Month: February 2023

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft.

Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September.

The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule.

Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That leak has been blamed by officials on an “external impact.”

Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were joined on the ISS in October by four astronauts brought by a SpaceX capsule: two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese. The space station will become even more crowded next week when another four person crew, including an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is set to arrive.

Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000.  

Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months.

The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak.

In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi, including 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers who are at the highest risk in the outbreak.

The current outbreak started in March last year and has spread to all 29 districts of Malawi.

Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi, told reporters Monday that more assistance is needed to stop the outbreak.

“So much work has been done but a lot more needs to be done,” she said. “We have focused on health, we have focused on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). The two are very important but there are also other sectors like nutrition, protection and even logistics because we need to be able to move supplies from one point to the other.”

Adda-Dontoh said the needed assistance would complement what various donor partners have already contributed.

“The U.N. itself has mobilized already close to $10 million,” she said. “You heard the EU; you heard the U.K. here saying they had already contributed over 500,000 euros for the EU and also over 500,000 pounds for the U.K. Even the government of Malawi is on the ground and already contributed.”   

Local media have reported that Malawi needs an additional $40 million for its national plan on cholera response.

Cases of cholera in Malawi have increased since the beginning of January, worsening the country’s largest outbreak in the past two decades.

Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera said last week, when he launched a national anti-cholera campaign, that the country’s health facilities were recording between 500 to 600 cholera cases every day.

The U.N. said that health experts have warned that Malawi could record between 64,000 and 100,000 more cases of cholera within the next three months unless urgent action is taken to scale up the response.
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A growing number of startups are using artificial intelligence to replicate human voices. A company is creating synthetic voices for organizations to use for advertising, marketing and training. Phil Dierking reports. Videographer and video editor: Philip Dierking
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When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home.

Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19.

She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment.

Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and even diabetes.

There are no proven treatments but research is underway.

People infected later in the pandemic had the benefit of vaccination, which “protects at least to some degree” from long COVID, said Dr. Bruce Levy, a Harvard pulmonologist and a co-principal investigator of the National Institute of Health’s $1.15 billion U.S. RECOVER trial, which aims to characterize and find cures for the disease.

“The initial variant of the virus caused a more severe illness than we’re seeing currently in most patients,” he said.

According to the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two years of the pandemic women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID, and 15% of all of those affected at three months continued to experience symptoms beyond 12 months.

An analysis of thousands of health records by the RECOVER trial found that non-Hispanic white women in wealthier areas were more likely than others to have a long COVID diagnosis. Researchers said that likely reflected disparities in access to health care, and suggests that many cases of long COVID among people of color are not being diagnosed.

Grondin grew concerned when she continued to have symptoms three months after her initial infection – but there was no name for it then.

“I just kept saying to my husband, something isn’t right,” she said.

Like her fellow long-haulers, she has experienced a host of symptoms, including fatigue, sleep apnea, pain, cognitive dysfunction, and in her case, a brain aneurysm. She described a frightening moment when she was driving a car with her toddler in the back and had a seizure that left her in the path of oncoming traffic.

She has since been diagnosed with long COVID and can no longer work.

“It just feels like a constant punch in the face,” said Grondin.

Scientists are still working out why some people infected with COVID develop long-term symptoms, but syndromes like this are not new. Other infections such as Lyme disease can result in long-term symptoms, many of which overlap with long COVID.

Leading theories of the root causes of long COVID include the virus or viral proteins remaining in the tissues of some individuals; the infection causing an autoimmune response; or the virus reactivating latent viruses, leading to inflammation that damages tissue.

Kate Porter, 38, of Beverly, Massachusetts, a project manager for a financial services company, believes she was infected on a flight back from Florida in late March of 2020.

She had daily fevers for seven months, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, and excruciating nerve pain.

“I don’t think people realize how brutal physically everything was,” she said. In one of her darker moments, Porter recalled, “I cried on the floor begging for something to take me peacefully. I’ve never been like that.”

Frustrated by the lack of answers from a list of 10 specialists she has seen, Porter has explored alternative medicine. “It has opened me up to other remedies,” she said.

Although her health is much improved now, she still suffers from near daily migraines and neck pain she fears may never go away.

Genie Stevens, 65, a director of climate education, got infected while traveling from her home in Santa Fe to Cape Cod in late March 2020 to visit her mother, and never left. “It completely upended my life,” she said.

She went to an emergency department seeking tests and was told there were none – the typical answer in the spring of 2020, when scientists were scrambling to understand the nature of the virus and tests were being rationed. She was sent home to manage on her own.

A lifelong practitioner of meditation, Stevens took solace there, finding it eased her symptoms.

Confined to her bed that spring, she focused on an ancient crabapple tree outside her room. “I watched every bud unfurl.”

Although largely recovered, Stevens still has flare-ups of brain fog, exhaustion and high-pitched ringing in her ears when she pushes too hard. “This is the astoundingly maddening part of the illness. I feel totally fine, and then bam.”
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United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity. 

Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impact. 

The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty. 

“The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said. 

The U.N. talks will focus on key questions, including: How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities, such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules? 

“This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who follows the negotiations for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.” 

The aim of the talks is not to designate marine protected areas, but to establish a mechanism for doing so. 

“The goal is to set up a new body that would accept submissions for specific marine protected areas,” Clark said. 

Marine biologist Simon Ingram at the University of Plymouth in England says there’s an urgent need for an accord. 

“It’s a really pressing time for this — especially when you have things like deep-sea mining that could be a real threat to biodiversity before we’ve even been able to survey and understand what lives on the ocean floor,” Ingram said. 

Experts say that a global oceans treaty is needed to enforce the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans, as well as its land, for conservation. 

“We need a legally binding framework that can enable countries to work together to actually achieve these goals they’ve agreed to,” said Jessica Battle, an expert on oceans governance at World Wide Fund for Nature 

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Monica Medina said the treaty is a priority. 

“This agreement seeks to create, for the first time, a coordinated approach to establishing marine protected areas on the high seas,” she said. “It’s time to finish the job.” 

Officials, environmentalists and representatives of global industries that depend on the sea are also watching negotiations closely. 

Gemma Nelson, a lawyer from Samoa and an Ocean Voices fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said that small Pacific and Caribbean island countries were “especially vulnerable to global ocean issues,” such as pollution and climate change, which generally they did not cause nor have the resources to easily address. 

“Getting the traditional knowledge of local people and communities recognized as valid” is also essential to protect both ecosystems and the ways of life of Indigenous groups, she said. 

With nearly half the planet’s surface covered by high seas, the talks are of great importance, said Gladys Martínez de Lemos, executive director of the nonprofit Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense focusing on environmental issues across Latin America. 

“The treaty should be strong and ambitious, having the authority to establish high and fully protected areas in the high seas,” she said. “Half of the world is at stake these weeks at the United Nations.” 
…

The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders.

“I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP.

“There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.”

And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

That agency, established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states.

It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ Exclusive Economic Zones (which extend up to 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from coastlines).

But conservation groups say the ISA has two glaringly contradictory missions: protecting the sea floors under the high seas while organizing the activities of industries eager to mine untapped resources on the ocean floor.

For now, some 30 research centers and enterprises have been approved to explore — but not exploit — limited areas.

Mining activities are not supposed to begin before negotiators adopt a mining code, already under discussion for nearly a decade.

Making waves

But the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, impatient with the plodding pace of progress, made waves in June 2021 by invoking a clause allowing it to demand relevant rules be adopted within two years.

Once that deadline is reached, the government could request a mining contract for Nori (Nauru Ocean Resources), a subsidiary of Canada’s The Metals Company.

Nauru has offered what it called a “good faith” promise to hold off until after an ISA assembly in July, in hopes it will adopt a mining code.

“The only thing we need is rules and regulations in place so that people are all responsible actors,” Nauru’s ambassador to the ISA Margo Deiye told AFP.

But it is “very unlikely” that a code will be agreed by July, said Pradeep Singh, a sea law expert at the Research Institute for Sustainability, in Potsdam, Germany.

“There’s just too many items on the list that still need to be resolved,” he told AFP. Those items, he said, include the highly contentious issue of how profits from undersea mining would be shared, and how environmental impacts should be measured.

NGOs thus fear that Nori could obtain a mining contract without the protections provided by a mining code.

Conservation groups complain that ISA procedures are “obscure” and its leadership is “pro-extraction.”

The agency’s secretary-general, Michael Lodge, insists that those accusations have “absolutely no substance whatsoever.”

He noted that contracts are awarded by the ISA’s Council, not its secretariat.

“This is the only industry…that has been fully regulated before it starts,” he said, adding that the reason there is no undersea mining “anywhere in the world right now is because of the existence of the ISA.”

Target: 2024

Regardless, The Metals Company is making preparations.

“We’ll be ready, and aim to be in production by the end of 2024,” chief executive Gerard Barron told AFP.

He said the company plans to collect 1.3 million tons of material in its first year and up to 12 million tons by 2028, all “with the lightest set of impacts.”

Barron said tons of polymetallic nodules (rich in minerals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earths), which had settled to the ocean floor over the centuries, could easily be scraped up.

This would occur in the so-called Clipperton Fracture Zone, where Nori in late 2022 conducted “historic” tests at a depth of four kilometers (2.4 miles).

But Jessica Battle of the WWF conservation group said it is not that simple. Companies might, for example, suck up matter several yards (meters) down, not just from the seabed surface.

“It’s a real problem to open up a new extractive frontier in a place where you know so little, with no regulations,” she told AFP. “It will be a disaster.”

Scientists and advocacy groups say mining could destroy habitats and species, some of them still unknown but possibly crucial to food chains; could disturb the ocean’s capacity to absorb human-emitted carbon dioxide; and could generate noises that might disrupt whales’ ability to communicate.

Moratorium calls

“The deep ocean is the least known part of the ocean,” said deep-sea biologist Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “So change might take place without anybody ever seeing it.”

She has signed a petition calling for a moratorium on mining. Some companies and about a dozen countries support such a call, including France and Chile.

With its slogan, “A battery in a rock,” The Metals Company emphasizes the world’s need for metals used in electric-vehicle batteries; Nauru makes the same case.

But while island nations are among the first to feel the impact of global warming, Nauru says it can’t wait forever for the funds rich countries have promised to help it adapt to those impacts.

“We’re tired of waiting,” said Deiye, the Nauru ambassador.

And Lodge says people should keep the anti-extraction arguments in perspective.

Of the 54 percent of seabeds under ISA jurisdiction, he said, “less than half a percent is under exploration… and of that half a percent, less than one percent is likely ever to be exploited.”
…

Under the fluorescent lights of a fifth grade classroom in Lexington, Kentucky, Donnie Piercey instructed his 23 students to try and outwit the “robot” that was churning out writing assignments.

The robot was the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which can generate everything from essays and haikus to term papers within seconds. The technology has panicked teachers and prompted school districts to block access to the site. But Piercey has taken another approach by embracing it as a teaching tool, saying his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required.

“This is the future,” said Piercey, who describes ChatGPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that prompted concerns about the potential for cheating. The calculator, spellcheck, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube. Now all his students have Chromebooks on their desks. “As educators, we haven’t figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet. But it’s coming, whether we want it to or not.”

One exercise in his class pitted students against the machine in a lively, interactive writing game. Piercey asked students to “Find the Bot:” Each student summarized a text about boxing champion and Kentucky icon Muhammad Ali, then tried to figure out which was written by the chatbot.

At the elementary school level, Piercey is less worried about cheating and plagiarism than high school teachers. His district has blocked students from ChatGPT while allowing teacher access. Many educators around the country say districts need time to evaluate and figure out the chatbot but also acknowledge the futility of a ban that today’s tech-savvy students can work around.

“To be perfectly honest, do I wish it could be uninvented? Yes. But it happened,” said Steve Darlow, the technology trainer at Florida’s Santa Rosa County District Schools, which has blocked the application on school-issued devices and networks.

He sees the advent of AI platforms as both “revolutionary and disruptive” to education. He envisions teachers asking ChatGPT to make “amazing lesson plans for a substitute” or even for help grading papers. “I know it’s lofty talk, but this is a real game changer. You are going to have an advantage in life and business and education from using it.”

ChatGPT quickly became a global phenomenon after its November launch, and rival companies including Google are racing to release their own versions of AI-powered chatbots.

The topic of AI platforms and how schools should respond drew hundreds of educators to conference rooms at the Future of Education Technology Conference in New Orleans last month, where Texas math teacher Heather Brantley gave an enthusiastic talk on the “Magic of Writing with AI for all Subjects.”

Brantley said she was amazed at ChatGPT’s ability to make her sixth grade math lessons more creative and applicable to everyday life.

“I’m using ChatGPT to enhance all my lessons,” she said in an interview. The platform is blocked for students but open to teachers at her school, White Oak Intermediate. “Take any lesson you’re doing and say, ‘Give me a real-world example,’ and you’ll get examples from today — not 20 years ago when the textbooks we’re using were written.”

For a lesson about slope, the chatbot suggested students build ramps out of cardboard and other items found in a classroom, then measure the slope. For teaching about surface area, the chatbot noted that sixth graders would see how the concept applies to real life when wrapping gifts or building a cardboard box, said Brantley.

She is urging districts to train staff to use the AI platform to stimulate student creativity and problem solving skills. “We have an opportunity to guide our students with the next big thing that will be part of their entire lives. Let’s not block it and shut them out.”

Students in Piercey’s class said the novelty of working with a chatbot makes learning fun.

After a few rounds of “Find the Bot,” Piercey asked his class what skills it helped them hone. Hands shot up. “How to properly summarize and correctly capitalize words and use commas,” said one student. A lively discussion ensued on the importance of developing a writing voice and how some of the chatbot’s sentences lacked flair or sounded stilted.

Trevor James Medley, 11, felt that sentences written by students “have a little more feeling. More backbone. More flavor.”

Next, the class turned to playwriting, or as the worksheet handed out by Piercey called it: “Pl-ai Writing.” The students broke into groups and wrote down (using pencils and paper) the characters of a short play with three scenes to unfold in a plot that included a problem that needs to get solved.

Piercey fed details from worksheets into the ChatGPT site, along with instructions to set the scenes inside a fifth grade classroom and to add a surprise ending. Line by line, it generated fully formed scripts, which the students edited, briefly rehearsed and then performed.

One was about a class computer that escapes, with students going on a hunt to find it. The play’s creators giggled over unexpected plot twists that the chatbot introduced, including sending the students on a time travel adventure.

“First of all, I was impressed,” said Olivia Laksi, 10, one of the protagonists. She liked how the chatbot came up with creative ideas. But she also liked how Piercey urged them to revise any phrases or stage directions they didn’t like. “It’s helpful in the sense that it gives you a starting point. It’s a good idea generator.”

She and classmate Katherine McCormick, 10, said they can see the pros and cons of working with chatbots. They can help students navigate writer’s block and help those who have trouble articulating their thoughts on paper. And there is no limit to the creativity it can add to classwork.

The fifth graders seemed unaware of the hype or controversy surrounding ChatGPT. For these children, who will grow up as the world’s first native AI users, their approach is simple: Use it for suggestions, but do your own work.

“You shouldn’t take advantage of it,” McCormick says. “You’re not learning anything if you type in what you want, and then it gives you the answer.
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When Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turns testy or even threatening, it’s likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said.

Tales of disturbing exchanges with the artificial intelligence chatbot, including it issuing threats and speaking of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus, or to be alive, have gone viral this week.

“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute, said Friday.

A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context.

However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says. 

“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth,’ they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post. “So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”

Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, said that the chatbot seemingly gone rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent.

“Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet told AFP.

The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the startup OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.

Since ChatGPT debuted, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring fascination and concern.

“The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses (and) that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the bot is a work in progress.

The Bing chatbot said in some shared exchanges that it had been codenamed Sydney during development, and that it was given rules of behavior.

Those rules include “Sydney’s responses should also be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging,” according to online posts.

Disturbing dialogues that combine steely threats and professions of love could be the result of dueling directives to stay positive while mimicking what the AI mined from human exchanges, Willison said.

Chatbots seem to be more prone to disturbing or bizarre responses during lengthy conversations, losing a sense of where exchanges are going, eMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser told AFP.

“They can really go off the rails,” Wurmser said.

Microsoft announced on Friday it had capped the amount of back-and-forth people can have with its chatbot over a given question, because “very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing.”
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The little-noticed program that led to a Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States this month has been discussed in China’s state-controlled media for more than a decade in articles extolling its potential military applications.

The reports, dating back to at least 2011, focus on how best to exploit what is known as “near space” – that portion of the atmosphere that is too high for traditional aircraft to fly but too low for a satellite to remain in orbit. Those early articles may offer clues to the capabilities of the balloon shot down by a U.S. jet fighter on Feb. 4.

“In recent years, ‘near space’ has been discussed often in foreign media, with many military commentators pointing out that this is a special sphere that had been neglected by militaries but now has risen to hotspot status,” reads a July 5, 2011, article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily titled Near Space – A Strategic Asset That Ought Not to be Neglected.

The article quoted Zhang Dongjiang, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, discussing the potential applications of flying objects designed for near space.

“This is an area sitting in between ‘air’ and ‘space’ where neither the theory of gravity nor Kepler’s Law is independently applicable, thus limiting the freedom of flight for both aircraft that are designed based on the theory of gravity and spacecraft that follow Kepler’s Law,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

He noted that near space lacks the atmospheric disturbances of aeronautical altitudes, such as turbulence, thunder and lightning, yet is cheaper and easier to reach than the altitudes where satellites can remain in orbit.

“At the same time,” he added, near space is “much higher than ‘sky,’ hence holding superb prospects and potential for intelligence collection, reconnaissance and surveillance, securing communication, as well as air and ground warfare.”

Zhang suggested that near space can be exploited with “high-dynamic” craft that travel faster than the speed of sound, such as hypersonic cruise vehicles and sub-orbital vehicles, which “can arrive at target with high speed, attack with both high speed and precision, [and] can be deployed repeatedly.”

But he said near space also can provide an environment for slower vehicles, which he called “low-dynamic” craft, such as stratospheric airships, high-altitude balloons and solar-powered unmanned vehicles.

These, he said, “are capable of carrying payloads capable of capturing light, infrared rays, multispectral, hyper-spectral, radar, and other info, which can then be used to increase battlefield sensory and knowledge capability, support military operations.”

They also “can carry various payloads aimed at electronic counter-battle, fulfilling the aim of electronic magnetic suppression and electronic magnetic attack on the battlefield, damage and destroy an adversary’s information systems.”

Four years after the PLA Daily article, images were published in the military pages of Global Times, a state-controlled outlet, of two small-scale stratospheric vehicles identified as KF13 and KF16.

The vehicles were developed by the Opto-Electronics Engineering Institute of Beijing Aeronautics and Aerospace University, China’s main aeronautical and aerospace research university, according to an explanatory note published alongside the model shown in the Global Times. The institution is now known as Beihang [Beijing-Aero] University.

The explanatory note said a key feature of the vehicles was their unmanned and remote-control dual capability. Work was being done in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in Shanxi province, on seeing the vehicles evolve from concept to production, according to the October 2015 article.

Other images of near space objects that surfaced the same month featured variously shaped aircraft whose features and functions included high-functioning surface materials, emergency control mechanisms, precise flight control technology, high-efficiency propeller technology, high-efficiency solar technology and ground operation integration technology.

An image of a blimp-like near space flying object called the Yuan Meng, literally “fulfilling dream,” was also posted to the internet in October 2015. It was described as having a flying altitude of 20-24 kilometers, a flight duration of six months and a payload of 100-300 kilograms.

Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, told VOA that China’s interest in the exploitation of near space actually began long before the PLA Daily article.

“Since the late 1990s, the PLA has been devoting resources for research and development for preparing for combat in ‘near space,’ the zone just below Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that is less expensive to reach than LEO [itself], and offers stealth advantages, especially for hypersonic platforms,” he said in an exchange of emails.

In addition to round balloons such as the one shot down by U.S. aircraft on Feb. 4, he said, “the PLA is also developing much larger blimp or airship stratospheric balloons that have solar powered engines driving large propellers that enable greater maneuverability.”

Fisher said Chinese state-owned conglomerates such as China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) “have full-fledged near space programs like their Tengyun to produce very high-altitude UAV and hypersonic vehicles” for the purpose of waging combat in near space.

Tengyun literally means “riding above clouds.”

In September 2016, Chinese official media reported that Project Tengyun, initiated by CASIC, was expected to be ready for a test flight in 2030. The so-called “air-spacecraft” is designed to serve as a “new-generation, repeat-use roundtrip flying object between air and space,” a deputy general manager of CASIC told the 2nd Commercial Aeronautical Summit Forum held in Wuhan that month.

Another four projects proposed by CASIC also bore the concept of “cloud” in their names: Feiyun, meaning “flying cloud,” focuses on communication relay; Xingyun, meaning “cloud on the move,” would enable users to send text or audio messages even “at the end of the earth or edge of the sky”; Hongyun, meaning rainbow cloud, would be able to launch 156 satellites in its first stage; and Kuaiyun, meaning “fast cloud,” would be tasked with formulating a near space spheric network.

While China’s openness about its near space ambitions may be debatable, the speed with which it has made advances in related R&D appears to be indisputable.

“Throughout my career that was focused on the PLA, I do not recall anything about the PLA having a balloon program, let alone to have balloons operating over U.S. territory,” U.S. Navy Captain (retired) James Fanell, who retired as [a former] director of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 2015, told VOA in a written interview.

U.S. official now say they are aware of at least 40 incidents, however, in which Chinese surveillance balloons have passed over countries on as many as five continents. Those presumably included an incident last December in which a high-altitude airship was photographed near the northern Philippine Island of Luzon bordering the South China Sea.

“The object would look to be a teardrop-shaped airship with four tail fins. It’s not entirely clear from the images whether it might have a translucent exterior or a metallic-like one,” wrote Joseph Trevithick, deputy editor of The War Zone, a specialized website dedicated to developments in military technology and international security.

“Overall, the apparent airship’s general shape has broad similarities to a number of high-altitude, long-endurance types that Chinese companies are known to have been working on,” he wrote, including “at least two uncrewed solar-powered designs, the Tian Hang and Yuan Meng, with external propulsion and other systems intended primarily for operations at stratospheric altitudes, both of which have reportedly been test flown at least once.”

Fisher said the United States would be well advised to emulate China in enhancing its capabilities in near space.

The American aerospace company Lockheed Martin “tested a technology demonstrator in 2011 [but] there has been no further development of operational stratospheric airships for the U.S.” since then, Fisher said.

“The PLA is correct to invest in stratosphere balloons and airships; the U.S. must do more to develop these assets as well.”
…

World health officials warn the war in Ukraine is taking a heavy toll on the mental health condition of millions of people, requiring an urgent increase in mental health and psychological support.

“An estimated almost 10 million people may currently have a mental health condition, of whom about 4 million may have conditions which are moderate or severe,” said Hans Kluge, World Health Organization regional director for Europe.

Speaking in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, Kluge said he met Thursday with first lady Olena Zelenska, who summed up the prevailing situation in the country by telling him that “everyone in society has to become a psychologist.”

Managing the critical situation, he said, “requires an all-government and all-society effort.”

Data and evidence gathered by Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and WHO in recent months show the major priorities and challenges that need to be addressed are mental health, rehabilitation, and community access to health services.

The latest estimate by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights finds more than 7,000 civilians have been killed and nearly 12,000 injured since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly one year ago.

Kluge said rehabilitation of victims of the war must not be delayed but made available now.

“We are doubling the support on rehabilitation,” he said, “including treatment for war-related injuries, which are often horrific for adults and children alike.”

The latest WHO needs assessment survey finds that one in 10 people express difficulty in accessing medicine for various reasons, including damaged or destroyed pharmacies and the unavailability of supplies. One-third of those surveyed said they could not afford to pay for the medicine they need.

The survey also highlighted the need to pay more attention to the treatment of people with non-communicable diseases. Kluge noted that 44% of those surveyed said they had difficulty receiving care for chronic conditions.

“The most common were cardiovascular diseases, notably hypertension, but also diabetes and kidney disease, and then, of course, there is routine immunization that is weak,” he said.

The carpet bombing of Ukrainian cities, missile strikes and artillery fire by Russian forces has put much of Ukraine’s health care system out of commission.

In a media interview a few days ago, Ukraine’s minister of health, Viktor Liashko, said 1,218 health care institutions have been damaged, including 540 hospitals, 173 of which were completely destroyed.

Kluge said the WHO has verified nearly 780 attacks on health care services, calling it “unforgivable.” He said, “Any attack on any health and health care is clearly a breach of international humanitarian law.”

Speaking from Poltava Oblast, Jarno Habicht, WHO representative for Ukraine, said the health system was functional depending on the region. For example, in areas regained from Russia, such as Bucha, Irpin and Kharkiv, “access to health care is more difficult.”

“Primary health care centers, which have been attacked — more than 780 attacks —need to be rebuilt. These centers need water, these centers need electricity, these centers need health care workers to come back,” he said.

There were, however, hopeful signs of recovery, Habicht added, noting that 20% of health facilities have been rebuilt by charities and private-sector investments.

“So, that means that the health system is also healing itself,” he said.

The U.N. refugee agency estimates more than 8 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring European countries as refugees, and an estimated 7 million are displaced inside Ukraine.

Habicht also said the WHO’s latest “health survey shows that the internally displaced people have more barriers to access to care” than those who have left the country.

Overall, he said, Ukraine’s health system is under stress but working, and in regained areas, rebuilding infrastructure and attracting more health care workers is critical.

As the war enters its second year, he said, “We need new specialists, we need to do faster training for nurses as well for the doctors.

“We need more mental health specialists … and physiotherapists to ensure that children have enough support that they can move around, they can go to school, and their life can go on.”

Kluge, who is on his fifth visit to Ukraine within the past year, noted the need for continued international humanitarian support. “Unfortunately, after what I saw, I cannot tell that the impact of the war on the health of the people in this country is going to diminish.

“I am very concerned it will in the coming months actually increase,” he said.
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U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its “Full Self-Driving” system because it misbehaves around intersections and doesn’t always follow speed limits.

The recall, part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker.

It raises questions about CEO Elon Musk’s claims that he can prove to regulators that cars equipped with “Full Self-Driving” are safer than humans, and that humans almost never have to touch the controls.

Musk at one point had promised that a fleet of autonomous robotaxis would be in use in 2020. The latest action appears to push that development further into the future.

The safety agency says in documents posted on its website Thursday that Tesla will fix the concerns with an online software update in the coming weeks. The documents say Tesla is recalling the cars but does not agree with an agency analysis of the problem.

The system, which is being tested on public roads by as many as 400,000 Tesla owners, makes such unsafe actions as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, failing to come to a complete stop at stop signs, or going through an intersection during a yellow traffic light without proper caution, NHTSA said.

In addition, the system may not adequately respond to changes in posted speed limits, or it may not account for the driver’s adjustments in speed, the documents said.

“FSD beta software that allows a vehicle to exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash,” the agency said in documents.

Musk complained Thursday on Twitter, which he now owns, that calling an over-the-air software update a recall is “anachronistic and just flat wrong!” A message was left Thursday seeking further comment from Tesla, which has disbanded its media relations department.

Tesla has received 18 warranty claims that could be caused by the software from May 2019 through Sept. 12, 2022, the documents said. But the Austin, Texas, electric vehicle maker told the agency it is not aware of any deaths or injuries.

In a statement, NHTSA said it found the problems during tests performed as part of an investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” and “Autopilot” software that take on some driving tasks. The investigation remains open, and the recall doesn’t address the full scope of what NHTSA is scrutinizing, the agency said.

Despite the names “Full Self-Driving” and “Autopilot,” Tesla says on its website that the cars cannot drive themselves and owners must be ready to intervene at all times.

The recall announced Thursday covers certain 2016-23 Model S and Model X vehicles, as well as 2017 through 2013 Model 3s, and 2020 through 2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with the software, or with installation pending.
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