Novak Djokovic’s bid for the first calendar-year Grand Slam in men’s tennis since 1969 ended one victory short with a 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 loss to Daniil Medvedev in the U.S. Open final on Sunday. Medvedev’s surprisingly lopsided triumph gave him his first major championship and prevented Djokovic from winning what would have been the record 21st of his career. The No. 1-ranked Djokovic entered this match 27-0 in 2021 at the sport’s four most important tournaments, enduring the burdens of expectations and pressure that came along with his two-track pursuit of history over the past seven months and, in New York, the past two weeks. He beat Medvedev in the Australian Open final on a hard court in February, then added titles on clay at the French Open in June and Wimbledon on grass in July. But Djokovic, a 34-year-old from Serbia, couldn’t get to 28-0. He simply was far from his best on this particular day. He made mistakes, 38 unforced errors in all. He wasn’t able to convert a break chance until it was too little, too late. He showed frustration, too, destroying his racket by pounding it three times against the court after one point, drawing boos from the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd and a code violation from the chair umpire.A lot of Djokovic’s issues had to do with the No. 2-ranked Medvedev, who used his 6-foot-6 (1.98-meter) frame to chase down everything and respond with seemingly effortless groundstrokes — much the way Djokovic wears down foes — and delivered pinpoint serving.Djokovic reached his record-equaling 31st Grand Slam final with six victories on the hard courts of Flushing Meadows. But he could not quite get the last one he wanted. He remains tied with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal with 20 major titles.And the last man to sweep a season’s singles trophies at the Slams remains Rod Laver, who did it twice — in 1962 and 1969 — and was in the stands Sunday. The last woman to accomplish the feat was Steffi Graf in 1988.Instead, Djokovic joins Jack Crawford in 1933 and Lew Hoad in 1956 as men who won a year’s first trio of Grand Slam tournaments and made it all the way to the U.S. Open final before losing.
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Day: September 12, 2021
Children in Bangladesh flooded back into classrooms on Sunday as schools reopened after 18 months, one of the world’s longest coronavirus shutdowns.The resumption came after UNICEF warned that prolonged school closures during the COVID-19 crisis were worsening inequities for millions of children across South Asia.In the capital Dhaka, students at one school were welcomed with flowers and sweets, and told to wear masks and sanitize their hands. Some hugged each other in excitement.”We are really excited to be back at school,” 15-year-old Muntasir Ahmed told AFP as he entered the campus.”I am hoping to physically see all of my friends and teachers, not through a laptop window today.”At the gate, school officials checked the body temperatures of students before allowing them to enter.The school’s vice principal, Dewan Tamziduzzaman, said he “didn’t expect such a big number to be turning up on the first day.”Only 41% of Bangladesh’s 169 million population have smartphones, according to the country’s telecom operators’ association, which means millions of children cannot access online classes.Even with smartphones, students in many of Bangladesh’s rural districts do not have the high-speed internet access usually required for e-learning.’Enormous setbacks’UNICEF warned in a report released Thursday that the pandemic has accentuated “alarming inequities” for more than 430 million children in the region.”School closures in South Asia have forced hundreds of millions of children and their teachers to transition to remote learning in a region with low connectivity and device affordability,” UNICEF’s regional director, George Laryea-Adjei, said in a statement.”As a result, children have suffered enormous setbacks in their learning journey.”In India, 80% of children aged 14-18 years said they learnt less than when they were in a physical classroom, according to UNICEF.Among children aged between six and 13 years, 42% said they had no access to remote learning.”Their future is at stake,” Deepu Singh, a farmer in India’s Jharkhand state, said last week of his children ages 9 and 10.The pair have not been to school in a year and have no internet access at home, Singh told AFP, adding: “I do not know English. I cannot help him (my son), even if I want to.”Students in the rest of the region were similarly impacted, UNICEF reported.In Pakistan, 23% of young children had no access to any device for remote learning.Some towns in Nepal have been broadcasting radio lessons due to the lack of internet access.”We are (in) a dangerous situation,” Nepalese schoolteacher Rajani K.C. told AFP last week.”If the pandemic continues and the academic sector loses more years, what kind of human resource will the country have in the future?”
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Chilean scientists have announced the discovery of the first-ever southern hemisphere remains of a type of Jurassic-era “winged lizard” known as a pterosaur.Fossils of the dinosaur which lived some 160 million years ago in what is today the Atacama desert, were unearthed in 2009.They have now been confirmed to be of a rhamphorhynchine pterosaur — the first such creature to be found in Gondwana, the prehistoric supercontinent that later formed the southern hemisphere landmasses.Researcher Jhonatan Alarcon of the University of Chile said the creatures had a wingspan of up to 2 meters, a long tail, and pointed snout.”We show that the distribution of animals in this group was wider than known to date,” he added.The discovery was also “the oldest known pterosaur found in Chile,” the scientists reported in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
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Several hundred people line up every morning, starting before dawn, on a grassy area outside Nairobi’s largest hospital hoping to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Sometimes the line moves smoothly, while on other days, the staff tells them there’s nothing available and they should come back tomorrow.Halfway around the world, at a church in Atlanta in the U.S. state of Georgia, two workers with plenty of vaccine doses waited hours Wednesday for anyone to show up, whiling away the time by listening to music from a laptop. In six hours, one person came through the door.The dramatic contrast highlights the vast disparity around the world. In richer countries, people can often pick and choose from multiple available vaccines, walk into a site near their homes and get a shot in minutes. Pop-up clinics, such as the one in Atlanta, bring vaccines into rural areas and urban neighborhoods, but it is common for them to get very few takers.In the developing world, supply is limited and uncertain. Just more than 3% of people across Africa have been fully vaccinated, and health officials and citizens often have little idea what will be available from one day to the next. More vaccines have been flowing in recent weeks, but the World Health Organization’s director in Africa said Thursday that the continent will get 25% fewer doses than anticipated by the end of the year, in part because of the rollout of booster shots in wealthier counties such as the United States.Bidian Okoth said he spent more than three hours in line at a Nairobi hospital, only to be told to go home because there weren’t enough doses. But a friend who traveled to the U.S. got a shot almost immediately after his arrival there with a vaccine of his choice, “like candy,” he said.”We’re struggling with what time in the morning we need to wake up to get the first shot. Then you hear people choosing their vaccines. That’s super, super excessive,” he said.Okoth said his uncle died from COVID-19 in June and had given up twice on getting vaccinated because of the length of the lines, even though he was eligible because of his age. The death jolted Okoth, a health advocate, into seeking a dose for himself.He stopped at one hospital so often on his way to work that a doctor “got tired of seeing me” and told Okoth he would call him when doses were available. Late last month, after a new donation of vaccines arrived from Britain, he got his shot.The disparity comes as the U.S. is moving closer to offering booster shots to large segments of the population even as it struggles to persuade Americans to get vaccinated in the first place. President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans, including private-sector employees, as the country faces the surging COVID-19 delta variant.Riley Erickson poses for a photo at Springfield Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta on Sept. 8, 2021, where the disaster relief group CORE was offering COVID-19 vaccinations. The one person who showed up was a college student.About 53% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and the country is averaging about 145,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day, along with about 1,600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Africa has had more than 7.9 million confirmed cases, including more than 200,000 deaths, and the highly infectious delta variant recently drove a surge in new cases as well.John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Thursday that “we have not seen enough science” to drive decisions on when to administer booster shots.”Without that, we are gambling,” he said, and urged countries to send doses to countries facing “vaccine famine” instead.In the U.S., vaccines are easy to find, but some people are hesitant to get them.At the church in northwest Atlanta, a nonprofit group offered the Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer vaccines for free without an appointment from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. But site manager Riley Erickson spent much of the day waiting in an air-conditioned room full of empty chairs, though the group had reached out to neighbors and the church had advertised the location to its large congregation.Erickson, with the disaster relief organization CORE, said the vaccination rate in the area was low and he wasn’t surprised by the small turnout. The one person who showed up was a college student.FILE – In this Aug. 20, 2021, photo, medical workers prepare to remove the body of a coronavirus victim in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Machakos, Kenya.”When you put the effort into going into areas where there’s less interest, that’s kind of the result,” he said. His takeaway, however, was that CORE needed to spend more time in the community.Margaret Herro, CORE’s Georgia director, said the group has seen an uptick in vaccinations at its pop-up sites in recent weeks amid a COVID-19 surge fueled by the delta variant and the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine. It also has gone to meatpacking plants and other work locations, where turnout is better, and it plans to focus more on those places, Herro said.In Nairobi, Okoth believes there should be a global commitment to equity in the administration of vaccines so everyone has a basic level of immunity as quickly as possible.”If everyone at least gets a first shot, I don’t think anyone will care if others get even six booster shots,” he said.
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