Month: November 2022

Cholera cases are overwhelming Haiti, and experts warn the situation could worsen now that the country is bustling following the end of a paralyzing fuel blockade that lasted two months.

Dr. Jeanty Fils, a spokesman for Haiti’s Ministry of Health, told The Associated Press that people are back on the streets and likely spreading cholera as the government struggles to find life-saving equipment, including IV supplies, amid an ongoing discussion on whether to request cholera vaccines.

“We need more resources,” he said. “Cholera cases continue to climb in Haiti.”

At least 161 people have died and more than 7,600 are hospitalized, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Haiti’s government, although officials believe the numbers are much higher as a result of underreporting. Cholera is caused by a bacteria found in contaminated food or water that leads to vomiting and diarrhea. If not treated in time, it can cause fatal dehydration.

The worsening situation led the United Nations to announce Tuesday that it, along with Haiti’s government and other partners, was seeking $146 million to help fight cholera. At least half a million people in Haiti are at risk of contracting the disease, according to PAHO and the World Health Organization.

“The surge in cases in recent weeks and the rapid spread of cholera in the country is worrying,” said Ulrika Richardson, U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator.

Fils noted that cholera cases were likely contained during the fuel blockade as gas stations were closed and many in the country of more than 11 million people remained at home.

“Now people are going to move around more,” he said. “It could start spreading.”

Stephanie Mayronne, medical operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, agreed.

She said if people sickened with cholera start traveling to areas with poor sanitation and a lack of drinking water, the number of cases will likely rise.

“It’s a match that can light a fire,” she said.

The number of patients seeking help at Doctors Without Borders hospitals in the capital of Port-au-Prince has spiked in recent weeks, with more than 6,500 admitted so far. Beds filled up so quickly that the aid group was forced to open a fifth center two weeks ago, said Alexandre Marcou, Haiti’s field communication manager.

Inside that new center, mothers hovered over their children on a recent morning. One rearranged the tangle of intravenous cables surrounding her baby while another pumped the little cheeks of her young daughter to force her mouth open and give her an oral supplement. Nearby, adult patients sat in silence in plastic chairs with large white buckets between their legs, holding their head to one side with their arm. Some ate rice and red beans out of small containers that nurses later collected.

Marcou noted that people can survive cholera if treated in time, but the recent lack of fuel and ongoing violence between gangs that has worsened since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse has prevented Haitians from reaching hospitals and medical clinics.

“There’s a huge security crisis. And we are tremendously lacking resources,” said Ralph Ternier, chief medical officer in Haiti for the nonprofit Partners in Health. “The epidemic is spreading so quickly that vaccines are really the tool that we need.”

PAHO told the AP that it is supporting Haiti’s government in preparing a request for vaccines as well as to plan and implement vaccination campaigns. But it wasn’t clear if and when that might happen.

In October, the World Health Organization announced a worldwide cholera vaccine shortage that has forced it to suspend the usual double-dose strategy “at a time of unprecedented rise in cholera outbreaks worldwide.” At least 29 countries have reported cholera cases this year, compared with fewer than 20 on average for the past five years, the agency said.

Mayronne said cholera vaccines can be a useful tool but noted that a single dose can lower one’s risk by only 40%.

“In and of itself, a vaccine is not a be-all and end-all,” she said.

Amid the lack of vaccines in Haiti, crushing poverty made worse by a spiraling economic crisis and double-digit inflation is contributing to the spread of cholera because many are unable to access or afford potable water or food that isn’t contaminated.

Lovena Shelove, 30, lost her 2-year-old son to cholera despite a kind neighbor who brought drinking water to try to revive the toddler after severe bouts of vomiting and diarrhea.

“I don’t have anything in the house,” she said in a soft voice. “I could not afford anything to provide for the kids.”

Her other child, a 7-month-old daughter, is still hospitalized.

Cholera is easily transmitted, especially in crowded and unhygienic conditions. Sanitation further worsened during the fuel blockade because companies that supplied drinking water were forced to suspend operations.

Haiti’s first outbreak occurred in 2010 after U.N. peacekeepers introduced the bacteria into the country’s largest river by sewage runoff from their base. Nearly 10,000 people died, and thousands of others were sickened.

The number of cases eventually dwindled, and the World Health Organization was preparing to declare Haiti cholera-free until the government announced in early October that at least three people had died — the first deaths reported in three years.

Patrick Joseph, 40, was among the thousands recently hospitalized after he became severely dehydrated.

“I don’t know where I got cholera from,” he said, although he suspects it’s from the water he buys from a seller who claims it’s treated. “I feared that I would die if I did not go to the doctor.”

It’s a feeling familiar to street vendor Lucna Francois, who had been relying on well water because the fuel blockade prevented her from accessing potable water. The 24-year-old got so sick on a recent evening that she called a relative to take her to the hospital.

“I am dying,” she recalled telling them. “I was very, very weak.”

Fils, with Haiti’s health ministry, said another big challenge the government faces is that many people don’t believe cholera exists and are not taking measures to avoid becoming sick.

“Prevention, it’s a must,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of drinking (clean) water.”
…

The world’s population is projected to hit an estimated 8 billion people on Tuesday, according to a United Nations projection, with much of the growth coming from developing nations in Africa.

Among them is Nigeria, where resources are already stretched to the limit. More than 15 million people in Lagos compete for everything from electricity to light their homes to spots on crowded buses, often for two-hour commutes each way in this sprawling megacity. Some Nigerian children set off for school as early as 5 a.m.

And over the next three decades, the West African nation’s population is expected to soar even more: from 216 million this year to 375 million, the U.N. says. That will make Nigeria the fourth-most populous country in the world after India, China and the United States.

“We are already overstretching what we have — the housing, roads, the hospitals, schools. Everything is overstretched,” said Gyang Dalyop, an urban planning and development consultant in Nigeria.

The U.N.’s Day of 8 Billion milestone Tuesday is more symbolic than precise, officials are careful to note in a wide-ranging report released over the summer that makes some staggering projections.

The upward trend threatens to leave even more people in developing countries further behind, as governments struggle to provide enough classrooms and jobs for a rapidly growing number of youth, and food insecurity becomes an even more urgent problem.

Nigeria is among eight countries the U.N says will account for more than half the world’s population growth between now and 2050 — along with fellow African nations Congo, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

“The population in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double between 2022 and 2050, putting additional pressure on already strained resources and challenging policies aimed to reduce poverty and inequalities,” the U.N. report said.

It projected the world’s population will reach around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100.

Other countries rounding out the list with the fastest growing populations are Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines and India, which is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation next year.

In Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where more than 12 million people live, many families struggle to find affordable housing and pay school fees. While elementary pupils attend for free, older children’s chances depend on their parents’ incomes.

“My children took turns” going to school, said Luc Kyungu, a Kinshasa truck driver who has six children. “Two studied while others waited because of money. If I didn’t have so many children, they would have finished their studies on time.”

Rapid population growth also means more people vying for scarce water resources and leaves more families facing hunger as climate change increasingly impacts crop production in many parts of the world.

“There is also a greater pressure on the environment, increasing the challenges to food security that is also compounded by climate change,” said Dr. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Reducing inequality while focusing on adapting and mitigating climate change should be where our policy makers’ focus should be.”

Still, experts say the bigger threat to the environment is consumption, which is highest in developed countries not undergoing big population increases.

“Global evidence shows that a small portion of the world’s people use most of the Earth’s resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India. “Over the past 25 years, the richest 10% of the global population has been responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions.”

According to the U.N., the population in sub-Saharan Africa is growing at 2.5% per year — more than three times the global average. Some of that can be attributed to people living longer, but family size remains the driving factor. Women in sub-Saharan Africa on average have 4.6 births, twice the current global average of 2.3.

Families become larger when women start having children early, and 4 out of 10 girls in Africa marry before they turn 18, according to U.N. figures. The rate of teen pregnancy on the continent is the highest in the world — about half of the children born last year to mothers under 20 worldwide were in sub-Saharan Africa.

Still, any effort to reduce family size now would come too late to significantly slow the 2050 growth projections, the U.N. said. About two-thirds of it “will be driven by the momentum of past growth.”

“Such growth would occur even if childbearing in today’s high-fertility countries were to fall immediately to around two births per woman,” the report found.

There are also important cultural reasons for large families. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are seen as a blessing and as a source of support for their elders — the more sons and daughters, the greater comfort in retirement.

Still, some large families “may not have what it takes to actually feed them,” says Eunice Azimi, an insurance broker in Lagos and mother of three.

“In Nigeria, we believe that it is God that gives children,” she said. “They see it as the more children you have, the more benefits. And you are actually overtaking your peers who cannot have as many children. It looks like a competition in villages.”

Politics also have played a role in Tanzania, where former President John Magufuli, who ruled the East African country from 2015 until his death in 2021, discouraged birth control, saying that a large population was good for the economy.

He opposed family planning programs promoted by outside groups, and in a 2019 speech urged women not to “block ovaries.” He even described users of contraceptives as “lazy” in a country he said was awash with cheap food. Under Magufuli, pregnant schoolgirls were even banned from returning to classrooms.

But his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, appeared to reverse government policy in comments last month when she said birth control was necessary in order not to overwhelm the country’s public infrastructure.

Even as populations soar in some countries, the U.N. says rates are expected to drop by 1% or more in 61 nations.

The U.S. population is now around 333 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The population growth rate in 2021 was just 0.1%, the lowest since the country was founded.

“Going forward, we’re going to have slower growth — the question is, how slow?” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The real wild card for the U.S. and many other developed countries is immigration.”

Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, says environmental concerns surrounding the 8 billion mark should focus on consumption, particularly in developed countries.

“Population is not the problem, the way we consume is the problem — let’s change our consumption patterns,” he said.
…

Malaria exploded this year in the Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa, which saw more than 10 times as many cases between January and May as it did in all of 2019.

What made this spike in cases unusual is that it happened outside the rainy season, when malaria typically surges across Africa, and in an urban area — malaria is more of a rural problem on the continent. Cities are not immune, but they typically don’t see these kinds of outbreaks.

Something new and insidious has arrived in the Horn of Africa. An invasive species of mosquito called Anopheles stephensi threatens to unravel two decades of gains in malaria control. And it may bring the deadly disease to more of the continent’s rapidly growing cities.

“There is real fear that it could start more transmission in these areas that traditionally don’t have as much malaria,” said Arran Hamlet, a disease modeling expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And they don’t have infection control strategies implemented to the same levels.”

The new mosquito arrives at a bad time in the fight against malaria.

Africa’s native mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to insecticides. (Anopheles stephensi is already resistant.) In addition, the malaria parasite is getting not only tougher to kill, but tougher to spot. Malaria strains that don’t show up on rapid diagnostic tests are becoming more common.

“We don’t want the three to meet — the drug resistance, the diagnostic resistance and the highly efficient vector [Anopheles stephensi],” said Fitsum Girma Tadesse, a molecular biologist at Ethiopia’s Armauer Hansen Research Institute.

“What happens if they coexist? We don’t know,” he said. “It’s really dangerous. You can’t detect the parasite. You can’t kill it with a drug. And the mosquito is wise enough to evade your [control] mechanisms.”

Fitsum and his colleagues linked Anopheles stephensi to the Dire Dawa outbreak in a study presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Seattle this month. It is the strongest evidence yet that the mosquito is increasing malaria rates in Ethiopia.

A different mosquito

Malaria fighters started the millennium strong.

With insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor insecticide spraying campaigns and new artemisinin-based drugs, deaths from malaria plunged from nearly 900,000 in 2000 to around 560,000 in 2015. But since then, progress has stalled.

And the tools that have worked up until recently won’t help much against Anopheles stephensi.

“This [mosquito] is different and more insidious than some of the other mosquitoes that transmit malaria that we’re used to seeing in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs epidemiologist April Monroe.

Africa’s native malaria mosquitoes prefer to bite people inside their homes late at night. That’s why bed nets and indoor spraying have been so effective.

But Anopheles stephensi bites earlier in the evening. When it goes searching for a meal, “people aren’t actually in bed yet, and so they don’t get the same protection” from bed nets, Hamlet said.

It also prefers to take its blood meal outdoors. Or if it does bite indoors, it doesn’t rest there, thereby avoiding indoor insecticides.

The new mosquito’s habitat is different, too. Most malaria mosquitoes live in rural Africa. But Anopheles stephensi is “really highly adapted to urban areas, which isn’t what we typically see,” Monroe said.

It likes to lay its eggs in water storage containers, which are especially common in Africa’s fast-growing unplanned urban areas that lack piped water, Fitsum noted.

Newcomer

Originally from South Asia, Anopheles stephensi was first spotted on the African continent in Djibouti in 2012.

The small nation was on the verge of eliminating malaria at the time. It recorded just 27 cases that year. In 2020, there were more than 73,000.

Besides Djibouti and Ethiopia, the mosquito has turned up in Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria.

One study estimates the mosquito may put an additional 126 million people at risk of malaria in cities across Africa.

In Ethiopia alone, Hamlet and colleagues estimate that Anopheles stephensi could increase malaria cases by 50% and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to control.

“This is very much possibly a cheap option compared to letting Anopheles stephensi spread around the country,” Hamlet said. “There is a lot of economic burden on both individuals and the wider economy in this level of malaria increase.”

The last thing African countries need, however, is new disease vector that is expensive to control.

“Most of the countries affected by malaria have limited resources to deal with already existing prevalent diseases,” Fitsum said.

One bit of relatively good news is that since Anopheles stephensi breeds in the same places as the mosquitoes that carry yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue, efforts that target one would also control the others.

Fitsum says covering water containers with polystyrene beads can help prevent the mosquitoes from laying eggs. He advises people to cover water containers tightly and get rid of any they don’t need.

And keep using bed nets and indoor sprays, he added. Native mosquitoes are still out there.
…

Search giant Google has agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users’ locations, state attorneys general announced Monday. 

The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history.” 

The attorneys general called the settlement a historic win for consumers, and the largest multistate settlement in U.S history dealing with privacy. 

It comes at a time of mounting unease over privacy and surveillance by tech companies that has drawn growing outrage from politicians and scrutiny by regulators. The Supreme Court’s ruling in June ending the constitutional protections for abortion raised potential privacy concerns for women seeking the procedure or related information online. 

“This $391.5 million settlement is a historic win for consumers in an era of increasing reliance on technology,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Location data is among the most sensitive and valuable personal information Google collects, and there are so many reasons why a consumer may opt-out of tracking.” 

Google, based in Mountain View, California, said it fixed the problems several years ago. 

“Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” company spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement. 

Location tracking can help tech companies sell digital ads to marketers looking to connect with consumers within their vicinity. It’s another tool in a data-gathering toolkit that generates more than $200 billion in annual ad revenue for Google, accounting for most of the profits pouring into the coffers of its corporate parent, Alphabet — which has a market value of $1.2 trillion. 

In its 2018 story, the AP reported that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store users’ location data even if they’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request. 

Storing such data carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects. 

The AP reported that the privacy issue with location tracking affected some 2 billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search. 

The attorneys general who investigated Google said a key part of the company’s digital advertising business is location data, which they called the most sensitive and valuable personal data the company collects. Even a small amount of location data can reveal a person’s identity and routines, they said. 

Google uses the location information to target consumers with ads by its customers, the state officials said. 

The attorneys general said Google misled users about its location tracking practices since at least 2014, violating state consumer protection laws. 

As part of the settlement, Google also agreed to make those practices more transparent to users. That includes showing them more information when they turn location account settings on and off and keeping a webpage that gives users information about the data Google collects. 

The shadowy surveillance brought to light by the AP troubled even some Google engineers, who recognized the company might be confronting a massive legal headache after the story was published, according to internal documents that have subsequently surfaced in consumer-fraud lawsuits. 

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed the first state action against Google in May 2020, alleging that the company had defrauded its users by misleading them into believing they could keep their whereabouts private by turning off location tracking in the settings of their software. 

Arizona settled its case with Google for $85 million last month, but by then attorneys general in several other states and the District of Columbia had also pounced on the company with their own lawsuits seeking to hold Google accountable for its alleged deception. 

 
…

It’s not easy being Elon Musk.

That was the message the new Twitter owner and billionaire head of Tesla and SpaceX had for younger people who might seek to emulate his entrepreneurial success.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Musk told a business forum in Bali on Monday when asked what an up-and-coming “Elon Musk of the East” should focus on.

“I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. They would like to be what they imagine being me, which is not the same,” he continued. “I mean, the amount that I torture myself, is the next level, frankly.”

Musk was speaking at the B-20 business forum ahead of a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies taking place on the Indonesian resort island. He joined the conference by video link weeks after completing his heavily scrutinized takeover of Twitter.

He had been expected to attend the event in person, but Indonesian government minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, who’s responsible for coordinating preparations for the summit, said Musk could not attend because he’s preparing for a court case later in the week.

He’s got plenty else to keep himself busy.

“My workload has recently increased quite a lot,” he said with a chuckle in an apparent reference to the Twitter deal. “I mean, oh, man. I have too much work on my plate, that is for sure.”

The businessman appeared in a darkened room, saying there had been a power cut just before he connected.

His face, projected on a large screen over the summit hall, appeared to glow red as it was reflected in what he said was candlelight – a visage he noted was “so bizarre.”

While Musk was among the most anticipated speakers at the business forum, his remarks broke little new ground. Only the moderator was able to ask questions.

The Tesla chief executive said the electric carmaker would consider making a much cheaper model when asked about lower-cost options for developing countries like India and G-20 host Indonesia. 

“We do think that making a much more affordable vehicle would make a lot of sense and we should do something,” he said.

Musk also reiterated a desire to significantly boost the amount and length of Twitter’s video offerings, and share revenue with people producing the content, though he didn’t provide specifics.

He bought Twitter for $44 billion last month and quickly dismissed the company’s board of directors and top executives.

He laid off much of the rest of the company’s full-time workforce by email on Nov. 4 and is now eliminating the jobs of outsourced contractors who are tasked with fighting misinformation and other harmful content.

Musk has vowed to ease restrictions on what users can say on the platform.

He’s reaped a heap of complaints — much on Twitter itself — and has tried to reassure companies that advertise on the platform and others that it won’t damage their brands by associating them with harmful content.

In his appearance Monday, Musk acknowledged the criticism.

“There’s no way to make everyone happy, that’s for sure,” he said.
…

Several Chinese cities began cutting routine community COVID-19 testing on Monday, days after China announced an easing of some of its heavy-handed coronavirus measures, sparking worry in some communities as nationwide cases continued to rise.

In the northern city of Shijiazhuang, some families expressed concern about exposing their children to the virus at school, giving excuses such as toothaches or earaches for their children’s absence, according to social media posts following a state media report that testing in the city would end.

Other cities, including Yanji in the northeast and Hefei in the east, also said they will stop routine community COVID testing, according to official notices, halting a practice that has become a major fiscal burden for communities across China.

On Friday, the National Health Commission updated its COVID rules in the most significant easing of curbs yet, describing the changes as an “optimization” of its measures to soften the impact on people’s lives, even as China sticks to its zero-COVID policy nearly three years into the pandemic.

The move, which cut quarantine times for close contacts of cases and inbound travelers by two days, to eight days total, was applauded by investors, even though many experts don’t expect China to begin significant easing until March or April at the earliest.

The changes come even as several major cities including Beijing logged record infections on Monday, posing a challenge for authorities scrambling to quell outbreaks quickly while trying to minimize the impact on people’s lives and the economy.

Some areas of Beijing are requiring daily tests.

The concern and confusion in Shijiazhuang was a top-five trending topic on the Twitter-like Weibo.

The city’s Communist Party chief, Zhang Chaochao, said its “optimization” of prevention measures should not be seen as authorities “lying flat” – an expression for inaction – nor is Shijiazhuang moving towards “full liberation” from COVID curbs.

The city, about 295 kms (183 miles) southwest of Beijing, reported 544 infections for Sunday, only three of which it categorized as symptomatic.

“I’m a little scared. In the future, public places will not look at nucleic acid tests, and nucleic acid test points will also be closed, everyone needs to pay for the tests,” one Weibo user wrote, referring to Shijiazhuang.

Gavekal Research said in a Monday note that it was “curious timing” for China to relax its COVID policies: “The combination of an intensifying outbreak and loosening central requirements has led to debate over whether China is now gradually moving to a de facto policy of tolerating Covid,” it said.

Fresh records

Nationwide, 16,072 new locally transmitted cases were reported by the National Health Commission, up from 14,761 on Sunday and the most in China since April 25, when Shanghai was battling an outbreak that locked down the city for two months.

Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Zhengzhou all recorded their worst days so far, though in the capital city the tally was a few hundred cases, while the other cities were counting in thousands.

Case numbers are small compared with infection levels in other countries, but China’s insistence on clearing outbreaks as soon as they emerge under its zero-COVID policy has been widely disruptive to daily life and the economy.

Under the new rules unveiled on Friday, individuals, neighborhoods and public spaces can still be subject to lockdowns, but the health commission relaxed some measures.

In addition to shortening quarantines, secondary close contacts are no longer identified and put into isolation – removing what had been a major inconvenience for people caught up in contact-tracing efforts when a case is found.

Despite the loosening of curbs, many experts described the measures as incremental, with some predicting that China is unlikely to begin reopening until after the March session of parliament, at the earliest.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said on Monday that rising cases in cities including Guangzhou and Chongqing and the continuation of the zero-COVID policy pose downside near-term economic risks. 

 
…

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.

Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and enforce rules against harmful content.

But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on Nov. 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.

Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.

“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.

“I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,” she said. “I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do this at this time.”

Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000 contract workers were fired Saturday night.

Twitter hasn’t said how many contract workers it cut. The company hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and other offices, contract workers wore green badges while full-time workers wore blue badges. Contractors did a number of jobs to help keep Twitter running, including engineering and marketing, Roberts said. But it was the huge force of contracted moderators that was “mission critical” to the platform, said Roberts.

Cutting them will have a “tangible impact on the experience of the platform,” she said.

Musk promised to loosen speech restrictions when he took over Twitter. But in the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue tamping down hate and hate-fueled violence.

That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the Nov. 4 layoffs only affected “15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.”

Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity and complying with regulations.
…

An unmanned U.S. military space plane landed early Saturday after spending a record 908 days in orbit for its sixth mission and conducting science experiments.

The solar-powered vehicle, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its previous mission lasted 780 days.

“Since the X-37B’s first launch in 2010, it has shattered records and provided our nation with an unrivaled capability to rapidly test and integrate new space technologies,” said Jim Chilton, a senior vice president for Boeing, its developer.

For the first time, the space plane hosted a service module that carried experiments for the Naval Research Laboratory, U.S. Air Force Academy and others. The module separated from the vehicle before de-orbiting to ensure a safe landing.

Among the experiments was a satellite dubbed the FalconSat-8 that was designed and built by academy cadets in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory. It was deployed in October 2021 and still remains in orbit.

Another experiment evaluated the effects of long-duration space exposure on seeds.

“This mission highlights the Space Force’s focus on collaboration in space exploration and expanding low-cost access to space for our partners, within and outside of the Department of the Air Force,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations.

The X-37Be has now flown over 1.3 billion miles and spent a total of 3,774 days in space.
…

Australian researchers have identified 1,500 additional locations across the country that could be used as pumped storage hydropower facilities. They have said it should reduce Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Academics at the Australian National University have said pumped storage hydropower is a “low-cost, mass storage option” that could help Australia reach its emissions reduction targets.

Emeritus Professor Andrew Blakers at the university’s College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics told VOA the process involves transferring water between two reservoirs or lakes at different elevations.

He said water is pumped to the higher reservoir when there are plentiful supplies of wind and solar energy. The water is then released at night, or at other times when it is not windy or sunny, maximizing the use of the stored energy in the reservoirs.

“We have two reservoirs; one at the top of a hill and the other down in a valley connected with a pipe or tunnel,” he said. “On sunny and windy days, the pump turbine pumps water uphill to the upper reservoir and then in the middle of the night the water is allowed to come back down through the turbine to recover the energy that was stored. So, the same water goes up and down between the two reservoirs for 100 years. So, if you want large-scale storage, you go to pumped hydro.”

Researchers studied the area near every reservoir in Australia looking for a potential site for another reservoir that could be used as pumped storage hydropower.

They identified 1,500 locations that could help Australia store the energy it generates from wind and solar projects.

Blakers says Australia is becoming a world leader in the field.

“All Australian governments and companies are focused on very rapid construction of solar and wind, and equally rapid construction of new transmission to bring the new power to the cities, and pumped hydro and battery storage to balance the variable solar and wind. Australia is the global pathfinder. We are leading in every department,” he said.

Australia has a target of producing 82% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Because of the country’s heavy reliance on coal and natural gas, it has been one of the world’s worst emitters of greenhouse gases, per capita.

Those fossil fuels continue to generate much of Australia’s electricity, but researchers believe that the country’s path toward a cleaner energy future is well underway.

The Australian National University study released Friday follows the team’s identification of 530,000 potential pumped-storage hydro sites across the world.
…

The 10 women gathered on yoga mats in a New Orleans suburb, the lights dimmed.

“I’d like to invite you to close your eyes,” instructor Stephanie Osborne said in a soothing voice from the front of the room. The only other noises were the hum of the air conditioner and the distant sounds of children playing in a nearby field.

For the next hour the women focused on various mindfulness exercises designed to help them deal with the stress of everyday life.

The six-week mindfulness program in Slidell, Louisiana, is the brainchild of Kentrell Jones, the executive director of East St. Tammany Habitat for Humanity, who was concerned about the health of her colleagues and others affected by Hurricane Ida, which ripped through this region east of New Orleans last year.

Participants meet for an hour once a week for six weeks beginning with the inaugural session this fall and plans for future sessions next year.

Prospective participants, who had to be living in the parish during Hurricane Ida, filled out a survey asking them questions such as whether they had struggled with lack of sleep or had problems paying bills or having to relocate since the hurricane. They don’t have to be clients of Habitat for Humanity’s housing programs, although some are.

Jones said the organization’s clients have struggled with being displaced from their homes, trying to complete repairs while dealing with insurance and living through another hurricane season in which the calendar is filled with anniversaries of previous storms and everyone keeps an eye glued to the television for weather alerts.

One family she works with had to move to Mississippi in the aftermath of Ida while their tree-damaged home was repaired. Just as the repairs were completed, the husband died of a heart attack.

“You have people that are stressed,” she emphasized.

The program hits on a growing concern — the long-term stress that extreme weather events such as hurricanes can take on the people who live through them. People who work in hurricane-affected areas often talk about the stress the long rebuilding process can take on people and the anxiety stirred up during hurricane season.

In late August, with anniversaries of Hurricanes Katrina and Ida looming, the New Orleans emergency preparedness social media feed reminded residents of something called the “anniversary effect,” which might trigger feelings of depression or PTSD. After Hurricane Ian hit Florida in September, two men in their 70s took their own lives after seeing their losses.

In the north shore region of Louisiana, local mental health officials note that hurricanes are often followed by increased suicides in ensuing years. Nick Richard, who heads the local branch of the National Alliance on Mental Health, said that following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina suicides climbed by 46% in 2007. Other events such as 2008’s Hurricane Gustav or the 2016 floods have shown similar jumps.

Research also suggests extreme weather events such as hurricanes can have long-term health effects on survivors. A Tulane University study found hospital admissions for heart attacks were three times higher after Katrina than before the storm.

Another study published earlier this year looked at mortality rates for counties that experienced a tropical cyclone over a 30-year period, from 1988 to 2018. The research found there were increases for certain types of deaths, including cardiovascular and respiratory disease in the six months after landfall — suggesting death tolls often tabulated in the initial weeks after a storm might be undercounted.

The study’s lead author, Robbie Parks, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, said while major hurricanes such as this year’s Ian get a lot of attention, his research suggested repeated strikes with weaker cyclones also take a toll. He’s concerned that the full extent of events like hurricanes aren’t being captured. It’s an “incredible challenge” just counting the dead after a hurricane, he said.

“What if someone has a heart attack in the week after a hurricane?” he said. “Then you’re getting into subjective territory.”

One of the women taking part in the inaugural meditation course is Louise Mace of Slidell. She had just opened her shop selling home decor goods when Katrina wiped it out in 2005. Then, last year, Hurricane Ida’s winds and a tornado damaged her roof; she’s been battling with her insurance carrier ever since as she lives in a camper.

The stress has taken a toll on Mace’s health with her blood pressure jumping up and down. Her doctor recommended meditation and then she ran into Jones, who recruited her for the course. Mace said it has helped her learn techniques to deal with the stress and to know she’s not alone.

“You think you’re dealing. You think you’re fine. You’re not. Listening to other people made it better,” Mace said.

The program is funded by the Northshore Community Foundation. Susan Bonnett, the foundation’s president and CEO, says in the immediate aftermath of events like hurricanes the foundation would receive funding requests around traditional post-disaster needs — tarps for damaged roofs, for example.

But the foundation also noticed funding requests for mental health services months after the storm. At the same time, there was a dearth of mental health services in the region so the organization started looking for creative ways like Kentrell’s mindfulness proposal to address the problems they knew would build after events like Ida.

The mindfulness classes are designed to build skills that the participants can use to address any stresses in their lives, whether those are weather-related or something else like a conflict with a family member.

Instructor Stephanie Osborne says people don’t always realize the mental strain that extreme weather can cause.

Take the lead-up to Hurricane Ian, for example, when it wasn’t yet clear the storm was going to hit Florida and not Louisiana. Some of the women gathered outside the community room after the class and talked about whether they needed to book a hotel room in Baton Rouge or get gas for the generator. All of that buildup takes a toll, Osborne said.

“There is an anxiety, a stress around that, especially for folks who are struggling financially,” she said. And if people aren’t aware of how much anxiety they’re holding inside, it can affect things like their health or their jobs: “It starts spilling out in other ways.” 

 
…