In Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, residents say plastic and other waste is increasingly polluting Lake Kivu. A new initiative is keeping some of that waste out of the lake. Austere Malivika has this report from Goma, narrated by Aida Issa.
…
Month: September 2023
In a grand farewell to its beloved giant pandas, Smithsonian’s National Zoo is hosting “Panda Palooza,” a celebration ending October 1. From their longtime Washington base, the pandas have brought joy to millions of visitors and generations of fans — and now they are being moved to China. Liliya Anisimova has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Sergey Sokolov.
…
Half of the world’s children breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke, and about 51,000 children die each year from illnesses related to second-hand smoke. Lisa Schlein reports from Geneva about the World Health Organization’s call to schools to protect children from the harmful effects of tobacco.
…
The World Health Organization is calling on schools to protect children from the harmful health impacts of tobacco use by creating nicotine- and tobacco-free zones on their campuses.
Tobacco kills more than 8 million people every year, most in low- and middle-income countries, which account for about 80% of the world’s 1.3 billion tobacco users.
The United Nations health agency reports that roughly half of the world’s children breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke and that about 51,000 children die each year from illnesses related to secondhand smoke.
“Young people are not only threatened by secondhand smoke,” said Kerstin Schotte, medical officer at WHO, “they are also aggressively targeted by the tobacco and related industries and their deadly products.”
As more than half of all smokers die prematurely, and in a bid to keep profits high, she said, the tobacco industry “tries to replace all the customers they lose by recruiting new users.”
“Given that an overwhelming 90% of smokers pick up the habit before turning 18, teenagers become prime targets,” Schotte said.
She said one tactic employed by the tobacco industry to entice young people to become new users is through marketing addictive, sweet and fruity flavored nicotine products. She said, “These products are sold near schools, online and in vending machines, where age verification can be circumvented.”
She said the industry also has made its product more affordable for young people “through the sale of single-use vape sticks, as they are called. They usually do not bear any health warnings, and children often do not know that they contain nicotine and are dangerous.”
Ruediger Krech, WHO director of health promotion, said this is a problem throughout the world, in rich and poor countries alike. He noted that last month the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned 15 online retailers to stop selling illegal e-cigarettes that are packaged to appeal to young people.
He said these dangerous products are being sold in class, at bus stops — everywhere young people congregate. “We must protect young people from deadly secondhand smoke and toxic e-cigarette emissions, as well as ads promoting these products,” he said.
E-cigarettes are marketed by the tobacco industry as products that help adult smokers quit the habit. However, medical officer Schotte said this isn’t proven science.
“We think there is not enough evidence to say for sure that these products can help smokers to quit,” she said. “If anything, we see another double use. The majority of smokers who try to quit smoking with these devices do not quit all products. But they just switch to these products.
“And our definition of quitting is not that you switch to another addictive product,” she said.
To counter this, the World Health Organization has launched a new guide and toolkit for school administrators and teachers about how to create tobacco- and nicotine-free schools. The guides provide best-practice examples of what countries, cities and schools have done to become tobacco and nicotine free.
“Schools are in a unique position to create this healthy tobacco- and nicotine-free environment because children spend a third of their waking time in schools,” Schotte said.
“This is the place where children encounter a lot of this peer pressure about using these products, and this is why it is important that schools provide this safe and healthy environment for children,” she said.
The WHO guide highlights four ways to promote a nicotine- and tobacco-free environment for young people. They include banning nicotine and tobacco products on school campuses, prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes and other toxic commodities near schools, and banning the advertisement and promotion of tobacco products near schools. The guide also calls on schools to refuse sponsorships or engagement with tobacco and nicotine industries.
“We want children to be in a safe place,” Schotte said, “so schools should be completely smoke and nicotine free indoors.”
She noted that 149 countries already have put legislation in place prohibiting smoking inside educational facilities. She said the WHO guide also recommends turning the entire school campus — indoors and outdoors — into a smoke-free zone.
“We want to de-normalize the act of smoking in public places,” she said.
…
Deeply entrenched gender norms, biases and perceptions are affecting the ability of girls and young women to use the internet, influencing their online activity and hurting their access to information and work, a new report has found.
A survey of more than 10,000 users aged 14-21, and their parents, in over half a dozen countries including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and India, found that girls are constantly being monitored and told they are vulnerable and not competent online, “creating a crisis of confidence.”
“This is resulting in girls setting up more protections and behaving more conservatively when connecting with others and sharing personal information online,” said the report by nonprofit Girl Effect, the Malala Fund, the United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF and the Vodafone Americas Foundation.
“These attitudes are not just impacting girls’ access and usage, they are influencing their self-confidence and shaping their own perceptions of their ability to use these tools to pursue their social, educational, and intellectual interests,” said the report.
The gender digital divide has persisted despite efforts by governments worldwide. A UNICEF study earlier this year showed that in 54 countries, the median gender parity ratio is 71, meaning that for every 100 adolescent boys and young men who use the internet, only 71 adolescent girls and young women do.
At the same time, women experience more online abuse, and harassment is driving girls to quit social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, recent studies have found.
Among digitally connected youth, 12% more girls than boys said that they feel self-conscious while using social media and are 11% less likely to post photos or comments online compared to boys of the same age, the report by Girl Effect found.
Vicious cycle
As girls’ exposure to the internet is restricted by biases and fear of abuse, they do not see themselves as tech-savvy, and do not see the internet as something that is for them, the report from Girl Effect said.
“This creates a vicious cycle whereby girls avoid tech because they don’t think it’s for them, and then tech is seen as ‘not for them’ because they have been avoiding it,” it said.
As teenagers who scrutinize, regulate and limit their behavior online, women “often carry these traits to their workplace, where they face difficulties in demonstrating their skills and building strategic connections,” said Mitali Nikore, a gender policy specialist at research group Nikore Associates.
“This negatively affects women’s behavior at workplaces, constraining their labor market opportunities and professional advancement … and their access to potential sources of revenue-generating activities,” Nikore told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Besides better smartphone access for girls and young women, digital literacy programs and an end to discrimination based on gender norms are needed, said Nikore.
Girls must also be involved in creating digital products for their needs, said a spokesperson for Girl Effect.
For example, Girl Effect developed artificial intelligence-enabled chatbots in South Africa and India — Big Sis and Bol Behen (“tell me, sister”) — with girls, as a source of accurate information on general health and sexual wellbeing for girls.
While new laws such as Britain’s Online Safety Act and the proposed Kids Online Safety Act in the United States can help protect children somewhat, “regulations can only go so far, and often lag behind technological advances,” the spokesperson for Girl Effect said.
“Adolescent girls and young women want to be involved in co-creating solutions; they have clear ideas for the functions, experiences, and strategies that could be applied to make the internet a safer, more accessible place.”
…
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) said its members could return to work on Wednesday while a ratification vote takes place on a new three-year contract with Hollywood studios.
Union leaders “voted unanimously to lift the restraining order and end the strike as of 12:01 a.m. PT/3:01 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 27th,” the WGA said in a statement on Tuesday.
WGA members will have until October 9 to cast their votes on the contract, the union said.
Film and television writers walked off the job in May in a fight for higher pay, protections that their work will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, and other issues.
The writers appeared to have won concessions across the board, with raises over the three years of the contract, increased health and pension contributions, and AI safeguards.
Under the tentative agreement, AI cannot be used to undermine a writer’s credit. Writers can choose to use AI when drafting scripts, but a company cannot require the use of the software. The studios also have to disclose to a writer if any materials they furnish were generated by AI.
…
Spanish prosecutors have charged pop star Shakira with failing to pay $7.1 million in tax on her 2018 income, authorities said Tuesday, in Spain’s latest fiscal allegations against the Colombian singer.
Shakira is alleged to have used an offshore company based in a tax haven to avoid paying the tax, Barcelona prosecutors said in a statement.
She has been notified of the charges in Miami, where she lives, according to the statement.
Shakira is already due to be tried in Barcelona on November 20 in a separate case that hinges on where she lived between 2012-14. In that case, prosecutors allege she failed to pay $15.4 million in tax.
Prosecutors in Barcelona have alleged the Grammy winner spent more than half of the 2012-14 period in Spain and therefore should have paid taxes in the country, even though her official residence was in the Bahamas.
Spanish tax officials opened the latest case against Shakira last July. After reviewing the evidence gathered over the last two months, prosecutors have decided to bring charges. No date for a trial was set.
The public relations firm that previously has handled Shakira’s affairs, Llorente y Cuenca, made no immediate comment.
Last July, it said the artist had “always acted in concordance with the law and on the advice of her financial advisers.”
Shakira, whose full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, has been linked to Spain since she started dating the now-retired soccer player Gerard Pique. The couple, who have two children, lived together in Barcelona until last year, when they ended their 11-year relationship.
Spain tax authorities have over the past decade or so cracked down on soccer stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for not paying their full due in taxes. Those players were found guilty of tax evasion but avoided prison time thanks to a provision that allows a judge to waive sentences under two years in length for first-time offenders.
…
Actor David McCallum, who became a teen heartthrob in the hit series “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” in the 1960s and was the eccentric medical examiner in the popular “NCIS” 40 years later, has died. He was 90.
McCallum died Monday of natural causes surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital, CBS said in a statement.
“David was a gifted actor and author, and beloved by many around the world. He led an incredible life, and his legacy will forever live on through his family and the countless hours on film and television that will never go away,” said a statement from CBS.
Scottish-born McCallum had been doing well appearing in such films “A Night to Remember” (about the Titanic), “The Great Escape” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (as Judas). But it was “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that made the blond actor with the Beatlesque haircut a household name in the mid-’60s.
The success of the James Bond books and films had set off a chain reaction, with secret agents proliferating on both large and small screens. Indeed, Bond creator Ian Fleming contributed some ideas as “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was being developed, according to Jon Heitland’s “The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Book.”
The show, which debuted in 1964, starred Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, an agent in a secretive, high-tech squad of crime fighters whose initials stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Despite the Cold War, the agency had an international staff, with McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, Solo’s Russian sidekick.
The role was relatively small at first, McCallum recalled, adding in a 1998 interview that “I’d never heard of the word ‘sidekick’ before.”
The show drew mixed reviews but eventually caught on, particularly with teenage girls attracted by McCallum’s good looks and enigmatic, intellectual character. By 1965, Illya was a full partner to Vaughn’s character and both stars were mobbed during personal appearances.
The series lasted to 1968. Vaughn and McCallum reunited in 1983 for a nostalgic TV movie, “The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” in which the agents were lured out of retirement to save the world once more.
McCallum returned to television in 2003 in another series with an agency known by its initials — CBS’ “NCIS.” He played Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, a bookish pathologist for the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, an agency handling crimes involving the Navy or the Marines. Mark Harmon played the NCIS boss.
McCallum said he thought Ducky, who sported glasses and a bow tie and had an eye for pretty women, “looked a little silly, but it was great fun to do.” He took the role seriously, too, spending time in the Los Angeles coroner’s office to gain insight into how autopsies are conducted.
Co-star Lauren Holly took to X, formerly Twitter, to mourn: “You were the kindest man. Thank you for being you.” The previously announced 20th anniversary “NCIS” marathon on Monday night will now include an “in memoriam” card in remembrance of McCallum.
The series built an audience gradually, eventually reaching the roster of top 10 shows. McCallum, who lived in New York, stayed in a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica when “NCIS” was in production.
“He was a scholar and a gentleman, always gracious, a consummate professional, and never one to pass up a joke. From day one, it was an honor to work with him and he never let us down. He was, quite simply, a legend, said a statement from ”NCIS” Executive Producers Steven D. Binder and David North.
McCallum’s work with “U.N.C.L.E.” brought him two Emmy nominations, and he got a third as an educator struggling with alcoholism in a 1969 Hallmark Hall of Fame drama called “Teacher, Teacher.”
In 1975, he had the title role in a short-lived science fiction series, “The Invisible Man,” and from 1979 to 1982 he played Steel in a British science fiction series, “Sapphire and Steel.” Over the years, he also appeared in guest shots in many TV shows, including “Murder, She Wrote” and “Sex and the City.”
He appeared on Broadway in a 1968 comedy, “The Flip Side,” and in a 1999 revival of “Amadeus” starring Michael Sheen and David Suchet. He also was in several off-Broadway productions.
Largely based in the U.S. from the 1960s onward, McCallum was a longtime American citizen, telling The Associated Press in 2003 that “I have always loved the freedom of this country and everything it stands for. And I live here, and I like to vote here.”
David Keith McCallum was born in Glasgow in 1933. His parents were musicians; his father, also named David, played violin, his mother played cello. When David was 3, the family moved to London, where David Sr. played with the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic.
Outbreaks of dengue fever and acute watery diarrhea have “killed hundreds” in war-torn Sudan, medics reported on Monday, warning of “catastrophic spreads” that could overwhelm the country’s decimated health system.
In a statement, the Sudanese doctors’ union warned that the health situation in the southeastern state of Gedaref, on the border with Ethiopia, “is deteriorating at a horrific rate,” with thousands infected with dengue fever.
Although Gedaref has been spared the direct effects of the brutal war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), it has nonetheless been impacted by mass displacement and other humanitarian crises.
More than five months into the war, 80% of the hospitals in Sudan are out of service, according to the United Nations.
Even before the war, the fragile health care system struggled to contain the annual disease outbreaks that accompany the country’s rainy season starting in June, including malaria — endemic in Sudan — and dengue fever.
This year, with Gedaref hosting upwards of 250,000 internally displaced persons, according to the U.N., the situation is much worse.
“The hospital’s beds are all full, but the cases keep coming in, particularly children,” a medical source told AFP from Gedaref Hospital, requesting anonymity out of concern for his safety.
“But the number of those receiving treatment at home are much more than those at the hospital,” he said.
Gedaref resident Amal Hussein told AFP that “in each home, there are at least three people sick with dengue.”
Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that causes high fever, headaches, nausea, vomiting, muscle pain and, in the most serious cases, bleeding that can lead to death.
Medics and the U.N. have repeatedly warned that the violence in Sudan, combined with the rainy season and devastated infrastructure, would cause disease outbreaks.
More than 1,200 children have died in refugee camps since May, due in part to a measles outbreak, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
‘Disaster is knocking’
In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, “13 cases of malaria were reported in one week,” the health ministry said.
In Khartoum, “three people died of acute watery diarrhea” — suspected cases of cholera — in the Hajj Youssef district in the east of the capital, the local resistance committee said on Monday.
“Take precautions to avoid infection,” urged the committee — one of many that used to organize pro-democracy demonstrations before the war and that now volunteers to help those caught in the crossfire.
Health crises have compounded the dire humanitarian situation in Sudan, where half of the population of 48 million relies on aid to survive and with 6 million on the brink of starvation, according to the U.N.
Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the U.N.’s humanitarian representative in Sudan, warned on Monday that “disaster is knocking on the door in Sudan.”
She urged “donors to immediately disburse pledged funds to sustain life-saving humanitarian aid.”
By early September, the conflict between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, had killed nearly 7,500 people, according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Dozens of hospitals have been bombed or occupied by fighters, in what the U.N. has called “cruel disregard for civilians.”
The medics and aid workers who remain are themselves regularly targeted and their stocks looted as more people demand help.
The health ministry said on Monday RSF forces had seized control of the main medical supplies warehouse.
“Medicines and medical equipment amounting to $500 million have been lost,” ministry spokesman Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim said, adding that “70% of the equipment in specialized centers in Khartoum … has been lost.”
Even before the war, 1 in 3 Sudanese needed to walk more than an hour to gain access to medical care, and just 30% of vital medicines were available, according to the U.N.
…
Sea ice that packs the ocean around Antarctica hit record low levels this winter, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said Monday, adding to scientists’ fears that the impact of climate change at the southern pole is ramping up.
Researchers warn the shift can have dire consequences for animals like penguins who breed and rear their young on the sea ice, while also hastening global warming by reducing how much sunlight is reflected by white ice back into space.
Antarctic sea ice extent peaked this year on September 10, when it covered 16.96 million square kilometers (6.55 million square miles), the lowest winter maximum since satellite records began in 1979, the NSIDC said. That’s about 1 million square kilometers (about 621,371 square miles) less ice than the previous winter record set in 1986.
“It’s not just a record-breaking year, it’s an extreme record-breaking year,” said NSIDC senior scientist Walt Meier.
NSIDC in a statement said that the figures were preliminary with a full analysis to be released next month.
Seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere with sea ice generally peaking around September near the end of winter and later melting to its lowest point in February or March as summer draws to a close.
The summer Antarctic sea ice extent also hit a record low in February, breaking the previous mark set in 2022.
The Arctic has been hit hard by climate change over the last decade, with sea ice rapidly deteriorating as the northern region warms four times faster than the global average.
While climate change is contributing to melting glaciers in Antarctica, it has been less certain how warming temperatures are impacting sea ice near the southern pole. Sea ice extent there grew between 2007 and 2016.
The shift in recent years toward record-low conditions has scientists concerned climate change may finally be presenting itself in Antarctic sea ice.
While Meier cautioned it is too soon to say, an academic article published earlier this month in the journal Communications Earth and Environment pointed to climate change as a potential factor.
The study found that warming ocean temperatures, driven mainly by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, are contributing to the lower sea ice levels seen since 2016.
“The key message here is that to protect these frozen parts of the world that are really important for a whole number of reasons,” said Ariaan Purich, a sea ice researcher at Australia’s Monash University who co-authored the study, “we really need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”
…
Kathleen Maxwell has lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years, but this summer was the first time she felt fear, as daily high temperatures soared to 110 degrees or hotter and kept it up for a record-shattering 31 consecutive days.
“It’s always been really hot here, but nothing like this past summer,” said Maxwell, 50, who last week opened her windows for the first time since March and walked her dog outdoors for the first time since May. “I was seriously scared. Like, what if this doesn’t end and this is how it’s going to be?”
Maxwell blames climate change, and she’s not alone.
New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicates that extreme weather, including a summer that brought dangerous heat for much of the United States, is bolstering Americans’ belief that they’ve personally felt the impact of climate change.
About 9 in 10 Americans (87%) say they have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — including drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding — up from 79% who said that just a few months ago in April. And about three-quarters of those believe climate change is at least partly to blame.
In total, 64% of U.S. adults say both that they’ve recently experienced extreme weather and that they believe it was caused at least partially by climate change, up from 54% in April. And about 65% say climate change will have or already has had a major impact in their lifetime.
This summer’s heat might be a big factor: About three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they’ve been affected by extremely hot weather or extreme heat waves in the last five years, up from 55% in April — and of those, 92% said they’ve had that experience just in the past few months.
This summer was the hottest ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the European climate service Copernicus.
Millions of Americans also were affected by the worst wildfire season in Canada’s history, which sent choking smoke into parts of the U.S. About six in 10 U.S. adults say haze or smoke from the wildfires affected them “a lot” (15%) or “a little” (48%) in recent months.
And around the world, extreme heat, storms, flooding and wildfires have affected tens of millions of people this year, with scientists saying climate change has made such events more likely and intense.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said researchers there have conducted twice-yearly surveys of Americans for 15 years, but it wasn’t until 2016 that they saw an indication that people’s experience with extreme weather was affecting their views about climate change. “And the signal has been getting stronger and stronger year by year as these conditions continue to get worse and worse,” he said.
But he also believes that media coverage of climate change has changed dramatically, and that the public is interpreting information in a more scientific way than they did even a decade ago.
Seventy-six-year-old Bruce Alvord, of Hagerstown, Maryland, said it wasn’t unusual to experience days with a 112-degree heat index this summer, and health conditions mean that “heat really bothers me because it’s restricted what I can do.”
Even so, the retired government worker doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change; he recalls stories from his grandparents about bad weather, and thinks the climate is fluctuating on its own.
“The way the way I look at it is I think it’s a bunch of powerful politicians and lobbying groups that … have their agenda,” said Alvord, a Republican who sees no need to change his own habits or for the government to do more. “I drive a Chrysler 300 (with a V8 engine). I use premium gas. I get 15 miles a gallon. I don’t give a damn.”
The AP-NORC poll found significant differences between Democrats and Republicans. Among those who have experienced extreme weather, Democrats (93%) are more certain that climate change was a cause, compared to just half of Republicans (48%).
About 9 in 10 Democrats say climate change is happening, with nearly all of the remaining Democrats being unsure about whether climate change is happening (5%), rather than outright rejecting it. Republicans are split: 49% say climate change is happening, but 26% say it’s not and an additional 25% are unsure. Overall, 74% of Americans say climate change is happening, largely unchanged from April.
Republican Ronald Livingston, 70, of Clute, Texas, said he’s not sure if human activity is causing climate change, “but I know something is going on because we have been sweating our butts off.”
The retired history teacher said it didn’t rain for several months this year, killing his grass and drying up a slough on his property where he sometimes fishes. It was so hot — with 45 days of 100 degrees or more — that he could barely go outside, and he struggled to grow a garden. He also believes that hurricanes are getting stronger.
And after this summer, he’s keeping an open mind about climate change.
“It worries me to the extent that I don’t think we can go two or three more years of this,” Livingston said.
Jeremiah Bohr, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who studies climate change communication, said scientific evidence “is not going to change the minds that haven’t already been changed.” But people might be swayed if people or institutions they already trust become convinced and spread the word, Bohr said.
After a brutal summer, Maxwell, the Phoenix resident, said she hopes more Americans will accept that climate change is happening and that people are making it worse, and support measures to slow it.
“It seems very, very obvious to me, with all of the extreme weather and the hurricanes and flooding,” said Maxwell. “I just can’t imagine that people wouldn’t.”
…
“My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion,” a play by Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova, made its debut at Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth theater earlier this month. The play was inspired by online chats its creator had with her 82-year-old mother who lives near Kyiv. Maxim Adams has the story. Camera: David Gogokhia.
…
European Union member countries have watered down a proposal by the bloc’s executive arm aimed at lowering vehicle emissions.
The European Commission had proposed last year updated pollution standards for new combustion engine vehicles that are expected to remain on European roads well after the 27-nation bloc bans their sale in 2035, with the aim of lowering emissions from tailpipes, brakes and tires.
The Commission hoped that new guidelines would help lower nitrogen oxide emissions from cars and vans by 35% compared to existing exhaust emission regulations for pollutants other than carbon dioxide, and by 56% from buses and trucks.
But several member states and automakers pushed for a weaker legislation and agreed Monday on a diluted compromise put forward by the rotating presidency of the EU currently held by Spain.
Member states instead decided to keep existing emissions limits and test conditions for cars and vans, and to lower them only for buses and heavy commercial vehicles. They also agreed to reduce brake particle emissions limits and tire abrasion rate emissions.
The standards are separate from but intended to complement the EU’s climate change rules for CO2.
“The Spanish presidency has been sensitive to the different demands and requests of the member states and we believe that, with this proposal, we achieved broad support, a balance in the investment costs of the manufacturing brands and we improve the environmental benefits derived from the regulation,” said Héctor Gómez Hernández, the acting Spanish minister for industry, trade and tourism.
The position adopted by member countries will be negotiated with the European Parliament once lawmakers have also defined their stance.
EU lawmakers and member states last year reached a deal to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars and vans by 2035. The deal was part of the bloc’s “Fit for 55” package, which the European Commission set up to achieve the goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55% over this decade.
Under the deal, carmakers will be required to reduce the emissions of new cars sold by 55% in 2030, compared to 2021, before reaching a 100% cut five years later.
The Commission thought that introducing new pollution norms for the last generation of combustion engines was crucial because vehicles that enter the market before the 2035 deadline will remain in service for years.
According to the EU, emissions from transportation are responsible for some 70,000 premature deaths each year in the bloc.
…
Neanderthals live on within us.
These ancient human cousins, and others called Denisovans, once lived alongside our early Homo sapiens ancestors. They mingled and had children. So some of who they were never went away — it’s in our genes. And science is starting to reveal just how much that shapes us.
Using the new and rapidly improving ability to piece together fragments of ancient DNA, scientists are finding that traits inherited from our ancient cousins are still with us now, affecting our fertility, our immune systems, even how our bodies handled the COVID-19 virus.
“We’re now carrying the genetic legacies and learning about what that means for our bodies and our health,” said Mary Prendergast, a Rice University archeologist.
In the past few months alone, researchers have linked Neanderthal DNA to a serious hand disease, the shape of people’s noses and various other human traits. They even inserted a gene carried by Neanderthals and Denisovans into mice to investigate its effects on biology, and found it gave them larger heads and an extra rib.
Much of the human journey remains a mystery. But Dr. Hugo Zeberg of the Karolinska Insitute in Sweden said new technologies, research and collaborations are helping scientists begin to answer the basic but cosmic questions: “Who are we? Where did we come from?”
And the answers point to a profound reality: We have far more in common with our extinct cousins than we ever thought.
Neanderthals within us
Until recently, the genetic legacy from ancient humans was invisible because scientists were limited to what they could glean from the shape and size of bones. But there has been a steady stream of discoveries from ancient DNA, an area of study pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Svante Paabo who first pieced together a Neanderthal genome.
Advances in finding and interpreting ancient DNA have allowed them to see things like genetic changes over time to better adapt to environments or through random chance.
It’s even possible to figure out how much genetic material people from different regions carry from the ancient relatives our predecessors encountered.
Research shows some African populations have almost no Neanderthal DNA, while those from European or Asian backgrounds have 1% to 2%. Denisovan DNA is barely detectable in most parts of the world but makes up 4% to 6% of the DNA of people in Melanesia, which extends from New Guinea to the Fiji Islands.
That may not sound like much, but it adds up: Even though only 100,000 Neanderthals ever lived, “half of the Neanderthal genome is still around, in small pieces scattered around modern humans,” said Zeberg, who collaborates closely with Paabo.
It’s also enough to affect us in very real ways. Scientists don’t yet know the full extent, but they’re learning it can be both helpful and harmful.
For example, Neanderthal DNA has been linked to auto-immune diseases like Graves’ disease and rheumatoid arthritis. When Homo sapiens came out of Africa, they had no immunity to diseases in Europe and Asia, but Neanderthals and Denisovans already living there did.
“By interbreeding with them, we got a quick fix to our immune systems, which was good news 50,000 years ago,” said Chris Stringer, a human evolution researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. “The result today is, for some people, that our immune systems are oversensitive, and sometimes they turn on themselves.”
Similarly, a gene associated with blood clotting believed to be passed down from Neanderthals in Eurasia may have been helpful in the “rough and tumble world of the Pleistocene,” said Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution. But today it can raise the risk of stroke for older adults. “For every benefit,” he said, “there are costs in evolution.”
In 2020, research by Zeberg and Paabo found that a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals. “We compared it to the Neanderthal genome and it was a perfect match,” Zeberg said. “I kind of fell off my chair.”
The next year, they found a set of DNA variants along a single chromosome inherited from Neanderthals had the opposite effect: protecting people from severe COVID.
The list goes on: Research has linked Neanderthal genetic variants to skin and hair color, behavioral traits, skull shape and Type 2 diabetes. One study found that people who report feeling more pain than others are likely to carry a Neanderthal pain receptor. Another found that a third of women in Europe inherited a Neanderthal receptor for the hormone progesterone, which is associated with increased fertility and fewer miscarriages.
Much less is known about our genetic legacy from Denisovans – although some research has linked genes from them to fat metabolism and better adaptation to high altitudes. Maanasa Raghavan, a human genetics expert at the University of Chicago, said a stretch of Denisovan DNA has been found in Tibetans, who continue to live and thrive in low-oxygen environments today.
Scientists have even found evidence of “ghost populations” — groups whose fossils have yet to be discovered — within modern humans’ genetic code.
So why did we survive?
In the past, the tale of modern humans’ survival “was always told as some success story, almost like a hero’s story,” in which Homo sapiens rose above the rest of the natural world and overcame the “insufficiencies” of their cousins, Potts said.
“Well, that simply is just not the correct story.”
Neanderthals and Denisovans had already existed for thousands of years by the time Homo sapiens left Africa. Scientists used to think we won out because we had more complex behavior and superior technology. But recent research shows that Neanderthals talked, cooked with fire, made art objects, had sophisticated tools and hunting behavior, and even wore makeup and jewelry.
Several theories now tie our survival to our ability to travel far and wide.
“We spread all over the world, much more than these other forms did,” Zeberg said.
While Neanderthals were specially adapted to cold climates, Potts said, Homo sapiens were able to disperse to all different kinds of climates after emerging in tropical Africa. “We are so adaptable, culturally adaptable, to so many places in the world,” he said.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals and Denisovans faced harsh conditions in the north, like repeated ice ages and ice sheets that likely trapped them in small areas, said Eleanor Scerri, an archeologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology. They lived in smaller populations with a greater risk of genetic collapse.
Plus, we had nimble, efficient bodies, Prendergast said. It takes a lot more calories to feed stocky Neanderthals than comparatively skinny Homo sapiens, so Neanderthals had more trouble getting by, and moving around, especially when food got scarce.
Janet Young, curator of physical anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, pointed to another intriguing hypothesis – which anthropologist Pat Shipman shared in one of her books –- that dogs played a big part in our survival. Researchers found the skulls of domesticated dogs in Homo sapiens sites much further back in time than anyone had found before. Scientists believe dogs made hunting easier.
By around 30,000 years ago, all the other kinds of hominins on Earth had died off, leaving Homo sapiens as the last humans standing.
‘Interaction and mixture’
Still, every new scientific revelation points to how much we owe our ancient cousins.
Human evolution was not about “survival of the fittest and extinction,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s about “interaction and mixture.”
Researchers expect to learn more as science continues to advance, allowing them to extract information from ever-tinier traces of ancient lives. Even when fossils aren’t available, scientists today can capture DNA from soil and sediment where archaic humans once lived.
And there are less-explored places in the world where they hope to learn more. Zeberg said “biobanks” that collect biological samples will likely be established in more countries.
As they delve deeper into humanity’s genetic legacy, scientists expect to find even more evidence of how much we mixed with our ancient cousins and all they left us.
“Perhaps,” Zeberg said, “we should not see them as so different.”
…
The Great Lakes’ frigid fresh water used to keep shipwrecks so well preserved that divers could see dishes in the cupboards. Downed planes that spent decades underwater were left so pristine they could practically fly again when archaeologists finally discovered them.
Now, an invasive mussel is destroying shipwrecks deep in the depths of the lakes, forcing archeologists and amateur historians into a race against time to find as many sites as they can before the region touching eight U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario loses any physical trace of its centuries-long maritime history.
“What you need to understand is every shipwreck is covered with quagga mussels in the lower Great Lakes,” Wisconsin state maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen said. “Everything. If you drain the lakes, you’ll get a bowl of quagga mussels.”
Quagga mussels, finger-sized mollusks with voracious appetites, have become the dominant invasive species in the lower Great Lakes over the past 30 years, according to biologists.
The creatures have covered virtually every shipwreck and downed plane in all of the lakes except Lake Superior, archaeologists say. The mussels burrow into wooden vessels, building upon themselves in layers so thick they will eventually crush walls and decks. They also produce acid that can corrode steel and iron ships. No one has found a viable way to stop them.
Wayne Lusardi, Michigan’s state maritime archaeologist, is pushing to raise more pieces of a World War II plane flown by a Tuskegee airman that crashed in Lake Huron in 1944.
“Divers started discovering (planes) in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said. “Some were so preserved they could fly again. (Now) when they’re removed the planes look like Swiss cheese. (Quaggas are) literally burning holes in them.”
Quagga mussels, native to Russia and Ukraine, were discovered in the Great Lakes in 1989, around the same time as their infamous cousin species, zebra mussels. Scientists believe the creatures arrived via ballast dumps from transoceanic freighters making their way to Great Lakes ports.
Unlike zebra mussels, quaggas are hungrier, hardier and more tolerant of colder temperatures. They devour plankton and other suspended nutrients, eliminating the base level of food chains. They consume so many nutrients at such high rates they can render portions of the murky Great Lakes as clear as tropical seas. And while zebra mussels prefer hard surfaces, quaggas can attach to soft surfaces at greater depths, enabling them to colonize even the lakes’ sandy bottoms.
After 30 years of colonization, quaggas have displaced zebra mussels as the dominant mussel in the Great Lakes. Zebras made up more than 98% of mussels in Lake Michigan in 2000, according to the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Invasive Species Research. Five years later, quaggas represented 97.7%.
For wooden and metal ships, the quaggas’ success has translated into overwhelming destruction.
The mussels can burrow into sunken wooden ships, stacking upon themselves until details such as name plates and carvings are completely obscured. Divers who try to brush them off inevitably peel away some wood. Quaggas also can create clouds of carbon dioxide, as well as feces that corrode iron and steel, accelerating metal shipwrecks’ decay.
Quaggas have yet to establish a foothold in Lake Superior. Biologists believe the water there contains less calcium, which quaggas need to make their shells, said Dr. Harvey Bootsma, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
That means the remains of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down in that lake during a storm in 1975 and was immortalized in the Gordon Lightfoot song, The Ballad of the Edmund Fitzgerald, are safe, at least for now.
Lusardi, Michigan’s state maritime archaeologist, ticked off a long list of shipwreck sites in the lower Great Lakes consumed by quaggas.
His list included the Daniel J. Morrel, a freighter that sank during a storm on Lake Huron in 1966, killing all but one of the 29 crew members, and the Cedarville, a freighter that sank in the Straits of Mackinac in 1965, killing eight crew members. He also listed the Carl D. Bradley, another freighter that went down during a storm in northern Lake Michigan in 1958, killing 33 sailors.
The plane Lusardi is trying to recover is a Bell P-39 that went down in Lake Huron during a training exercise in 1944, killing Frank H. Moody, a Tuskegee airman. The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of Black military pilots who received training at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama during World War II.
Brendon Baillod, a Great Lakes historian based in Madison, has spent the last five years searching for the Trinidad, a grain schooner that went down in Lake Michigan in 1881. He and fellow historian Bob Jaeck finally found the wreck in July off Algoma, Wisconsin.
The first photos of the site, taken by a robot vehicle, showed the ship was in unusually good shape, with intact rigging and dishes still in cabins. But the site was “fully carpeted” with quagga mussels, Baillod said.
“It has been completely colonized,” he said. “Twenty years ago, even 15 years ago, that site would have been clean. Now you can’t even recognize the bell. You can’t see the nameboard. If you brush those mussels off, it tears the wood off with it.”
Quagga management options could include treating them with toxic chemicals; covering them with tarps that restrict water flow and starve them of oxygen and food; introducing predator species; or suffocating them by adding carbon dioxide to the water.
So far nothing looks promising on a large scale, UW-Milwaukee’s Bootsma said.
“The only way they will disappear from a lake as large as Lake Michigan is through some disease, or possibly an introduced predator,” he said.
That leaves archaeologists and historians like Baillod scrambling to locate as many wrecks as possible to map and document before they disintegrate under the quaggas’ assaults.
At stake are the physical remnants of a maritime industry that helped settle the Great Lakes region and establish port cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and Toledo, Ohio.
“When we lose those tangible, preserved time capsules of our history, we lose our tangible connection to the past,” Baillod said. “Once they’re gone, it’s all just a memory. It’s all just stuff in books.”
…
Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.
Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.
With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.
California’s main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.
The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.
“The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there’s possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.
It’s already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.
The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn’t have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.
San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.
The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.
“They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.
The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.
The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.
“Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.
Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.
For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.
Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.
PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.
Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.
“That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.
Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.
“What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.
Ferres’ team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.
The system has its limitations — it can’t predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.
“It’s not going to get it all perfectly right,” he said. “But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”
The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open-source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.
Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.
Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.
As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.
Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.
“There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster,” CEO Thomas Gruebler said.
The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.
“Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate,” Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”
…
The North American box office hit a 2023 low this weekend, with top film “The Nun II” estimated to take in a paltry $8.4 million, industry watchers said Sunday.
“The numbers are not good,” said David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research, describing an entire month of poor results.
He said the months-long strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors — reportedly at a key point Sunday — “cannot end soon enough.”
The strikes have prevented stars from promoting upcoming films.
This weekend’s top five films had a combined take of roughly $31 million — less than “Barbie” alone earned in its fourth weekend out.
Warner Bros.’ “The Nun II,” starring Taissa Farmiga in a tale of Gothic horror and possession, has led the box office for the past few weeks, despite posting tepid numbers.
Nearly tying it this weekend was new action film “Expend4bles,” at an estimated $8.3 million for the Friday-through-Sunday period, Exhibitor Relations reported.
The Lionsgate movie, the fourth in a series, has a veteran team of Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren — joined by franchise newcomers including Megan Fox, 50 Cent and Andy Garcia — heading to Libya to try to prevent a mercenary from stealing nuclear warheads.
In third place, down one spot from last weekend, was 20th Century’s “A Haunting in Venice,” Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie-inspired film, at $6.3 million. Branagh again plays legendary Belgian detective Hercules Poirot.
Fourth spot went to Sony’s “The Equalizer 3,” at $4.7 million. Denzel Washington plays a retired U.S. Marine and drug-enforcement agent taking on beaucoup bad guys.
And holding on in fifth — in its 10th weekend out — was Warner Bros. blockbuster “Barbie,” at $3.2 million. The Greta Gerwig paean to pinkness has now taken in $630.5 million domestically and an additional $797 million internationally.
Rounding out the top 10 were:
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” ($3 million)
“It Lives Inside” ($2.6 million)
“Dumb Money” ($2.5 million)
“Blue Beetle” ($1.8 million)
“Oppenheimer” ($1.6 million)
…
NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.
In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the mothership set off after another asteroid.
Scientists estimate the capsule holds at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu but won’t know for sure until the container is opened. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up too much and rocks jammed the container’s lid during collection three years ago.
Japan, the only other country to bring back asteroid samples, gathered about a teaspoon in a pair of asteroid missions.
The pebbles and dust delivered Sunday represent the biggest haul from beyond the moon. Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, the samples will help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed.
Osiris-Rex, the mothership, rocketed away on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed rubble from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned, the spacecraft had logged 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers).
NASA’s recovery effort in Utah included helicopters as well as a temporary clean room set up at the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range. The samples will be flown Monday morning to a new lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The building already houses the hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts more than a half-century ago.
The mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, will accompany the samples to Texas. The opening of the container in Houston in the next day or two will be “the real moment of truth,” given the uncertainty over the amount inside, he said ahead of the landing.
Engineers estimate the canister holds 250 grams (8.82 ounces) of material from Bennu, plus or minus 100 grams (plus or minus 3.53 ounces). Even at the low end, it will easily surpass the minimum requirement of the mission, Lauretta said.
It will take a few weeks to get a precise measurement, said NASA’s lead curator Nicole Lunning.
NASA plans a public show-and-tell in October.
Currently orbiting the sun 50 million miles (81 million kilometers) from Earth, Bennu is about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across, roughly the size of the Empire State Building but shaped like a spinning top. It’s believed to be the broken fragment of a much larger asteroid.
During a two-year survey, Osiris-Rex found Bennu to be a chunky rubble pile full of boulders and craters. The surface was so loose that the spacecraft’s vacuum arm sank a foot or two (0.5 meters) into the asteroid, sucking up more material than anticipated and jamming the lid.
These close-up observations may come in handy late in the next century. Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182 — possibly close enough to hit. The data gleaned by Osiris-Rex will help with any asteroid-deflection effort, according to Lauretta.
Osiris-Rex is already chasing after the asteroid Apophis and will reach it in 2029.
This was NASA’s third sample return from a deep-space robotic mission. The Genesis spacecraft dropped off bits of solar wind in 2004, but the samples were compromised when the parachute failed, and the capsule slammed into the ground. The Stardust spacecraft successfully delivered comet dust in 2006.
NASA’s plans to return samples from Mars are on hold after an independent review board criticized the cost and complexity. The Martian rover Perseverance has spent the past two years collecting core samples for eventual transport to Earth.
…