Month: August 2020

As millions of children head back to school, the World Health Organization has issued its recommendation on whether they need to wear face masks.The WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have broken their new guidelines into age groups, and they say children younger than 6 should not wear them.”According to the limited available evidence, young children may have lower susceptibility to infection compared to adults, however available data suggests that this may vary by age among children,” WHO and UNICEF said.In this May 27, 2020, photo, teachers Jana Blair, right, and Aaron Rainboth, upper-center, wear masks as they work with kids at the Frederickson KinderCare daycare center, in Tacoma, Wash.Children 6 to 11 should wear masks, but what the experts call a “risk-based control” should be considered. This includes social and cultural environments, the child’s ability to comply, and the impact mask wearing has on disabilities or underlying diseases.Kids 12 and older need to be treated like adults when wearing masks.But the WHO and UNICEF said no child should be denied access to an education if a mask is unavailable.“Very few, if any, children or teenagers will come to long-term harm from COVID-19 due solely to attending school,’’ British medical officials have said. “This has to be set against a certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school.’’While children who are infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, generally have mild or asymptomatic symptoms, they can still spread the virus to adults.Scientists at the University of Hong Kong said they have found the first known case of someone who was infected twice with COVID-19.The popular belief is that catching the coronavirus once makes people immune to a second case.But the doctors say genetic tests on a 33-year-old male COVID-19 patient found that the strain he had after returning from a trip to Spain several weeks ago is different than the coronavirus strain he had in March.“It shows that some people do not have lifelong immunity” to the virus if they’ve already had it, microbiologist Dr. Kelvin Kai-Wang To said. “We don’t know how many people can get reinfected. There are probably more out there.”“COVID patients should not be complacent about prevention measures,” To said, stressing that everyone needs to continue social distancing and wearing masks.But other experts said the silver lining is that the Hong Kong patient had mild symptoms in March and was asymptomatic the second time around. The virus was confirmed during a screening on his return home.Doctors said this could mean that the initial infection could protect the patient from a more moderate or severe second case.A sign outside the Michigan State University Student Union building alerts students to MSU’s face covering rule on Aug. 21, 2020.Meanwhile, Gaza reported its first cases of COVID-19 that didn’t come from the outside.A government spokesman said four cases from a single family living in a refugee camp were confirmed Monday and security forces have locked down the entire territory for at least two days.Until Monday, all the coronavirus cases found in Gaza were in quarantine centers.Gaza is the Palestinian territory government by Hamas, which Israel considers a terrorist group. Israeli and Egyptian blockades make it tough for people to move in and out of the territory.A WHO official said Monday the coronavirus cases in Gaza, along with the poverty and overcrowding, is a huge challenge and a “matter of concern.” 
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Kenyan authorities and aid agencies say rape and sexual abuse cases against girls have increased since the start of pandemic restrictions, and they say in most cases relatives are the offenders. Some safe shelters in Nairobi are overwhelmed by girls who need an escape from people meant to care for them.  Kenyan children have extra time off these days since schools closed in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. That is making them more vulnerable to sexual predators.  Thirty-three-year-old Judith Andiso said a 20-year-old man targeted her teenage daughter at home and got her pregnant.  “I started interrogating my daughter,” Andiso said. “She started to explain how the man will come in the house while I am away, give her 10-20 shillings, and take her to another dark building near our place.”  Some of the abused children end up in safe houses in central Nairobi. Florence Keya runs one of them. Her center hosts 26 girls, 17 of them came here between March and July.  Keya said  there are many more girls who need a safe home.  “We can only take the number we can manage,” Keya said. “We are so sad because sometimes we deny cases at the gate. So, we say we can’t take them in because we are full.”  Kenya’s Ministry of Health says it has received reports of at least 5,000 sexual violence cases across the country, 65% of them involve girls younger than 18, many of whom live in poverty.  Officials say in many cases the perpetrators are close to the victims and do not believe the abuse is a crime.     Fanis Lisiagali is the head of Healthcare Assistance Kenya, an organization that works closely with the ministry of gender on issues of women and girls. “Girls are being lured very easily by these perpetrators just because they know this family cannot afford to provide,” Lisiagali said. “So, they give them handouts and they end up having sex with these girls. They don’t know this is a punishable thing or punishable crime, but now they accept just because their parents cannot afford to provide certain items.”  Andiso, the mother of five, rarely leaves her house these days worried her children will be victim to more abuse.  
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Misbahu Lawan Didi became paralyzed in both legs after contracting the polio virus as a child. As a lover of games, he was unable to enjoy his favorite sports with his able-bodied counterparts. In 1988, he founded para-soccer for disabled polio survivors to play. Not long after, he also played a part in creating Nigeria’s Polio Survivors’ Association. The aim was to use survivors’ stories to drive awareness and vaccinations.”Many people were rejecting treatment based on what they believed. Some believed it is Western manipulation to reduce the number of Nigerians; some believed in the religion of Islam that it is not accepted,” Didi said. “Everybody had their own beliefs and the government always found it difficult to get to some people because they have already decided not to take the oral polio vaccination.” The game which Lawan started as a young man has become a national sport with a major tournament held each October to mark World Polio Day. A boy wears a cap during a news conference marking the 3-year-polio-free milestone in Abuja, Nigeria, Aug. 21, 2019.Polio survivors like Bello Abdullahi, who have been a part of the game since 1997, are para-soccer stars. He has also made enough money to do business and support his family.”Through the sport I got a house in FCT (Abuja), I have been doing small business,” Abdullahi said. “If you look down there,” he points, “you’ll see my refrigerators — two of them. I got the money to buy the refrigerators through sports.”A 43-nation region in Africa was certified polio-free on August 24 after Nigeria, the last country on the continent to report cases, had not seen an instance since 2016, when cases surged during unrest in the Borno region.Faisal Shuaib is executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency. He said an insurgency involving Boko Haram militants stalled progress made against polio. Boko Haram has been fighting to carve out an Islamic caliphate based in Nigeria.”We could not access kids behind the enemy lines,” Shuaib said. “When the kids started coming out then it became obvious that there was still some transmission going on in Borno around the lake Chad region. But beyond all of that, there was insecurity as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency, that is what created many communities that were inaccessible.A player for the Kano Pillars para-soccer team holds his son Khalid after a training session in Kano, northwestern Nigeria, on April 22, 2017.The victory for the African region comes more than two decades since Nigeria joined the fight to eradicate polio in Africa.While many celebrate, Shuaib said it’s important to remain vigilant. ”As long as we continue to have two endemic countries — Pakistan and Afghanistan, then there’s always that potential that there’ll be importation of the wild polio virus to any African country, to Nigeria as it were,” Shuaib said. “So, of course, that concern is there.”A disability rights group in Nigeria estimates 40% of people with disabilities in the country are polio survivors, and that most of them live in abject poverty. Beyond Nigeria’s polio eradication, polio survivor Misbahu Lawan Didi says he will keep working to give other survivors hope through sports. 
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A region in Africa that includes 43 nations has been certified free of the wild polio virus (Aug. 24) after Nigeria, the last endemic country, recorded no new cases for the past three consecutive years. Nigeria’s polio survivors are celebrating the eradication of the virus, even though many still face challenges. Timothy Obiezu profiles the president of Nigeria’s Polio Survivors Association, who has been helping other survivors through sport.
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Videoconferencing platform Zoom experienced worldwide outages Monday morning, coinciding with the first day of remote classes for many schools and universities. On its status page, Zoom reported partial outages for its website, meetings and webinars. By Monday afternoon, all systems were reported as operational. Downdetector recorded a spike in issue reports, mostly from North America and western Europe, which peaked at nearly 17,000 complaints at 9 a.m. EST. Lighter areas on Downdetector’s map Monday morning also showed complaints in China, India, Mexico and other countries, although most had faded by the afternoon. The company’s Twitter mentions were flooded with concerned and panicked users, including professors and students. “Please fix the system — we depend on your availability,” wrote Janine M. Ziermann, an assistant professor at Howard University’s College of Medicine in Washington. “Half of my student’s [sic] don’t get emails due to server failure … Zoom seems down … my lecture starts in 43 minutes,” she wrote, alongside an animated image from TV show The Big Bang Theory of a character hyperventilating into a paper bag. Half of my student’s don’t get emails due to server failure … Zoom seems down …
my lecture starts in 43 minutes pic.twitter.com/OY2sPRyx5g
— Janine M. Ziermann, PhD (@JMZiermann) August 24, 2020“My laptop is buzzing, phone melting down,” wrote Florida State University professor Mark Zeigler. “I would cry, but I decided to laugh and have a cup of tea.” So ZOOM is out campus wide. My laptop is buzzing, phone melting down….I would cry, but I decided to laugh and have a cup of tea.
— Mark Zeigler (@fsuzeigler) August 24, 2020Students were quick to make jokes on the widespread outages. “And like clockwork both Zoom and Canvas crash the first morning back to school,” wrote Lauren Gruber, a graduate student at Indiana University, alongside an image of a flaming Elmo figure. The meme is used to denote chaotic situations. “You really, really can’t make this stuff up.” And like clockwork both Zoom and Canvas crash the first morning back to school. You really, really can’t make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/u3SCCjIliZ
— Lauren Gruber (@GrubersOrch) August 24, 2020Canvas is a program that supports online learning by allowing users to submit homework assignments and view their grades. Zoom announced it was investigating the problems at 8:51 a.m. EST and said by 11:30 a.m. it had rolled out a fix for most users. “Everything should be working properly now!” the company tweeted, offering its “sincere apologies” to customers. Everything should be working properly now! We are continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you all for your patience and our sincere apologies for disrupting your day.
— Zoom (@zoom_us) August 24, 2020Users in California, Mexico and elsewhere replied saying they were still experiencing issues. Others, seemingly students, jokingly asked Zoom to shut down again. Billionaire businessman Eric Yuan started Zoom in 2011, originally under the name Saasbee. By the end of its first month, the California-based company had more than 400,000 users, and by 2017 was valued at $1 billion. The company remained little known outside its base of mostly business users, but when the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, Zoom saw its usage rates surge. Schools, universities and other organizations took their operations to Zoom, kicking off heightened scrutiny of the software’s security and privacy features, and connections to China. In June, the company acknowledged closing three accounts belonging to U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Axios reported. Zoom has also been plagued by reports of unwanted guests intruding on video meetings, an event so common it has its own name: Zoom-bombing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a press release in March warning the public of the practice after two schools said their online classes were hacked. The widespread crashes Monday morning underscored the problems of online learning, even as schools kick off another year.Students Give Online Learning Low MarksMany call on universities to end the semester early  
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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, was a tough act to follow. But Tim Cook seems to be doing so well at it that his eventual successor may also have big shoes to fill.
Initially seen as a mere caretaker for the iconic franchise that Jobs built before his 2011 death, Cook has forged his own distinctive legacy. He will mark his ninth anniversary as Apple’s CEO Monday — the same day the company will split its stock for the second time during his reign, setting up the shares to begin trading on a split-adjusted basis beginning August 31.
Grooming Cook as heir apparent was “one of Steve Jobs’ greatest accomplishments that is vastly underappreciated,” said longtime Apple analyst Gene Munster, who is now managing partner of Loup Ventures.
The upcoming four-for-one stock split, a move that has no effect on share price but often spurs investor enthusiasm, is one measure of Apple’s success under Cook. The company was worth just under $400 billion when Cook the helm; it’s worth five times more than that today, and has just become the first U.S. company to boast a market value of $2 trillion. Its share performance has easily eclipsed the benchmark S&P 500, which has roughly tripled in value during the past nine years.
But it hasn’t always been easy. Among the challenges Cook has faced: a slowdown in iPhone sales as smartphones matured, a showdown with the FBI over user privacy, a U.S. trade war with China that threatened to force up iPhone prices and now a pandemic that has closed many of Apple’s retail stores and sunk the economy into a deep recession.
Cook, 59, has also struck out into novel territory. Apple now pays a quarterly dividend, a step Jobs resisted partly because he associated shareholder payments with stodgy companies that were past their prime. Cook also used his powerful perch to become an outspoken advocate for civil rights and renewable energy, and on a personal level came out as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company in 2014.
Apple declined to make Cook available for an interview. But it did point to 2009 comments Cook made to financial analysts when he was running the company while Jobs battled pancreatic cancer.
Asked what the company might look like under his management, Cook said that Apple needs “to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make.” It has doubled down on that commitment, becoming a major chip producer in order to supply both iPhones and Macs. He added that Apple would resist exploring most projects “so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.”
That laser focus has served Apple well. At the same time, though, under Cook’s stewardship, Apple has largely failed to come up with breakthrough successors to the iPhone. Its smartwatch and wireless ear buds have emerged as market leaders, but not game changers.
Cook and other executives have dropped hints that Apple wants make a big splash in the field of augmented reality, which uses phone screens or high-tech eyewear to paint digital images into the real world. Apple has yet to deliver, although neither have other companies that have hyped the technology.
Apple also remains a laggard in artificial intelligence, particularly in the increasingly important market for voice-activated digital assistants. Although Apple’s Siri is widely used on Apple devices, Amazon’s Alexa and Google”s digital assistant have made major inroads in helping people manage their lives, particularly in homes and offices.
Apple also has stumbled a few times under Cook’s leadership.
In 2017, it alienated customers by deliberately but quietly slowing the performance of older iPhones via a software update, ostensibly to spare the life of aging batteries. Many consumers, though, viewed it as a ploy to boost sales of newer and more expensive iPhones. Amid the furor, Apple offered to replace aging batteries at a steep discount; later it paid $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over the matter.
Apple has also faced government investigations into its aggressive efforts to minimize its corporate taxes and complaints that it has abused control of its app store to charge excessive fees and stifle competition to its own digital services. On the tax front, a court ruled in July that Apple did nothing wrong.
Cook has turned the app store into the cornerstone of a services division that he set out to expand four years ago. At the time, it was growing clear that sales of the iPhone — Apple’s biggest money maker — were destined to slow down as innovations grew sparse and consumers kept their old devices for longer.
To help offset that trend, Cook began to emphasize recurring revenue from app commission, warranty programs and streaming subscriptions to music, video, games and news sold for the more 1.5 billion devices already running on the company’s software.
After doubling in size in less than four years, Apple’s services division now generates $50 billion in annual revenue, more than all but 65 companies in the Fortune 500. Ives estimates Apple’s services division by itself is worth about $750 billion — about the same as Facebook currently is in its entirety.
That division could be worth even more now had Cook done something many analysts believe Apple should have done at least five years ago by dipping into a hoard of cash that at one point surpassed $260 billion to buy Netflix or a major movie studio to fuel its video streaming ambitions.
Buying Netflix seemed within the realm of possibility five years ago when the video streaming service was valued at around $40 billion. Now that Netflix is worth more than $200 billion today, that idea seems off the table, even for a company with Apple’s vast resources.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday nine vaccines are being evaluated by its cooperative COVAX facility which now has 172 nations as contributing partners. The FILE – World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a news conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, July 3, 2020.Speaking at his usual briefing at the agency’s Geneva headquarters, WHO director- general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the facility is critical to efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Tedros said making sure all nations have access to any viable vaccine makes the most economic sense. He said it would lead to a prolonged pandemic if only a small number of the richest countries would get most of the supply, saying “Vaccine nationalism only helps the virus.” The WHO chief urged other nations who are not participating to join COVAX. More resources and more vaccines are needed, he said, to meet the goal of having at least two billion does of safe, effective vaccines by the end of 2021.  Tedros said as nations invest billions into their economic stimulus, to see get their economies back up and running, COVAX offers “a huge return on investment. There is a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.  
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The World Food Program reports Burkina Faso is facing an acute shortage of food, with more than 3.2 million people going hungry in this conflict-ridden country.There has been a 50 percent rise in the number of people struggling to feed themselves and their families since March. The World Food Program warns the situation is likely to worsen in the current lean season – the period when food stocks are at their lowest ahead of the September harvest. WFP reports people in two provinces in the Sahel region, Oudalan and Soum, have reached near starvation level. It says fighting by a myriad of Jihadist and armed groups in the region has forced thousands of people to flee their homes, preventing them from cultivating their crops.   WFP spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs says insecurity and conflict are the main drivers of growing hunger in Burkina Faso. “Most of those forced to flee are subsistence farmers and livestock herders who have had to abandon their farms, homes, assets, livelihoods. Some farmers were not able to harvest their fields and most of the displaced are no longer able to grow crops. This is dramatic in a country where 80 percent of the population lives from agriculture,” Byrs said.The United Nations reports a surge of attacks by armed groups over the last two years has prompted more than one million people in Burkina Faso to flee their homes.   Byrs says WFP is racing against the clock to prevent a hunger catastrophe. She says the agency has continued to scale up its assistance over the past two years to try to keep pace with the growing humanitarian crisis.   She says WFP is hoping to provide food assistance to 1.2 million people this month, but money is running out. She says the agency urgently needs $51 million to respond to the growing needs. She warns WFP will be forced to cut food rations without immediate funding, putting many lives at risk. 
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