Day: October 24, 2023

Bird flu has been detected in the Antarctica region for the first time, according to British experts, raising concerns the deadly virus could pose a threat to penguins and other local species.

Scientists had been fearing that the worst outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in history would reach Antarctica, a key breeding ground for many birds.

The British Antarctic Survey said its staff took samples from brown skua seabirds after they died on Bird Island in South Georgia, a British overseas territory east of South America’s tip and north of Antarctica’s main landmass.

The tests were sent to Britain and came back positive, the U.K.’s polar research institute said in a statement on Monday.

The virus was most likely brought by birds returning from their migration to South America, where there has been a huge number of bird flu cases, it added.

Visitors to South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are under enhanced biosecurity measures, and scientific field work involving birds there has been stopped, the statement said.

There have been regular bird flu outbreaks since the virus first emerged in 1996.

Since mid-2021, much larger outbreaks started to spread southward to previously untouched areas including South America, leading to mass deaths among wild birds and tens of millions of poultry being culled.

‘Devastating news’

Michelle Wille, a bird flu expert at the University of Melbourne, said the spread of bird flu to the Antarctica region was “devastating news.”

“The situation could change rapidly,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Ian Brown, virology head at the U.K.’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, warned last week that there was a risk migrating birds could spread the virus from South America to the Antarctica islands and then onto the main landmass.

This could be a “real concern” for populations of birds such as penguins that are unique to Antarctica, he told journalists.

Birds such as penguins that have never before been exposed to the virus would have no prior immunity, potentially making them more vulnerable.

In better news, the Animal Plant Health Agency also said last week that preliminary research had confirmed that the populations of two seabirds — northern gannets and shag — had shown immunity to bird flu.

Humans rarely catch bird flu, but when they do it is usually via direct contact with infected birds.

Earlier this month, a two-year-old girl died from bird flu in Cambodia, the third death recorded in the country this year.

The virus has also been detected in a growing number of mammals, raising fears it could mutate into a version that is more transmissible between humans. 
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Thirty-three U.S. states are suing Meta Platforms Inc., accusing it of damaging young people’s mental health through the addictive nature of their social media platforms.

The suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, alleges Meta knowingly installed addictive features on its social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and has collected data on children younger than 13, without their parents’ consent, violating federal law.

“Research has shown that young people’s use of Meta’s social media platforms is associated with depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and many other negative outcomes,” the complaint says.

The filing comes after Meta’s own research in 2021 found that the company was aware of the damage Instagram can do to teenagers, especially girls.

In Meta’s 2021 study, 13.5% of teen girls said Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls said it makes eating disorders worse.

Meta responded to the lawsuit by saying it has “already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families.”

“We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the company added.

Meta is one of many social media companies facing criticism and legal action, with lawsuits also filed against ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube.

Measures to protect children on social media exist, but they are easily circumvented, such as a federal law that bans kids under 13 from setting up accounts.

The dangers of social media for children have been highlighted by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who said the effects of social media require “immediate action to protect kids now.”

In addition to the 33 states suing, nine more state attorneys general are expected to join and file similar lawsuits.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Phoenix, Arizona, in America’s Southwest, is the site of a Taiwanese semiconductor chip making facility. One part of President Joe Biden’s cornerstone agenda is to rely less on manufacturing from overseas and boost domestic production of chips that run everything from phones to cars. Many Taiwanese workers who moved to the U.S. to work at the facility — face the challenges of living in a new land. VOA’s Stella Hsu, Enming Liu and Elizabeth Lee have the story.
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Artificial intelligence companies and governments should allocate at least one third of their AI research and development funding to ensuring the safety and ethical use of the systems, top AI researchers said in a paper on Tuesday. 

The paper, issued a week before the international AI Safety Summit in London, lists measures that governments and companies should take to address AI risks. 

“Governments should also mandate that companies are legally liable for harms from their frontier AI systems that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented,” according to the paper written by three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and more than a dozen top AI academics. 

Currently there are no broad-based regulations focusing on AI safety, and the first set of legislation by the European Union is yet to become law as lawmakers are yet to agree on several issues.

“Recent state of the art AI models are too powerful, and too significant, to let them develop without democratic oversight,” said Yoshua Bengio, one of the three people known as the godfather of AI.

“It [investments in AI safety] needs to happen fast, because AI is progressing much faster than the precautions taken,” he said.

Authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song and Yuval Noah Harari.

Since the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI models, top academics and prominent CEOs such as Elon Musk have warned about the risks on AI, including calling for a six-month pause in developing powerful AI systems.

Some companies have countered this, saying they will face high compliance costs and disproportionate liability risks.

“Companies will complain that it’s too hard to satisfy regulations — that ‘regulation stifles innovation’ — that’s ridiculous,” said British computer scientist Stuart Russell.

“There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies.” 
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The World Health Organization reported Monday that progress was being made in efforts to prevent and respond to cases of sexual misconduct but acknowledged that abuse by WHO staff remained problematic.  

“For the past two years, WHO has intensified our work to prevent and respond to any form of sexual misconduct, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, said Gaya Gamhewage, director of prevention and response to sexual misconduct at WHO.

“However, the numbers are still going up for the simple reason, I believe, that all the cases have not surfaced yet. So, the numbers will keep going up for some time. But this does not mean that what we are doing is not having any effect. In fact, what we are doing is surfacing this issue, as well,” she said.

The numbers would seem to bear this out. Over the past 12 months, the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services, or IOS, reports it has investigated 287 allegations of sexual misconduct in all WHO regions.

Gamhewage said, “WHO is working on preventing and responding to sexual misconduct related to its own workforce—our staff, our contractors, our implementing partners.  This does not include numbers for peacekeepers.”

Approximately 83 of these cases are related to the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 25% of that number pertaining to alleged abuse by WHO personnel.  

According to a WHO press release, the remaining allegations were related to other agencies operating during the outbreak. The WHO received investigation reports related only to accusations against people associated with the WHO, including consultants and other contractors.

“Since 2021, we have entered the names of 25 alleged perpetrators of sexual misconduct into the U.N. Clear Check database to prevent future employment within the U.N. system,” said LisaMcClennon, IOS director.

“Several have been dismissed, including five staff members related to findings of sexual conduct during the period. And several former personnel were informed that their actions would have led to termination had they still been in service.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo announced its 10th Ebola outbreak on August 1, 2018, in the country’s volatile Eastern provinces, claiming 2,299 lives by the time WHO declared the epidemic over on June 25, 2020.

WHO created a special unit in November 2021 to address sexual misconduct to rid the organization of exploitative behavior.  This was triggered by a sexual scandal which erupted during the Ebola epidemic involving many responders including peacekeepers, U.N. personnel, and contractors.

McClennon said the 83 alleged perpetrators identified in the report are connected to that 2018-2020 mission in the DRC.

“WHO has been taking required follow-up action for each of these cases, including information shared with the national authorities, referral to other U.N. agencies and issuing case closure letters to the alleged subjects,” McClennon said. “While reports are confidential, we are taking disciplinary action in the substantiated cases.”

WHO reports that the highest number of alleged sexual perpetrators are found in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.

“We do not like to reveal which countries because we can identify alleged perpetrators and it can actually interfere with the investigation,” Gamhewage said.

The WHO official said she believed populations in these regions are highly vulnerable to sexual abuse due to the large number of countries affected by health emergencies and humanitarian crises, explaining that the large U.N. presence in these countries was in response to the enormous needs.

“We know sexual misconduct happens when there is a power differential, and that power differential is used for sexual exploitation. And this used to happen with impunity.

“But with the work we are doing, we are getting complaints and concerns raised. So, I think we should not expect numbers to go down any time soon,” Gamhewage said. “What we want is to surface all of the numbers, so Lisa [McClennon] and her team can assess which ones need to be investigated.”

Gamhewage said it was important to listen to the testimony and experience of any victim or survivor.

“What we need to do is understand there could be a risk there, and then we can start preventive action,” she said.

Since it was unlikely that sexual misconduct could be completely eradicated, Gamhewage said, “What we are looking for is zero tolerance, not for zero cases.”
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The world is moving too slowly to meet pledges to end deforestation by 2030, with the destruction worsening in 2022, according to a report by a coalition of environmental organizations released on Monday.

More than 140 countries – representing the vast majority of the world’s woodlands – pledged at the 2021 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by the end of the decade.

Yet deforestation increased by 4% worldwide in 2022 compared with 2021, as some 66,000 square kilometers (25,000 square miles) were destroyed, the annual Forest Declaration Assessment report said. That means the world is 21% off track to end deforestation by 2030.

“The world’s forests are in crisis. The opportunity to make progress is passing us by,” said Erin Matson, a senior consultant at environmental group Climate Focus.

The report was conducted by a coalition of civil society and research organizations who assess progress toward pledges to eliminate deforestation by 2030.

That includes the Glasgow pledge and the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, which saw a shorter list of countries as well as dozens of the world’s biggest companies make a similar commitment.

Efforts to preserve old-growth tropical forests — prized for their dense carbon content and rich biodiversity — are 33% off track, with 4.1 million hectares lost in 2022, according to the study.

In a news briefing, the researchers involved in the report stressed that the annual $2.2 billion in public funds channeled to projects to protect forests every year is a fraction of the investment needed.

The study also looked beyond deforestation to analyze forest degradation, with one researcher estimating the area of degraded forests to be much larger than the area of global deforestation.

Drivers of forest degradation include logging activities, livestock grazing, and road construction, according to Climate Focus.

But some parts of the world are making progress, said Franziska Haupt, a lead author and managing partner at consultancy Climate Focus.

Haupt said that some 50 countries are on track to end forest loss, with Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia showing drastic reductions in deforestation.

“Hope isn’t lost,” Haupt said. “These countries set clear examples that others must follow.”

Brazil, which is responsible for around 30 percent of the world’s deforestation, has seen a significant turnaround with a new government that is much more committed to fighting deforestation than the last, said a WWF Brazil representative during the news conference.

“This showcases what could happen when countries with good laws and the books actually invest in enforcing them,” said Darragh Conway, lead on rights & governance for the Forest Declaration Assessment.
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