Month: January 2022

It’s a chaotic time for the Consumer Electronics Show 2022, the world’s largest technology event. Last-minute COVID-19-related cancellations have wreaked havoc on the organizers’ plans to host exhibitors and welcome visitors in person in Las Vegas and online. But as VOA’s JulieTaboh reports, the show will go on.
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As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week. 

Under that Dec. 27 guidance, isolation restrictions for people infected with COVID-19 were shortened from 10 days to five days if they are no longer feeling symptoms or running a fever. After that period, they are asked to spend the following five days wearing a mask when around others.  

The guidelines have since received criticism from many health professionals for not specifying a negative antigen test as a requirement for leaving isolation.  

“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested,” Fauci said. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.” 

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. has been seeing almost a “vertical increase” of new cases, now averaging 400,000 cases a day, with hospitalizations also up. 

“We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” he said. “The acceleration of cases that we’ve seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before.” 

Fauci said he’s concerned that the omicron variant is overwhelming the health care system and causing a “major disruption” on other essential services. 

“When I say major disruptions, you’re certainly going to see stresses on the system and the system being people with any kind of jobs … particularly with critical jobs to keep society functioning normally,” Fauci said. “We already know that there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities that 10, 20, 25 and sometimes 30% of the people are ill. That’s something that we need to be concerned about, because we want to make sure that we don’t have such an impact on society that there really is a disruption. I hope that doesn’t happen.” 

The surging variant is ravaging other sectors of the workforce and American life. 

Wintry weather combined with the pandemic were blamed for Sunday’s grounding of more than 2,500 U.S. flights and more than 4,100 worldwide. Dozens of U.S. colleges are moving classes online again for at least the first week or so of the semester — and some warn it could stretch longer if the wave of infection doesn’t subside soon. Many companies that had been allowing office workers to work remotely but that were planning to return to the office early in 2022 have further delayed those plans.

The White House Correspondents’ Association announced on Sunday that the number of journalists allowed in the briefing room for at least the first few weeks of the year would be scaled back because of concerns about the fast-spreading virus. Typically, 49 reporters have seats for the daily briefing, but only 14 reporters will be seated under the restrictions. The White House limited capacity in the briefing room early in the pandemic but returned to full capacity in June 2021. 

While there is “accumulating evidence” that omicron might lead to less severe illness, he cautioned that the data remains early. Fauci said he worries in particular about the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans because “a fair number of them are going to get severe disease.” 

He urged Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated and boosted to do so and to mask up indoors to protect themselves and blunt the current surge of U.S. cases. 

The Food and Drug Administration last week said preliminary research indicates at-home rapid tests detect omicron but may have reduced sensitivity. The agency noted it’s still studying how the tests perform with the variant, which was first detected in late November. 

Fauci said Americans “should not get the impression that those tests are not valuable.” 

“I think the confusion is that rapid antigen tests have never been as sensitive as the PCR test,” Fauci said. “They’re very good when they are given sequentially. So, if you do them like maybe two or three times over a few-day period, at the end of the day, they are as good as the PCR. But as a single test, they are not as sensitive.” 

A PCR test usually needs to be processed in a laboratory. The test looks for the virus’s genetic material and then reproduces it millions of times until it’s detectable with a computer.  

Fauci said if Americans take the necessary precautions, the U.S. might see some semblance of more normal life returning soon. 

“One of the things that we hope for is that this thing will peak after a period of a few weeks and turn around,” Fauci said. He expressed hope that by February or March, omicron could fall to a low enough level “that it doesn’t disrupt our society, our economy, our way of life.” 

Fauci spoke on ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union.”  
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Conservationists are blaming climate change, land clearing and pesticides for the population crash of one of Australia’s most famous insects. Once a common sight, bogong moths have become rare in recent years. They are now recognized as endangered by the world’s leading scientific authority on vulnerable species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

The bogong moth is native to Australia. The mass migration of billions of the small insects has long been a spectacular sight in eastern Australia.   

Scientists say the moths are guided by the stars and the earth’s magnetic fields.  

They fly up to 1,000 kilometers from Queensland to the mountains of Victoria to shelter in caves from the heat of summer. In the caves, it was once estimated there were as many as 17,000 moths per square meter.  

But Jess Abrahams, a nature campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation says bogong moth numbers have collapsed.   

“It is a dramatic decline, and this population crash has been caused by climate change-fueled extreme drought in their breeding grounds in western Queensland. There has also been land clearing over many years, use of pesticides as well and the consequence is a huge crash in numbers and the flow-on affects to other species is of huge concern. This should be an alarm bell because we are in the midst of an extinction crisis. We are seeing (a) million species globally at risk of extinction and literally these things are disappearing before our very eyes,” Abrahams said.  

The decline of the bogong moth has a cascading effect on other species. They were a major source of food for another critically endangered animal, the mountain pygmy-possum. Fewer than 2,000 of Australia’s only hibernating marsupials are thought to be left in the wild.    

The moth is one of 124 Australian animals and plants that were added in December to the “Red List” of threatened species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They include several other types of insects and the grey-headed flying fox, which is Australia’s largest bat.    

The Red List classifies how close global animal, plant and fungi species are to dying out, and includes sharks, rays and birds. Many populations are strained by global warming, deforestation, habitat loss and pollution.    

Campaigners are urging the Australian government to do more to save the moths that were once in such abundance in cities such as Sydney and Canberra that their vast numbers disrupted sporting events.  
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World-renowned Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose groundbreaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, died on Sunday at the age of 77, the country’s president said.

The legendary paleoanthropologist remained energetic into his 70s despite bouts of skin cancer, kidney and liver disease. 

“I have this afternoon… received with deep sorrow the sad news of the passing away of Dr. Richard Erskine Frere Leakey,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement late Sunday.

Born on December 19, 1944, Leakey was destined for paleoanthropology — the study of the human fossil record — as the middle son of Louis and Mary Leakey, perhaps the world’s most famous discoverers of ancestral hominids.

Initially, Leakey tried his hand at safari guiding, but things changed when at 23 he won a research grant from the National Geographic Society to dig on the shores of northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, despite having no formal archaeological training. 

In the 1970s he led expeditions that recalibrated scientific understanding of human evolution with the discovery of the skulls of Homo habilis (1.9 million years old) in 1972 and Homo erectus (1.6 million years old) in 1975.

A TIME magazine cover followed of Leakey posing with a Homo habilis mock-up under the headline “How Man Became Man.” Then in 1981, his fame grew further when he fronted “The Making of Mankind,” a seven-part BBC television series. 

Yet the most famous fossil find was yet to come: the uncovering of an extraordinary, near-complete Homo erectus skeleton during one of his digs in 1984, which was nicknamed Turkana Boy.

As the slaughter of African elephants reached a crescendo in the late 1980s, driven by insatiable demand for ivory, Leakey emerged as one of the world’s leading voices against the then-legal global ivory trade.

President Daniel arap Moi in 1989 appointed Leakey to lead the national wildlife agency — soon to be named the Kenya Wildlife Service, or KWS.

That year he pioneered a spectacular publicity stunt by burning a pyre of ivory, setting fire to 12 tons of tusks to make the point that they have no value once removed from elephants.

He also held his nerve, without apology, when implementing a shoot-to-kill order against armed poachers. 

In 1993, his small Cessna plane crashed in the Rift Valley where he had made his name. He survived but lost both legs.

“There were regular threats to me at the time and I lived with armed guards. But I made the decision not to be a dramatist and say: ‘They tried to kill me.’ I chose to get on with life,” he told the Financial Times.

Leakey was forced out of KWS a year later and began a third career as a prominent opposition politician, joining the chorus of voices against Moi’s corrupt regime.

His political career met with less success, however, and in 1998 he was back in the fold, appointed by Moi to head Kenya’s civil service, putting him in charge of fighting official corruption.

The task proved impossible, however, and he resigned after just two years.

In 2015, as another elephant poaching crisis gripped Africa, President Kenyatta asked Leakey to again take the helm at KWS, this time as chairman of the board, a position he would hold for three years.

Deputy President William Ruto said Leakey “fought bravely for a better country” and inspired Kenyans with his zeal for public service.

Soft-spoken and seemingly devoid of personal vanity, Leakey stubbornly refused to give in to health woes.

“Richard was a very good friend and a true loyal Kenyan. May he Rest In Peace,” Paula Kahumbu, the head of Wildlife Direct, a conservation group founded by Leakey, posted on Twitter.
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Twitter on Sunday banned the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of its COVID-19 misinformation policy, according to a statement from the company. 

The Georgia Republican’s account was permanently suspended under the “strike” system Twitter launched in March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus that are misleading enough to cause harm to people. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock; four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension, and five or more strikes can get someone permanently removed from Twitter. 

In a statement on the messaging app Telegram, Greene blasted Twitter’s move as un-American. She wrote that her account was suspended after tweeting statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government database which includes unverified raw data. 

“Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Greene said. “That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them and it’s time to defeat our enemies.” 

Twitter had previously suspended the account for periods ranging from 12 hours to a full week. 

The ban applies to Greene’s personal account, @mtgreenee, but does not affect her official Twitter account, @RepMTG. 

A Greene tweet posted shortly before her weeklong suspension in July claimed that the virus “is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people under 65 account for nearly 250,000 of the U.S. deaths involving COVID-19. 

Greene previously blasted a weeklong suspension as a “Communist-style attack on free speech.” 
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France has lowered the age of its mask mandate to 6-year-old children, officials announced Saturday. The news comes just days before schools reopen Monday, following the winter holiday break.

While the mandate requires children to wear masks in indoor public places, the mandate will also include outside locations in cities like Paris and Lyon where an outside mandate is already in place.

The wildly contagious omicron variant, French authorities said Saturday, has resulted in four consecutive days of over 200,000 new infections.

The chief executive of Britain’s National Health Service Confederation told the BBC Saturday that the surge in COVID cases fueled by omicron may force hospitals to ban visitors.

“It’s a last resort. But, when you’re facing the kind of pressures the health service is going to be under for the next few weeks, this is the kind of thing managers have to do,” Matthew Taylor said.

Europe has surpassed 100 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began nearly two years ago, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Worldwide, nearly 290 million cases have been recorded.

Nearly 5 million of Europe’s cases were reported in the last seven days, with 17 of the 52 countries or territories that make up Europe setting single-day new case records thanks to the omicron variant, Agence France-Presse reported Saturday.

More than 1 million of those cases were reported in France, which has joined the U.S., India, Brazil, Britain and Russia to become the sixth country to confirm more than 10 million cases since the pandemic began, Reuters reported.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded 289.3 million global COVID cases and 5.4 million deaths.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press. 

 
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Looking west from Hazel Mountain, Brad Kreps can see forested hills stretching to the Tennessee border and beyond, but it is the flat, denuded area in front of him he finds exciting.

Surface coal mining ended on this site several years ago. But with a clean-up underway, it is now being prepared for a new chapter in the region’s longstanding role as a major energy producer – this time from a renewable source: the sun.

While using former mining land to generate solar energy has long been discussed, this and five related sites are among the first projects to move forward in the coalfields of the central Appalachian Mountains, as well as nationally.

Backers say the projects could help make waste land productive and boost economic fortunes in the local area, part of a 250,000-acre (101,171-hectare) land purchase by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 2019, one of its largest such acquisitions.

“There’s very little activity going on this land, so if we can bring in a new use like solar, we can bring tax revenue into these counties that are really trying to diversify their economies,” said Kreps, a TNC program director.

Besides creating a new source of green energy, the project offers a model for solar development that does not impinge on forests or farmland, he said.

TNC, a U.S.-based environmental nonprofit, has identified six initial sites for solar plants in the area and is now moving forward with projects on parcels covering about 1,700 acres.

The two companies that have bid to do the work – solar developer Sun Tribe and major utility Dominion Energy – estimate the projects could produce around 120 megawatts (MW) of electricity, potentially enough to power 30,000 homes.

Construction is expected to start in two or three years after pre-development work and permitting are completed.

“This is a ground-breaking model,” said Emil Avram, Dominion’s vice president of business development for renewables in Virginia.

Dominion believes it is the largest utility-scale renewable energy initiative to be developed on former coal mining land, and could be replicated elsewhere, Avram added.

Renewables targets

The U.S. government formally began looking at putting renewable energy installations on disturbed land – including mines, but also contaminated sites and landfills – in 2008.

Since then, the RE-Powering America’s Land program has mapped over 100,000 potential sites covering more than 44 million acres, and helped establish 417 installations producing 1.8 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, according to March data.

A toxic landfill site in New Jersey, for instance, now hosts a 6.5-MW solar installation, while a former steel mill in New York has been turned into a wind farm with capacity of 35 MW.

Yet on mine land, the work has so far been mostly limited to doing inventories and providing technical assistance, resulting in fewer than a half-dozen projects, said Nels Johnson, TNC’s North America director for energy.

That has stunted solar developers’ interest in mine land, he said – a knowledge gap he hopes the new projects can help fill, particularly amid a surging focus on meeting clean energy goals.

“After five to 10 years of almost nobody paying attention to this, there’s an awakening starting to take place,” he said. “As more and more states pass renewable energy commitments, it’s kind of a situation of the dog catching the car.”

Virginia, for instance, has a 2020 clean energy bill that, among other things, pushes for Dominion Energy’s electricity in the state to be carbon-free by 2045.

There are about 100,000 acres affected by coal mining in southwest Virginia alone, said Daniel Kestner, who manages the Innovative Reclamation Program for the state’s energy department.

“Reusing land like former coal mines makes a lot of sense instead of looking at prime farmland … or lands near populated areas where there may be conflict,” he said.

Kestner’s team is now exploring renewable energy development as an approved option for required post-mining reclamation work.

‘LIFE AFTER COAL’

Appalachia had harbored a deep-rooted skepticism toward renewable energy, said Adam Wells, regional director of community and economic development with Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit that works in former coal communities.

But recent years have seen a turnaround, he noted, with the recognition that the coal industry – the region’s longstanding main economic driver – will not return to its former strength.

Across the country, the number of coal mines dropped by 62% from 2008 to 2020, based on U.S. government figures, translating into a loss of 100,000 jobs since the mid-1980s, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Starting around 2015, Wells said, “it became necessary to talk about what life after coal looks like in Appalachia. And so, as a result, it became safe to talk about solar.”

While the number of jobs from utility-scale solar development does not compare to coal-industry jobs, he said, it could still be significant.

“It does generate notable and meaningful tax revenues for localities at a time of declining revenues from coal,” he added.

For now, communities are watching the shift with a “wait-and-see” attitude, he said.

Dominion Energy’s 50-MW project is the largest of the six local solar initiatives now underway.

While Dominion does not have job and tax revenue estimates for that project, it noted in a recent regulatory filing that 15 newly proposed solar projects across Virginia would generate more than $880 million in economic benefits and support almost 4,200 jobs associated with construction.

The company is under major pressure to increase solar production and is planning for an additional 16,000 MW by 2035, executive Avram said, requiring new capacity of about 1,000 MW annually through that date.

“That will require a fair amount of land – a thousand acres per project, roughly,” he said.

While the initial mine-land project in southwestern Virginia is relatively small, he said, it is an important “stepping stone” in learning how to work on previously disturbed sites.

TNC’s Kreps sees much more opportunity, literally on the horizon.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of acres like this across the region – and in many cases, right now they aren’t creating a lot of economic value,” he said.

His organization, he added, aims to demonstrate “that we can manage these lands for nature outcomes and people outcomes.” 
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India’s health ministry reported 22,775 new cases of the coronavirus Saturday, saying the new cases bring the country’s omicron variant count to 1,431. Public health officials, however, have warned that the country’s COVID-19 tallies are likely undercounted.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Saturday that paramedics in the Australian state of New South Wales had a “record breaking” level of calls overnight, resulting in its busiest night in 126 years, as the omicron variant of coronavirus sweeps across the globe.

New South Wales Ambulance Inspector Kay Armstrong told the newspaper the telephone calls included, “the usual business of New Year’s Eve – alcohol-related cases, accidents, obviously mischief – and then we had COVID on top of that.” The Herald reported paramedics also received “time-wasting calls from people wanting COVID-19 test results.”

The chief executive of Britain’s NHS Confederation said the omicron variant will “test the limits of finite NHS [National Health Service] capacity even more than a typical winter.” Matthew Taylor also predicted that hospitals will be forced to make “difficult choices” because of the variant.

CNN reports that more than 30 colleges and universities have changed the starting date of their spring semesters as the omicron variant crosses the United States.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center on Saturday reported 288.2 million global COVID-19 cases. The center said 9.1 billion vaccinations have been administered.
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U.S. authorities have asked telecom operators AT&T and Verizon to delay for up to two weeks their already postponed rollout of 5G networks amid uncertainty about interference with vital flight safety equipment.

The U.S. rollout of the high-speed mobile broadband technology had been set for December 5, but was delayed to January 5 after aerospace giants Airbus and Boeing raised concerns about potential interference with the devices used by planes to measure altitude.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Steve Dickson, asked for the latest delay in a letter sent Friday to AT&T and Verizon, two of the country’s biggest telecom operators.

The U.S. letter asked the companies to “continue to pause introducing commercial C-Band service” — the frequency range used for 5G — “for an additional short period of no more than two weeks beyond the currently scheduled deployment date of January 5.”

The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. officials’ letter assures the companies that 5G service will be able to begin “as planned in January with certain exceptions around priority airports.”

The officials say their priority has been “to protect flight safety, while ensuring that 5G deployment and aviation operations can co-exist.”

Last February, Verizon and AT&T were authorized to start using 3.7-3.8 GHz frequency bands on December 5, after obtaining licenses worth tens of billions of dollars.

But when Airbus and Boeing raised their concerns about possible interference with airplanes’ radio altimeters, which can operate in the same frequencies, the launch date was pushed back to January. 

The FAA requested further information about the instruments, and it issued directives limiting the use of altimeters in certain situations, which sparked airline fears over the potential costs.

When Verizon and AT&T wrote to federal authorities in November to confirm their intention to start deploying 5G in January, they said they would take extra precautions beyond those required by U.S. law until July 2022 while the FAA completes its investigation.

The conflict between 5G networks and aircraft equipment led French authorities to recommend switching off mobile phones with 5G on planes in February.

France’s civil aviation authority said interference from a signal on a nearby frequency to the radio altimeter could cause “critical” errors during landing. 
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U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday asked AT&T and Verizon Communications to delay the planned Jan. 5 introduction of new 5G wireless service over aviation safety concerns.

In a letter Friday seen by Reuters, Buttigieg and FAA Administrator Steve Dickson asked AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey and Verizon Chief Executive Hans Vestberg for a delay of no more than two weeks as part of a “proposal as a near-term solution for advancing the co-existence of 5G deployment in the C-Band and safe flight operations.”

The aviation industry and FAA have raised concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters that could disrupt flights.

“We ask that your companies continue to pause introducing commercial C-Band service for an additional short period of no more than two weeks beyond the currently scheduled deployment date of January 5,” the letter says.

Verizon and AT&T both said they received the letter and were reviewing it. Earlier Friday the two companies accused the aerospace industry of seeking to hold C-Band spectrum deployment “hostage until the wireless industry agrees to cover the costs of upgrading any obsolete altimeters.”

Buttigieg and Dickson said under the framework “commercial C-band service would begin as planned in January with certain exceptions around priority airports.”

The FAA and the aviation industry would identify priority airports “where a buffer zone would permit aviation operations to continue safely while the FAA completes its assessments of the interference potential.”

The government would work to identify “mitigations for all priority airports” to enable most “large commercial aircraft to operate safely in all conditions.” That would allow deployment around “priority airports on a rolling basis,” aiming to ensure activation by March 31 barring unforeseen issues.

The carriers, which won the spectrum in an $80 billion government auction, previously agreed to precautionary measures for six months to limit interference.

On Thursday, trade group Airlines for America asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to halt deployment of new 5G wireless service around many airports, warning thousands of flights could be disrupted.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines, called the Transportation Department proposal “the right move to successfully implement 5G without using the traveling public (and the crews on their flights) as guinea pigs for two systems that need to coexist without questions for safety.”

Wireless industry group CTIA said 5G is safe and spectrum is being used in about 40 other countries.

House Transportation Committee chair Peter DeFazio on Friday backed the airline group petition warning “we can’t afford to experiment with aviation safety.” 
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