Category: Silicon Valley

In the southern Chilean city of Santa Juana, hit hard by wildfires earlier this year, locals have a special taskforce helping fight blazes: a herd of goats.

The goats have already saved the native forest of the Bosques de Chacay once in February, preventing the park from being consumed by forest fires – fueled by heatwaves and a punishing drought – that left dozens dead, thousands injured and almost 440,000 hectares destroyed in south-central Chile.

“The park was surrounded by fires, but it ended up being the only green spot left,” said Rocio Cruces, cofounder of the 16-hectare (40-acre) park, and “Buena Cabra,” a project that uses goats to build firebreaks.

The technique, also used in Portugal and Spain, relies on grazing goats to control dry pastures and other vegetation that fuel forest fires in the summer. Goat droppings also help enrich the soil and prevent further erosion.

“The fire reached our forest but only the first line of trees was really affected, less than 10% of the park,” Cruces said, adding that small fires broke out but did not advance due to minimal brush.

Cruces started the project after deadly wildfires in 2017. Her flock has since grown from 16 goats to 150 and she hopes to inspire others to follow suit.

“In Chile we are failing in fire prevention,” said Francisco Di Napoli, a forestry engineer from the University of Concepcion in Chile who is familiar with the technique, known as “strategic grazing.”

“These animals can help us a lot,” Di Napoli said, adding that other organizations should “evaluate where it can be applied, find where there’s fuel and have the goats eat it.”
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Footage of a plump snapping turtle relaxing along a Chicago waterway has gone viral after the man who filmed the well-fed reptile marveled at its size and nicknamed it “Chonkosaurus.”

Joey Santore was kayaking with a friend along the Chicago River last weekend when they spotted the large snapping turtle sitting atop a large chain draped over what appear to be rotting logs.

He posted a jumpy video of the turtle on Twitter, labeling it the “Chicago River Snapper aka Chonkosaurus.”

In the video, Santore can be heard sounding stunned by the size of the turtle, which was displaying folds of flesh extending well beyond its shell.

“Look at this guy. We got a picture of this most beautiful sight. Look at the size of that … thing,” he says, using an expletive. “Look at that beast. Hey, how ya doing guy? You look good. You’re healthy.”

Chris Anchor, the chief wildlife biologist with Forest Preserves of Cook County, said the snapping turtle Santore filmed is quite rare, considering its apparent size. He said it’s also unusual for the reptiles to be seen basking along rivers, but it probably recently emerged from hibernation.

“So my guess is that this animal had crawled out of the river to try and gather as much heat as it could in the sunshine,” Anchor told WMAQ-TV.

While it’s difficult to determine exactly how large the turtle is from the video alone, Anchor called it “a very large individual.” And he noted that snapping turtles are not picky eaters.

“Turtles this big will consume anything they can get their mouth around,” he said, adding that anyone encountering a snapping turtle should not disturb it or try to catch it.

“Enjoy it. Leave it alone,” Anchor said.
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The platypus, a species unique to Australia, was reintroduced into the country’s oldest national park just south of Sydney on Friday in a landmark conservation project after disappearing from the area more than half a century ago.

Known for its bill, webbed feet, and venomous spurs, the platypus is one of only two egg-laying mammals globally and spends most of its time in the water at night.

Because of its reclusive nature and highly specific habitat needs, most Australians have never seen one in the wild.

The relocation is a collaborative effort between the University of New South Wales, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, World Wild Fund for Nature Australia and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Four females were released on Friday into the Royal National Park, which was established in 1879 and is the second oldest national park in the world.

No confirmed platypus sightings have been reported in the park, about 35 kilometers or one hour’s drive south of Sydney, since the 1970s.

The relocation comes at a time when the platypus is increasingly threatened by habitat destruction, river degradation, feral predators, and extreme weather events such as droughts and bushfires.

Estimates on the current population vary widely, from 30,000 to some 300,000.

“(It is) very exciting for us to see platypuses come back into the park, for a thriving population here to establish themselves and for Sydneysiders to come and enjoy this amazing animal,” said Gilad Bino, a researcher from UNSW’S Center for Ecosystem Science.

The platypuses, which live along Australia’s east coast and in Tasmania, were collected from various locations across south-eastern New South Wales state and subjected to various tests before relocation.

Each platypus will be tracked for the next two years to better understand how to intervene and relocate the species in the event of drought, bushfire, or flood, researchers said.
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The Group of Seven (G-7) rich nations is set to agree on establishing a new program to distribute vaccines to developing countries at next week’s summit of leaders, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper said Saturday.

In addition to the G-7, G-20 nations such as India and international groups such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank will participate, it added, citing Japanese government sources.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the COVAX facility, backed by WHO and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), delivered nearly 2 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine to 146 countries.

However, COVAX faced setbacks in ensuring equitable access, as wealthy nations prioritized shots for their citizens while insufficient storage facilities in poorer nations caused supply delays and disposal of millions of close-to-expiry doses.

The new program aims to pool rainy-day funds for vaccine production and purchases, as well as investment in low-temperature storages and training of health workers to prepare for the next global pandemic, the Yomiuri said.

Japan, this year’s chair of the G-7 meetings, looks to build support from emerging nations on wide-ranging issues such as supply chains, food security and climate change to counter the growing influence of China and Russia.

Saturday’s meeting of G-7 finance ministers agreed to offer aid to low- and middle-income countries to help increase their role in supply chains for energy-related products.

At a meeting Saturday, G-7 finance and health ministers called for a new global financing framework to “deploy necessary funds quickly and efficiently in response to outbreaks without accumulating idle cash,” they said in a statement.

The G-7 will collaborate with the WHO and the World Bank, which manages an international pandemic fund, to explore the new funding scheme ahead of an August meeting of G-20 finance and health ministers in India, they said.

The G-7 grouping of Britain, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, is considering whether to issue a statement on a global pandemic response at the May 19-21 summit in Japan’s city of Hiroshima, the Yomiuri said.  
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Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Friday named NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino as the chief executive officer of social media giant Twitter.

From his own Twitter account Friday, Musk wrote, “I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter! (She) will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design and new technology.” 

He said Yaccarino would transform Twitter, which is now called X Corp., into “an everything app” called X. 

On Thursday, Musk teased Yaccarino’s hiring, saying only “she” will start in six to eight weeks.  

Yaccarino worked in advertising and media sales for NBCUniversal since 2011 and as chairperson of global advertising since October 2020. The company announced her departure earlier in the day Friday.

Analysts say Yaccarino’s background could be key to Twitter’s future. Since Musk acquired Twitter last October, he has taken some controversial steps, such as loosening controls on the spread of false information and laying off nearly 80% of its staff, which prompted advertisers to flee.

No comment from Yaccarino on her hiring was immediately available.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Malawi has launched a nationwide rollout of the newest typhoid vaccine for children under 15.

A two-year study of the vaccine, the first in Africa, found it safe to use and effective in more than 80% of recipients. Health authorities say the vaccine is expected to reduce the threat from a disease that kills close to 20,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa each year.

Typhoid fever is a contagious bacterial infection caused by consuming contaminated foods or drinks. Its symptoms include nausea, fever and abdominal pain, and if left untreated it can be fatal.

Malawi health authorities said the typhoid conjugate vaccine (TCV) rollout would be part of a nationwide program expected to start Monday when children will be vaccinated against three other diseases: measles, rubella and polio.

However, some fear the campaign will encounter hesitancy and resistance from people, as was the case with COVID-19 vaccines, which led to the burning of about 20,000 expired doses in Malawi in 2021.

George Jobe, chairperson of the Universal Health Coverage Coalition in Malawi, told VOA that efforts were made to educate people on the importance of the campaign.

“There was training for community health care workers as well as teachers, so that they take messages to community leaders, who would also take messages to their subjects,” Jobe said.

Terrible toll

Typhoid has long been a health threat in Malawi and across sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 1.2 million cases and 19,000 deaths each year.

In 2018, Malawi became the first country to use TCV to fight typhoid infections in children under clinical trials.

Over 20,000 children from 9 months to 12 years of age took part in a clinical trial in Malawi led by professor Melita Gordon of the University of Liverpool. The trial found the vaccine was safe and was more than 80% effective.

Priyanka Patel, an understudy doctor at the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome program, told VOA that this vaccine can offer protection for at least four years, making it a highly effective and efficient tool for preventing the spread of typhoid.

“Secondly,” Patel said, “the typhoid conjugate vaccine can be given to children as young as 6 months old, making it easier to reach vulnerable populations. This is in contrast to older vaccines, which were not approved for use in young children.”

In Malawi, TCV was expected to be rolled out in 2021, but the effort was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gianfranco Rotigliano, country representative for the U.N. children’s agency in Malawi, urged the government to prioritize its immunization campaign in hard-to-reach areas where most of the children are unvaccinated.

“Vaccination is a right, health is a right,” he said. “So we should definitely look for children who are not vaccinated, because in urban areas most of the children are vaccinated, but there are those who never got even one dose of vaccine.”

Government authorities hope the campaign will be a success, following the efforts they have put in place to educate people on the importance of vaccinating children.
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Apple will launch its first online store in Vietnam next week, the company said Friday, hoping to cash in on the country’s young and tech-savvy population.

The iPhone maker is among a host of global tech giants including Intel, Samsung and LG, that have chosen Vietnam for assembly of their products.

But up to now, the Silicon Valley giant has sold its products in Vietnam’s market of 100 million people via authorized resellers.

“We’re honored to be expanding in Vietnam,” said Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of retail in an online statement in Vietnamese.

The country’s communist government says it wants 85 percent of its adult population to have access to a smartphone by 2025, up from the current 73 percent.

Less than a third of the country’s mobile users have an iPhone, according to market research platform Statista.

Through online stores, “clients in Vietnam can discover products and connect with our experienced experts,” O’Brien said in the statement.

The production of accessories and assembly of mobile phones account for up to 70 percent of electronics manufacturing in Vietnam. Products are mainly for export.

Official figures said Vietnam’s mobile phone production industry reported an import-export turnover of U.S. $114 billion last year, a third of the country’s total import-export revenue.
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Astronomers have created a stunning mosaic of baby star clusters hiding in our galactic backyard.

The montage, published Thursday, reveals five vast stellar nurseries less than 1,500 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 9.7 trillion kilometers.

To come up with their atlas, scientists pieced together more than 1 million images taken over five years by the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The observatory’s infrared survey telescope was able to peer through clouds of dust and discern infant stars.

“We can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” University of Vienna’s Stefan Meingast, the lead author, said in a statement.

The observations, conducted from 2017 to 2022, will help researchers better understand how stars evolve from dust, Meingast said.

The findings, appearing in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, complement observations by the European Space Agency’s star-mapping Gaia spacecraft, orbiting nearly 1.5 million kilometers away.

Gaia focuses on optical light, missing most of the objects obscured by cosmic dust, the researchers said.
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The World Health Organization on Thursday declared mpox — formerly known as monkeypox — no longer poses a global public health emergency.

At a briefing at agency headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the organization’s emergency committee on mpox met and recommended the multi-country outbreak no longer represents a public health emergency of international concern, and that he accepted that recommendation.

One major factor in the decision Tedros cited was a nearly 90% drop in cases of the disease during the last three months compared to the previous three months.

The WHO chief credited the sharp drop in cases to the work of community organizations and public health authorities around the world. The United Nations-linked health body noted that organizational efforts to inform the public of the risks of mpox, encouraging and supporting behavior change, and advocating for access to tests, vaccines and treatments, were critical.

But Tedros warned mpox continues to pose significant public health challenges that require “a robust, proactive and sustainable response.” In fact, Wednesday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a new cluster of cases were reported in Chicago.

Symptoms of mpox often include a rash that may be located on hands, feet, chest, face, or mouth or near the genitals, as well as fever, chills, and fatigue.

The WHO reported 98% of cases are among men who have sex with other men and can be spread from person to person through sexual contact, kissing, hugging and through contaminated clothing, towels and bed sheets.

In his briefing, Tedros said the misinformed stigma that mpox is a “gay disease” had been a driving concern in managing the epidemic, adding that it continues to hamper access to care for the disease. A feared much larger backlash against the most affected communities with mpox has largely not materialized.

As the outbreak expanded late last year, a trend of racist and stigmatizing language online and in some communities toward the term “monkeypox” was reported to the WHO. After consultations with international experts, the agency adopted mpox as a new, preferred term for the disease.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France Presse.
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A new wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City officially opened to the public in in early May. The futuristic space features new galleries including an insectarium, butterfly vivarium, floor-to-ceiling collections displays and more. Evgeny Maslov has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Vladimir Badikov 
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For two decades, scientists have been comparing every person’s full set of DNA they study to a template that relies mostly on genetic material from one man affectionately known as “the guy from Buffalo.”

But they’ve long known that this template for comparison, or “reference genome,” has serious limits because it doesn’t reflect the spectrum of human diversity.

“We need a really good understanding of the variations, the differences between human beings,” said genomics expert Benedict Paten of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re missing out.”

Now, scientists are building a much more diverse reference that they call a “pangenome,” which so far includes the genetic material of 47 people from various places around the world. It’s the subject of four studies published Wednesday in the journals Nature and Nature Biotechnology. Scientists say it’s already teaching them new things about health and disease and should help patients down the road.

Paten said the new reference should help scientists understand more about what’s normal and what’s not. “It is only by understanding what common variation looks like that we’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, this big structural variation that affects this gene? Don’t worry about it,'” he said.

A human genome is the set of instructions to build and sustain a human being, and experts define a pangenome as a collection of whole genome sequences from many people that is designed to represent the genetic diversity of the human species. The pangenome is not a composite but a collection; scientists depict it as a rainbow of stacked genomes, compared with one line representing the older, single reference genome.

The Human Pangenome Project builds upon the first sequencing of a complete human genome, which was nearly completed more than two decades ago and finally finished last year. Paten, a pangenome study author and project leader, said 70% of that first reference genome came from an African American man with mixed African and European ancestry who answered an ad for volunteers in a Buffalo newspaper in 1997. About 30% came from a mix of around 20 people.

The pangenome contains material from 24 people of African ancestry, 16 from the Americas and the Caribbean, six from Asia and one from Europe.

Although any two people’s genomes are more than 99% identical, Paten said “it’s those differences that are the things that genetics and genomics is concerned with studying and understanding.”

It may take a while for patients to see concrete benefits from the research. But scientists said new insights should eventually make genetic testing more accurate, improve drug discovery and bolster personalized medicine, which uses someone’s unique genetic profile to guide decisions for preventing, diagnosing and treating disease.

“The Pangenome Project gives a more accurate representation of the genome of people from around the world,” and should help doctors better diagnose genetic conditions, said clinical genetics expert Dr. Wendy Chung at Columbia University, who was not involved in the research.

If someone has a variation in a certain gene, it could be compared to the rainbow of references.

Study author Evan Eichler of the University of Washington said researchers will also learn more about genes already linked to problems, such as one tied to cardiovascular disease in African Americans.

“Now that we can actually sequence that gene in its entirety and we can understand the variation in that gene, we can start to go back to unexplained cases of patients with coronary heart disease” and look at them in light of the new knowledge, he said.

University of Minnesota plant genetics expert Candice Hirsch, who wasn’t involved in the research but has closely followed the effort, said she expects many discoveries to flow from it. Until now, “we really have only been able to scratch the surface of understanding the genetics that underlies disease,” she said.

The consortium leading the research is part of the Human Genome Reference Program, which is funded by an arm of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The team is in the process of adding to the collection of reference genomes, with the goal of having sequences from 350 people by the middle of next year. Scientists are also hoping to work more with international partners, including those focusing on Indigenous populations.

“We’re in it for the long game,” Paten said.
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Health agencies warn that viral hepatitis could kill more people by 2040 than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined if it remains a neglected disease and efforts to fight it remain underfunded.  

The World Health Organization reports every year that viral hepatitis, a potentially life-threatening liver infection, affects more than 350 million people globally and kills more than a million. Ninety percent of these infections and deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. 

Despite a cure for hepatitis C and a vaccine for hepatitis B, campaigners for a world free of this dangerous and debilitating disease remain far off that mark. 

“Over the last 10 years, we have seen really remarkable progress in this journey to eliminate viral hepatitis,” said Oriel Fernandez, senior director of the Viral Hepatitis Global Program at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, or CHAI.

“We have the tools to prevent, diagnose and treat viral hepatitis,” she said. “Secondly, the price of hepatitis drugs and diagnostics has significantly fallen over the years.” 

For example, Fernandez noted that in 2018, CHAI supported the government of Rwanda to set the lowest price for WHO-approved hepatitis B treatment. 

“The total cost to cure a patient dropped by 96%, from over $2,500 per person to less than $80 per person cured. And this made the idea of elimination affordable for Rwanda and really established a benchmark price for all countries to aim for,” she said. 

Pledging conference

But funding to help poor countries pay for the treatments and vaccines to cure and eliminate this debilitating disease remains elusive. To address this issue, the Hepatitis Fund and CHAI will hold the first-ever pledging conference in Geneva next week.  

The conference hopes to raise $150 million to support countries that are committed to the elimination of viral hepatitis and have taken action to implement programs toward this end. Organizers cite Egypt, Rwanda, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam among other countries that have begun this process. 

Kenneth Kabagambe, who has been living in Uganda with hepatitis B since 2012, is the founding executive director of the National Organization for People Living with Hepatitis B. He said he started the organization to raise awareness of the disease and to shatter the myths that stigmatize people and discourage them from seeking help. 

“For example, there are issues to do with the myths and misconceptions, which actually are drawn from the lack of clear information about the transmission of hepatitis B and hepatitis C in the communities,” he said. “These actually have led to domestic violence in some families because people think that hepatitis B is just casually transmitted, which is not correct.”

Hepatitis B is spread through sexual transmission and through contact with the blood, open sores or body fluids from a person infected with the disease. The main mode of transmission, however, is from mother to child during birth and delivery.   

WHO reports that about 70% of hepatitis B infections worldwide occur in Africa, and 70% of those infected with the disease are children younger than 5.   

Birth doses

While vaccination is the best way to prevent hepatitis B, Fernandez noted that the first birth dose of this vaccine has very low coverage in Africa. 

“In 2021, only 17% of newborn babies in the WHO Africa region received a timely hepatitis B birth dose,” she said. “And only 14 of the countries in the region have policies for routine HB-dose vaccinations.”   

Fernandez said effective and affordable treatments are available for both hepatitis B and hepatitis C, which is largely spread through unsafe drug injections and is a particularly huge problem in countries in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central and Southeast Asian regions, as well as some countries in the Western Pacific. 

“I think the bottom line is we do have effective tools for prevention in the case of hepatitis C and B, and treatment in the case of a cure for hepatitis C,” she said. “They just have not been implemented effectively, and to do this, we need a surge in financing. It is not an insurmountable goal. Countries have shown that we can do this.” 

Conference organizers say that investing $6 billion annually to end hepatitis in 67 low- and middle-income countries would prevent the deaths of 4.5 million people by 2030.  

They add, “For every dollar spent on HBV [hepatitis B virus] elimination activities, there is a two to four times return on investment.”
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The growing abilities of artificial intelligence have left many observers wondering how AI will impact people’s jobs and livelihoods. One expert in the field predicts it won’t have much effect, at least in the short term.  

The topic was a point of discussion at the annual TED conference held recently in Vancouver.   

In a world where students’ term papers can now be written by artificial intelligence, paintings can be drawn by merely uttering words and an AI-generated version of your favorite celebrity can appear on screen, the impact of this new technology is starting to be felt in societies and sparking both wonderment and concern.  

While artificial intelligence has yet to become pervasive in everyday life, the rumblings of what could be a looming economic earthquake are growing stronger.  

Gary Marcus is a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University who helped ride sharing company Uber adopt the rapidly developing technology. 

An author and host of the podcast “Humans versus Machines,” Marcus says AI’s economic impact is limited for now, although some jobs have already been threatened by the technology, such as commercial animators for electronic gaming. 

Speaking with VOA after a recent conference for TED, the non-profit devoting to spreading ideas, Marcus said jobs that require manual labor will be safe, for now.   

“We’re not going to see blue collar jobs replaced I think as quickly as some people had talked about.,” Marcus predicted. “So we still don’t have driverless cars, even though people have talked about that for years. Anybody that does something with their hands is probably safe right now. Because we don’t really know how to make robots that sophisticated when it comes to dealing with the real world.”          

Another TED speaker, Sal Khan, is the founder of Khanmigo, an artificial intelligence powered software designed to help educate children. He is optimistic about AI’s potential economic impact as a driver of wealth creation. 

“Will it cause mass dislocations in the job market? I actually don’t know the answer to that,” Khan said, adding that “It will create more wealth, more productivity.” 

The legal profession could be boosted by AI if the technology prompts litigation. Copyright attorneys could especially benefit. 

Tom Graham and his company, Metaphysic.ai, artificially recreate famous actors and athletes so they do not need to physically be in front of a camera or microphone in order to appear in films, TV shows or commercials.    

His company is behind the popular fake videos of actor Tom Cruise that have gone viral on social media. 

He says the legal system will play a role in protecting people from being recreated without their permission.  

Graham, who has a law degree from Harvard University, has applied to the U.S. Copyright Office to register the real-life version of himself.            

“We did that because you’re looking for legal institutions that exist today, that could give you some kind of protection or remedy,” Graham explained, “It’s just, if there’s no way to enforce it, then it’s not really a thing.”                                

Gary Marcus is urging the formation of an international organization to oversee and monitor artificial intelligence.   

He emphasized the need to “get a lot of smart people together, from the companies, from the government, but also scientists, philosophers, ethicists…” 

“I think it’s really important that we as a globe, think all these things through,” Marcus concluded, “And don’t just leave it to like 190 governments doing whatever random thing they do without really understanding the science.”     

The popular AI website ChatGPT has gained widespread attention in recent months but is not yet a moneymaker. Its parent company, OpenAI, lost more than $540 million in 2022.     
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An unmarried Chinese woman on Tuesday began her final appeal of a hospital’s denial of access to freeze her eggs five years ago in a landmark case of female reproductive rights in the country. 

Teresa Xu’s case has drawn broad coverage in China, including by some state media outlets, since she first brought her case to court in 2019. She lost her legal challenge last year at another Beijing court, which ruled the hospital did not violate her rights in its decision. 

The upcoming judgment will have strong implications for the lives of many unmarried women in China and the country’s demographic changes, especially after the world’s second-largest economy recorded its first population decline in decades. 

In China, the law does not explicitly ban unmarried people from services such as fertility treatments and simply states that a “husband and wife” can have up to three children. But hospitals and other institutions, in practice, implement the regulations in a way that requires people to present a marriage license. 

Xu, who wanted to preserve her eggs so she could have the option to bear children later, is one of those facing difficulties in accessing fertility treatment. 

In 2018, Xu, then 30 years old, had gone to a public hospital in Beijing to ask about freezing her eggs. But after an initial check-up, she was told she could not proceed without a marriage certificate. 

According to the judgment she received last year, the hospital argued that egg freezing poses certain health risks. It said that egg-freezing services were only available to women who could not get pregnant in the natural way, and not for healthy patients. 

But it also stated that delaying pregnancy could bring risks to the mother during pregnancy and “psychological and societal problems” if there is a large age gap between parents and their child. 

After Tuesday’s hearing, Xu told reporters that the denial constituted a violation of her right to bodily autonomy, and she chose to fight on because this matter is very important to single women. 

“I also have grown up a lot as the case evolves, I don’t want to give up easily,” she said. 

It is unclear when the court will hand down the judgment, she said. 
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A report by leading United Nations agencies says global progress in reducing maternal and newborn deaths has stalled for nearly a decade largely due to underinvestment in providing the health care.

The report shows more than 4.5 million women and babies die every year in pregnancy, childbirth or the first weeks after birth — equivalent to one death every seven seconds — “mostly from preventable or treatable causes if proper care was available.”

Allisyn Moran, unit head for maternal health at the World Health Organization, said all the deaths have similar risk factors and causes.

While the trends pre-date the coronavirus pandemic, she said “COVID-19-related service disruptions and funding diversions, rising poverty and worsening humanitarian crises are intensifying pressures on already overstretched maternity and newborn health services.”

Since 2018, the report finds, more than three-quarters of all conflict-affected and sub-Saharan African countries report funding for maternal and newborn health has declined and that only one in 10 of more than 100 countries surveyed reported they had the money needed to implement their current plans.

Speaking in Cape Town, South Africa, the site of a major global conference on maternal health, Moran said that a lack of investment in primary health care risked lowering survival prospects.

“For instance, while prematurity is now the leading cause of all under-5 deaths globally, less than a third of countries report having sufficient newborn care units to treat small and sick babies,” she said. “Two-thirds of emergency childbirth facilities in sub-Saharan Africa lack essential resources like medicines and supplies, water, electricity or staffing for 24-hour care.”

Steven Lauwerier, UNICEF director of health, agreed with that assessment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he said “babies, children, and women who were already exposed to threats to their well-being, especially those living in fragile countries and emergencies, are facing the heaviest consequences of decreased spending and efforts on providing quality and accessible healthcare.”

The report, “Improving Maternal and Newborn Health and Survival and Reducing Stillbirth,” found that in sub-Saharan Africa and central and southern Asia, the regions with the greatest number of newborn and maternal deaths, fewer than 60 percent of women receive even four of the WHO’s recommended eight prenatal checks.

“The death of any woman or young girl during pregnancy or childbirth is a serious violation of their human rights,” said Julitta Onabanjo, director of the technical division at the U.N. Population Fund.  “It also reflects the urgent need to scale-up access to quality sexual and reproductive health services as part of universal health coverage and primary health care, especially in communities where maternal mortality rates have stagnated or even risen during recent years.”

The authors of the report agree that women and babies must have quality, affordable health care before, during and after childbirth, as well as access to family planning services to increase survival rates.

They add that “more skilled and motivated health workers, especially midwives, are needed, alongside essential medicine and supplies, safe water, and reliable electricity.”

The stated aim of health leaders from over 30 countries attending the week-long conference is to develop plans that accelerate progress where it is most needed.

Anshu Banerjee, the WHO director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and aging, is in no doubt as to where that is. “Pregnant women and newborns continue to die at unacceptably high rates worldwide,” he said, “and the COVID-19 pandemic has created further setbacks to providing them with the healthcare they need.”

“If we wish to see different results, we must do things differently,” he said. “More and smarter investments in primary health care are needed now so that every woman and baby — no matter where they live — has the best chance of health and survival.”
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Providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women — such as offering aspirin — could prevent more than a million babies from being stillborn or dying as newborns in developing countries every year, new research said on Tuesday.   

An international team of researchers also estimated that one quarter of the world’s babies are born either premature or underweight, adding that almost no progress is being made in this area.    

The researchers called for governments and organizations to ramp up the care women and babies receive during pregnancy and birth in 81 low- and middle-income countries.   

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Timothy Obiezu

Eight proven and easily implementable measures could prevent more than 565,000 stillbirths in these countries, according to a series of papers published in the Lancet journal.    

The measures included providing micronutrient, protein and energy supplements, low-dose aspirin, the hormone progesterone, education on the harms of smoking, and treatments for malaria, syphilis and bacteria in urine.   

If steroids were made available to pregnant women and doctors did not immediately clamp the umbilical cord, the deaths of more than 475,000 newborn babies could also be prevented, the research found.    

Implementing these changes would cost an estimated $1.1 billion, the researchers said.   

This is “a fraction of what other health programs receive”, said Per Ashorn, a lead study author and professor at Finland’s Tampere University.    

‘Shockingly’ common 

Another study author, Joy Lawn of the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP that the researchers used a new definition for babies born premature or underweight.   

She said the traditional way to determine a baby had a low birthweight — if it was born weighing under 2.5 kilograms — was “a bit randomly selected” by a Finnish doctor in 1919.   

 This “very blunt measure” has remained the benchmark for more than a century, despite plentiful evidence that “those babies are not all the same”, Lawn said.   

The researchers analyzed a database that included 160 million live births from 2000 to 2020 to work out how often babies are born “too soon and too small”, she said.   

“Quite shockingly, we found that this is much more common once you start to think about it in a more nuanced way.”   

The researchers estimated that 35.3 million — or one in four — of the babies born worldwide in 2020 were either premature or too small, classifying them under the new term “small vulnerable newborns.”   

While most of the babies were born in southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Lawn emphasized that every country was affected.    

One reason progress has flatlined is that these problems tend “to be something that happens to families and women with less of a voice”, Lawn said.   

For example, pregnant African American women in the United States received a lower level of care than other groups, she added. 
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Tesla Inc on Monday broke ground on a Texas lithium refinery that CEO Elon Musk said should produce enough of the battery metal to build about 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) by 2025, making it the largest North American processor of the material. 

The facility will push Tesla outside its core focus of building automobiles and into the complex area of lithium refining and processing, a step Musk said was necessary if the auto giant was to meet its ambitious EV sales targets. 

“As we look ahead a few years, a fundamental choke point in the advancement of electric vehicles is the availability of battery grade lithium,” Musk said at the ground-breaking ceremony on Monday, with dozers and other earth-moving equipment operating in the background. 

Musk said Tesla aimed to finish construction of the factory next year and then reach full production about a year later. 

The move will make Tesla the only major automaker in North America that will refine its own lithium. Currently, China dominates the processing of many critical minerals, including lithium. 

“Texas wants to be able to be self-reliant, not dependent upon any foreign hostile nation for what we need. We need lithium,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at the ceremony. 

Musk did not specify the volume of lithium the facility would process each year, although he said the automaker would continue to buy the metal from its vendors, which include Albemarle Corp and Livent Corp. 

“We intend to continue to use suppliers of lithium, so it’s not that Tesla will do all of it,” Musk said. 

Albemarle plans to build a lithium processing facility in South Carolina that will refine 100,000 tons of the metal each year, with construction slated to begin next year and the facility coming online sometime later this decade. 

Musk did not say where Tesla will source the rough form of lithium known as spodumene concentrate that will be processed at the facility, although Tesla has supply deals with Piedmont Lithium Inc and others. 

‘Clean operations’

Tesla said it would eschew the lithium industry’s conventional refining process, which relies on sulfuric acid and other strong chemicals, in favor of materials that were less harsh on the environment, such as soda ash. 

“You could live right in the middle of the refinery and not suffer any ill effect. So they’re very clean operations,” Musk said, although local media reports said some environmental advocates had raised concerns over the facility. 

Monday’s announcement was not the first time that Tesla has attempted to venture into lithium production. Musk in 2020 told shareholders that Tesla had secured rights to 10,000 acres in Nevada where it aimed to produce lithium from clay deposits, which had never been done before on a commercial scale. 

While Musk boasted that the company had developed a proprietary process to sustainably produce lithium from those Nevada clay deposits, Tesla has not yet deployed the process. 

Musk has urged entrepreneurs to enter the lithium refining business, saying it is like “minting money.” 

“We’re begging you. We don’t want to do it. Can someone please?” he said during a conference call last month. 

Tesla said last month a recent plunge in prices of lithium and other commodities would aid Tesla’s bruised margins in the second half of the year. 

The refinery is the latest expansion by Tesla into Texas after the company moved its headquarters there from California in 2021. Musk’s other companies, including SpaceX and The Boring Company, also have operations in Texas. 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Arash Arabasadi

“We are proud that he calls Texas home,” Abbott said, saying Tesla and Musk are “Texas’s economic juggernauts.” 
…

Mexican officials and the conservation group Sea Shepherd said Monday that experts would set out in two ships in a bid to locate the few remaining vaquita marina, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. 

Mexico’s environment secretary said experts from the United States, Canada and Mexico will use binoculars, sighting devices and acoustic monitors to try to pinpoint the location of the tiny elusive porpoises. The species cannot be captured, held or bred in captivity. 

The trip will start Wednesday and run to May 26 in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, the only place the vaquita lives. The group will travel in a Sea Shepherd vessel and a Mexican boat and try to sight vaquitas. As few as eight of the creatures are believed to remain. 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Annika Hammerschlag

Illegal gillnet fishing traps and kills the vaquita. Fishermen set the nets to catch totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China and can fetch thousands of dollars per pound (0.45 kilograms). 

Sea Shepherd has been working in the Gulf alongside the Mexican navy to discourage illegal fishing in the one area where vaquitas were last seen. The area is known as the “zero tolerance” zone, and fishing is supposedly not allowed there. However, illegal fishing boats are regularly seen there, and so Mexico has been unable to completely stop them. 

Pritam Singh, Sea Shepherd’s chairman, said that a combination of patrols and the Mexican navy’s sinking of concrete blocks with hooks to snare illegal nets has reduced the number of hours that fishing boats spend in the restricted zone by 79% in 2022, compared with the previous year. 

Singh said that “the last 18 months have been incredibly impactful and encouraging,” while noting that “the road ahead for saving this species is long.” 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Henry Wilkins

The last such sighting expedition in 2021 yielded probable sightings of between five and 13 vaquitas, a decline from the previous survey in 2019. The porpoises are so small and so elusive, and are usually seen from so far away, that it is hard for observers to be certain that they saw a vaquita, count how many they saw or determine whether they saw the same animal twice. 

Illegal fishing itself has impeded population calculations in the past. 

According to a report published in 2022, both the 2019 and 2021 surveys “were hindered by the presence of many illegal fishing boats with gillnets in the water. Some areas could not be surveyed at all on some days due to the density of illegal fishing.” 

The government’s protection efforts have been uneven, at best, and often face violent opposition from local fishermen. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration has largely declined to spend money to compensate fishermen for staying out of the vaquita refuge and not using gillnets, or to monitor the fishing boats or the areas they launch from. 
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