cases and deaths continue to drop, but thousands of Americans are still affected by the disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,773 people died of COVID-19 during the week ending April 5.

Some fear that with so many people still being impacted, suddenly ending the declaration could create a new set of problems.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system — for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy earlier this year.

Dr. Joe McLaughlin, Alaska state epidemiologist, believes ending the PHE can reduce government spending and help the country return to a more traditional health care model. But he warns of downsides.

“We’re going to see fewer health care provider flexibilities, a reduction in access to over-the-counter tests and a decrease in some social safety net benefits. This is definitely going to affect people,” he said.

Of particular concern to health care providers is that states will no longer be forbidden from dropping enrollees from Medicaid, a federal health care program for the poor and disadvantaged, as they were during the PHE. In the months following the emergency’s conclusion, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million of America’s most vulnerable will lose their Medicaid coverage.

Additionally, it is expected that COVID-19 tests and vaccinations will no longer be offered free of charge. Once the government stops buying vaccines, the cost is expected to skyrocket. Pfizer announced it could charge as much as $130 per dose.

Challenge and opportunity

“I think it’s the right time to end it,” New Orleans nurse Brandon Legnion said of the PHE.

“I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of a single COVID-positive admission at our hospital in the last six months,” he told VOA. “The demand for PPE [personal protective equipment] and vaccines are way down, so maybe it’s time to treat coronavirus patients with the same well-researched protocols we use for other airborne transmitted diseases like tuberculosis or varicella [chickenpox].”

Ending the PHE will restructure the federal government’s COVID-19 response as an endemic, rather than a pandemic, managed through government agencies’ normal authorities. In addition to tapering coronavirus relief funds, the development of vaccines and treatments will be shifted away from federal government control.

State health department officials say the transition will be a challenge, but they are ready.

“We’ve been preparing for the possibility of the end of the federal public health emergency for some time now, and we released our state’s plan in a roadmap last year,” said AnneMarie Harper, communications director at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

“It’s a sustainable, continued response to COVID-19 that features partnerships between public and private entities that ensure all Coloradans are being taken care of, including those without insurance,” she said.

In Maryland, similar work has been done to prepare for what has become a critical transition in the country’s health care system.

Chase Cook, acting director of communications at the Maryland Department of Health, said ending the PHE makes sense because it aligns with a decrease in COVID-19 hospitalization and severity, as well as an increasing integration of coronavirus-related services into existing public health infrastructure.

“The end of the public health emergency can be seen as a challenge,” Cook told VOA, “but it’s also an opportunity … to continue responding to the effects of the pandemic on public health, to strengthen relationships within the health care system, to maintain public-private partnerships, to grow the public health workforce, and to build on renewed efforts to decrease health disparities in Maryland. It’s an opportunity, and we’re ready.” 
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Mohammed Azhar holds his baby niece next to a storm drain full of plastic and stinking black sludge, testament to India’s failure to treat nearly two-thirds of its urban sewage.

“We stay inside our homes. We fall sick if we go out,” the 21-year-old told AFP in the Delhi neighborhood of Seelampur, where open gutters packed with plastic and sickly greyish water flow alongside the narrow lanes.

“It stinks. It attracts mosquitoes. We catch diseases and the kids keep falling sick,” he added. “There is no one to clean the filth.”

India at the end of April was projected to have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, according to the United Nations, with almost 1.43 billion people.

Its urban population is predicted to explode in the coming decades, with over 270 million more people forecast to live in its cities by 2040.

But of the 72 billion liters of sewage currently generated in urban centers every day, 45 billion liters — enough to fill 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — aren’t treated, according to government figures for 2020-21.

India’s sewerage system does not connect to about two-thirds of its urban homes, according to the National Fecal Sludge and Septage Management Alliance (NFSSM).

Many of the sewage treatment plants in operation don’t comply with standards, including 26 out of Delhi’s 35 facilities, according to media reports.

Coupled with huge volumes of industrial effluent, the sewage is causing disease, polluting India’s waterways, killing wildlife and seeping into groundwater.

Ecologically dead

Although India has made major progress in reducing child mortality, diarrhea — caused mostly by contaminated water and food — remains a leading killer.

More than 55,000 children under five died of diarrhea across India in 2019, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal BMC Public Health.

The Yamuna in Delhi is one of the world’s filthiest rivers and is considered ecologically dead in places, although people still wash clothes and take ritual baths in it.

It often billows with white foam, and facilities processing drinking water from the river for Delhi’s 20 million people regularly shut down because of dangerous ammonia levels.

Despite some bright spots, as well as efforts to plant more trees alongside rivers, the situation elsewhere is often no better in big cities including Mumbai and Chennai.

In Bengaluru, massive Bellandur Lake has on occasion caught fire when methane, generated by bacteria feasting on sewage in the oxygen-depleted water, ignited.

Water crisis

Mridula Ramesh, author of a book about India’s water woes who lives in a “nearly” net-zero-waste home, said properly treating sewage into useable water would help solve the crisis.

According to the World Bank, India is one of the most “water-stressed” countries in the world, with plummeting water tables and increasingly erratic monsoon rains.

Chennai nearly ran out of water briefly in 2019, and other cities may see similar calamities in the coming years due to excessive groundwater pumping and rainfall volatility.

“India is headed for a water crisis. Sewage can so easily be co-opted to fight that and help us to a very large extent solve the problem in our cities,” Ramesh told AFP.

This could be achieved with decentralized treatment plants partially funded by the private sector or non-governmental organizations, with some of the fully treated sewage reused or released into local lakes.

“India’s water is so seasonal. Many cities in India get 50 rain days… but sewage is available every day because you go to the bathroom every day… It’s such a powerful weapon,” she said.

For Khalil Ahmad, standing by the revolting open drain in Seelampur as flies buzz around, a solution can’t come soon enough.

“Children keep falling sick… If they don’t get treatment and medicine, the children will die,” he told AFP. 
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China has approved the safety of a gene-edited soybean, its first approval of the technology in a crop, as the country increasingly looks to science to boost food production.

The soybean, developed by privately owned Shandong Shunfeng Biotechnology Co. Ltd., has two modified genes, significantly raising the level of healthy fat oleic acid in the plant.

The safety certificate has been approved for five years from April 21, according to a document published last week by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Unlike genetic modification, which introduces foreign genes into a plant, gene editing alters existing genes.

The technology is considered to be less risky than GMOs and is more lightly regulated in some countries, including China, which published rules on gene-editing last year.

“The approval of the safety certificate is a shot in the arm for the Shunfeng team,” said the firm in a statement to Reuters on Thursday.

Shunfeng claims to be the first company in China seeking to commercialize gene-edited crops.

It is currently researching around 20 other gene-edited crops, including higher yield rice, wheat and corn, herbicide-resistant rice and soybeans and vitamin C-rich lettuce, said a company representative.

United States-based company Calyxt also developed a high oleic soybean, producing a healthy oil that was the first gene-edited food to be approved in the U.S. in 2019.

Several additional steps are needed before China’s farmers can plant the novel soybean, including approvals of seed varieties with the tweaked genes.

The approval comes as trade tensions, erratic weather and war in major grain exporter Ukraine have increased concerns in Beijing over feeding the country’s 1.4 billion people.

A growing middle class is also facing a surge in diet-related disease.

China is promoting GMO crops too, starting large-scale trials of GM corn this year.

Getting gene-edited crops onto the market is expected to be faster however, given fewer steps in the regulatory process.

Aside from the United States, Japan also has approved gene-edited foods, including healthier tomatoes and faster-growing fish.
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The World Health Organization has declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be over as a global health emergency. 

 

“However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said Friday. ‘This virus is here to stay. It is killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths.” 

 

The first known outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in November 2019 in Wuhan, China. When the WHO declared COVID a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, there were fewer than 100 reported cases, and no reported deaths outside China. 

 

In the three years since then, the number of global COVID deaths reported to WHO has risen to nearly 7 million, though the true death toll, according to Tedros, is several times higher, reaching at least 20 million. 

 

“COVID-19 has turned our world upside down,” he said, severely disrupting health systems, causing severe economic and social upheaval, and plunging millions into poverty.  

 

But for more than a year now, he said, “the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing.” 

 

He noted these were among the many reasons he decided to take the advice of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee to lower the level of alarm and declare an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern. 

 

Didier Houssin, chair of the IHR committee, said only two or three people on the 18-member committee displayed any hesitation about declaring an end to the pandemic as a global threat.

 

He acknowledged that many uncertainties remained, “particularly regarding the evolution of the virus,” which he said continued to circulate in every country as the pandemic continued. 

 

Houssin said the committee also expressed concern about the big gaps in surveillance, reporting and health care, “particularly in the most vulnerable countries.” 

 

“However, the situation has markedly improved, with less mortality and an increased immunity against the virus, an immunity which is vaccine-induced or naturally induced, and a better access to diagnosis, vaccines and treatment,” he said. 

 

Houssin emphasized that after more than three years, it was “time to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused so much suffering, with new tools and new ambitions,” underscoring the need to prepare for future pandemics.

‘The battle is not over’

Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said this virus would continue to persist and threaten, but at a much lower levels of impact, tragedy, hospitalization and death. 

 

“We have got control over the virus by applying the science, and by applying the hard-won lessons we have learned from this pandemic,” Ryan said.  

 

“We now need to move on to the next phase. The battle is not over. We still have weaknesses, and those weaknesses that we still have in our system will be exposed by this virus or another virus, and it needs to be fixed,” he said. 

 

While the public health emergency might be over, he observed that in most cases, “pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins,” which means that the world must prepare for what is to come. 

 

His colleague, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, picked up on this theme, warning that the virus was evolving. “While we are not in a crisis mode, we cannot let our guard down. Epidemiologically, this virus will continue to cause waves,” she said.   

 

“What we are hopeful of is that we have the tools in place to ensure that the future waves do not result in more severe disease, do not result in waves of death, and we can do that with the tools we have at hand,” she said. “We just have to make sure that we are tracking the virus, because it will continue to evolve.”  

 

WHO chief Tedros said, “The virus is here to stay and … it is time for countries to transition from emergency mode to managing COVID-19 alongside other infectious diseases.” 

 

He said the world must prepare for the next pandemic that surely will come and “move forward with a shared commitment to meet shared threats with a shared response.”
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The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers a coda to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The U.N. health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t ended, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to assess the situation should a new variant “put our world in peril.”

Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19.

He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty.

The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by President Donald Trump in his administration’s response to the pandemic had a role in his losing reelection bid in 2020. The United States saw the deadliest outbreak of any country in the world — where more than 1 million people died.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said it was incumbent on heads of states and other leaders to negotiate a wide-ranging pandemic treaty to decide how future health threats should be faced.

Ryan said that some of the scenes witnessed during COVID-19, when people resorted to “bartering for oxygen canisters,” fought to get into emergency rooms and died in parking lots because they couldn’t get treated, must never be repeated.

When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.

More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.

In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped most of their provisions against the pandemic last year.

When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus’ potential to spread in countries with weak health systems.

In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the U.S. and Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just 3% of the global total.

WHO doesn’t “declare” pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway.

WHO is the only agency mandated to coordinate the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization faltered repeatedly as the coronavirus unfolded.

In January 2020, WHO publicly applauded China for its supposed speedy and transparent response, even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.

WHO also recommended against mask-wearing for the public for months, a mistake many health officials say cost lives.

Numerous scientists also slammed WHO’s reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 was frequently spread in the air and by people without symptoms, criticizing the agency’s lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.

Tedros was a vociferous critic of rich countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, warning that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share shots with poor countries.

Most recently, WHO has struggled to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavour that has also become politically fraught.

After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”

But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.

Tedros lamented that the catastrophic toll of COVID-19 could have been avoided.

“We have the tools and the technologies to prepare for pandemics better, to detect them earlier, to respond to them faster,” Tedros said, without citing missteps by WHO specifically.

“Lives were lost that should not have been. We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again.”
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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