Day: July 22, 2021

The largest wildfire in the United States continued to burn Thursday in southern Oregon, but lower winds and higher humidity were assisting firefighting crews. In Northern California, a fire spread to the neighboring state of Nevada.

Oregon’s Bootleg Fire grew to 1,616 square kilometers (624 square miles), yet firefighting crews were reportedly improving fire lines.

The fire was also nearing an area burned during a previous fire, giving officials hope that the lack of fuel would hinder its spread.

“Fire crews and support personnel have made significant progress in containing this fire in the last few days,” Joe Prummer, incident commander trainee of Pacific Northwest Incident Management Team 2, said in a statement. “However, we still have a long road ahead of us to ensure the safety of the surrounding communities.”

In Oregon, 2,000 homes were ordered evacuated and 5,000 were still under threat, The Associated Press reported. No deaths from the fire have been reported.

Smoke and ash were reportedly affecting air quality as far away as the East Coast.

The Oregon fire was started by a lightning strike.

In California, the Tamarack fire, south of Lake Tahoe, has burned 176 square kilometers (68 square miles) and crossed the state line into Nevada.

California power company Pacific Gas & Electric announced a plan to bury 10,000 miles of its power lines to prevent tree falls from starting fires.

The cost of burying what amounts to 10% of the company’s power lines could be $15 billion to $30 billion. That cost was expected to be passed along to PG&E customers, who already pay among the highest electricity rates in the nation.

The announcement came after the company said a tree’s plunge onto a power line might have ignited a major fire.

PG&E’s poorly maintained equipment was blamed for devastating fires in 2017 and 2019, leading to the company’s bankruptcy filing in 2019.

Since emerging from bankruptcy, the company has faced criticism for not addressing the problem of trees near its power lines, which it has promised to fix.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.
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Confronting the historic drought that has a firm grip on the American West requires a heavy federal infrastructure investment to protect existing water supplies but also will depend on efforts at all levels of government to reduce demand by promoting water efficiency and recycling, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Thursday.Haaland told reporters in Denver that the Biden administration’s proposed fiscal 2022 budget includes a $1.5 billion investment in the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water and power in the Western states, and more than $54 million for states, tribes and communities to upgrade infrastructure and water planning projects.”Drought doesn’t just impact one community. It affects all of us — from farmers and ranchers to city dwellers and Indian tribes. We all have a role to use water wisely,” Haaland said at the start of a three-day visit to Colorado to address the U.S. response to the increasing scarcity of  water and the massive wildfires burning throughout the region.The American West, including most of western Colorado, is gripped by the worst drought in modern history. The northern part of the state is experiencing deadly flash flooding and mudslides after rain fell in areas scarred by massive wildfires last year. Fires are burning across the West, most severely in Oregon and California, while the drought stresses major waterways like the Colorado River and reservoirs that sustain millions of people.FILE – In this July 28, 2014, photo, lightning strikes over Lake Mead near Hoover Dam that impounds Colorado River water at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Arizona.The drought and recent heat waves in the region that are tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires larger and more destructive.Haaland spoke after meeting with Democratic Representative Diana DeGette, Governor Jared Polis and Jim Lochhead, chief executive of Denver Water, Colorado’s largest water agency, for a discussion on the drought and possible federal solutions.Among other initiatives, she said, the Bureau of Reclamation is working to identify and dispense “immediate technical and financial assistance for impacted irrigators and Indian tribes.”Tanya Trujillo, the department’s assistant secretary for water and science, cited a recent decision to release water from several Upper Colorado River basin reservoirs to supply Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two manmade reservoirs that store Colorado River water.FILE – This Aug. 21, 2019, image shows Lake Powell near Page, Ariz.The reservoirs are shrinking faster than expected, spreading panic throughout a region that relies on the river to sustain 40 million people. Federal officials expect to make the first-ever water shortage declaration in the Colorado River basin next month, prompting cuts in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.”We have seen hydrologic projections that are worse than anticipated,” Trujillo said.Haaland’s three-day stay in Colorado includes her first trip Friday to the Bureau of Land Management’s new headquarters in Grand Junction, established by the Trump administration in 2019. The agency’s move from Washington, D.C., produced an outcry from critics who said it gutted the office. Haaland opposed the move as a member of Congress.The agency overseen by the Interior Department manages nearly 250 million acres of public lands, most of which are in the West. Polis and Colorado’s congressional delegation have urged Haaland to keep the office in Grand Junction.Haaland is visiting as severe dry periods sweeping areas of the West over the last several years have resulted in more intense and dangerous wildfires, parched croplands and a lack of vegetation for livestock and wildlife, according to government scientists.They also found that the problem is accelerating — rainstorms are becoming increasingly unpredictable and more regions are seeing longer intervals between storms since the turn of the century.
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Over 600,000 users of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service’s (NHS) COVID-19 test and trace app were “pinged” alerts recommending self-isolation earlier this month.In what has been dubbed the “pingdemic,” the app told users to begin a 10-day quarantine if they tested positive for the coronavirus or had been in close contact with someone who did.The mass alerts have had significant repercussions for supermarkets and other businesses in the U.K. Stores warn that products are running low, and staff shortages have affected restock abilities. Some shops are altering their hours of operation in response to the challenge.Grocery store chain Lidl indicated a worker shortage was “starting to have an impact on our operations.”People walk past a sign, amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in St Albans, Britain, July 21, 2021.Supermarkets are hiring large numbers of temporary employees to overcome staffing challenges. After 1,000 staff members were unable to return to work, the Iceland grocery chain is hiring 2,000 interim workers.Photographs of empty shelves were widely shared on social media, but supermarkets downplayed the shortages, with Iceland declaring them “isolated incidents.”Driver shortages and a rising number of workers required to self-isolate have also led to fuel supply issues.BP announced that a “vast majority” of the shortages were going to be resolved “within the day,” but a “handful” of their gas stations will be temporarily closed.According to the BBC, isolation is only legally required when instructed by the NHS test and trace program. A ping from the NHS COVID-19 app is only an advised self-isolation.Some business owners are trying to circumvent this regulation by allowing ‘pinged’ employees who have received a negative PCR test to return to work.Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng cautioned those attempting to avoid isolation, stating that “the rules are clear, and I think they should be followed.”The British government announced that it is necessary to maintain these guidelines until August 16, when further restrictions are scheduled to be lifted. 
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Space tourism notches another win after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos follows fellow billionaire Richard Branson in rocketing to weightlessness.  Plus, the hunt for ancient life on Mars is about to begin, and wildfires rage out of control in the U.S.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space
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Human rights and media rights groups have expressed outrage over revelations that 180 journalists around the world were targeted for surveillance by military-grade Israeli spyware.  VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports on a widening scandal, with some world leaders also targeted, such as French President Emmanuel Macron.
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China has rejected the World Health Organization’s proposal for a second phase of its investigation into the origin of the novel coronavirus pandemic.Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the Chinese National Health Commission, told reporters in Beijing Thursday that he was extremely surprised when he read the proposal offered by the U.N. health agency includes audits of laboratories in the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019 that led to more than 192 million infections around the globe, including 4.1 million deaths. Zeng said the WHO’s origin-tracing proposal lacks “common sense” and displays a disrespect toward science that makes it “impossible” for Beijing to accept. A team of WHO researchers visited Wuhan earlier this year to research the initial cause of the virus. The team concluded the virus likely jumped from animals to humans and that it was “extremely unlikely” that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as some experts have speculated. But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has criticized China for not fully cooperating with investigators by not sharing raw data, and has called for a continued probe of all theories, including a lab accident.Chinese officials and news outlets have begun speculating that the virus may have escaped from a U.S. military laboratory, a theory that has been widely dismissed by the scientific community.Meanwhile, a new study says that two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine are effective against the highly contagious delta variant of the disease. In a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at Public Health England found that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine are 88% effective at preventing symptomatic disease caused by the delta variant, compared to 93% against the alpha variant. The researchers also say two doses of AstraZeneca vaccine are 67% effective against delta, compared to 74% against the alpha variant.A single dose of Pfizer is just 36% effective against delta, the researchers say, while one shot of AstraZeneca was just 30% effective. A study posted online Tuesday suggests that Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine may be less effective against the emerging variants of the coronavirus, compared to either of the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters and AFP.
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Armenia is struggling to leave behind its war in 2020 with neighboring Azerbaijan and the political turbulence that surrounded recent legislative elections.  With the social and political upheaval of the last several months now easing, the calm is allowing many Armenians to examine and deal with the war wounds that continue to fester, along with the pain of defeat and the losses that Armenia says amount to nearly 4,000 mostly young soldiers.  Roderick James narrates this report by Pablo Gonzalez in Yerevan and Ricardo Marquina in Moscow.

(Ricardo Marquina contributed to this video.)

Camera:  Pablo Gonzalez   

Produced by:  Ricardo Marquina, Henry Hernandez 
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The little girl wearing a red Mickey and Minnie Mouse tee-shirt was firm. “The rulers of this country are all trash,” she pronounced with indignation, and “they should resign; it would be better if someone from any other country came to rule us,” she told the host of a talk show on Lebanon’s MTV channel.

“We cannot get anything.  There is no medicine, no Internet, no fuel,” she said.

The audience applauded. The host sighed. 

Since Marita Derzeh’s pronouncements, made July 15, the plight of her small Mediterranean country has only worsened, and while the youngster’s comments might reflect the views more of her parents than herself, they aren’t out of place in a country that is losing patience with the everyday struggle just to get by. 

The Lebanese pound is now trading on the black market at 22,000 to the dollar, around 15 times the official rate of 1,500. The government is running out of hard currency to subsidize staple products, medicines and gas, and the most common sights in the country are miles-long lines of ill-tempered motorists to fill up tanks. Hospital directors say they are running out of medicine.  

Free fall

The World Bank has dubbed Lebanon’s economic free fall, which has seen the country’s currency lose 95% of its value against major foreign currencies since 2019, as one of the world’s worst financial crises in more than 150 years.

“The Lebanon financial and economic crisis is likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century,” it said in a recent report. And it largely blames the country’s sectarian political elites for the slow-motion crisis.

“This illustrates the magnitude of the economic depression that the country is enduring, with sadly no clear turning point on the horizon, given the disastrous deliberate policy inaction,” the bank said. It warned, “The social impact of the crisis, which is already dire, could rapidly become catastrophic.”

Ordinary Lebanese families have seen their purchasing power plummet and are desperate. 

And with more than half the population now living below the poverty line, the Crisis Observatory at the American University of Beirut reported this week that families would have to spend around five times the minimum wage just to put sufficient food on the table, never mind paying for utilities, gas and hard-to-find medicine. 

 
The observatory, set up to monitor Lebanon’s crisis, said the cost of food has soared by 700% over the past two years with increases quickening. “The price of a basic food basket increased by more than 50 percent in less than a month,” Nasser Yassin, head of the observatory told AFP Wednesday.

Moment of Truth

An international conference co-hosted by the U.N. and France, the country’s former colonial ruler, scheduled August 4 to discuss the crisis in Lebanon, might be the last chance to save the failing state of Lebanon from meltdown, warn French officials.  

The conference coincides with the first anniversary of the devastating Beirut port explosion, which left more than 200 people dead, about 6,500 injured, and flattened part of the Lebanese capital. Many blame Lebanese officials for storing hundreds of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate at the port, which ignited.

“The moment of truth is fast approaching,” a senior official at the French foreign ministry told VOA. “The politicians reform or they don’t; unless they do, there’s not much we can do to help pull the abyss,” he added. French officials are especially alarmed about the stability of Lebanon’s army, a key state institution that’s being relied on to maintain security and law and order in a country that’s on the brink of social explosion and breakdown.

Earlier this week the commanders of Lebanon’s army warned of mounting turmoil in the wake of last week’s resignation of Saad Hariri as Prime Minister-designate, a Sunni Muslim centrist. “The army is a deterrent to chaos,” General Joseph Aoun told his soldiers.  

 
Lebanon’s armed forces need an immediate injection of $100 million to cover the basic needs of its soldiers, according to Gen. Youssef Haddad. He has warned publicly that the country’s armed forces will be in “critical condition” by September and that, “if the army collapses, Lebanon will be lost.”

France, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have earmarked the country’s armed forces as the key institution to save. In Riyadh earlier in July, their diplomats discussed subsidizing the Lebanese Army with monthly allowances for 80,000 soldiers and officers, say Western and Arab diplomats. The average salary of a soldier was before the economic crisis worth around the equivalent of $800 a month, now it is about $80. 

Diplomats and analysts say the country’s brutal 1975-1990 civil war shows the danger, if the military were to falter. Marco Carnelos, a former Italian diplomat, says Lebanon is already a failed state. “But there is always further to fall, and Lebanon seems to be heading there,” he wrote in a commentary for the news site Middle East Eye, adding, “When will the world step in?”

He complains: “No western power other than France has yet dedicated to Lebanon the attention it deserves.” U.S. diplomats say the Biden administration also deserves credit for trying to get the international community to focus more on Lebanon and has warned not only of the mounting humanitarian crisis in the country but the danger of severe regional consequences.  

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary State Antony Blinken added his voice to the widespread dismay at the resignation of Saad Hariri, who said he was abandoning his efforts to form a government nine months after accepting the challenge because of political squabbling between Lebanon’s factions. The 51-year-old Hariri, who served as prime minister twice before, blames obstructionism by Lebanese President Michel Aoun, an ally of the radical Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.

“Lebanon’s political class has squandered the last nine months,” Blinken complained in a statement. “The Lebanese economy is in free-fall and the current government is not providing basic services in a reliable fashion.” He added, “It is critical that a government committed and able to implement priority reforms be formed now.” 

Hassan Diab, the acting prime minister, told foreign diplomats last week, “Lebanon is a few days away from a social explosion.”

But like France and other international donors, the Biden administration is conditioning support for an IMF bailout of Lebanon on the formation of a pro-reform government and the implementation of financial and economic changes. They say without them the state will continue to slide toward failure.

Western diplomats say the August 4 conference in Paris will likely focus on two key areas: how to use both carrots and sticks to cajole the country’s political elites to agree on reforms, and if that fails, how to mitigate the humanitarian crisis and maintain the stability of the country’s armed forces.

This report includes information from AFP.
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Asian countries are reporting record COVID-19 waves this year compared to 2020, as vaccination drives fall short and governments lose hope that mass closures and border controls can keep the coronavirus away, observers in the region say.Spread of the delta variant from India, infections among airline personnel and citizens who brought back the virus from trips spread COVID-19 in parts of Asia with recent outbreaks. Containment measures had relaxed in some spots after months of low caseloads while domestic travel picked up.Officials from Bangkok to Taipei sidelined vaccine procurement last year while Western countries were preparing to make shots so widespread that England is now 87% vaccinated and in the United States just about any adult can get shots from a local drugstore.Many Asian countries held back the respiratory disease in 2020 by barring foreign tourists and shutting down places where people gather. Manufacturing-reliant Asian economies held up economically last year for lack of long-term work stoppages.“I call this a complacency curse,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.“Thailand did so well during virus stage last year that it sat on its laurels and got behind the curve on vaccine procurement,” he told VOA.Thailand has fully vaccinated just 5% of its population, with Vietnam at around 1%, according to the Our World in Data research website. Vietnam hit a one-day coronavirus infection record of 5,926 on July 18, while Thailand posted its own record of 11,397 the same day.In Taiwan, which reported its first major COVID-19 wave in May, just 0.5% of people Residents wait on line to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at the Central Vaccination Center in Bangkok, Thailand, July 22, 2021.Asian countries are fighting now to get vaccines because Western pharmaceutical companies are busy filling orders in other parts of the world, governments in Asia are slow to grant permits for domestic drug firms, and their citizens worry about side effects, news reports say. Cold storage has run short in some spots.Many have turned to donations or rush orders from China, Japan and the United States. Taiwan and Vietnam aim to release domestically produced vaccines to augment supplies. Japan offered Vietnam $1.8 million as well for vaccine cold storage, the Vietnam Insider news website said in May.“I think slowly [Vietnam] will recover as people are doing in Europe and in the U.S.,” said Phuong Hong, 40, a travel sector worker in Ho Chi Minh City who spends 95% of her time at home with four family members as they all await text messages from the government telling them when they qualify for vaccines.“It should be faster, but I think the distribution channel — they also need to understand how to store the vaccine,” she said.In Indonesia, the government has accepted vaccines from China and other sources, but the country’s full vaccination rate is just 6%. On July 15, Indonesia hit a record daily caseload of 56,757.Citizens have a list of misgivings, said Paramita Supamijoto, an international relations lecturer at Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta. They might believe vaccines are not halal, according to Islamic rules about what a person should ingest, or that COVID-19 itself is a “hoax,” she said. Indonesians with possible symptoms tend to avoid hospitals, she added, in part because they’re full.“It’s really complicated here in Indonesia, in general,” Supamijoto said. “You don’t know whether the people who stand next to you or sit next to you [are] healthy or not.”A health worker administers the COVID-19 vaccine at the Central Vaccination Center in Bangkok, Thailand, July 22, 2021.Much of 660 million-population Southeast Asia now faces new rounds of economic inactivity triggered by business closures and stay-home orders to contain the virus. The Asian Development Bank said this month it had downgraded Southeast Asia’s 2021 economic growth forecast to 4.0% from 4.4% “as some countries reimpose pandemic restrictions.”“Countries have been significantly impacted quite a lot in terms of their economies and the impact is increasing, so that’s I would say quite a contrast to what’s happening say in the U.S. and Europe, where things have improved quite a lot,” said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Markit.A surge in delta variant cases brought from India by frequent travel has added to Southeast Asia’s woes, Biswas added. He said, though, that most Asian countries are shunning the “total lockdowns” of last year because of the economic impacts.Asian governments say vaccine supplies should surge in the second half of the year. Thai officials said in June they would fill an earlier pledge for doses by the end of this month, while Taiwan’s president set a target of vaccinating 25% of the island’s population by July 31.Vietnam anticipates providing 110 million doses by December, though still short of its goal of 150 million doses for 75% of the population, Vietnam Insider reports.Economic slowdowns are “not permanent,” said Song Seng Wun, an economist in the private banking unit of Malaysian bank CIMB, adding, “we will get back once the vaccine rollout comes.”  
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The Tokyo Olympic organizing committee fired the director of the opening ceremony on Thursday because of a Holocaust joke he made during a comedy show in 1998.

Organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said a day ahead of the opening ceremony that director Kentaro Kobayashi has been dismissed. He was accused of using a joke about the Holocaust in his comedy act, including the phrase “Let’s play Holocaust.”

“We found out that Mr. Kobayashi, in his own performance, has used a phrase ridiculing a historical tragedy,” Hashimoto said. “We deeply apologize for causing such a development the day before the opening ceremony and for causing troubles and concerns to many involved parties as well as the people in Tokyo and the rest of the country.”

Tokyo has been plagued with scandals since being awarded the Games in 2013. French investigators are looking into alleged bribes paid to International Olympic Committee members to influence the vote for Tokyo. The fallout forced the resignation two years ago of Tsunekazu Takeda, who headed the Japanese Olympic Committee and was an IOC member.

The opening ceremony of the pandemic-delayed Games is scheduled for Friday. The ceremony will be held without spectators as a measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections, although some officials, guests and media will attend.

“We are going to have the opening ceremony tomorrow and, yes, I am sure there are a lot of people who are not feeling easy about the opening of the Games,” Hashimoto said. “But we are going to open the Games tomorrow under this difficult situation.”

Earlier this week, composer Keigo Oyamada, whose music was to be used at the ceremony, was forced to resign because of past bullying of his classmates, which he boasted about in magazine interviews. The segment of his music will not be used.

Soon after a video clip and script of Kobayashi’s performance were revealed, criticism flooded social media.

“Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and global social action director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based human rights group.

He also noted that the Nazis gassed Germans with disabilities.

“Any association of this person to the Tokyo Olympics would insult the memory of 6 million Jews and make a cruel mockery of the Paralympics,” he said.

Kobayashi is a former member of a popular comedy duo Rahmens and known overseas for comedy series including The Japanese Tradition.

Japan is pushing ahead with the Olympics against the advice of most of its medical experts. This is partially due to pressure from the IOC, which is estimated to face losses of $3 billion to $4 billion in television rights income if the Games were not held.

“We have been preparing for the last year to send a positive message,” Hashimoto said. “Toward the very end now there are so many incidents that give a negative image toward Tokyo 2020.”

Toshiro Muto, the CEO of the Tokyo organizing committee, also acknowledged the reputational damage.

“Maybe these negative incidents will impact the positive message we wanted to deliver to the world,” he said.

The last-minute scandals come as Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s government faces criticism for prioritizing the Olympics despite public health concerns amid a resurgence of coronavirus infections.

Kobayashi’s Holocaust joke and Oyamada’s resignation were the latest to plague the Games. Yoshiro Mori resigned as organizing committee president over sexist remarks. Hiroshi Sasaki also stepped down as creative director for the opening and closing ceremonies after suggesting a Japanese actress should dress as a pig.

Also this week, the chiropractor for the American women’s wrestling team apologized after comparing Olympic COVID-19 protocols to Nazi Germany in a social media post. Rosie Gallegos-Main, the team’s chiropractor since 2009, will be allowed to finish her planned stay at USA Wrestling’s pre-Olympic camp in Nakatsugawa, Japan. 
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Indian farmers, protesting over three new farm laws they say threaten their livelihoods, will start a sit-in near parliament in the center of the capital New Delhi in a renewed push to pressure the government to repeal the laws.

In the longest-running growers’ protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, tens of thousands of farmers have camped out on major highways leading to New Delhi for more than seven months.

As India’s monsoon session of parliament began this week, some protesting farmers tried to march towards the main government district, but they were stopped by police just miles from parliament.

On Thursday, 200 protesters will gather at Jantar Mantar, a large Mughal-era observatory in central New Delhi that doubles up as a protest site for causes of all manner.

“Throughout the monsoon session of parliament, 200 farmers will go to Jantar Mantar every day to hold farmers’ parliament to remind the government of our long-pending demand,” said Balbir Singh Rajewal, a leading farmers’ leader.

The monsoon session of parliament will end in early August. After extended negotiations, Delhi police have agreed to let 200 farmers gather during the day at Jantar Mantar, but protesters need to follow coronavirus guidelines issued by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority, a government statement said.

In late January, thousands of angry farmers clashed with police after driving their tractors into security barriers. One protester was killed, and more than 80 police officers were injured across the city.

Farmers say the laws favor large private retailers who, prior to the new laws, were not permitted to procure farm goods outside government-regulated wholesale grain markets.

The government says the laws, introduced in September 2020, will unshackle farmers from having to sell their produce only at regulated wholesale markets.

It argues farmers will gain if large traders, retailers and food processors can buy directly from producers. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday he will continue “this encounter with China” to attempt to stem the flow of deadly drugs being smuggled into the United States via Mexico.Biden, during an appearance on a CNN “town hall”-style program from Cincinnati, said his administration is “dealing with the whole opioid issue” by significantly increasing the number of people in the Justice Department working on it.Fentanyl is considered 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin. The health crisis in America caused by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, was frequently raised by Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump.The former president repeatedly criticized China, the primary exporter of fentanyl or its precursor chemicals to Mexico, where cartels smuggle it into the United States, for not cracking down on the drug trafficking.A 1,500-word background memo issued ahead of Biden’s third visit to Ohio during his 6-month-old presidency, covered key concerns in the state ranging from repairing highway bridges to combating childhood obesity. It did not mention the opioid crisis, although Ohio has one of the highest per capita rates of overdose deaths, which have been the leading cause of fatal injuries in the state for more than a decade.Asked by VOA on the Air Force One flight Wednesday to the event whether — in view of this — the issue remains a priority for the Biden administration, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded: “Absolutely, it’s a top priority, and there’s no question it is an issue that has impacted people across Ohio and continues to. Any health expert will tell you that the most important thing we could do is make sure people have access to health care coverage. ”Some U.S. objectives set during the Trump administration with respect to China remain unmet.China has not taken action to control additional fentanyl precursors, following Beijing’s crackdown on two such substance in 2018.Chinese traffickers shifted to sending not yet controlled chemicals to Mexico and Chinese nationals indicted in the United States on fentanyl trafficking charges remain at large, noted a January report from the Congressional Research Service.“I don’t believe there’s much we can do to slow these countries’ export of these drugs,” said Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Created the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic.“All we can do is implement harm reduction measures at home, like supervised injection facilities, while also providing greater access to fentanyl testing strips, medication assisted treatment, and needle exchange programs,” he said.Westhoff, described himself as an advocate for harm reduction, the philosophy that accepts people cannot be stopped from using drugs and that instead users should be taught about their dangers and helped to use them more safely.“In this framework, the Biden administration has been only marginally better than Trump’s. Mostly they have simply maintained the status quo,” Westhoff told VOA. “In the midst of the worst drug crisis in American history, we need much bolder action.”Projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Ohio last year likely saw its largest-ever number of drug overdoses — more than 14 per day for a total of 5,215, breaking the recorded high from 2017.That puts the midwestern state with the fourth-largest total among the 50 U.S. states.Overall, there was a dramatic spike in U.S. drug deaths, up about 27% in the first six months of the coronavirus pandemic.A total of 88,000 Americans died in the 12-month period ending in August 2020, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.”Illicitly manufactured fentanyl and synthetic opioids are the primary drivers of this increase,” with people between the age of 35 and 44 most at risk, the acting head of the office, Regina LaBelle, told reporters in early April.“The Biden administration is not doing enough to address this issue with either China or Mexico,” according to Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.Larkin said the question for the president is how many people must die from smuggled fentanyl before he closes the southwest border to drug smugglers.“Hundreds of people are dying every day in this country while we wait for the answer to that question,” Larkin told VOA.Tom Synan, police chief of the village of Newton, in Hamilton County, Ohio, who testified before the U.S. Senate in 2017 about the fentanyl crisis, said most of the emergency calls his officers respond to are drug-related, be they overdoses or gun crimes.Throughout Hamilton County there are 50 to 70 overdoses each week and more than 400 people dying every year.While the numbers have stabilized in the county, Synan told VOA those statistics are “a person, a mother, father, brother, sister, son or daughter, I just had a mother reach out today asking for help. Every single day we’re dealing with an addiction epidemic.”Synan said he wrote Trump asking whether 70,000 to 100,000 Americans needed to die before action is taken.“I thought I was being overdramatic. But now I realize that not only was I not dramatic, but the number was pretty close,” said the police chief, adding he has a similar question for Biden.“I wholeheartedly believe that when a president of the United States stands up and says that we as Americans need to change the way we view and deal with addiction. It’ll shift the stigma. It’ll shift funding research out of the criminal justice system and into the mental medical health care system. And that would be my question to him — is what will it take for us to shift?” said Synan.The White House, nearly four months ago, after the start of the Biden administration, introduced a seven-part plan intended to decrease the number of deaths. It is to be implemented over the next year.One goal is to shift the government response from a focus on arrests toward treatment.“What really is the biggest enabler of addiction is our own ideologies and policies that hold us back from changing addiction from being punished to actually treating it as the mental medical health condition it is,” said the Newtown police chief.Biden has expressed understanding of that approach.“We shouldn’t be sending people to jail for [drug] use. We should be sending them to mandatory rehabilitation,” the president said on Wednesday night’s television program. 
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The U.S. has averaged more than 26,000 new COVID-19 cases per day over the past week — more than double the number it was a month ago — with the more contagious delta variant making up over 80% of cases. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara looks at the Biden administration’s strategy for dealing with the surge, as misinformation continues to drive anti-vaccination sentiments in certain groups.
Producer: Kimberlyn Weeks
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A senior Chinese health official said Thursday he was shocked by the World Health Organization’s plan for the second phase of a COVID-19 origins study.National Health Commission Vice Minister Zeng Yixin dismissed the lab leak theory as a rumor running counter to common sense.The head of the WHO acknowledged last week that it was premature to rule out a potential link between the pandemic and a leak of the coronavirus from a Chinese lab.Zeng said that the lab in the city of Wuhan has no virus that can directly infect humans.He said that China has made repeated clarifications and does not accept the WHO plan. 
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Thousands of residents fled blazes in western Canada on Wednesday with several hundred soldiers scheduled to deploy to fight this year’s virulent and early fires, which are wreaking havoc across portions of western North America.

“I have a holiday trailer that is my new home,” said Margo Wagner, head of a district in the western province of British Columbia, who has found herself among the evacuees.

The fire marks the second time in four years that her home in the province’s central Canim Lake rural area has been threatened by a blaze.

South of the border, a number of communities in the United States are being threatened by wildfires, creating conditions that are so extreme that the blazes have generated their own climate, according to experts.

Nearly 80 huge fires are currently ravaging hundreds of thousands of hectares in California, Oregon, Montana and Nevada.

The largest among these is still the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which has burned through a section of land the same size as the city of Los Angeles, in just two weeks.

In neighboring California, several towns were evacuated as they faced rising flames from the Dixie Fire, a conflagration that may have been caused by a tree falling on Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) lines.

Back in Canada, British Columbia declared a state of emergency on Monday, with more than 5,700 people under an evacuation order and more than 32,000 people under evacuation alert.

“We did it in 2017 and we will do it again in 2021. Is it stressful? Is it scary? Absolutely it is,” Wagner said.

Other neighboring areas are preparing for the worst since weather conditions — particularly wind and heat — are not expected to give 3,000 firefighters already fighting the blazes a break anytime soon.

“I have been living here in Ashcroft for almost 25 years now and I have never seen anything like this before,” said Mayor Barbara Roden, whose municipality in the center of the province has been on high alert since July 14.

“The most frightening thing in a lot of ways is that we’re all looking at the calendar and this is only halfway through July,” she said.

Climate change amplifies droughts which dry out regions, creating ideal conditions for wildfires.

The Canadian armed forces are preparing to deploy 350 additional troops to British Columbia and 120 to Manitoba, a central province also struggling with large fire outbreaks, according to the Canadian Joint Operations Command.

In Ontario, some 75 military personnel are helping firefighters.   
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