Day: November 9, 2021

New Zealand Marchers Demand End to COVID-19 Lockdowns, Vaccine Mandates

Thousands of people gathered Tuesday outside of New Zealand’s parliament building in the capital, Wellington, to protest the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates and lockdowns intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 protesters marched through central Wellington carrying signs displaying various anti-mandate slogans, with many waving campaign flags of former U.S. president Donald Trump. Security personnel closed nearly all entrances to the parliament campus and its iconic “Beehive” building during the demonstrations.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters inside parliament, “What we saw today was not representative of the vast bulk of New Zealanders.”

The nation of 5 million people has been among the best in the world at containing the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, largely because New Zealand closed its borders for most of the last 18 months to non-residents.

The strategy to eliminate COVID-19 worked for the most part, with the nation reporting only 28 deaths over the course of the pandemic. Earlier this year, much of the country had all but returned to normal.

But New Zealand has been battling a rise of new infections triggered by the Delta variant since August, prompting Prime Minister Ardern to impose new lockdowns in Auckland, its largest city, and other parts of the country. The new outbreaks also have forced Ardern to change from a strategy of total elimination of COVID-19 to controlling the virus through mass vaccinations.

The government announced a new goal for all doctors, pharmacists, nurses and other health care workers to be fully vaccinated by December, with teachers and other education workers required to be fully vaccinated by January.

Additionally, the government has implemented a new “traffic-light” system that would loosen nearly all restrictions once 90% of an area’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Ardern announced Monday the strict lockdown imposed on Auckland will be lifted by the end of November, with some restrictions beginning to ease Tuesday as the city nears 90% vaccination.

Meanwhile, authorities in Singapore announced Monday that beginning December 8, it will no longer pay medical bills for any future COVID-19 patients who are “unvaccinated by choice.”

The city-state currently covers the full medical costs for any Singaporean who tests positive for the virus, as well permanent residents and long-term visa holders, unless they test positive shortly after returning home from overseas.

But Singapore is currently struggling with a surge of new infections that is threatening to overwhelm its health care system, despite 85% of its eligible population having been fully vaccinated.

The Health Ministry said it will continue to cover partly vaccinated patients until December 31 to allow them time to get their second shots.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.

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SpaceX Returns 4 Astronauts to Earth, Ending 200-Day Flight

Four astronauts returned to Earth on Monday, riding home with SpaceX to end a 200-day space station mission that began last spring.

Their capsule streaked through the late night sky like a dazzling meteor before parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Recovery boats quickly moved in with spotlights.

“On behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to Planet Earth,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. Within an hour, all four astronauts were out of the capsule, exchanging fist bumps with the team on the recovery ship.

Their homecoming — coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station — paved the way for SpaceX’s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night.

The newcomers were scheduled to launch first, but NASA switched the order because of bad weather and an astronaut’s undisclosed medical condition. The welcoming duties will now fall to the lone American and two Russians left behind at the space station.

Before Monday afternoon’s undocking, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who’s waiting to launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted it was a shame the two crews wouldn’t overlap at the space station but “we trust you’ll leave everything nice and tidy.” His will be SpaceX’s fourth crew flight for NASA in just 1 1/2 years.

NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and France’s Thomas Pesquet should have been back Monday morning, but high wind in the recovery zone delayed their return.

“One more night with this magical view. Who could complain? I’ll miss our spaceship!” Pesquet tweeted Sunday alongside a brief video showing the space station illuminated against the blackness of space and the twinkling city lights on the nighttime side of Earth.

From the space station, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei — midway through a one-year flight — bid farewell to each of his departing friends, telling McArthur “I’ll miss hearing your laughter in adjacent modules.”

Before leaving the neighborhood, the four took a spin around the space station, taking pictures. This was a first for SpaceX; NASA’s shuttles used to do it all the time before their retirement a decade ago. The last Russian capsule fly-around was three years ago. 

It wasn’t the most comfortable ride back. The toilet in their capsule was broken, and so the astronauts needed to rely on diapers for the eight-hour trip home. They shrugged it off late last week as just one more challenge in their mission.

The first issue arose shortly after their April liftoff; Mission Control warned a piece of space junk was threatening to collide with their capsule. It turned out to be a false alarm. Then in July, thrusters on a newly arrived Russian lab inadvertently fired and sent the station into a spin. The four astronauts took shelter in their docked SpaceX capsule, ready to make a hasty departure if necessary.

Among the upbeat milestones: four spacewalks to enhance the station’s solar power, a movie-making visit by a Russian film crew and the first-ever space harvest of chile peppers.

The next crew will also spend six months up there, welcoming back-to-back groups of tourists. A Japanese tycoon and his personal assistant will get a lift from the Russian Space Agency in December, followed by three businessmen arriving via SpaceX in February. SpaceX’s first privately chartered flight, in September, bypassed the space station.

NASA’s Kathy Lueders, head of space operations, said engineers would evaluate the lagging inflation of one of the four main parachutes, something seen in testing when the lines bunch together. Overall, though, “the return looked spotless.” 

“I can’t tell you how excited I am to see all four of the crew members back on Earth,” she added, “and I’m looking forward to launching another set of four this week.”

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Australia Plans Electric Car Boost With 50,000 New Home Charging Stations

Australia’s electric car industry has criticized the government’s new policy to build thousands of charging stations as “far too little, too late.” The Australian government Tuesday pledged $132 million to speed up the rollout of hydrogen refueling and electric charging stations. 

The Electric Vehicles Council says an Australian government plan to build electric vehicle charging stations and hydrogen-powered vehicle fueling stations doesn’t include subsidies, tax incentives or minimum fuel standards, and leaves Australia lagging the rest of the world. 

Transport accounts for one-fifth of Australia’s emissions. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicles are key in efforts to decarbonize the economy. There’s a plan to build 50,000 home charging stations and increase the government’s fleet of electric vehicles.  

Morrison says it’s a bold strategy.   

“Our plan, which is another key part of the overall national plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 — this is one of the key building blocks, the future fuels and the take-up of electric vehicles driven by Australians’ choices,” Morrison said.

The government has forecast that electric and hybrid electric vehicles will make up about a third of annual new car and light truck sales by 2030. Sales hit a record 8,688 in the first half of this year but made up a fraction — about 1.5% — of total sales. 

During the 2019 election campaign, Morrison derided electric cars, insisting they would “end the weekend” because they wouldn’t be able to tow trailers or boats to go camping.    

His stance has changed as environmental pressures grow on governments around the world. 

But critics say the Australian strategy lacks ambition and does nothing to improve affordability of electric cars, which are more expensive than gasoline or diesel models. Morrison insists that costs will come down as technologies improve. 

Opposition Labor leader Anthony Albanese says other countries are leaving Australia behind.    

“There is this massive shift around the world to electric vehicles. Australia’s uptake last year was under 2%. In Norway, it was 70%. In the United Kingdom, it was 15% and rising. We are falling way behind,” Albanese said. 

Australia has some of the world’s highest emissions per person and is a huge exporter of fossil fuels. Despite a pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the Morrison government said its coal and gas industries would not be phased out. 

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WFP: $65 Million Needed to Ease Zimbabwe Food Insecurity

The World Food Program says it is seeking $65 million to ease food insecurity in Zimbabwe. The U.N. agency says its assessment shows that more than 5 million people in the southern African nation are looking at food shortages in coming months. 

Belinda Popovska, the WFP Zimbabwe spokeswoman, told VOA on Monday that the U.N. agency had started looking for funds to import food for those in need. 

“The latest 2021 rural Zimbabwe vulnerability assessment committee rural report indicates that 2.9 million people in rural areas – that’s 27% of rural households – continue to be food insecure during the peak lean season between January and March 2022. In urban areas up to 2.4 million people are expected to be food insecure according to the latest 2021 urban livelihoods assessment,” Popovska said.

The government says Zimbabwe experienced a bumper harvest this year, but the lack of food in rural areas indicates the harvest was in fact disappointing.  

Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa says Zimbabwe’s perennial food shortages will end with more production in the farms in the coming 2021/2022 season, which is expected to start anytime now.  

She says the government will make sure farmers have the supplies and money they need to meet national requirements for both human consumption and industrial use.   

“The strategy will result in more area being put to crop production as evidenced by the proposed increases of the following crops: maize, sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, soybeans and tobacco. The financing of the summer cropping and livestock will be through the private and public sector as well as development partners,” Mutsvangwa said.

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of the region, has for years been facing food shortages, forcing it to rely on humanitarian organizations such as World Vision, USAID and the WFP to feed the people.  

The government blames the problems on recurring droughts, but its critics point to a chaotic land reform program which started in 2000 and displaced experienced white farmers from their land.   

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Patriotic Korean War Epic Topped China’s October Box Office

The dramatic retelling of a decisive Korean War battle between Chinese soldiers and U.S.-led United Nations forces smashed box office records last month to become China’s third-highest grossing film of all-time, according to state media, amid a new push for patriotic-only historical accounts by the Communist Party. 

Released over China’s National Day holidays in early October, The Battle at Lake Changjin is set during November 1950 and recounts how Chinese soldiers forced a retreat of U.N. forces from the Choisin Reservoir in present-day North Korea. 

The film has already earned $875.5 million (5.6 billion RMB) since opening on September 30, according to the e-ticketing platform Maoyan, and it is still showing at some cinemas in China more than a month after opening.    

The Battle at Lake Changjin was commissioned by the Chinese government ahead of the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary this year, and it is the latest in a series of patriotic war-time films to hit Chinese theatres in the last few years. 

Other notable hits include The Korean War epic, The Sacrifice, The Eight Hundred, which recounts the 1937 Battle of Shanghai between invading Japanese forces and the National revolutionary Army, and The Wolf Warrior action film franchise about contemporary People’s Liberation Army soldiers.

In China, the Korean War is officially known as the war to “Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea,” and it has inspired multiple films — but this time the story has changed. According to a review by The Washington Post newspaper, The Battle at Lake Changjin emphasizes the defeat of the United States rather than China’s close bonds with North Korea.

“The Korean War has always been used as propaganda by Beijing — that’s nothing new — but I think what is new is in recent years the elevated level of nationalism as well as the new circumstances in which China and the United States find themselves in,” Adam Ni, a China watcher and editor of the newsletter China Neican, told VOA.   

“The Battle at Lake Changjin,” Ni said, “speaks to the moment” of souring U.S.-China relations — as well as the Party’s renewed emphasis on China’s history and an accompanying crackdown on “historical nihilism” that questions its official narrative of events.    

In one of the most high-profile incidents, Chinese journalist Luo Changping was detained in early October for criticizing The Battle at Lake Changjin, according to The New York Times. Luo wrote on social media that more than 50 years later “few Chinese people have reflected on the justifiability of the war.”  

Luo’s criticism could not have come at a worse time, however, as the Party celebrated its 100th anniversary on October 1. China’s historical narrative has remained front and center throughout celebrations and will be the subject of a resolution this week at the Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee — a meeting of more than 300 of China’s top leaders in Beijing.    

“The Party sees the construction of historical narrative as an integral part of its power and of its legitimacy, so that’s why it’s come down pretty hard on historical nihilism — people who have visions of historical events that are different from the Party in a way that the Party perceives them to be harmful,” Ni said.   

This trend is already making its way into popular culture where the Party is “rectifying the entertainment sector,” he said, by rewarding more patriotic films and pushing out more subservient ones. Less than a month after the success of The Battle at Lake Changjin, the government already announced a sequel — although other films may not be as lucky.  

“The Party has a lot of resources and if your agenda overlaps, if your aesthetic and creative agenda overlaps with the party it could be a lucrative market opportunity because the Party has leverage over market opportunities,” Ni said. “But the other hand you get to the case of ‘boy love’ (LGBTQ-themed) stories or fantasy stories … you could be successful creatively and commercially, but on the other hand, you run the political risk of upsetting the Party.” 

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Original Apple Built by Jobs and Wozniak to be Auctioned 

An original Apple computer, hand-built by company founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak 45 years ago, goes under the hammer in the United States on Tuesday. 

The functioning Apple-1, the great, great grandfather of today’s sleek chrome-and-glass Macbooks, is expected to fetch up to $600,000 at an auction in California. 

The so-called “Chaffey College” Apple-1, is one of only 200 made by Jobs and Wozniak at the very start of the company’s odyssey from garage start-up to megalith worth $2 trillion. 

What makes it even rarer is the fact it is encased in koa wood — a richly patinated wood native to Hawaii. Only a handful of the original 200 were made in this way. 

Apple-1s were mostly sold as component parts by Jobs and Wozniak. One computer shop that took delivery of around 50 units decided to encase some of them in wood, the auction house said 

“This is kind of the holy grail for vintage electronics and computer tech collectors,” Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen told the Los Angeles Times. “That really makes it exciting for a lot of people.” 

Auctioneers John Moran say the device, which comes with a 1986 Panasonic video monitor, has only ever had two owners. 

“It was originally purchased by an electronics professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, who then sold it to his student in 1977,” a listing on the auction house’s website says. 

The Los Angeles Times reported the student — who has not been named — paid just $650 for it at the time. 

That student now stands to make a pretty penny: A working Apple-1 that came to the market in 2014 was sold by Bonhams for more than $900,000. 

“A lot of people just want to know what kind of a person collects Apple-1 computers and it’s not just people in the tech industry,” Cohen said. 

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