Day: December 7, 2024

SKOPJE, North Macedonia — A political party in North Macedonia on Saturday demanded authorities ban social networks whose content incites violence and self-destructive behavior after several young people were seriously injured in connection with the popular “Superman challenge” on TikTok. 

Health authorities said at least 17 students, ages 10 to 17, were brought to hospitals in the capital Skopje and other towns over the past week with broken bones, contusions and bruises. The children were injured after being thrown into the air by their friends to fly like superheroes and get applause on the internet. 

The Liberal-Democratic Party, which was part of the left-led coalition that ruled the country from 2016 to earlier in 2024, issued a press statement Saturday strongly condemning “the irresponsible spread of dangerous content on social media, such as the latest TikTok ‘challenge’ known as ‘Superman,’ which has injured six children across (the country) in the past 24 hours.” 

“The lack of adequate control over the content of social media allows such ‘games’ to reach the most vulnerable users,” the party statement said. It demanded the “immediate introduction of measures to ban content that incites violence and self-destructive behavior, increase surveillance, and sanction platforms that enable dangerous trends.” 

North Macedonia’s education minister Vesna Janevska said students should focus on education, not TikTok challenges. 

“The ban on mobile phones in schools will not have an effect. Phones will be available to children in their homes, neighborhoods and other environments,” she said. 

Psychologists have warned that the desire to be “in” with the trends on social networks, combined with excessive use of mobile phones, is the main reason for the rise in risky behaviors among children. They urged parents and schools to talk with students. 
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SYDNEY — Australian authorities are being criticized for ruling out drug decriminalization at an international summit in Sydney this week, ignoring a call by many experts and health groups for a health care response to drug use and addiction rather than criminal penalties.

Several hundred politicians, policy experts, police officers and health professionals gathered this week for a summit on drug reform in Sydney.

The New South Wales government is examining ways to redraft the state’s drug laws and policies.

Calls for the decriminalization of drug use and possession were the focus of the meeting.

Campaigners say not treating drug use as a crime would encourage people to seek help without fear of legal consequences.

New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park told local media Friday, though, there is not enough local support for such reform.

“The summit is not just about decriminalization, and for a government to move to decriminalize in the drugs … would be a seismic shift to the way in which we handle drugs in New South Wales,” Park said. “In relation to decriminalization, we think that is too significant to put on the table now without a clear mandate.”

The Sydney summit heard from the mayor of Portland, in the U.S. state of Oregon, Ted Wheeler. He told delegates that earlier this year, state lawmakers repealed laws that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs in the state. He said that the health system has been overwhelmed, and that drug-related crime has risen sharply because of the legislation.

International debate is passionate and divided.

A report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, formed in 2011 to campaign for drug reform, called for a total reexamination of the approach to illicit substances.

Louise Arbour, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was involved in the report and told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that a new approach is needed.

“Globally, it is very clear that this so-called war on drugs has created a gigantic international illegal drug trade,” Arbour said. “The worst aspect of that war is that it has essentially been a war on people — been a war on people who use drugs and not a war on people who actually prey on them.”

The annual number of drug overdose deaths in Australia has almost doubled over the past 20 years, according to the Penington Institute, a nonprofit organization in Victoria state.

Some 100,000 people are estimated to die each year from drug overdoses in the United States, but the number of fatalities has decreased, according to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Efforts to reduce the nation’s persistently high maternal mortality rates involve state panels of experts that investigate and learn from each mother’s death.

The panels — called maternal mortality review committees — usually do their work quietly and out of the public eye. But that’s not been the case recently in three states with strict abortion laws.

Georgia dismissed all members of its committee in November after information about deaths being reviewed leaked to the news organization ProPublica. Days later, The Washington Post reported that Texas’ committee won’t review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after the state banned nearly all abortions. In Idaho, the state let its panel disband in 2023 only to reinstate it earlier this year.

“They’ve become more of a lightning rod than they were before,” said epidemiologist Michael Kramer, director of the Center for Rural Health and Health Disparities at Mercer University in Georgia.

Here’s what maternal mortality review committees across the nation do and what might happen next:

What are they?

“Maternal mortality review committees are important because they are the most comprehensive source of information about maternal mortality that we have,” said David Goodman, who leads the maternal mortality prevention team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The panels review deaths that occur during pregnancy or within a year after it ends, whether directly related to the pregnancy or not. Causes of death can range from hemorrhage during childbirth to drug overdoses to traffic accidents.

The goal, Kramer said, is to examine maternal deaths and help “decide what we can do about them.”

All states, a few cities and Puerto Rico have these committees. Their membership varies and may include OB-GYNs, maternal-fetal medicine doctors, nurses, midwives, mental and public health experts and members of patient advocacy groups. Most have representatives from several areas of expertise, which the CDC recommends.

How members are selected also varies; people may apply, submit letters of interest or be invited to serve.

The selection shouldn’t be politically motivated, Kramer said, because “if there’s a systematic exclusion of certain data or certain perspectives” it’s difficult to truly understand what’s happening.

How do they look at deaths?

First, the panels work with state vital statistics offices and epidemiologists to identify deaths associated with pregnancy by examining death certificates and looking for a pregnancy checkbox or a related cause of death. They may also search for links to birth and fetal death records, or delve into hospital discharge data, media reports and obituaries.

Once they identify cases, they collect as much information as possible, such as prenatal care records, hospital and social service records, autopsy reports and interviews with family members. Professional “abstractors” distill all this into case narratives, which committee members pore over. Most use a standardized review process developed by the CDC — and all panels can get help and guidance from the agency.

They consider questions such as: Was the death pregnancy-related? What was the underlying cause? Was it preventable? What factors contributed?

States generally have privacy rules that protect committee members and people who provide information on the deaths.

The groups then issue public reports that don’t name moms or hospitals but include overall findings, trends and recommendations. Some come out a couple of years or more after the deaths.

Across the nation in 2023, Goodman said, 151 recommendations from those reports were implemented by communities, hospitals, medical professionals and policymakers.

What about Georgia, Texas and Idaho?

Georgia will rebuild its committee through a new application process, the state public health commissioner said.

Texas’ committee has been reviewing 2021 deaths and will start on 2024 cases at its next meeting, Texas Department of State Health Services spokesperson Lara Anton said in an email to The Associated Press.

“Reviewing cases is a lengthy process and legislators have asked for more recent data. Starting the next review cycle with 2024 cases will allow us to provide that in the next report,” Anton said, adding that maternal and child health epidemiologists will continue to analyze and publish data for 2022 and 2023.

In Idaho, the reconstituted review committee now falls under the state board of medicine, which licenses doctors, instead of the state’s health and welfare department. It will operate like it always has, said Bob McLaughlin, spokesperson for the medical board. Members met for the first time in November and plan to issue a report by Jan. 31. Because the legislature wanted the most up-to-date information, McLaughlin said the first report will cover only 2023 cases, and the group will review 2022 deaths next.

Goodman said he’s encouraged that every state has a review committee now — only 20 had them in 2015.
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A federal appeals court in Washington on Friday upheld a law requiring the wildly popular social media app TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese owner or face closure in the United States by next month. The court cited “persuasive” and “compelling” arguments presented by the federal government that TikTok poses a risk to national security.

The ruling could leave the 170 million Americans who regularly use TikTok without access to a social media platform that has enjoyed explosive global growth in recent years. It could also mean that the millions of Americans who create content for TikTok — some of whom rely on monetizing that content for their livelihood — could be cut off from their audiences.

The government has argued that TikTok presents a unique danger to national security because it collects vast amounts of information about its users, and because the Chinese government ultimately exercises control over its parent company, ByteDance, and over the algorithm that determines what content TikTok users see.

Because ByteDance is in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) it is subject to that country’s laws, including measures requiring private companies to cooperate with government intelligence agencies.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the government has a compelling interest in taking steps “to counter the PRC’s efforts to collect great quantities of data about tens of millions of Americans” and “to limit the PRC’s ability to manipulate content covertly on the TikTok platform.”

TikTok signals an appeal

TikTok immediately signaled that it would appeal the circuit court’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

In a statement posted to its website, the company said, “The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue.”

The company said that the law underlying the case “was conceived and pushed through based on inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” and warned that it “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the U.S. and around the world.”

The Supreme Court is not obligated to hear the company’s appeal, and it was not immediately clear that it would do so. If the high court accepts the case, it is possible that it would block the government from enforcing the law until the case is decided.

President-elect Donald Trump, who once supported a TikTok ban before changing his mind during the recent presidential election, has suggested that he will act to save the app when he takes office. However, it is unclear what options he might have for doing that.

Lack of trust

In April, President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law. The measure gave TikTok 270 days to find a way to separate itself from ByteDance before a ban on the application would kick in on January 19, 2025.

The federal government made it clear that the only kind of divestiture that it would accept was a complete separation of TikTok from its Chinese parent. The company offered alternatives, and established TikTok U.S. Data Security Inc. (TTUSDS) as a subsidiary in Delaware, to wall off U.S. user data from ByteDance.

However, the government cited instances in which U.S. user data that the company claimed to have shielded from the PRC was, in fact, accessible to ByteDance employees in mainland China. It told the court that it lacked “the requisite trust” that “ByteDance and TTUSDS would comply in good faith” with any arrangement other than complete separation of TikTok and ByteDance.

In Friday’s ruling, the judges wrote, “The court can neither fault nor second-guess the government on these crucial points.”

First Amendment concerns

TikTok and its supporters have claimed that severing TikTok from ByteDance is both practically impossible for technological reasons and legally impossible because the Chinese government will block the sale of the company. Therefore, they claim, the law constitutes a de facto ban and a violation of the guarantee of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

In a sign of how seriously the court took the First Amendment arguments, the panel of judges agreed that the law should be subject to “heightened scrutiny,” which the Supreme Court has applied to measures restricting fundamental rights.

In the end, the panel determined that the law satisfies even the most stringent form of “strict scrutiny,” which requires that the government “prove that the restriction furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.”

Free speech advocates respond

The decision came under immediate criticism from free speech advocates.

“Although we’re still analyzing the decision, we find it deeply disappointing,” David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement emailed to VOA. “The court appropriately applied strict scrutiny as we have urged it to. But the strict-scrutiny analysis is lacking, relying heavily on speculation about possible future harms.

“Restricting the free flow of information, even from foreign adversaries, is fundamentally undemocratic,” Greene said. “Until now, the U.S. has championed the free flow of information and called out other nations when they have shut down internet access or banned online communications tools like social media apps.”

George Wang, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told VOA that the court accorded “a shocking amount of deference” to the government’s claims about the danger TikTok poses to national security.

“We should be really wary whenever we allow the government to use vague national security arguments as a justification to shut down speech,” Wang said. “That’s a tactic of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. It’s usually the job of courts to stand up to the government when it infringes on the constitutional rights of millions of Americans, and I think the D.C. Circuit really didn’t do that today.”

‘A victory for the American people’

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, and one of the original sponsors of the law requiring TikTok’s divestiture or ban, released a statement Friday praising the court’s decision.

“With today’s opinion, all three branches of government have reached the same conclusion: ByteDance is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance is a national security threat that cannot be mitigated through any other means than divestiture,” Krishnamoorthi said.

“Every day that TikTok remains under the Chinese Communist Party’s control is a day that our security is at risk,” Krishnamoorthi added.

Representative John Moolenaar, the committee’s Republican chairman, said in a statement that the ruling was “a victory for the American people and TikTok users, and a loss for the Chinese Communist Party, which will no longer be able to exploit ByteDance’s control over TikTok to undermine our sovereignty, surveil our citizens and threaten our national security.”

Moolenaar also held out hope to the app’s users that access to it may, in the end, be preserved under a Trump presidency.

“I am optimistic that President Trump will facilitate an American takeover of TikTok to allow its continued use in the United States and I look forward to welcoming the app in America under new ownership,” Moolenaar said.
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A surprising study of temperature-related deaths in Mexico upends conventional thinking about what age group is hit hardest by heat. Researchers found at higher temperatures and humidity, the heat kills far more young people under 35 than those older than 50.

For decades, health and weather experts have warned that the elderly and the youngest children were most vulnerable in heat waves. But this study looking at all deaths in Mexico from 1998 to 2019 shows that when the combination of humidity and temperature reach uncomfortable levels, around 30 degrees Celsius and 50% relative humidity, there were nearly 32 temperature-related deaths of people 35 years old for every temperature-related death of someone 50 and older.

The study in Friday’s journal Science Advances shows an especially surprising spike of heat-related deaths in an age group thought to be young and robust: people between 18 and 35. That age group alone had nine times as many temperature-related deaths as those older than 50.

Study authors and outside experts are scrambling to figure out why. Demographics alone don’t explain why more young adult Mexicans are dying in high heat than their elders. Two theories: Outdoor workers who can’t escape the heat, and young people who don’t know their limits.

The trend is likely to widen as the world warms from human-caused climate change, according to computer simulations run by the study team.

“We found that younger people are especially vulnerable to humid heat,” study co-author Jeffrey Shrader, a climate economist at Columbia University, said. “As the climate warms, we’re really going to be shifting the burden of temperature-related mortality towards younger individuals and away from older individuals who tend to be more vulnerable to cold temperatures.”

Data from cold weather shows more than 300 deaths of Mexican residents 50 and older for every young person dying from cold temperatures, according to the study.

“People of all ages are increasingly at risk from the rising temperatures, and this study shows that those that we might have considered relatively safe from heat-related adverse health outcomes might not be so much so,” said Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown that monitors health effects of climate change. She was not part of the study team.

“Heat is a much more dangerous silent killer than most people acknowledge it to be, and that heat is increasingly putting our health and survival at risk,” Romanello said in an email.

Study authors decided to examine weather-related deaths in Mexico because that country not only has detailed mortality data, but it has a variety of different climates making it an ideal place to study in depth, Shrader said.

Researchers also want to figure out whether this is just a situation in Mexico or other warmer sections of the globe have similar spikes in young adult deaths in high heat and humidity.

Initially the team just wanted to look at deaths and what scientists call wet-bulb globe temperatures, but when they looked at age differences, they were surprised and looked in more detail, Shrader said. Wet-bulb temperature, which is intended to mirror how the body cools itself, is derived using a complicated measurement system that factors in humidity and solar radiation. A wet-bulb globe temperature of 35 degrees Celsius is thought to be the limit for human survivability. Most places don’t reach that level.

Researchers determined temperature-related mortality by complex statistical analysis that compares numerous factors in the number of deaths and removes everything they can except temperature fluctuations, said study co-author Andrew Wilson, a Columbia climate economics researcher.

Researchers also calculated the ideal temperature for when there are the fewest excess deaths at each age group. Younger adults’ sweet temperature spot is about 5 degrees Celsius cooler than it is for older people, Shrader and Wilson said.

Some outside health and climate experts were initially puzzled at the higher youth mortality seen in the study. Co-author Patrick Kinney, a professor of urban health and sustainability at Boston University, said it was likely the study included a higher proportion of outdoor workers exposed to heat than prior studies did.

Study co-author Tereza Cavazos, a climate scientist at the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education in Mexico, said she remembers her father’s generations taking siestas in the high heat of the day and that was healthy. That doesn’t happen so much now, she said.

“There is a lot of population that is vulnerable in the future. Not even in the future, right now,” Cavazos said. She mentioned three Mexican heat waves this year that hit in the middle of the country and kept the deadly heat going overnight so people had little relief. Usually cool nights allow a body to recover.

Younger people often have a sense of invulnerability to weather extremes and do things that increase their risk, such as play sports in high heat, Cavazos said.

“High humidity makes it a lot harder for the body to cool itself through sweating – which is how our body primarily stays cool,” said Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician and climate change expert at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She was not part of the study team. “So someone young and healthy working outside in heat and high humidity can reach a point where the body can no longer cool itself safely – causing a deadly form of heat injury called heat stroke.” 
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