The “end of coal” is in sight, according to Britain — the host of the COP26 climate summit — after dozens of countries pledged to stop using coal and end the financing of fossil fuels. But as Henry Ridgwell reports from the Glasgow summit, weaning economies off coal won’t be easy — even for Britain itself.
Camera: Henry Ridgwell
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Congressional Democrats this week proposed an addition to U.S. President Joe Biden’s climate and social spending legislation that would allow Medicare, the federal government’s health care program for older Americans, to negotiate with drugmakers over the cost of certain prescription medications.
U.S. consumers pay higher prices for prescription medications than almost any of their peers in the developed world, a fact that generations of politicians and advocates have struggled in vain to change. If passed, the proposal working its way through Congress would make a dent, though a relatively small one, in that long-standing problem.
The plan being discussed would give Medicare officials the ability to negotiate pricing on a sliver of the thousands of prescription medications on the market in the United States, beginning with about 10 drugs and capped at 20. Liberal members of Congress at first had hoped to grant Medicare authority to negotiate the prices of up to 250 costly drugs every year.
Though small, the number of drugs that would be covered by the proposal represents a disproportionate amount of the annual “spend” on drugs by Medicare patients.
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation released this year determined that the 10 top-selling drugs covered under Medicare Part D accounted for 16% of net total spending in 2019. The top 50 drugs — representing just 8.5% of all drugs covered under the program — accounted for 80% of spending.
The top 10 drugs, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation include “three cancer medications, four diabetes medications, two anticoagulants and one rheumatoid arthritis treatment.”
Confusing system
Unlike many countries outside the U.S., where the government is able to negotiate drug prices and bring down the cost for a single national health care system, the landscape in the U.S. is highly fragmented. Most Americans with health insurance are covered by policies issued by for-profit companies in the private sector.
Americans 65 years and older are eligible for Medicare, which takes the place of a private insurer, but with some critical differences. For many years, Medicare did not offer prescription drug coverage, forcing Medicare patients to pay for medications out of pocket or seek third-party insurance coverage for their medications.
In 2003, Congress created Medicare Part D, under which private insurers offered medication coverage that met minimum requirements established by the federal government. While that program reduced costs for many seniors, cost-sharing provisions and design flaws mean that many recipients continue to face financially crippling bills for medication. A key reason is that each insurance provider must negotiate prices with drug companies individually, rather than using the bargaining power of the entire Medicare population to insist on lower costs.
‘Subsidizing R&D for the world’
For years, advocates for change have pointed out that drug companies set prices in the U.S. far above those in other countries in which they sell the same drugs. A study by the Rand Corporation this year comparing the U.S. with 32 other countries found that drugs cost on average 256% more in the U.S.
“American consumers are subsidizing the R&D for the world,” said Lovisa Gustafsson, vice president of the Controlling Health Care Costs program at the Commonwealth Fund, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Compounding the problem is that Americans also shoulder a much greater share of the cost for their prescription medications.
“Patients in the U.S. face far higher cost-sharing than in a lot of other countries. So, just because they have insurance doesn’t mean that patients can actually afford the drugs that they need currently,” Gustafsson said. “There’s survey after survey showing that 20% to 25% of Americans can’t afford the drugs they’re prescribed by their physician, or split pills, or don’t get the prescription filled, because they just can’t afford it. And that’s even when they have insurance.”
Putting a lid on costs
An important element of the proposal before Congress is that it would place an annual cap of $2,000 on the co-payments that Medicare patients can be charged for their medications.
The prospect of a cap on out-of-pocket costs was well-received by many calling for reforms, such as AARP, a large advocacy group for older Americans.
“There’s no greater issue affecting the pocketbooks of seniors on Medicare than the ever-increasing costs of prescription drugs,” AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins said in a statement. “For decades, seniors have been at the mercy of Big Pharma. Allowing Medicare to finally negotiate drug prices is a big win for seniors. Preventing prices from rising faster than inflation and adding a hard out-of-pocket cap to Part D will provide real relief for seniors with the highest drug costs.”
Drug firms unhappy
PhRMA, a powerful trade group representing the pharmaceuticals industry, reacted unhappily to news of the proposal.
“If passed, it will upend the same innovative ecosystem that brought us lifesaving vaccines and therapies to combat COVID-19,” PhRMA President and CEO Stephen J. Ubl said in a statement. “Under the guise of ‘negotiation,’ it gives the government the power to dictate how much a medicine is worth and leaves many patients facing a future with less access to medicines and fewer new treatments.”
“While we’re pleased to see changes to Medicare that cap what seniors pay out of pocket for prescription drugs, the proposal lets insurers and middlemen like pharmacy benefit managers off the hook when it comes to lowering costs for patients at the pharmacy counter,” Ubl continued. “It threatens innovation and makes a broken health care system even worse.”
Industry claims exaggerated?
Numerous supporters of allowing the government to negotiate on drug prices claim that the industry’s insistence that it will stymie innovation is exaggerated.
One piece of evidence they point to is a study released by the Congressional Budget Office in August. The CBO created a model in which pharmaceutical companies were faced with the following scenario: A policy is put in place that reduces the return on their most profitable drugs by 15% to 25%.
The agency estimated that the impact would be a reduction of the number of new drugs coming onto the market by only one-half of 1% over the first 10 years of the new policy. That would increase to as much as an 8% reduction in the first three decades of the program.
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A documentary about the impact of climate change in Africa is a highlight of the annual French film festival in Los Angeles this year. The festival, “City of Light, City of Angels,” draws filmmakers from Paris and fans from Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports on the documentary “Marcher sur L’eau” (released in English as “Above Water”), which is causing a buzz.
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Belinda Kaziwisi of Mount Darwin, Zimbabwe, about 200 kilometers north of Harare, is among the Zimbabwean mothers seeing the benefits that have grown from money provided by UNICEF.
“What I see has changed for the better is that from when I got pregnant until up to the delivery of my child, I didn’t pay anything,” Kaziwisi said, her healthy baby in her arms. “When I delivered, I was given soap, cotton and other things for free. It was all nice compared with what used to happen before.”
With funding from UNICEF, the Zimbabwe government has hired health workers who encourage pregnant mothers in rural villages to seek assistance from the country’s health institutions to avoid complications.
“We encourage pregnant mothers to come to clinics,” said Letty Chindundu, one of the health workers. “We tell them: When you get to the third month of your pregnancy, please go to the clinic. Health workers there will tell you what to do. The journey to delivery of your baby becomes easy. Even your baby will be taken care of while in the tummy, since there are now so many diseases. If they do not come to clinic, the baby may be delivered with ailments. That’s how we encourage them to come to clinic — when they [become] pregnant.”
Dr. Tajudeen Oyewale, the UNICEF representative in Zimbabwe, said that having health workers in rural villages and funding the country’s health sector are paying off.
“[According to] the latest results of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, Zimbabwe has successfully halved the maternal mortality ratio in the last 10 years, and this is a combination of different efforts [by] everyone,” Oyewale said. “The challenges are real because the world is evolving. We did not [know] COVID was going to come. What is great about what I have seen is innovation. The problem comes, our people innovate.”
Dr. Aboubacar Kampo, UNICEF’s director of health programs, was a junior official in Zimbabwe for the U.N. agency when it launched the Health Transition Fund, a multidonor pooled fund to support the country’s barely functioning health sector, about a decade ago.
This week, Kampo has been in Zimbabwe to assess whether the fund has changed Zimbabwe’s maternal, newborn and child health systems. He said the fund was bearing fruit.
“I am very pleased with the progress which Zimbabwe has made in terms of providing health care to the entire population,” Kampo said. “It is not perfect. But I think Zimbabwe can be proud of the achievement made. I think you have fully functional health systems, in particular primary health care. What I have seen is an integrated system.”
Kampo, a Mali national, said Zimbabwe now has a fully functional health system in primary health care, a sharp contrast to what the nation had nearly a decade ago.
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An Earth-flight giant contributes to NASA’s upcoming moon missions. Plus, words from the next crew to visit the International Space Station and grim news from NASA about the future of food on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space.
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Britain could revive domestic production of super strong magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines with government support, to cut its reliance on China and achieve vital cuts in carbon emissions, two sources with direct knowledge said.
A government-funded feasibility study is due to be published on Friday, laying out the steps Britain must take to restart output of rare earth permanent magnets, the sources said.
A magnet factory would help Britain, hosting the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, meet its goal of banning petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and slashing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
British production of the magnets vanished in the 1990s when the industry found it could not compete with China. But with the huge growth in demand, the government is keen to secure enough supply.
Last month, the government set out plans to achieve its net zero strategy, which includes spending $1.15 billion to support the roll out of electric vehicles (EVs) and their supply chains.
The study outlines how a plant could be built by 2024 and eventually produce enough of the powerful magnets to supply 1 million EVs a year, the sources who have read the report said.
“We’re looking to turn the tide of shipping all this kind of manufacturing to the Far East and resurrect U.K. manufacturing excellence,” one of the sources said.
The government’s Department for Business declined to comment on details regarding a possible magnet factory because the report has not been released.
“The government continues to work with investors through our Automotive Transformation Fund (ATF) to progress plans to build a globally competitive electric vehicle supply chain in the U.K.,” a spokesperson said in an email.
EV ramp up
British rare earth company Less Common Metals put together the feasibility study and is considering seeking partners to jointly build the factory, the sources said.
LCM is one of the only companies outside of China that transforms rare earth raw materials into the special compounds needed to produce permanent magnets.
Automakers will need the magnets as they ramp up EV output in Britain. Ford said last month it would invest up to $310 million in an English plant to produce around 250,000 EV power units a year from mid-2024.
Rare earth magnets made of neodymium are used in 90% of EV motors because they are widely seen as the most efficient way to power them.
Electric cars with these magnets require less battery power than those with ordinary magnets, so vehicles can travel longer distances before recharging.
A race by automakers to ramp up EVs and countries to switch to wind energy is due to boost demand for permanent magnets in Europe as much as tenfold by 2050, according to the European Union.
The sources said government support would be vital so Britain could compete with China, which produces 90% of supply.
The strategy mirrors similar efforts by the EU and the United States to create domestic industries of raw materials, rare earth processing and permanent magnets.
The World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe said Thursday the continent is now the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for 59 percent of all cases globally.
At a virtual news briefing from Copenhagen, Hans Kluge said the current pace of transmission across the region’s 53 countries is of grave concern. He said new cases are approaching record levels, with the delta variant of the coronavirus driving the surge.
Kluge said his agency’s latest data shows hospitalizations in the region more than doubled in one week.
He noted officials are seeing increasing trends across all age groups, but that the rapid increase in the older population is of the most concern. He said this is translating into more people having severe cases and dying, with 75 percent of the deaths among persons aged 65 or older.
Kluge said one reliable projection indicates that at the current pace, Europe could see another half a million COVID-19 deaths by the first of February. COVID-19 is caused by the coronavirus.
He also cited uneven vaccination rates and the relaxation of public health and social measures throughout the region as the cause of the surge.
While a billion doses of vaccine have been distributed, in Europe, only 47 percent of the total population are fully vaccinated. He says in eight nations, at least 70 percent of the people have been inoculated fully. Kluge notes the rate remains below 10 percent in two other countries.
Kluge encouraged nations with low vaccination rates to increase coverage, particularly among priority groups such as the elderly. He urged nations with high vaccination rates and ample supply to share with less fortunate nations.
He also said that vaccines are most effective when used with other preventive measures, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Kluge said if the region achieved universal mask use, 188,000 lives could be saved between now and February.
The WHO region chief said, “We must change our tactics, from reacting to surges” of COVID-19 to “preventing them from happening in the first place.”
Chinese authorities have squelched virtually all online discussion of sexual assault accusations apparently made by a Chinese professional tennis star against a former top government official, showing how sensitive the ruling Communist Party is to such charges.
In a lengthy social media post that disappeared quickly, Peng Shuai wrote that Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier and member of the party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, had forced her to have sex despite repeated refusals following a round of tennis three years ago. Her post also said they had sex once seven years ago and she had feelings for him after that.
Peng is a former top-ranked doubles player, taking 23 tour-level doubles titles, including Grand Slams at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014.
The Associated Press could not verify the authenticity of her post, which was made late Tuesday night by her verified account on Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform. The post was removed soon after, and a search on Weibo for Peng’s account now turns up no results. Neither she nor Zhang could be reached for comment.
The accusation is the first against a prominent government official since the #MeToo movement took hold in China in 2018 before being largely tamped down by authorities the same year. Earlier accusations were confined to the media, advocacy groups and academia.
The Communist Party’s response illustrates its determination to control public discourse and restrain social movements it can’t be sure of controlling. While social media has become ubiquitous in China, it remains firmly under party control.
Screenshots of the post have circulated on Twitter, which is blocked in China, reinvigorating discussion on that platform about gender relations in China, where men dominate the top levels in politics and business.
In the post, Peng, 35, wrote that Zhang, now 75, and his wife arranged to play tennis in Beijing about three years ago and that he later brought her into a room at his home where the assault occurred.
“I was so frightened that afternoon, never thinking that this thing could happen,” the post says.
Rumors and overseas reports about affairs between younger women and leading officials have long been staples of Chinese politics, starting with the founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong.
Cases brought against present and former officials under party leader and President Xi Jinping’s decade-long anti-corruption campaign also frequently feature accusations of “lascivious lifestyles,” along with bribery and abusing their positions.
Zhang retired in 2018 and has largely disappeared from public life, as is usual with former Chinese officials.
Peng hasn’t played at the top tier since the Qatar Open in February 2020. In singles, she reached the semifinals of the 2014 U.S. Open and the Round of 16 at the subsequent Australian Open, but hasn’t progressed beyond the third round at any major since Wimbledon in 2017.
The Communist Party has increasingly cracked down on civil society, including the #MeToo movement that has struggled to gain traction in the country.
Zhou Xiaoxuan, a former intern at Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, was shoved by bystanders in September as she went to court in a case against a well-known presenter.
Since then, the movement has been largely shut down by authorities as activists found their online posts censored and faced pressure from authorities when trying to hold protests.
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The COVID-19 pandemic shortened life expectancy around the globe last year, according to a new international study.
A team of researchers led by University of Oxford public health professor Nazur Islam examined changes to life expectancy in 37 upper-middle- and high-income countries, using the years between 2005 and 2019 as a benchmark, and compared the ages of the deceased to their life expectancies.
The study, published this week in the scientific journal BMJ, found that Russia had the highest drop in life expectancy, where men lost 2.33 years and women 2.14 years. In second place was the United States, with men losing 2.27 years and women 1.61 years, followed by Bulgaria with men losing 1.96 years and women 1.37 years.
A total of 31 nations saw declines in life expectancy. According to the researchers, these countries’ populations lost about 28 million additional years of life.
Six nations — Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea and Taiwan — were the only nations of those studied where life expectancy either increased or remained the same.
The researchers say most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America were not included in the study due to a lack of data, meaning the true toll from the pandemic was likely even higher.
The pandemic has claimed more than 5 million lives since the first cases were detected in central China in late 2019, with the United States the world leader in COVID-19 deaths with 750,430, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
Meanwhile, vaccinations of children between 5 and 11 years of age began in earnest across the United States Wednesday, just hours after Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, formally accepted the advice of the agency’s vaccine advisory panel that a low dosage of Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine was safe for that age group.
Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters Monday that the government had already begun shipping the doses to more than 20,000 doctors’ offices, pharmacies and various health clinics around the country to begin inoculating as many as 28 million children. Zients said the program should be “running at full strength” by next week.
In Beijing, more than 1 million people have applied to volunteer at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, according to state-run Global Times, as quoted by the Atlanta-based cable news network, CNN. Enthusiasm for the Games, which are slated to be held in February, is running high despite ongoing outbreaks of COVID-19 cases across China, prompting authorities to impose a “zero-COVID” policy that includes widespread testing and strict lockdowns to blunt the spread of the virus.
Organizers of the Beijing Winter Olympics will hold the Games in a “COVID-safe bubble” in which athletes and other participants will be quarantined from local residents. In addition, only residents of mainland China will be allowed to attend the Games as spectators.
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Social media behemoth Facebook is facing public and regulatory scrutiny after the disclosure of thousands of pages of internal documents by a whistleblower who used to work for the company.
What are the Facebook papers?
After compiling the documents while working as a Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen distributed them to a group of 17 U.S. news organizations that collaborated on a project to individually publish stories on their findings.
The stories, released on a coordinated day in late October, portray Facebook as pursuing audience growth and profits while ignoring how people were using the platform to spread hate and misinformation.
The documents showed Facebook particularly struggled with monitoring for hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation by users posting in certain countries, including some that Facebook had determined were at the most risk for real-world consequences of such abuses.
The failures included both inadequate artificial intelligence systems and not enough human moderators who speak the many languages spoken by Facebook users.
Who else received them?
In addition to providing the documents to journalists, Haugen has also made them available to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Congress. Haugen has also appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee and testified before the British Parliament.
Haugen used her smartphone camera to capture the documents.
Why are they important?
The company has massive global reach. Facebook had 2.74 billion active users as of the end of September, according to company statistics. That is about 1 out of every 3 people on the planet, and the company also operates other popular services such as WhatsApp and Instagram.
How has Facebook responded?
Facebook spokesperson Mavis Jones said in a statement that the company is working to stop abuse on its platform in places where there is a higher risk of conflict, and that it has native speakers to review content in 70 languages.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke during a quarterly earnings conference call Monday and said Facebook is facing “a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, the Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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A New Zealand research project is looking at ways to produce hydrogen in Antarctica to reduce carbon emissions.
A four-month New Zealand project is investigating whether hydrogen could be generated, used and stored at Scott Base, its Antarctic research facility, to reduce its reliance on carbon-based fuels. Those fuels are currently used for transportation, cooking and heating. A special grade fuel is shipped in on ice-breakers.
Surplus power from wind turbines at Scott Base could be used to generate green hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells that produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
The hydrogen initiative is a collaboration between Antarctica, New Zealand, a government scientific body, and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. The project started in August and will finish this month.
The project faces some obstacles, including geographic isolation and extreme weather. Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and driest continent. In 1983, a temperature of minus 89.2 degrees was recorded.
Brendon Miller, a consultant chemical engineer, says it is an ambitious plan.
“We would like to demonstrate that we can use hydrogen effectively as an energy source to replace fossil fuels. It is a very challenging environment to do it in Antarctica. But, actually, there are some things going for it because the alternates like batteries are quite awkward to use for long-term storage particularly at very cold temperatures,” Miller said.
New Zealand’s work in Antarctica focuses in large part on global warming. Experts have said the world’s southernmost continent was very sensitive to rising temperatures, and it also influenced the global climate system. Earlier this year, the New Zealand government said it would spend $200 million to guarantee the future of its scientific hub at Scott Base.
Scientific projects in Antarctica are highly collaborative, bringing together researchers from around the world.
Twenty-nine countries, including Australia, China and the United States, operate bases in Antarctica.
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Indian police have detained or arrested at least a dozen Muslims for allegedly celebrating Pakistan’s cricket match victory October 24 over archrival India in the T20 World Cup.
Those arrested include a Muslim teacher in the western state of Rajasthan who was fired from her job for writing “We won” on her WhatsApp status following Pakistan’s crushing victory against India last week in Dubai. Authorities at a government hospital in Indian-administered Kashmir also terminated the job contract of a Kashmiri Muslim medical technician after she allegedly celebrated the victory on social media.
In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, seven people, including three Kashmiri students, were arrested for celebrating Pakistan’s victory. The state’s chief minister said all would be charged with sedition, and the accused could face jail terms of up to seven years.
Former Indian Supreme Court Justice Deepak Gupta said the celebration by any Indian of Pakistan’s cricket victory is “definitely not sedition and it is ridiculous to think it is.”
India and Pakistan are cricket-frenzy nations, and the neighbors have been fierce rivals on the pitch since British India was split into two countries in 1947.
But because of the bitter political enmity between the countries, the Indian government does not allow the Indian cricket team to play Pakistan except in an official International Cricket Council-organized contest such as the ongoing T20 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates.
India accuses Pakistan of sponsoring terrorism in India and has blamed its rival for many terrorist attacks in India-administered Kashmir and other parts of the country. While Pakistan denies the accusations, almost all exchanges between the nations have come to a standstill in the recent years. The bilateral cricketing ties between the two neighbors have been frozen for more than eight years.
Pakistan’s trouncing of archrival India in the October 24 match triggered ecstatic celebrations among some Muslims in India, according to police reports. In India, where the majority is Hindu, those celebrating Pakistan’s victory are viewed as anti-nationals or enemies of India.
On October 27, police arrested Muslim teacher Nafisa Attari in Rajasthan’s Udaipur for her WhatsApp status in support of the Pakistani cricket team. The private school where she worked dismissed her immediately.
The same day, police in Uttar Pradesh announced they had arrested seven people, including three Kashmiri students from a private engineering college in Agra, for allegedly celebrating Pakistani team’s victory on WhatsApp. The Kashmiris were suspended from school.
In a tweet, Uttar Pradesh police said those arrested were “anti-national elements” who used “disrespectful words against the Indian cricket team and made anti-India comments which disrupted peace.” The Kashmiris also face charges of cyberterrorism, under India’s Information Technology Act.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath threatened that Indians found cheering Pakistani cricket team will face tough actions.
Adityanath tweeted: “Those celebrating Pakistan’s victory will face sedition charges.”
The charge of sedition, which is based on a British colonial-era law, can be used against anyone who “brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law.”
Nasir Khuehami, national spokesperson of the Jammu and Kashmir Students Association, told VOA that Kashmiri Muslim students were violently assaulted in many states in India for allegedly celebrating the Pakistani cricket team’s victory.
“This is perhaps true that those Kashmiri students celebrated Pakistani team’s victory in social media. But the Kashmiri students in Agra are being hounded more because of some Hindu groups’ charge that they shouted ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans. This charge is completely untrue. The college authorities and some non-Kashmiri students from the Agra engineering college confirmed it to us that no Kashmiri students shouted anti-India or pro-Pakistan slogans. But mostly because of the bogus charge, the students are being viewed as anti-nationalists,” Khuehami said.
In the presence of police, Hindu right-wing groups beat up three arrested Kashmiri students while they were being produced in the court, Khuehami said.
“Several lawyer associations in Agra have decided not to provide legal support to the three Kashmiri students. It is obvious that once the three students are booked under sedition charges, their studies will be doomed. Slapping sedition charges against the students just on the basis of their WhatsApp statuses and congratulatory messages is an arbitrary and unwarranted act.”
The parents of the three students, who are mostly poor, have urged that the Uttar Pradesh government forgive them and revoke all the charges on humanitarian grounds.
In a video interview, Gupta said celebrating the Pakistani team’s victory over India may be offensive or unwise for an Indian “but it is not a crime. It is not illegal. A thing may be good or bad, but that does not make it a crime or illegal.”
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The Tour du Faso, a 10-day bicycle race through the conflict-stricken West African country of Burkina Faso, began in the southern city of Banfora on October 29. One Burkinabe rider hopes to build on his Summer Olympics performance and secure victory despite security concerns.
Paul Daumont is one of eighty cyclists taking part in this year’s Tour du Faso, Burkina Faso’s answer to the world-famous Tour de France bicycle race.
Since October 29, cyclists have pedaled their way across the country, with a new stage each day.
Daumont is back from the Olympics in Tokyo and hopes to improve on his performance in his home country.
He says breaking into cycling was tough, but at just 22, it has already taken him all over the world, from Japan to Switzerland.
“You could say that cycling, whether in Burkina Faso or in the rest of the world, is a sport that is difficult to get into, because you need a machine and the machines are relatively expensive. You have to be lucky enough to already have a bike — or someone who can lend one to you to get started,” Daumont said.
He says that the cycling federation in Burkina Faso helped him with a road racing bike after he showed potential, but you need a good bike to get to that level in the first place.
Despite difficulties with access, the sport of cycling is becoming more popular in Africa, and the Union Cycliste Internationale’s annual Africa tour takes in 11 countries, including Burkina Faso.
Burkina Faso is in the midst of a six-year conflict involving terror groups linked to the Islamic State group, al-Qaida and local bandits, and security has deteriorated in recent months.
The organizers and participants at this year’s event, however, were pushing ahead, and the atmosphere was festive.
When asked about security, one of the organizers said it was a concern.
“Yeah. Sure. It’s one of the big difficulties for us, because of course when we have, for example, European countries. We are not all the time sure, but we have a big organization. We have the military with us; we have to police with us,” Bezault said.
Contenders from Europe say they are not worried about security.
“Oh, I don’t feel unsafe at all. I think everyone is very friendly and, yeah, like I said, I haven’t felt unsafe at all. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” Betten said.
Local riders say they are enjoying the cosmopolitan nature of the event but have their eyes on the prize.
“I thank the foreigners who came, and I also thank the cyclists, the runners from Burkina Faso. May God give us the yellow jersey,” Sorgho said.
Meanwhile, Daumont has already placed in the top 10 in the first two stages of the Tour du Faso, which will reach its conclusion on Sunday.
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South African writer Damon Galgut won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Wednesday with “The Promise,” a novel about one white family’s reckoning with South Africa’s racist history.
Galgut had been British bookmakers’ runaway favorite to win the 50,000-pound ($69,000) prize with his story of a troubled Afrikaner family and its broken promise to a Black employee — a tale that reflects bigger themes in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.
Galgut took the prize on his third time as a finalist, for a book the judges called a tour de force. He was previously shortlisted for “The Good Doctor” in 2003 and “In a Strange Room” in 2010.
Despite his status as favorite, Galgut said he was stunned to win.
Galgut said he was accepting the prize “on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I’m part of.”
“Please keep listening to us — more to come,” he added.
Historian Maya Jasanoff, who chaired the judging panel, said “The Promise” was a profound, forceful and succinct book that “combines an extraordinary story, rich themes — the history of the last 40 years in South Africa — in an incredibly well-wrought package.”
Galgut’s ninth novel traces members of the Swart family — the word is Afrikaans for black — haunted by an unkept promise to give their Black maid, Salome, her own house. The book is structured around a series of funerals over several decades; Galgut has said he wanted to make readers fill in the narrative gaps themselves.
He is the third South African novelist to win the Booker Prize, after Nadine Gordimer in 1974 and J.M. Coetzee, who won twice, in 1983 and 1999.
“The Promise” was selected over five other novels, including three by U.S. writers: Richard Powers’ “Bewilderment,” the story of an astrobiologist trying to care for his neurodivergent son; Patricia Lockwood’s social media-steeped novel “No One is Talking About This”; and Maggie Shipstead’s aviator saga “Great Circle.”
The other finalists were Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s aftermath-of-war story “A Passage North” and British/Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed’s “The Fortune Men,” about a Somali man falsely accused of murder in 1950s Wales.
Jasanoff said many of the shortlisted novels, including Galgut’s, reflected on the relationship between past and present.
“This is a book that’s very much about inheritance and legacy,” she said of the winner. “It’s about change over a period of decades. And I think it’s a book that invites reflection over the decades and invites and repays rereading.”
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and was originally open to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. Eligibility was expanded in 2014 to all novels in English published in the U.K.
The judging panel winnowed their list from 158 novels submitted by publishers. Only one British writer, Mohamed, made the final six, a fact has renewed debate in the U.K. about whether the prize is becoming U.S.-dominated.
Last year there also was only one British writer on a U.S.-dominated list of finalists, Scotland’s Douglas Stuart. He won the prize for “Shuggie Bain,” a gritty and lyrical novel about a boy coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow.
For a second year, the coronavirus pandemic has scuttled the prize’s usual black-tie dinner ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall. The winner was announced in a ceremony broadcast live on BBC radio and television.
No in-person school. Isolation from friends. Lost rites of passage like graduation ceremonies. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of many children in the United States.
“A lot of children’s joy comes from being with friends or from play, and from social interaction. When you ask kids, ‘What’s making you happy?’ 90% of the time, it’s being around friends or doing things with friends,” says Elena Mikalsen, head of the Psychology Section at the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio in Texas. “That was kind of taken away during the pandemic. … For the longest time, all kids had was the academics and no joy.”
A recent report finds that the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19 has negatively affected the emotional and mental health of about one-third of America’s youth. So much so that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), along with other children’s health organizations, has declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.
“Elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression or stress,” says Nirmita Panchal, a senior policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit organization focusing on national health issues. “There’s also been a number of changes in behavior that parents have reported with some children having a poor appetite and difficulty sleeping. For others, it may be fear or irritability and clinginess.”
Panchal co-authored the report, which found that 8% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 currently have anxiety. That number rises to 13% among adolescents ages 12 to 17.
“During the pandemic, children, just like everybody else, have experienced a number of changes and disruptions,” Panchal says. “That includes school closures, possibly financial difficulties at home, isolation, perhaps the loss of loved ones and then difficulty accessing health care. So, all of these factors may be contributing to increased mental health issues among children.”
Rates of children’s mental health concerns and suicide steadily increased between 2010 and 2020, according to the AAP, which says the pandemic has made the crisis worse with “dramatic increases” in the number of young people visiting hospital emergency rooms for mental health-related concerns, including possible suicide attempts.
Maryland psychologist Mary Karapetian Alvord says uncertainty, as well as losing out on school activities, provoked varying levels of grief in young people.
“Particularly high school students, who really lost out on all of the fun activities, the fun clubs, and also graduations and homecoming, football games and all the social as well as the outlets that they have,” says Alvord, who is also an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at The George Washington University School of Medicine. “So, those are themes that have dominated this pandemic, I think, grief, loss on all those different levels, and then just constant uncertainty. And we then get a rise in anxiety.”
Alvord says the young people being seen at her practice have a sense that they’re not moving forward, which has led to anger, frustration, sadness and anxiety.
“It runs the gamut, but kids have lost time,” she says. “They have a sense that they have lost time, and not in terms of only maybe some academic skills, which a lot of the schools are concerned about, but in terms of maturity. How do you mature as a kid? It’s not by being home 24/7.”
And while children missed being in school with their friends, the idea of returning to in-person classes also triggered some anxiety.
“Some kids were scared to go back to school because they were afraid of contracting COVID. They were afraid of what school might look like and what that would entail, especially kids that already were more predispositioned to have anxiety or depression,” says psychologist Nekeshia Hammond, former president of the Florida Psychological Association. “It basically made that process a lot more stressful. And not just school but going back into social situations.”
The pandemic has shaken the sense of safety most children feel. More than 140,000 children in the United States lost a primary and/or secondary caregiver to COVID-19.
“The majority of kids just have this innocence, in a way, that the world is safe. ‘I’m going to be OK. People are here to protect me,’” Hammond says. “And that got stripped away for a lot of kids who don’t feel the world is safe.”
Children of color have been disproportionately impacted by the losses caused by the pandemic. And not solely because they were more likely to lose a loved one to the virus.
Mikalsen, who works primarily with minority youth and inner-city youth in Texas, found that many of the children she spoke to were forced to use their smartphones for their schooling because they didn’t have computers at home. Spotty internet connections made it difficult to stay in touch with their schoolwork and to get their assignments.
Some of Mikalsen’s young patients were home alone all day because their parents are essential, front-line workers.
“A lot of the kids that I was talking to during the pandemic, they were completely alone at home, left to be there by themselves and, ‘Hey, if you can get connected to school, that’d be great, but if you don’t, no big deal,’” Mikalsen says. “So many kids that I talked to, they just slept all day and had nobody to talk to. Things like that can really cause a lot of depression and anxiety.”
And then there was the societal upheaval caused by the police murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man in Minneapolis. Video of police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck while Floyd struggled to breathe went viral, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality.
“All of that affects kids of color in a different way, on top of a global pandemic, on top of, ‘You can’t go to school, and you lost a loved one.’ It was basically more compounded,” Hammond says. “There were so many different stressors all at one time, which made it extremely difficult as far as coping, and as far as mental health.”
The AAP is calling for more federal funding for mental health screenings and treatment for all children from infancy through adolescence, with an emphasis on making certain kids from less privileged homes get the services they need.
“We don’t want to wait until it’s unmanageable. We want to have scaffolding and services in place to catch kids when they’re having that much trouble,” Alvord says. “We’re all tied to one another, and if your family is doing better, then those kids get sent to school and they’re doing better in school. Which helps the whole health of the classroom. Which helps the teachers do better to teach and do what they need to, instead of having to deal with the mental health crisis.”
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The U.S. government has added four foreign technology companies to its restricted companies list, saying they “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments” and that the spyware was used “to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
The State Department accused the companies of “engaging in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
The companies are Israel’s NSO Group and Candiru, Russia’s Positive Technologies, and Singapore’s Computer Security Initiative Consultancy PTE. LTD.
These companies will now face severe restrictions in exporting their products to the U.S., and it will make it difficult for U.S. cybersecurity firms to sell them information that could be useful in developing their products.
“This effort is aimed at improving citizens’ digital security, combating cyber threats, and mitigating unlawful surveillance,” the State Department said.
According to Reuters, both NSO Group and Candiru have been accused of selling their products to authoritarian regimes. NSO said it takes actions to prevent the abuse of its products.
Positive Technologies has been in the crosshairs before, having been sanctioned by the Biden administration for allegedly providing assistance to Russian security forces. The company said it has done nothing wrong.
None of the companies commented on their blacklisting.
Some information in this report comes from Reuters.
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