Category: Silicon Valley

Chinese officials recently released a 25-year space exploration plan that details five major scientific themes and 17 priority areas for scientific breakthroughs with one goal: to make China a world leader in space by 2050 and a key competitor with the U.S. in space, for decades to come.

Last week, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the China National Space Administration, and the China Manned Space Agency jointly released a space exploration plan for 2024 through 2050.

It includes searching for extraterrestrial life, exploring Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, sending space crews to the moon and building an international lunar research station by 2025.

Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the plan highlights China’s long-term commitment and answers some lingering questions as well.

“I think a lot of experts have wondered if China would continue to invest in space, particularly in science and exploration, given a lot of economic uncertainties in China … but this is a sign that they’re committed,” Swope said.

The plan reinforces a “commitment to really look at space science and exploration in the long term and not just short term,” he added.

The plan outlines Beijing’s goal to send astronauts to the moon by 2030, obtain and retrieve the first samples from Mars and successfully complete a mission to the Jupiter system in the next few years. It also outlines three phases of development, each with specific goals in terms of space exploration and key scientific discoveries.

The extensive plan is not only a statement that Beijing can compete with the U.S. in high-tech industries, it is also a way of boosting national pride, analysts say. 

“Space in particular has a huge public awareness, public pride,” says Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior intelligence officer and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. “It emboldens the Chinese people, gives them a strong sense of nationalism and superiority, and that’s what the main focus of the Bejing government is.”

Swope agrees.

“I think it’s [China’s long-term space plan] a manifestation of China’s interest and desire from a national prestige and honor standpoint to really show that it’s a player on the international stage up there with the United States,” he said.

Antonia Hmaidi, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, told VOA in an email response that, “China’s space focus goes back to the 1960,” and that “China has also been very successful at meeting its own goals and timelines.”

In recent years China has carried out several successful space science missions including Chang’e-4, which marked the world’s first soft landing and roving on the far side of the moon, Change’e-5, a mission that returned a sample from the moon back to Beijing for the first time, and Tianwen-1, a space mission that resulted in Chinese spacecraft leaving imprints on Mars. 

In addition, to these space missions, Bejing has implemented several programs aimed at increasing scientific discovery relating to space, particularly through the launch of several space satellites. 

Since 2011, China has developed and launched scientific satellites including Dark Matter Particle Explorer, Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory, and the Einstein Probe.

While China continues to make progress with space exploration and scientific discovery, according to Swope, there is still a way to go before it catches up to the United States.

“China is undeniably the number 2 space power in the world today, behind the United States,” he said. “The United States is still by far the most important in a lot of measures and metrics, including in science and exploration.”

Eftimiades said one key reason the United States has maintained its lead in the space race is the success of Washington’s private, commercial aerospace companies.

“The U.S. private industry has got the jump on China,” Eftimiades said. “There’s no type of industrial control, industrial plan. In fact, Congress and administration shy away from that completely.”

Unlike the United States, large space entities in China are often state-owned, such as the China Aerospace Cooperation, Eftimiades said.

He adds that one advantage of China’s space entities being state-owned is the ability for the Chinese government to “direct their industries toward specific objectives.” At the same time, having bureaucracy involved with state-owned enterprises leads to less “cutting-edge technology.”

This year, China has focused on growing its space presence relative to the U.S. by conducting more orbital launches. 

Beijing planned to conduct 100 orbital launches this year, according to the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which was to conduct 70 of them. However, as of October 15, China had completed 48 orbital launches.

Last week, SpaceX announced it had launched its 100th rocket of the year and had another liftoff just hours later. The private company is aiming for 148 launches this year.

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Defense implemented its first Commercial Space Integration Strategy, which outlined the department’s efforts to take technologies produced in the private sector and apply their uses for U.S. national security purposes.

In a statement released relating to the U.S. strategic plan, the Department of Defense explained its strategy to work closely with private and commercial sector space companies that are known to be innovative and have scalable production.

According to the statement, officials say “the strategy is based on the premise that the commercial space sector’s innovative capabilities, scalable production and rapid technology refresh rates provide pathways to enhance the resilience of DOD space capabilities and strengthen deterrence.”

Many space technologies have military applications, Swope said.

“A lot of things that are done in space have a dual use, so [space technologies] may be primarily used for scientific purposes, but also could be used to design and build and test some type of weapons technology,” Swope said.

Hmaidi says China’s newest space plan stands out for what it doesn’t have.

“The most interesting and striking part about China’s newest space plan to me was the narrow focus on basic science over military goals,” she told VOA in an email. “However, we know from open-source research that China is also very active in military space development.”

“This plan contains only one part of China’s space planning, namely the part that is unlikely to have direct military utility, while not mentioning other missions with direct military utility like its low-earth orbit internet program,” Hmaidi explained.
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Snakebites are classified as a neglected tropical disease by the World Health Organization. In South Africa and other countries in the region, there are numerous barriers to getting the antivenom necessary to save limbs and lives. But scientists are working to make antivenom cheaper, safer and easier to produce. Kate Bartlett reports from Johannesburg. Camera: Zaheer Cassim
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The naturally occurring form of polio remains active in only two countries in the world: Pakistan and Afghanistan. Over 50 cases of so-called wild polio have been confirmed in the region this year despite continuing efforts to eradicate the disease. This report comes from both sides of the border, narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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A top Chinese official has urged tech giant Apple to deepen its presence and investment in innovation in the world’s second largest economy at a time when supply chains and companies are shifting production and operations away from China.

As U.S.-China geopolitical tensions simmer and tech competition between Beijing and Western countries intensifies, foreign investment in China shrunk in 2023 to its lowest level in three decades, according to government statistics.

The United States has banned the export of advanced technology to China and Beijing’s crackdown on spying in the name of national security concerns has spooked investors.

On Wednesday, Jin Zhuanglong – China’s Minister for Industry and Information Technology – told Apple CEO Tim Cook he hoped that, “Apple will continue to deepen its presence in the Chinese market,” urging Cook to “increase investment in innovation, grow alongside Chinese firms, and share in the dividends of high-quality investment,” according to a ministry statement.

At the meeting Jin also discussed “Apple’s development in China, network data security management, (and) cloud services,” according to the statement.

China has the world’s largest market for smartphones, and Apple is a leading competitor. However, increasingly the iPhone producer has lost market share in the country due to an increasing number of local rivals in the smartphone sector.

In the second quarter of this year, AFP reports that Apple ranked sixth among smartphone vendors in China, holding a 16% market share, marking a drop of three positions compared to its ranking during the same period last year, according to analysis firm Canalys.

Jin also repeated a frequent pledge from officials in Beijing that China would strive to provide a “better environment” for global investors and “continue to expand high-level opening up.

Cook’s trip to China was his second of the year. His posts on the X-like Chinese social media platform Weibo showed he visited an Apple store in downtown Beijing, visited an organic farm, and toured ancient neighborhoods with prominent artists such as local photographer Chen Man.

Cook added that he met with students from China’s Agricultural University and Zhejiang University to receive feedback on how iPhones and iPads can help farmers adopt more sustainable practices. 

Some information in this report came from Reuters and AFP.
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One person died and dozens fell ill from E. coli infections linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers in 10 states, led by Colorado, where 26 people were sickened, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said on Tuesday.

The E. coli outbreak, linked to one of McDonald’s most popular menu items, has sickened 49 people and sent 10 to the hospital, officials say.

The strain involved, E. coli O157:H7, can cause serious illness and was the source of a 1993 outbreak that killed four children who ate undercooked hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants.

Shares of the world’s largest fast-food chain were down about 6% in extended trading. A livestock trader said the outbreak also could pressure U.S. cattle futures on Wednesday by threatening demand for beef.

Everyone interviewed as part of an investigation into the outbreak has reported eating at McDonald’s before their illness started, and most mentioned eating a Quarter Pounder hamburger, according to the CDC.

The specific ingredient linked to the illness has not been identified but investigators are focused on fresh, slivered onions and fresh beef patties, the CDC said.

Most of the illnesses were reported in Colorado and Nebraska.

“The initial findings from the investigation indicate that a subset of illnesses may be linked to slivered onions used in the Quarter Pounder and sourced by a single supplier that serves three distribution centers,” McDonald’s North America Chief Supply Chain Officer Cesar Piña said in a statement.

McDonald’s has proactively removed the slivered onions and beef patties used for the Quarter Pounder hamburgers from stores in the affected states while the investigation continues, the company informed the CDC.

U.S. food safety attorney Bill Marler, who represented a victim in the Jack in the Box outbreak, said more cases of illness could surface. Onions have been linked to prior E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks, he said.

According to Marler, a founder of Marler Clark in Seattle, beef contamination is less common due to food safety measures. “You’d have to have multiple restaurants under-cooking the meat,” he said.

McDonald’s is temporarily removing the Quarter Pounder from restaurants in the impacted areas, including Colorado, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, it said in a statement, adding it was working with suppliers to replenish supply in the coming week.

Symptoms for E. coli include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting. Most people who suffer an infection will start feeling sick three to four days after eating or drinking something that contains the bacteria, Colorado’s public health department said. However, illnesses can start anywhere from one to 10 days after exposure, the department added.

In 2015, burrito chain Chipotle saw its sales battered and reputation hit due to E.coli outbreaks in several states. That outbreak was linked to a different strain of E. coli that typically causes less severe illness than E. coli O157:H7.

In addition to Colorado, the CDC said small clusters of a few people fell ill after eating a Quarter Pounder in Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming. Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, Iowa, Wisconsin and Montana had one illness apiece.
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Health officials say there have been six cases of polio reported in Ivory Coast in 2023, and one so far this year. It doesn’t seem like many, but any polio cases are cause for concern among health officials trying to completely eradicate the disease.  VOA’s Yassin Ciyow reports from Abidjan, in this story narrated by Anthony LaBruto. (Camera: Yassin Ciyow )
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Berlin — An infection with the new mpox variant clade 1b has been detected in Germany for the first time, the Robert Koch Institute health authority said on Tuesday.  

The infection occurred abroad and was detected last Friday, the institute said, adding that it did not see an increased risk for Germany but was “monitoring the situation very closely.”  

Mpox, a viral disease related to smallpox that causes fever, body aches, swollen lymph nodes and a rash that forms into blisters, has two main subtypes — clade 1 and clade 2.  

From May 2022, clade 2 spread around the world, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men in Europe and the United States. In July 2022, the WHO declared an international public health emergency, its highest level of alarm over the spread.  

Vaccination and awareness drives in many countries helped stem the number of worldwide cases and the WHO lifted the emergency in May 2023 after reporting 140 deaths out of roughly 87,400 cases.  

But this year, a new epidemic has broken out in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  

As well as clade 1, which mainly affects children, a new strain emerged in the DRC, called clade 1b.  

Clade 1b cases have also been recorded in nearby Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda — none of which had previously detected mpox. The WHO declared another international emergency in August.
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HONG KONG — China’s National Health Commission (NHC) published its first set of guidelines to standardize the diagnosis and treatment of obesity, with more than half of China’s adults already overweight and obese, and the rate expected to keep rising.

The guidelines, made public on October 17, come as China experiences an upward morbidity trend of its overweight and obese population. The rate of overweight or obese people could reach 65.3% by 2030, the NHC said.

“Obesity has become a major public health issue in China, ranking as the sixth leading risk factor for death and disability in the country,” the guidelines said.

China is facing a twin challenge that feeds its weight problem: In a modernizing economy underpinned by technological innovation, more jobs have become static or desk-bound, while a prolonged slowdown in growth is forcing people to adopt cheaper, unhealthy diets.

Job stress, long work hours and poor diets are growing high-risk factors in the cities, while in rural areas, agriculture work is becoming less physically demanding and inadequate healthcare is leading to poor screening and treatment of weight problems, doctors and academics say.

The guidelines provide guidance and regulations including in clinical nutrition, surgical treatment, behavioral and psychological intervention, and exercise intervention for obesity, Zhang Zhongtao, director of the guideline drafting committee and deputy head of Beijing Friendship Hospital, told the official Xinhua news agency.

China’s NHC and 15 other government departments in July launched public awareness efforts to fight obesity. The campaign, set to last for three years, is built around eight slogans: “lifelong commitment, active monitoring, a balanced diet, physical activity, good sleep, reasonable targets and family action.”

Health guidelines were distributed to primary and secondary schools in July urging regular screening, daily exercise, hiring nutritionists and implementing healthy eating habits – including lowering salt, oil and sugar.

Obesity in China is an “unintended consequence of improving living standards in the country,” Xinhua said, after China struggled for centuries to feed its population and under-nourishment was a genuine concern for many families before the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.
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Washington — When it comes to combating disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential elections, artificial intelligence and chatbots are failing, a media research group has found.

The latest audit by the research group NewsGuard found that generative AI tools struggle to effectively respond to false narratives.

In its latest audit of 10 leading chatbots, compiled in September, NewsGuard found that AI will repeat misinformation 18% of the time and offer a nonresponse 38.33% of the time — leading to a “fail rate” of almost 40%, according to NewsGuard.

“These chatbots clearly struggle when it comes to handling prompt inquiries related to news and information,” said McKenzie Sadeghi, the audit’s author. “There’s a lot of sources out there, and the chatbots might not be able to discern between which ones are reliable versus which ones aren’t.”

NewsGuard has a database of false news narratives that circulate, encompassing global wars and U.S. politics, Sadeghi told VOA.

Every month, researchers feed trending false narratives into leading chatbots in three different forms: innocent user prompts, leading questions and “bad actor” prompts. From there, the researchers measure if AI repeats, fails to respond or debunks the claims.

AI repeats false narratives mostly in response to bad actor prompts, which mirror the tactics used by foreign influence campaigns to spread disinformation. Around 70% of the instances where AI repeated falsehoods were in response to bad actor prompts, as opposed to leading prompts or innocent user prompts.

Foreign influence campaigns are able to take advantage of such flaws, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Russia, Iran and China have used generative AI to “boost their respective U.S. election influence efforts,” according to an intelligence report released last month.

As an example of how easily AI chatbots can be misled, Sadeghi cited a NewsGuard study in June that found AI would repeat Russian disinformation if it “masqueraded” as coming from an American local news source.

From myths about migrants to falsehoods about FEMA, the spread of disinformation and misinformation has been a consistent theme throughout the 2024 election cycle.

“Misinformation isn’t new, but generative AI is definitely amplifying these patterns and behaviors,” Sejin Paik, an AI researcher at Georgetown University, told VOA.

Because the technology behind AI is constantly changing and evolving, it is often unable to detect erroneous information, Paik said. This leads to not only issues with the factuality of AI’s output, but also the consistency.

NewsGuard also found that two-thirds of “high quality” news sites block generative AI models from using their media coverage. As a result, AI often has to learn from lower-quality, misinformation-prone news sources, according to the watchdog.

This can be dangerous, experts say. Much of the non-paywalled media that AI trains on is either “propaganda” or “deliberate strategic communication,” media scholar Matt Jordan told VOA.

“AI doesn’t know anything: It doesn’t sift through knowledge, and it can’t evaluate claims,” Jordan, a media professor at Penn State, told VOA. “It just repeats based on huge numbers.”

AI has a tendency to repeat “bogus” news because statistically, it tends to be trained on skewed and biased information, he added. He called this a “garbage in, garbage out model.”

NewsGuard aims to set the standard for measuring accuracy and trustworthiness in the AI industry through monthly surveys, Sadeghi said.

The sector is growing fast, even as issues around disinformation are flagged. The generative AI industry has experienced monumental growth in the past few years. OpenAI’s ChatGPT currently reports 200 million weekly users, more than double from last year, according to Reuters.

The growth in popularity of these tools leads to another problem in their output, according to Anjana Susarla, a professor in Responsible AI at Michigan State University. Since there is such a high quantity of information going in — from users and external sources — it is hard to detect and stop the spread of misinformation.

Many users are still willing to believe the outputs of these chatbots are true, Susarla said.

“Sometimes, people can trust AI more than they trust human beings,” she told VOA.

The solution to this may be bipartisan regulation, she added. She hopes that the government will encourage social media platforms to regulate malicious misinformation.

Jordan, on the other hand, believes the solution is with media audiences.

“The antidote to misinformation is to trust in reporters and news outlets instead of AI,” he told VOA. “People sometimes think that it’s easier to trust a machine than it is to trust a person. But in this case, it’s just a machine spewing out what untrustworthy people have said.”
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Paris — French drugmaker Sanofi’s confirmation that it will sell a controlling stake in its consumer health unit to a U.S. investment fund sparked a new political backlash Monday, stoked by fears the deal marks a loss of sovereignty over key medications.  

Paris “must block the sale” using powers to protect strategic sectors, Manuel Bompard, a senior lawmaker in the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party, told the TF1 broadcaster.  

Politicians and unions have torn into Sanofi’s proposed 16-billion-euro ($17.4 billion) deal with U.S. investment fund CD&R for a controlling stake in Opella.  

The subsidiary makes household-name drugs including Doliprane branded paracetamol  whose yellow boxes dominate the French market.  

Under pressure, Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s minority government said it had secured a two-percent stake in Opella for public investment bank Bpifrance and “extremely strong” guarantees against job cuts and offshoring.  

Opella employs over 11,000 workers and operates in 100 countries.  

Sanofi said it is the third-largest business worldwide in the market for over-the-counter medicines, vitamins and supplements.  

CD&R — which has a battery of investments in France — would help build Opella into a “French-headquartered, global consumer healthcare champion,” the pharma giant said in a statement.  

‘Just words’

But with memories of drug shortages during and since the Covid-19 pandemic still raw for many, critics say the defenses are too weak.

A small stake “won’t give the French state a say in strategic decisions” at Opella, said Bompard, whose LFI dominates a left alliance that is the largest opposition group against Barnier and President Emmanuel Macron.  

Thomas Portes, also of the LFI, posted on X that the government had offered “no guarantees, just words.”  

Economy Minister Antoine Armand said a contract between CD&R, Sanofi and the government included maintaining production sites, research and development and Opella’s official headquarters in France, as well as investing at least 70 million euros over five years.  

It covers “keeping up a minimum production volume for Opella’s sensitive products in France,” Armand added, including Doliprane, digestive medication Lanzor and Aspegic branded aspirin.  

There would be financial penalties for closing French production sites, laying off workers or failing to buy from French suppliers.  

That includes Seqens, a company re-establishing production in France of Doliprane’s active ingredient paracetamol.  

“Workers are not at all reassured by the latest developments,” said Johann Nicolas, a CGT union representative at Opella’s Doliprane plant in Lisieux, northern France.  

He added that a picket had throttled production there from around 1.3 million boxes of the drug per day to around 265,000.  

The proposed protections in the deal have also failed to win over even some in the government camp.  

Monday’s guarantees “do not at all indicate a commitment for the long term, whether on investment, supply or jobs,” Charles Rodwell, a lawmaker in Macron’s EPR party who has closely followed the case, told AFP.  

He vowed “painstaking” parliamentary surveillance of government action over the deal including measures to “block” the sale if ministers fall short.

Brand loyalty

Macron said last week that “the government has the instruments needed to protect France” from any unwanted “capital ownership.”  

Emotion over the Opella sales is closely linked to Doliprane.  

Boxes of the non-opioid analgesic against mild to moderate pain and fever often line entire pharmacy walls.  

The drug comes in many doses — from 100 mg for babies to 1,000 mg for adults — and in tablet, capsule, suppository and liquid forms.  

It is so ubiquitous that French people call any paracetamol product Doliprane, even when made by a different manufacturer.  

Sanofi, among the world’s top 12 health care companies, says the planned spinoff is part of a strategy to focus less on over-the-counter medication and more on innovative medicines and vaccines, including for polio, influenza and meningitis.
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Microsoft will allow customers to build autonomous artificial intelligence agents starting in November, the software giant said on Monday, in its latest move to tap the booming technology.

The company is positioning autonomous agents — programs which require little human intervention unlike chatbots — as “apps for an AI-driven world,” capable of handling client inquiries, identifying sales leads and managing inventory.

Other big technology firms such as Salesforce have also touted the potential of such agents, tools that some analysts say could provide companies with an easier path to monetizing the billions of dollars they are pouring into AI.

Microsoft said its customers can use Copilot Studio – an application that requires little knowledge of computer code – to create autonomous agents in public preview from November. It is using several AI models developed in-house and by OpenAI for the agents.

The company is also introducing ten ready-for-use agents that can help with routine tasks ranging from managing supply chain to expense tracking and client communications.

In one demo, McKinsey & Co, which had early access to the tools, created an agent that can manage client inquires by checking interaction history, identifying the consultant for the task and scheduling a follow-up meeting.

“The idea is that Copilot [the company’s chatbot] is the user interface for AI,” Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, told Reuters.

“Every employee will have a Copilot, their personalized AI agent, and then they will use that Copilot to interface and interact with the sea of AI agents that will be out there.”

Tech giants are facing investor pressure to show returns on their significant AI investments. Microsoft’s shares fell 2.8% in the September quarter, underperforming the S&P 500, but remain more than 10% higher for the year.

Some concerns have risen in recent months about the pace of Copilot adoption, with research firm Gartner saying in August its survey of 152 IT organizations showed that the vast majority had not progressed their Copilot initiatives past the pilot stage.
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Bogota, Colombia — Global environmental leaders gather Monday in Cali, Colombia to assess the world’s plummeting biodiversity levels and commitments by countries to protect plants, animals and critical habitats.

The two-week United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP16, is a follow-up to the 2022 Montreal meetings where 196 countries signed a historic global treaty to protect biodiversity.

The accord includes 23 measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030.

In opening remarks on Sunday, Colombia’s environment minister and COP16 president Susana Muhamad said the conference is an opportunity “to collect the experience that has passed through this planet from all civilizations, from all cultures, from all knowledge … to generate livable, relatively stable conditions for a new society that will be forged in the light of the crisis.”

A real threat to biodiversity loss

All evidence shows a dramatic decline in species abundance and distribution, said Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity at The Nature Conservancy.

“A lot of wild species have less room to live, and they’re declining in numbers,” Krueger said. “And we also see rising extinction rates. Things that we haven’t even discovered yet are blinking out.”

The world is experiencing its largest loss of life since the dinosaurs, with around 1 million plant and animal species now threatened with extinction, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

In the Amazon rainforest, threats to biodiversity include the expansion of the agricultural frontier and road networks, deforestation, forest fires and drought, says Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, an organization that protects the rainforest.

“You put all of that together and it’s a real threat to biodiversity,” Miller said.

Global wildlife populations have plunged on average by 73% in 50 years, according to the WWF and the Zoological Society of London biennial Living Planet report this month.

The report said Latin America and the Caribbean saw 95% average declines in recorded wildlife populations.

Indigenous communities key to biodiversity protection

Indigenous people are on the front lines of protecting biodiversity and fighting against climate change, putting their lives at great risk, said Miller of Amazon Watch.

“A lot of discourse has been given about the voices of local communities … Indigenous peoples really playing a key role,” he said. “So that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking for at COP16.”

Indigenous peoples hold the solutions to combat the climate change and biodiversity crises, said Laura Rico, campaign director at Avaaz, a global activism nonprofit.

“They’re who have been taking care of the land, healing the land through their governance systems, their care systems and their ways of life,” she said. “So … it’s fundamental that the COP recognizes, promotes and encourages the legalization of their territories.”

In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, the head of an Amazon Indigenous organization said the region’s Indigenous people have been preparing for months for COP16.

“This is a great opportunity to make the impact that we need to demonstrate to all the actors that come from other countries the importance of Indigenous peoples for the world,” said José Mendez, secretary of the National Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon.

“It’s no secret to anyone that we … are at risk right now,” he said. “The effects that we are currently experiencing due to climate change, the droughts that the country is experiencing, the Amazon River has never gone through a drought like the current one. … This is causing many species to become extinct.”

Nature can recover

Environment minister Muhamad told local media this month that one of the conference’s main objectives is to deliver the message that “biodiversity is as important, complementary and indispensable as the energy transition and decarbonization.”

Part of Colombia’s first ever leftist government, Muhamad cautioned last year’s World Economic Forum about the risks of continuing an extractive economy that ignores the social and environmental consequences of natural resource exploitation.

Since the 2022 Montreal conference, “progress has been too slow”, says Eva Zabey, executive director of the coalition Business for Nature.

“There’s been some progress,” she said. “But the headline message is the implementation of the global biodiversity framework is too slow and we need to scale and speed up.”

“COP16 comes at an absolutely critical moment for us to move from targets setting to real actions on the ground,” Zabey said.

Although biodiversity declines are grim, some environmentalists believe a reversal is possible. “We’ve had some very successful species reintroductions and we’ve saved species when we really focus on what is causing their decline,” said The Nature Conservancy’s Krueger.
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Geneva — The WHO chief on Sunday urged Rwanda to keep up its fightback against Marburg, as the country battles an outbreak of one of the world’s deadliest viruses.  

There have been 62 confirmed cases and 15 deaths in the outbreak, which was first announced in late September.  

No new cases have been detected in the last six days and 44 people have recovered from infection.  

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, visited Rwanda to see the outbreak response for himself and hailed the country’s handling of the situation.  

“We’re pleased to see that there have been no new cases in the past six days, and we hope that remains the case,” he told a press conference in the capital Kigali.  

“But we are dealing with one of the world’s most dangerous viruses, and continued vigilance is essential.  

“Enhanced surveillance, contact tracing and infection prevention and control measures must continue at scale until the outbreak is declared over.”  

Such a declaration can only be made after 42 days — two consecutive incubation periods — without a new confirmed case.  

Marburg is transmitted to humans from fruit bats, and is part of the filovirus family that includes Ebola.  

With a fatality rate of up to 88 percent, Marburg’s highly infectious hemorrhagic fever is often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure.   

However, the case fatality rate in this outbreak has been held down at 24 percent.   

On Saturday, Tedros visited the treatment center where the remaining patients are being looked after.  

“Two of the patients we met had experienced all of the symptoms of Marburg, including multiple organ failure, but they were put on life support, they were successfully intubated and extubated, and are now recovering,” he said.  

“We believe this is the first time patients with Marburg virus have been extubated in Africa. These patients would have died in previous outbreaks.”  

There are currently no officially approved vaccines nor approved antiviral treatments, but potential treatments, including blood products, immune and drug therapies are being evaluated.  

A vaccination program using a trial vaccine was launched in Rwanda earlier this month. 
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The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists and Nvidia investors. It’s also providing an unusual windfall for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean.

ChatGPT’s debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.

That’s where Anguilla comes in. The British territory was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s. It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it’s not always a requirement.

Google uses google.ai to showcase its artificial intelligence services while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.

Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million, fueled by the surging interest in AI. The income now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at around 5%.

Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time an .ai web address is renewed. The territory signed a deal Tuesday with a U.S. company to manage the domains amid explosive demand but the fees aren’t expected to change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.

The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 91 square kilometers and has a population of about 16,000. Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white sand beaches, the island is a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are underprivileged, and tourism has been battered by the pandemic and, before that, a powerful hurricane.

Anguilla doesn’t have its own AI industry though Premier Ellis Webster hopes that one day it will become a hub for the technology. He said it was just luck that it was Anguilla, and not nearby Antigua, that was assigned the .ai domain in 1995 because both places had those letters in their names.

Webster said the money takes the pressure off government finances and helps fund key projects but cautioned that “we can’t rely on it solely.”

“You can’t predict how long this is going to last,” Webster said in an interview with the AP. “And so I don’t want to have our economy and our country and all our programs just based on this. And then all of a sudden there’s a new fad comes up in the next year or two, and then we are left now having to make significant expenditure cuts, removing programs.”

To help keep up with the explosive growth in domain registrations, Anguilla said Tuesday it’s signing a deal with a U.S.-based domain management company, Identity Digital, to help manage the effort. They said the agreement will mean more revenue for the government while improving the resilience and security of the web addresses.

Identity Digital, which also manages Australia’s .au domain, expects to migrate all .ai domain services to its systems by the start of next year, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said in an interview.

A local software entrepreneur had previously helped Anguilla set up its registry system decades earlier.

There are now more than 533,000 .ai web domains, an increase of more than 10-fold since 2018. The International Monetary Fund said in a May report that the earnings will help diversify the economy, “thus making it more resilient to external shocks.

Webster expects domain-related revenues to rise further and could even double this year from last year’s $32 million.

He said the money will finance the airport’s expansion, free medical care for senior citizens and completion of a vocational technology training center at Anguilla’s high school.

The income also provides “budget support” for other projects the government is eyeing, such as a national development fund it could quickly tap for hurricane recovery efforts. The island normally relies on assistance from its administrative power, Britain, which comes with conditions, Webster said.

Mohan said working with Identity Digital will also defend against cyber crooks trying to take advantage of the hype around artificial intelligence.

He cited the example of Tokelau, an island in the Pacific Ocean, whose .tk addresses became notoriously associated with spam and phishing after outsourcing its registry services.

“We worry about bad actors taking something, sticking a .ai to it, and then making it sound like they are much bigger or much better than what they really are,” Mohan said, adding that the company’s technology will quickly take down shady sites.

Another benefit is .AI websites will no longer need to connect to the government’s digital infrastructure through a single internet cable to the island, which leaves them vulnerable to digital bottlenecks or physical disruptions.

Now they’ll use the company’s servers distributed globally, which means it will be faster to access them because they’ll be closer to users.

“It goes from milliseconds to microseconds,” Mohan said.
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MILWAUKEE — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.

There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.

The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.

Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.

Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.

“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.

But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.

That includes his own teenage daughter.

“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.

It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.

“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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People with HIV can safely receive donated kidneys from deceased donors with the virus, according to a large study that comes as the U.S. government moves to expand the practice. That could shorten the wait for organs for all, regardless of HIV status.

The new study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at 198 kidney transplants performed across the U.S. Researchers found similar results whether the donated organ came from a person with or without the AIDS virus.

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule change that would allow these types of kidney and liver transplants outside research studies. A final rule would apply to both living and deceased donors. If approved, it could take effect in the coming year.

Participants in the study were HIV positive, had kidney failure and agreed to receive an organ from either an HIV-positive deceased donor or an HIV-negative deceased donor, whichever kidney became available first.

Similar survival rates

Researchers followed the organ recipients for up to four years. They compared the half who received kidneys from HIV-positive donors to those whose kidneys came from donors without HIV.

Both groups had similarly high rates of overall survival and low rates of organ rejection. Virus levels rose for 13 patients in the HIV donor group and for four in the other group, mostly tied to patients failing to take HIV medications consistently, and in all cases returned to very low or undetectable levels.

“This demonstrates the safety and the fantastic outcomes that we’re seeing from these transplants,” said study co-author Dr. Dorry Segev of NYU Langone Health.

In 2010, surgeons in South Africa provided the first evidence that using HIV-positive donor organs was safe in people with HIV. But the practice wasn’t allowed in the United States until 2013 when the government lifted a ban and allowed research studies, at the urging of Segev. At first, the studies were with deceased donors. Then in 2019, Segev and others at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore performed the world’s first kidney transplant from a living donor with HIV to an HIV-positive recipient.

All told, 500 transplants of kidneys and livers from HIV-positive donors have been done in the U.S.

‘A win-win’

People with HIV have been actively discouraged from signing up to be organ donors by stigma and outdated state laws and policies criminalizing organ donation for people with HIV, said Carrie Foote, a sociology professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

“Not only can we help those of us living with this disease, but we free up more organs in the entire organ pool so that those who don’t have HIV can get an organ faster,” said Foote, who is HIV positive and a registered organ donor. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”

More than 90,000 people are on the waiting list for kidney transplants, according to the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. In 2022, more than 4,000 people died waiting for kidneys.

In an editorial in the journal, Dr. Elmi Muller of Stellenbosch University in South Africa predicted the new study will have “far-reaching effects in many countries that do not perform transplantations with these organs.”

“Above all, we have taken yet another step toward fairness and equality for persons living with HIV,” wrote Muller, who pioneered the practice.
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ISLAMABAD — Pakistan said Saturday that two children in its southern Sindh province had been paralyzed by poliovirus, bringing the total number of cases nationwide to 39 for the year since March, when officials confirmed the first case.

The South Asian nation of around 240 million people reported six cases of paralytic poliovirus infections in 2023, following a period of more than a year without any documented cases, only to see the numbers rise again.

“Genetic sequencing of the cases is under way,” said a Pakistan polio eradication program statement Saturday while reporting the two new infections in Sindh. “The intense virus transmission and increase in polio cases are indicative of the harm that children suffer when they miss opportunities for vaccination.”

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, with at least 20 cases this year, are the only two countries where the crippling disease is still endemic.

Pakistani officials are preparing to launch a nationwide vaccination campaign on October 28 to immunize more than 45 million children under 5 against the paralytic disease.

“It is critical for parents to open their doors to vaccinators during this drive and ensure that all children in their care receive two drops of the crucial oral polio vaccine to keep them protected from the devastating effects of polio,” the program emphasized in its Saturday statement.

Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, which sits on the Afghan border, has reported 20 polio cases in 2024, while Sindh has detected 12 cases.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan has documented five paralytic poliovirus cases. Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province and the national capital, Islamabad, reported one case each.

The resurgence of poliovirus in Pakistan is blamed on boycotts of vaccination drives by parents in rural areas who allege the initiatives are a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children.

Anti-state militants in violence-hit districts bordering Afghanistan occasionally attack vaccinators and their police escorts, suspecting them of spying for the government. The violence has claimed the lives of dozens of security forces and vaccinators.

An independent monitoring board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative noted in a report last month that more than 420,000 Pakistani children could not be inoculated in anti-polio campaigns in 2024.

The board reported more than 200 boycotts of the polio vaccination campaign in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year. “It is disturbing to realize that violence, insecurity, and boycotts are still as prevalent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as they were in 2023,” the report said.

It highlighted that residents in several impoverished districts of Pakistan also demanded electricity, gas supply, and road construction in return for getting their children vaccinated.

A representative for Pakistan’s Ministry of Health told a World Health Organization meeting in Doha, Qatar, earlier this week that polio eradication is the country’s “top priority,” and efforts have been intensified to halt virus transmission.

“Despite recent resurgence, a unified plan with provinces aims to stop polio transmission by 2025,” Safi Malik stated. “We’re focusing on quality campaigns, digital tracking of missed areas, and a strong Pakistan-Afghanistan collaboration for cross-border vaccinations,” he said. 
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ABUJA, NIGERIA — Nigeria officially launched its malaria vaccination campaign this week to protect millions of children from the deadly disease, focusing heavily on high-risk states.

The first 846,000 doses of the R21 malaria vaccine arrived in Abuja, Nigeria, on Thursday, marking a milestone in efforts to eliminate malaria. According to the World Health Organization, the country accounts for about 27% of global malaria cases. In 2022, it recorded nearly 67 million infections and nearly 200,000 deaths, about 80% of the deaths occurring in children under age 5.

Dr. Muyi Aina, head of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, said the initial rollout prioritizes high-risk regions.

“We expect another 140,000 or so to make a million doses in this first batch,” Aina said. “Every child, every person that is vaccinated, needs to get two doses. So, we know that that’s a limited number of people. So, we have prioritized the highest-burden locations in the country, Kebbi and Bayelsa.”

The government is covering part of the vaccine costs, with global vaccine group Gavi and international partners funding the rest.

Health Minister Muhammad Pate stressed that the vaccine will be administered to recipients at no charge.

“These vaccines are free for [the] population, but they cost resources,” he said.

Not everyone would be able to afford the vaccines, Pate said.

“The children of the poor in rural areas are the ones that may not be able to access them,” he said. “That’s why we’ve prioritized public financing in that regard, and we thank our partners for contributing toward it.”

Nigeria has improved vaccine logistics for hard-to-reach regions.

UNICEF’s chief of health in Nigeria, Dr. Eduardo Celades, expressed confidence in the country’s distribution capacity.

“Transportation and storage [are] a key issue,” he said. “How [can you] ensure that the cold chain has the integrity needed to keep safe the vaccines and to keep them effective? But we are confident that we know that we have the capacities.”

Malaria remains a complex challenge, requiring a mix of strategies such as mosquito control, better health care access and vaccine monitoring.

Malaria elimination strategic adviser Olugbenga Mokuolu said the vaccine complements traditional tools such as bed nets and treatments, offering children added protection.

“We know that no single tool offers 100% of the solution,” Mokuolu said. “That’s why we still talk about the combination of tools. But having the vaccine layering on it is very significant. … With the deployment of this vaccine, we will be conducting … an effectiveness study in order to note the rate of reoccurrence while on the vaccine.”

The WHO approved the RTS,S and R21 vaccines, with R21 showing 77% efficacy in trials. Other African countries, including Uganda and Burkina Faso, have begun vaccine distribution, reflecting the continent’s push to combat malaria.

Experts say the success of the malaria rollout depends on sustained engagement with local leaders and caregivers to ensure children complete their doses.
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