Month: April 2022

The World Health Organization says a variety of crises are adversely impacting the health of millions and blocking needed humanitarian aid in war-torn hotspots around the world.   

War, climate disasters, and COVID-19 are threatening global health and undermining the capacity to build and maintain economically viable and stable societies.  These multiple crises are most pronounced in war-torn countries.

Ukraine, a once thriving society, is now shattered. Since Russia invaded 51 days ago, thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed or injured.

The WHO has confirmed 119 attacks on health care personnel and facilities since the start of the war there.  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health services are severely disrupted, particularly in the east of the country, now the epicenter of the fighting.

“For the sake of humanity, I urge Russia to come back to the table and to work for peace,” he said. “In the meantime, humanitarian corridors must be established so that medical supplies, food, and water can be delivered, and civilians can move to safety.”  

On another front, the World Food Program says 4.6 million people in the embattled Tigray province of northern Ethiopia are suffering from acute hunger.  Hundreds of thousands reportedly are on the verge of famine.

The Ethiopian government called a humanitarian truce three weeks ago.  Despite this, WHO chief Tedros said a blockade, one of the longest in the country’s history, continues. Few life-saving supplies, he said, are reaching Tigray.

“In effect, the siege by the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces continues,” he said. “To avert the humanitarian calamity and hundreds of thousands more people from dying, we need unfettered humanitarian access from those reinforcing the siege.” 

Tedros warned the Horn of Africa and Sahel are at high risk of famine. He said conflict, years of drought, heavy flooding, and COVID-19 have destroyed peoples’ ability to cultivate the land, grow their crop and raise their cattle.  

He said many people are already starving and millions are on the move. He expressed concern about the impact this humanitarian crisis is having on peoples’ health and on regional security.
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Hours after announcing his $43 billion hostile takeover bid for Twitter, business magnate Elon Musk laid out some of his goals for the social media giant, including an edit button that would let users amend ill-considered tweets.

Musk made the comments on the concluding day of the annual TED Conference in Vancouver. In a question-and-answer session, he said Twitter is the global town square and an important and inclusive area for free speech.

He said he has enough assets to cover the $43 billion purchase himself but did not divulge details of how he expects to finance the attempted takeover. If necessary, he said, he has a “Plan B” for acquiring the company.

Musk said if successful, he will make Twitter’s algorithms open source, introduce an edit button for people to change their tweets and will work to “ban the bot armies,” or automated computer programs, from the platform. The edit option will be available for only a limited time after a tweet is sent, he said.

In answering questions from TED head curator and organizer Chris Anderson, Musk also said that when tweets are changed, all retweets and likes to the original message will be deleted.

Musk also indicated that under his control, Twitter would be more reluctant to delete tweets that are of questionable taste or veracity and that when in doubt, he would allow a tweet to exist. But the platform would follow the laws of the different countries where it exists, he said.

Musk also was harshly critical of the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, describing its staff as “those bastards.” The comment came in reference to fraud charges brought by the SEC regarding some 2,018 tweets that Musk sent claiming he had the funding to take his Tesla electric car company private.

In the settlement, Musk was forced to resign as chairman of Tesla, issue a $40 million payout to shareholders and have a lawyer approve his future tweets about the company. Musk said financial institutions forced him into the agreement, as if the SEC had been “holding a gun to your child’s head.” He agreed only to save the company, he said.

The 50-year-old entrepreneur, who also runs SpaceX and the Boring Company, announced the $43 billion takeover bid for Twitter just hours before arriving in Vancouver.

Last week, he purchased 9.2% of the company’s stock but subsequently turned down a seat on the company’s board of directors, which would have limited the amount he could own to 14.9%.

Musk said 2016 to 2018 were the worst years of his life, as Tesla encountered problems with the production of the Model 3. He said he now knows more about manufacturing than anybody on Earth after sleeping on the floors of assembly plants to work out the problems.

He also talked about building sustainable energy from wind, solar, hydro and geothermal, and repeated his support of nuclear power. He briefly talked about further developing robotic intelligence, saying the first robots to help people in everyday life are not far off. Musk said the robots will be affordable, but it should not be possible to update them remotely like computers or his Tesla vehicles.

Besides making these announcements in Vancouver, Musk has a personal tie to the city. The musician Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, is the mother of his two youngest children and grew up in the city, where she has family.
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The first all-private charter to the International Space Station. Plus, a look back in history at a moon mission gone wrong, and an auction offering some of the most-expensive dust on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Businessman Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter, saying the social media giant “needs to be transformed as a private company.”

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the filing. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

The founder of Tesla and SpaceX is already Twitter’s largest shareholder, owning more than 9% of the company. A regulatory filing showed he offered $54.20 per share to buy the rest.

That price would value the company at about $43 billion and represents a 38% premium above the stock’s closing price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk bought his 9%.

“My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk said.

Twitter acknowledged the offer and will analyze if Musk’s proposal is in the best interest of shareholders.

After Musk’s large share ownership was revealed, Twitter offered him a seat on the company’s board, but that had a stipulation limiting the amount of stock Musk could own.

After appearing to accept the board seat, Musk then declined.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into law Thursday as the state joined a growing conservative push to restrict access ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could limit the procedure nationwide.

The new law marks a significant blow to abortion access in the South, where Florida has provided wider access to the procedure than its regional neighbors.

The new law, which takes effect July 1, contains exceptions if the abortion is necessary to save a mother’s life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Under current law, Florida allows abortions up to 24 weeks.

“This will represent the most significant protections for life that have been enacted in this state in a generation,” DeSantis said as he signed the bill at the “Nación de Fe” (“Nation of Faith”), an evangelical church in the city of Kissimmee that serves members of the Latino population.

DeSantis, a Republican rising star and potential 2024 presidential candidate, signed the measure after several women delivered speeches about how they chose not to have abortions or, in the case of one, regretted having done so.

Some of the people in attendance, including young children, stood behind the speakers holding signs saying “Choose life,” while those who spoke stood at a podium to which was affixed a sign displaying an infant’s feet and a heartbeat reading, “Protect Life.”

Debate over the proposal grew deeply personal and revealing inside the Florida legislature, with lawmakers recalling their own abortions and experiences with sexual assault in often tearful speeches on the House and Senate floors.

Elsewhere in the United States, Republican lawmakers have introduced new abortion restrictions, some similar to a Texas law that bans abortion after roughly six weeks and leaves enforcement up to private citizens, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided to leave in place.

Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt recently signed a bill to make it a felony to perform an abortion, punishable by up to a decade in prison. Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in March signed legislation to outlaw abortion after 15 weeks if the U.S. Supreme Court leaves Mississippi’s law in place.

If Roe is overturned, 26 states are certain or likely to quickly ban or severely restrict abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that supports abortion rights. During debate of the Florida legislation, Republicans have said they want the state to be well placed to limit access to abortions if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Mississippi’s law.
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Climate change will accelerate at an unprecedented pace if governments don’t act soon, according to a recent report by the United Nations. For many people, such news can spur conflicting emotions. Hopelessness that it’s all too late? A sense of urgency to do something? VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a few young people about their concerns for the fate of the planet.
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Russian users of Netflix NFLX.O have launched a class action lawsuit against the streaming giant for leaving the Russian market, demanding 60 million roubles ($726,000) in compensation, the RIA news agency reported on Wednesday. 

Netflix Inc said in March that it suspended its service in Russia and had temporarily stopped all future projects and acquisitions in the country as it assessed the impact of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Today, a law firm representing the interests of Netflix users filed a class action lawsuit against the American Netflix service with the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow,” RIA cited law firm Chernyshov, Lukoyanov & Partners as saying. 

“The reason for the lawsuit was a violation of Russian users’ rights due to Netflix’s unilateral refusal to provide services in Russia.” 

Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Scores of foreign companies have announced temporary shutdowns of stores and factories in Russia or said they were leaving for good since Moscow began what it calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression against its neighbor. 

($1 = 82.62 roubles) 
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A former energy executive in California who took part in $1 billion solar power fraud that bilked Warren Buffett’s company and many others was sentenced Tuesday to six years in federal prison and ordered to pay $624 million in restitution.

Robert A. Karmann, 55, of Clayton was the chief financial officer for DC Solar, a company based in Benicia in the San Francisco Bay Area that sold mobile solar generator units mounted on trailers.

The company marketed the generators between 2011 and 2018 as being able to provide emergency power for cellphone companies or to provide lighting at sporting and other events.

But the company executives started telling investors they could benefit from federal tax credits by buying the generators and leasing them back to DC Solar, which would then provide them to other companies for their use, prosecutors said.

The generators never provided much income, and prosecutors say the company ran a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors were paid with funds from later investors.

The company eventually stopped building the mobile generators altogether, and prosecutors say a least half the company’s claimed 17,000 generators didn’t really exist.

Among those suckered by the business were Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

DC Solar founder Jeff Carpoff was sentenced last November to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $790.6 million in restitution for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 47, has pleaded guilty to federal charges and will be sentenced in May.

Prosecutors said the Carpoffs used the money to buy and invest in 32 properties, more than 150 luxury cars, a subscription to a private jet service, a semipro baseball team, a NASCAR race car sponsorship and a suite at the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium.

One other man was sentenced to three years in prison last year and three others pleaded guilty to criminal charges and await sentencing.
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Elon Musk’s huge Twitter investment took a new twist Tuesday with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the colorful billionaire illegally delayed disclosing his stake in the social media company so he could buy more shares at lower prices.

The complaint in New York federal court accuses Musk of violating a regulatory deadline to reveal he had accumulated a stake of at least 5%. Instead, according to the complaint, Musk didn’t disclose his position in Twitter until he’d almost doubled his stake to more than 9%. The lawsuit alleges that the strategy hurt less-wealthy investors who sold shares in the San Francisco company in the nearly two weeks before Musk acknowledged holding a major stake.

Musk’s regulatory filings show that he bought a little more than 620,000 shares at $36.83 apiece on Jan. 31 and then continued to accumulate more shares on nearly every single trading day through April 1. Musk, best known as CEO of the electric car maker Tesla, held 73.1 million Twitter shares as of the most recent count Monday. That represents a 9.1% stake in Twitter.

The lawsuit alleges that by March 14, Musk’s stake in Twitter had reached a 5% threshold that required him to publicly disclose his holdings under U.S. securities law by March 24. Musk didn’t make the required disclosure until April 4.

That revelation caused Twitter’s stock to soar 27% from its April 1 close to nearly $50 by the end of April 4’s trading, depriving investors who sold shares before Musk’s improperly delayed disclosure the chance to realize significant gains, according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of an investor named Marc Bain Rasella. Musk, meanwhile, was able to continue to buy shares that traded in prices ranging from $37.69 to $40.96.

The lawsuit is seeking to be certified as a class action representing Twitter shareholders who sold shares between March 24 and April 4, a process that could take a year or more.

Musk spent about $2.6 billion on Twitter stock — a fraction of his estimated wealth of $265 billion, the largest individual fortune in the world. In a regulatory filing Monday, Musk disclosed he may increase his stake after backing out of an agreement reached last week to join Twitter’s board of directors.

Jacob Walker, one of the lawyers that filed the lawsuit against Musk, told The Associated Press that he hadn’t reached out to the Securities and Exchange Commission about Musk’s alleged violations about the disclosure of his Twitter stake. “I assume the SEC is well aware of what he did,” Walker said.

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment.

The SEC and Musk have been wrangling in court since 2018 when Musk and Tesla agreed to pay a $40 million fine t o settle allegations that he used his Twitter account to mislead investors about a potential buyout of the electric car company that never materialized. As part of that deal, Musk was supposed to obtain legal approval for his tweets about information that could affect Tesla’s stock price — a provision that regulators contend he has occasionally violated and that he now argues unfairly muzzles him.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment posted on Twitter, where he often shares his opinion and thoughts. Alex Spiro, a New York lawyer representing Musk in his ongoing dispute with the SEC, also didn’t immediately respond to a query from The Associated Press. 
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The pandemic plunged 77 million more people into extreme poverty last year and many developing countries can’t recover because of the crippling cost of debt repayments — and that was before the added impact of the war in Ukraine, a U.N. report said Tuesday.

The report said rich countries could support their recovery from pandemic slumps with record amounts borrowed at ultra-low interest rates. But the poorest countries spent billions of dollars servicing their debts and faced much higher borrowing costs, preventing them from spending on improving education and health care, protecting the environment and reducing inequality.

According to the U.N., 812 million people lived in extreme poverty — on $1.90 a day or less — in 2019, and by 2021 amid the pandemic the number had risen to 889 million.

The report is on financing to achieve U.N. development goals for 2030, including ending poverty, ensuring quality education for all young people and achieving gender equality.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said at a news conference that the effort “is coming at a critical moment for humanity, adding to the compounding crises of climate assaults on our natural systems and the protracted COVID-19 pandemic.”

Added to this, she said, is the global impact of the war in Ukraine. A U.N. analysis indicates “1.7 billion people are faced with exposure to spiking food, energy and fertilizer costs as a result of the war in Ukraine,” Mohammed said.

The report estimates that GDP per capita in 20% of developing countries will not return to pre-2019 levels by the end of 2023, even before absorbing the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

It says the poorest developing countries, on average, pay 14% of their revenue for interest on their debts, with many forced to cut budgets for education, infrastructure and capital spending as a result of the pandemic. Rich developed countries pay only 3.5%, it says.

The war in Ukraine will exacerbate these challenges, the report said, and it will also bring higher energy and commodity prices, renewed supply chain disruptions, higher inflation, lower growth and increased volatility in financial markets.

Mohammed said “it would be a tragedy” if rich donor nations increased military expenditures as a result of the war and cut aid to developing countries and reduced efforts to address the climate crisis.

The U.N. already was “off track” in efforts to reach the U.N. development goals before the pandemic hit and brought new problems, she said. Now, the war and its impact will set these efforts back again, “so the big message is that we need more resources,” she said.

“There is no excuse for inaction at this defining moment of collective responsibility, to ensure hundreds of millions of people are lifted out of hunger and poverty,” Mohammed said. “We must invest in access for decent and green jobs, social protection, health care and education leaving no one behind.”

The report’s recommendations include speeding up debt relief and expanding eligibility to highly indebted middle-income countries, aligning the international tax system to address such issues as inequality in availability of coronavirus vaccines and access to medical products, accelerating investment in sustainable energy, and improving information sharing.

The report was produced by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs in collaboration with more than 60 international agencies, including the U.N. system and international financial institutions. 
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2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad. 

The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work on death statistics. 

The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020’s record-setting total. 

Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available. 

“We were wrong, unfortunately,” said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher. 

COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000 the year before — as new coronavirus variants emerged and an unexpectedly large number of Americans refused to get vaccinated or were hesitant to wear masks, experts said. 

The coronavirus is not solely to blame. Preliminary CDC data also shows the crude death rate for cancer rose slightly, and rates continued to increase for diabetes, chronic liver disease and stroke. 

Overdose deaths

Drug overdose deaths also continued to rise. The CDC does not yet have a tally for 2021 overdose deaths, because it can take weeks of lab work and investigation to identify them. But provisional data through October suggests the nation is on track to see at least 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021 — up from 93,000 the year before. 

New research released Tuesday showed a particularly large jump in overdose deaths among 14- to 18-year-olds. 

Adolescent overdose death counts were fairly constant for most of the last decade, at around 500 a year, according to the paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They almost doubled in 2020, to 954, and the researchers estimated that the total hit nearly 1,150 last year. 

Joseph Friedman, a UCLA researcher who was the paper’s lead author, called the spike “unprecedented.” 

Those teen overdose deaths were only around 1% of the U.S. total. But adolescents experienced a greater relative increase than the overall population, even though surveys suggest drug use among teens is down. 

Experts attributed the spike to fentanyl, a highly lethal drug that has been cut into heroin for several years. More recently it’s also been pressed into counterfeit pills resembling prescription drugs that teens sometimes abuse. 

The total number of U.S. deaths often increases year to year as the U.S. population grows. But 2020 and 2021 saw extraordinary jumps in death numbers and rates, due largely to the pandemic. 

Life expectancy

Those national death trends affect life expectancy — an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live. 

With rare exceptions, U.S. life expectancy has reliably inched up year after year. But the CDC’s life expectancy estimate for 2020 was about 77 years — more than a year and a half lower than what it was in 2019. 

The CDC has not yet reported its calculation for 2021. But Goldman and some other researchers have been making their own estimates, presented in papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals. 

Those researchers think U.S. life expectancy dropped another five or six months in 2021 — putting it back to where it was 20 years ago. 

A loss of more than two years of life expectancy over the last two years “is mammoth,” Goldman said. 

One study looked at death data in the U.S. and 19 other high-income countries. The U.S. fared the worst. 

“What happened in the U.S. is less about the variants than the levels of resistance to vaccination and the public’s rejection of practices, such as masking and mandates, to reduce viral transmission,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a statement. 

Some experts are skeptical that life expectancy will quickly bounce back. They worry about long-term complications of COVID-19 that may hasten the deaths of people with chronic health problems. 

Preliminary — and incomplete — CDC data suggest there were at least 805,000 U.S. deaths in about the first three months of this year. That’s well below the same period last year, but higher than the comparable period in 2020. 

“We may end up with a ‘new normal’ that’s a little higher than it was before,” Anderson said.

 
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The U.S. said on Tuesday it had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and at the same time unsealed charges against the website’s founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho.

Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Justice Department said.

The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol.

Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit cards information, log-in credentials and social security numbers.

In a parallel statement, Europol also lauded the takedown saying the RaidForums online marketplace had been seized in an operation known as “Operation Tourniquet,” that helped coordinate investigations by authorities from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Romania.

In addition to Coelho, it said two of his alleged accomplices were also in custody. It did not provide further details about the other two people arrested.

Coelho is facing a six-count indictment, charging him with conspiracy, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

It alleges that between Jan. 1, 2015 and his arrest in January 2022, he controlled and served as chief administrator of the site.

“To profit from the illicit activity on the platform, RaidForums charged escalating prices for membership tiers that offered greater access and features, including a top-tier ‘God’ membership status,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
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The world of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs is getting a boost from companies and celebrities, who are making the digital products. But the nascent technology comes with risks. Tina Trinh reports.
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The World Health Organization said on Monday it is tracking a few dozen cases of two new sub-variants of the highly transmissible omicron strain of the coronavirus to assess whether they are more infectious or dangerous.

It has added BA.4 and BA.5, sister variants of the original BA.1 omicron variant, to its list for monitoring. It is already tracking BA.1 and BA.2 — now globally dominant — as well as BA.1.1 and BA.3.

The WHO said it had begun tracking them because of their “additional mutations that need to be further studied to understand their impact on immune escape potential.”

Viruses mutate all the time but only some mutations affect their ability to spread or evade prior immunity from vaccination or infection, or the severity of disease they cause.

For instance, BA.2 now represents nearly 94% of all sequenced cases and is more transmissible than its siblings, but the evidence so far suggests it is no more likely to cause severe disease.

Only a few dozen cases of BA.4 and BA.5 have been reported to the global GISAID database, according to WHO.

The UK’s Health Security Agency said last week BA.4 had been found in South Africa, Denmark, Botswana, Scotland and England from Jan. 10 to March 30.

All the BA.5 cases were in South Africa as of last week, but on Monday Botswana’s health ministry said it had identified four cases of BA.4 and BA.5, all among people aged 30 to 50 who were fully vaccinated and experiencing mild symptoms.
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Twitter Inc’s biggest shareholder, Elon Musk, has decided not to join its board, Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said late on Sunday. 

Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist and has been critical of Twitter, disclosed a 9.1% stake on April 4 and said he plans to bring about significant improvements at the social media platform. 

His appointment to the board was to become effective on Saturday and would have prevented him from being a beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of common stock. 

But “Elon shared that same morning that he will no longer be joining the board,” Agrawal said in a note on Twitter. “I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input,” Agrawal said. 

Musk limited his response to a face with hand over mouth emoticon on Twitter. Tesla did not immediately respond to an email sent to the company seeking a comment from Musk. 

News of Musk taking a board seat had some Twitter employees panicking over the future of the social media firm’s ability to moderate content, company insiders told Reuters. 

Before taking a stake, Musk ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed Twitter adheres to the principle of free speech. 

A day after becoming the largest shareholder, he launched another poll asking users if they want an edit button, a long-awaited feature on which the social media platform has been working. 

The Tesla boss also asked users in a poll if Twitter’s headquarters should be converted into a homeless shelter, a plan backed by Amazon.com Inc’s founder Jeff Bezos. 

On Saturday, he suggested changes to Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price, banning advertising and giving an option to pay in the cryptocurrency dogecoin. 

Twitter shares, which soared 27% on April 4 after Musk disclosed his stake, has lost 7.5% since then to Friday’s close. 

“There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged,” Agrawal said in his Sunday note. 

“Let’s tune out the noise, and stay focused on the work and what we’re building.” 
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