Category: Silicon Valley

As the 2024 U.S. presidential race begins to ramp up, some contenders are already using artificial intelligence to generate promotional videos, some of which blur the lines between what is real and what is not. Karina Bafradzhian has the story. VOA footage by Andrey Degtyarev.
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Indigenous rangers in northern Australia have started managing herds of feral animals from space. In the largest project of its kind in Australia, the so-called Space Cows project involves tagging and then tracking a thousand wild cattle and buffalo via satellite.

Water buffalo were imported into Australia’s Northern Territory in the 19th century as working animals and meat for remote settlements. When those communities were abandoned, the animals were released into the wild.

Their numbers have grown, and feral buffaloes can cause huge environmental damage. In wetlands, they move along pathways called swim channels, which have caused salt water to flow into freshwater plains. This has led to the degradation and loss of large areas of paperbark forest and natural waterholes, as well as spreading weeds.  

Under the so-called Space Cows program, feral cattle and buffaloes are being rounded up, often by helicopter, tied to trees, and fitted with solar-powered tags that can be tracked by satellite.

Scientists say the real-time data will be critical to controlling and predicting the movement of the feral herds, which are notorious for trashing the landscape.

Most feral buffalo are found on Aboriginal land, and researchers are working closely with Indigenous rangers. They carry out sporadic buffalo culls, and there are hopes that First Nations communities can benefit economically from well-managed feral herds.

The technology will allow Indigenous rangers to predict where cattle and buffalo are going and cull them or fence off important cultural or environmental sites.  The data will help rangers stop the animals trampling sacred ceremonial areas and destroying culturally significant waterways.  Scientists say the satellite information will allow them to predict when herds might head to certain waterways in warm weather allowing rangers to intervene.

In recent years, thousands of wild buffalo have been exported from Australia to Southeast Asia.

Andrew Hoskins is a biologist at the CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s national science agency.

He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp’s AM Program this is the first time feral animals have been monitored from space.

“This really, you know, large scale tracking project, (is) probably the largest from a wildlife or a buffalo tracking perspective that has ever been done.  The novel part, I suppose, is then that links through to a space-based satellite system,” said Hoskins.

Australia has had an often-disastrous experience with bringing in animals from overseas since European colonization in the later 1800s.  It is not just buffaloes that cause immense environmental damage.   

Cane toads — brought to the country in a failed attempt to control pests on sugar cane plantations in the 1930s — are prolific breeders and feeders that can dramatically attack native insects, frogs, reptiles and other small creatures. Their skin contains toxic venom that can also kill native predators.

Feral cats kill millions of birds in Australia each year, while foxes, pigs and camels cause widespread ecological damage across Australia.  

Yellow crazy ants are one of the world’s worst invasive species.  Authorities believe they arrived in Australia accidentally through shipping ports.  They have been recorded in Queensland and New South Wales states as well as the Northern Territory.  The ants are a highly aggressive species and spit a formic acid, which burns the skin of their prey, including small mammals, turtle hatchlings and bird chicks.
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Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children.

“The inability for people to live their day-to-day life without encountering open-air drug use is so pressing on urban folks’ minds,” said John Horvick, vice president of polling firm DHM Research. “That has very much changed people’s perspective about what they think Measure 110 is.”

When the law was approved by 58% of Oregon voters three years ago, supporters championed Measure 110 as a revolutionary approach that would transform addiction by minimizing penalties for drug use and investing instead in recovery.

But even top Democratic lawmakers who backed the law, which will likely dominate the upcoming legislative session, say they’re now open to revisiting it after the biggest increase in synthetic opioid deaths among states that have reported their numbers.

The cycle of addiction and homelessness spurred by fentanyl is most visible in Portland, where it’s not unusual to see people using it in broad daylight on busy city streets.

“Everything’s on the table,” said Democratic state Sen. Kate Lieber, co-chair of a new joint legislative committee created to tackle addiction. “We have got to do something to make sure that we have safer streets and that we’re saving lives.”

Measure 110 directed the state’s cannabis tax revenue toward drug addiction treatment services while decriminalizing the possession of so-called “personal use” amounts of illicit drugs. Possession of under a gram of heroin, for example, is only subject to a ticket and a maximum fine of $100.

Those caught with small amounts of drugs can have the citation dismissed by calling a 24-hour hotline to complete an addiction screening within 45 days, but those who don’t do a screening are not penalized for failing to pay the fine. In the first year after the law took effect in February 2021, only 1% of people who received citations for possession sought help via the hotline, state auditors found.

Critics of the law say this doesn’t create an incentive to seek treatment.

Republican lawmakers have urged Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek to call a special session to address the issue before the Legislature reconvenes in February. They have proposed harsher sanctions for possession and other drug-related offenses, such as mandatory treatment and easing restrictions on placing people under the influence on holds in facilities such as hospitals if they pose a danger to themselves or others.

“Treatment should be a requirement, not a suggestion,” a group of Republican state representatives said in a letter to Kotek.

Law enforcement officials who have testified before the new legislative committee on addiction have proposed reestablishing drug possession as a class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail or a $6,250 fine.

“We don’t believe a return to incarceration is the answer, but restoring a (class A) misdemeanor for possession with diversion opportunities is critically important,” Jason Edmiston, chief of police in the small, rural city of Hermiston in northeast Oregon, told the committee.

However, data shows decades of criminalizing possession hasn’t deterred people from using drugs. In 2022, nearly 25 million Americans, roughly 8% of the population, reported using illicit drugs other than marijuana in the previous year, according to the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Some lawmakers have suggested focusing on criminalizing public drug use rather than possession. Alex Kreit, assistant professor of law at Northern Kentucky University and director of its Center on Addiction Law and Policy, said such an approach could help curb visible drug use on city streets but wouldn’t address what’s largely seen as the root cause: homelessness.

“There are states that don’t have decriminalization that have these same difficult problems with public health and public order and just quality-of-life issues related to large-scale homeless populations in downtown areas,” he said, mentioning California as an example.

Backers of Oregon’s approach say decriminalization isn’t necessarily to blame, as many other states with stricter drug laws have also reported increases in fentanyl deaths.

But estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show, among the states reporting data, Oregon had the highest increase in synthetic opioid overdose fatalities when comparing 2019 and the 12-month period ending June 30, a 13-fold surge from 84 deaths to more than 1,100.

Among the next highest was neighboring Washington state, which saw its estimated synthetic opioid overdose deaths increase seven-fold when comparing those same time periods, CDC data shows.

Nationally, overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl roughly doubled over that time span. Roughly two-thirds of all deadly overdoses in the U.S. in the 12 months ending June 30 involved synthetic opioids, federal data shows.

Supporters of Oregon’s law say it was confronted by a perfect storm of broader forces, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a mental health workforce shortage and the fentanyl crisis, which didn’t reach fever pitch until after the law took effect in early 2021.

A group of Oregon lawmakers recently traveled to Portugal, which decriminalized the personal possession of drugs in 2001, to learn more about its policy. State Rep. Lily Morgan, the only Republican legislator on the trip, said Portugal’s approach was interesting but couldn’t necessarily be applied to Oregon.

“The biggest glaring difference is they’re still not dealing with fentanyl and meth,” she said, noting the country also has universal health care.

Despite public perception, the law has made some progress by directing $265 million dollars of cannabis tax revenue toward standing up the state’s new addiction treatment infrastructure.

The law also created what are known as Behavioral Health Resource Networks in every county, which provide care regardless of the ability to pay. The networks have ensured about 7,000 people entered treatment from January to March of this year, doubling from nearly 3,500 people from July through September 2022, state data shows.

The law’s funding also has been key for providers of mental health and addiction services because it has “created a sustainable, predictable funding home for services that never had that before,” said Heather Jefferis, executive director of Oregon Council for Behavioral Health, which represents such providers.

Horvick, the pollster, said public support for expanding treatment remains high despite pushback against the law.

“It would be a mistake to overturn 110 right now because I think that would make us go backwards,” Lieber, the Democratic state senator, said. “Just repealing it will not solve our problem. Even if we didn’t have 110, we would still be having significant issues.” 
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A federal judge in Nevada has dealt another legal setback to Native American tribes trying to halt construction of one of the biggest lithium mines in the world.

U.S. District Judge Miranda Du granted the government’s motion to dismiss their claims the mine is being built illegally near the sacred site of an 1865 massacre along the Nevada-Oregon line.

But she said in last week’s order the three tribes suing the Bureau of Land Management deserve another chance to amend their complaint to try to prove the agency failed to adequately consult with them as required by the National Historic Preservation Act.

“Given that the court has now twice agreed with federal defendants (and) plaintiffs did not vary their argument … the court is skeptical that plaintiffs could successfully amend it. But skeptical does not mean futile,” Du wrote Nov. 9.

She also noted part of their case is still pending on appeal at the 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, which indicated last month it likely will hear oral arguments in February as construction continues at Lithium Nevada’s mine at Thacker Pass about 370 kilometers northeast of Reno.

Du said in an earlier ruling the tribes had failed to prove the project site is where more than two dozen of their ancestors were killed by the U.S. Cavalry Sept. 12, 1865.

Her new ruling is the latest in a series that have turned back legal challenges to the mine on a variety of fronts, including environmentalists’ claims it would violate the 1872 Mining Law and destroy key habitat for sage grouse, cutthroat trout and pronghorn antelope.

All have argued the bureau violated numerous laws in a rush to approve the mine to help meet sky-rocketing demand for lithium used in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.

Lithium Nevada officials said the $2.3 billion project remains on schedule to begin production in late 2026. They say it’s essential to carrying out President Joe Biden’s clean energy agenda aimed at combating climate change by reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

“We’ve dedicated more than a decade to community engagement and hard work in order to get this project right, and the courts have again validated the efforts by Lithium Americas and the administrative agencies,” company spokesperson Tim Crowley said in an email to The Associated Press.

Du agreed with the government’s argument that the consultation is ongoing and therefore not ripe for legal challenge.

The tribes argued it had to be completed before construction began.

“If agencies are left to define when consultation is ongoing and when consultation is finished … then agencies will hold consultation open forever — even as construction destroys the very objects of consultation — so that agencies can never be sued,” the tribal lawyers wrote in recent briefs filed with the 9th Circuit.

Will Falk, representing the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, said they’re still considering whether to amend the complaint by the Dec. 9 deadline Du set, or focus on the appeal.

“Despite this project being billed as `green,’ it perpetrates the same harm to Native peoples that mines always have,” Falk told AP. “While climate change is a very real, existential threat, if government agencies are allowed to rush through permitting processes to fast-track destructing mining projects like the one at Thacker Pass, more of the natural world and more Native American culture will be destroyed.”

The Paiutes call Thacker Pass “Pee hee mu’huh,” which means “rotten moon.” They describe in oral histories how Paiute hunters returned home in 1865 to find the “elders, women, and children” slain and “unburied and rotting.”

The Oregon-based Burns Paiute Tribe joined the Nevada tribes in the appeal. They say BLM’s consultation efforts with the tribes “were rife with withheld information, misrepresentations, and downright lies.”
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Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods.

“Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do.

The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text.

“We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,” said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. “Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.”

What’s at stake?

Perlmutter directs the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 480,000 copyrights last year covering millions of individual works but is increasingly being asked to register works that are AI-generated. So far, copyright claims for fully machine-generated content have been soundly rejected because copyright laws are designed to protect works of human authorship.

But, Perlmutter asks, as humans feed content into AI systems and give instructions to influence what comes out, “is there a point at which there’s enough human involvement in controlling the expressive elements of the output that the human can be considered to have contributed authorship?”

That’s one question the Copyright Office has put to the public.

A bigger one — the question that’s fielded thousands of comments from creative professions — is what to do about copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation.

More than 9,700 comments were sent to the Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, before an initial comment period closed in late October. Another round of comments is due by December 6. After that, Perlmutter’s office will work to advise Congress and others on whether reforms are needed.

What are artists saying?

Addressing the “Ladies and Gentlemen of the US Copyright Office,” the Family Ties actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman said she was disturbed that AI models were “ingesting 100 years of film” and TV in a way that could destroy the structure of the film business and replace large portions of its labor pipeline.

It “appears to many of us to be the largest copyright violation in the history of the United States,” Bateman wrote. “I sincerely hope you can stop this practice of thievery.”

Airing some of the same AI concerns that fueled this year’s Hollywood strikes, television showrunner Lilla Zuckerman (Poker Face) said her industry should declare war on what is “nothing more than a plagiarism machine” before Hollywood is “coopted by greedy and craven companies who want to take human talent out of entertainment.”

The music industry is also threatened, said Nashville-based country songwriter Marc Beeson, who’s written tunes for Carrie Underwood and Garth Brooks. Beeson said AI has potential to do good but “in some ways, it’s like a gun — in the wrong hands, with no parameters in place for its use, it could do irreparable damage to one of the last true American art forms.”

While most commenters were individuals, their concerns were echoed by big music publishers — Universal Music Group called the way AI is trained “ravenous and poorly controlled” — as well as author groups and news organizations including The New York Times and The Associated Press.

Is it fair use?

What leading tech companies like Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are telling the Copyright Office is that their training of AI models fits into the “fair use” doctrine that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.

“The American AI industry is built in part on the understanding that the Copyright Act does not proscribe the use of copyrighted material to train Generative AI models,” says a letter from Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The purpose of AI training is to identify patterns “across a broad body of content,” not to “extract or reproduce” individual works, it added.

So far, courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should treat AI systems. In a defeat for visual artists, a federal judge in San Francisco last month dismissed much of the first big lawsuit against AI image-generators, though allowed some of the case to proceed.

Most tech companies cite as precedent Google’s success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors’ claim that Google’s digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

But that’s a flawed comparison, argued former law professor and bestselling romance author Heidi Bond, who writes under the pen name Courtney Milan. Bond said she agrees that “fair use encompasses the right to learn from books,” but Google Books obtained legitimate copies held by libraries and institutions, whereas many AI developers are scraping works of writing through “outright piracy.”

Perlmutter said this is what the Copyright Office is trying to help sort out.

“Certainly, this differs in some respects from the Google situation,” Perlmutter said. “Whether it differs enough to rule out the fair use defense is the question in hand.”
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Advertisers are fleeing social media platform X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with billionaire owner Elon Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

IBM said this week that it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis — a fresh setback as the platform, formerly known as Twitter, tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue.

The liberal advocacy group Media Matters said in a report Thursday that ads from Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal’s Bravo network and Comcast also were placed next to antisemitic material on X.

“IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a statement.

Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal and Comcast didn’t respond immediately to requests seeking comment on their next steps.

The European Union’s executive branch said separately Friday it is pausing advertising on X and other social media platforms, in part because of a surge in hate speech. Later in the day, Disney, Lionsgate and Paramount Global also said they were suspending or pausing advertising on X.

Musk sparked outcry this week with his own tweets responding to a user who accused Jews of hating white people and professing indifference to antisemitism. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk tweeted in a reply Wednesday.

Musk has faced accusations of tolerating antisemitic messages on the platform since purchasing it last year, and the content on X has gained increased scrutiny since the war between Israel and Hamas began.

“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Friday in response to Musk’s tweet.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said X’s “point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board.”

“I think that’s something we can and should all agree on,” she tweeted Thursday.

Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal executive, was hired by Musk to rebuild ties with advertisers who fled after he took over, concerned that his easing of content restrictions was allowing hateful and toxic speech to flourish and that would harm their brands.

“When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop,” Yaccarino said.

Media Matters and Anti-Defamation League

The accounts that Media Matters found posting antisemitic material will no longer be monetizable and the specific posts will be labeled “sensitive media,” according to a statement from X. Still, Musk decried Media Matters as “an evil organization.”

The head of the Anti-Defamation League also hit back at Musk’s tweets this week, in the latest clash between the prominent Jewish civil-rights organization and the billionaire businessman.

“At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said on X.

Musk also tweeted this week that he was “deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.”

The group has previously accused Musk of allowing antisemitism and hate speech to spread on the platform and amplifying the messages of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who want to ban the ADL.

European Commission steps back

The European Commission, meanwhile, said it’s putting all its social media ad efforts on hold because of an “alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech” on platforms in recent weeks.

The commission, the 27-nation EU’s executive arm, said it is advising its services to “refrain from advertising at this stage on social media platforms where such content is present,” adding that the freeze doesn’t affect its official accounts on X.

The EU has taken a tough stance with new rules to clean up social media platforms, and last month it made a formal request to X for information about its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the Israel-Hamas war.

TikTok troubles

X isn’t alone in dealing with problematic content since the conflict.

On Thursday, TikTok removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica after users on the app posted sympathetic videos about Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the terrorist attacks against Americans on 9/11 and criticizing U.S. support for Israel. The Guardian news outlet, which published the transcript of the letter that was being shared, took it down and replaced it with a statement that directed readers to a news article from 2002 that it said provided more context.

The videos garnered widespread attention among X users critical of TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. TikTok said the letter was not a trend on its platform and blamed an X post by journalist Yashar Ali and media coverage for drawing more engagement to the hashtag.

The short-form video app has faced criticism from Republicans and others who say the platform has been failing to protect Jewish users from harassment and pushing pro-Palestinian content to viewers.

TikTok has aggressively pushed back, saying it’s been taking down antisemitic content and doesn’t manipulate its algorithm to take sides. 
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SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was presumed to have failed in space minutes after lifting off on Saturday in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion.

The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, soaring roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) above ground on a planned 90-minute flight into space.

But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it appeared to achieve a crucial maneuver to separate with its core stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching.

Meanwhile, the core Starship booster carried further toward space, but roughly 10 minutes into the flight a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle.

“We have lost the data from the second stage. … We think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX’s livestream host John Insprucker said.

The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, following an April attempt that ended in failure about four minutes after liftoff.

A live SpaceX webcast of Saturday’s launch showed the rocket ship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life.

The test flight’s principal objective was to get Starship off the ground and into space just shy of Earth’s orbit. Doing so would have marked a key step toward achieving SpaceX’s goal of producing a large, multipurpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo back to the moon later this decade for NASA, and ultimately to Mars.

Musk — SpaceX’s founder, chief executive and chief engineer — also sees Starship as eventually replacing the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as the centerpiece of its launch business, which already takes most of the world’s satellites and other commercial payloads into space.

NASA, SpaceX’s primary customer, has a considerable stake in the success of Starship, which the U.S. space agency is counting on to play a central role in its human spaceflight program, Artemis, successor to the Apollo missions of more than a half century ago that put astronauts on the moon for the first time.

The mission’s objective was to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii’s coast. The launch had been scheduled for Friday but was pushed back by a day for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.

During its April 20 test flight, the spacecraft blew itself to bits less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight that went awry from the start. SpaceX has acknowledged that some of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent, and that the lower-stage booster rocket failed to separate as designed from the upper-stage Starship before the flight was terminated. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed earlier this week that Beijing will crack down on companies in China that produce precursor chemicals for fentanyl, an agreement that Biden said would “save lives.”

In exchange, the Biden administration agreed to lift sanctions on China’s Physical Evidence Identification Center of the Ministry of Public Security and the National Drug Laboratory. In May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce sanctioned the lab for allegedly participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

China, which is the source of most fentanyl precursors used in the U.S., argued that U.S. export controls have “severely affected” China’s inspection and testing of fentanyl-related substances and impaired its “goodwill to help the U.S. in drug control,” according to the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the United States.

Although a cooperative effort to curb the supply of fentanyl brought some results over the years, enthusiasm dampened as tensions grew between China and the U.S. On Aug. 5, 2022 — after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing considers its own — China officially announced the suspension of anti-drug cooperation with the U.S.

Here is some background to the Biden-Xi deal.

What is fentanyl?

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It is a prescription drug in the United States used for treating severe pain.

Illegally manufactured fentanyl “is often added to other drugs because of its extreme potency, which makes drugs cheaper, more powerful, more addictive, and more dangerous,” according to the CDC.

Fentanyl sold on the black market is often mixed with heroin and/or cocaine to increase a user’s sense of euphoria, according to the CDC.

Why does the United States care about the fentanyl issue?

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 49, according to U.S. Department of Justice data.

What does the fentanyl problem in the United States have to do with China?

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service: “Prior to 2019, China was the primary source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl, fentanyl-related substances, and production equipment.” It said Chinese traffickers supplied fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances to the U.S. via international mail and express consignment operations.

Xi promised then-U.S. President Donald Trump to tighten regulation of fentanyl and related substances when the two met in 2018 on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was seen as a move taken by China to ease trade disputes.

China then passed new laws that took effect on May 1, 2019, to put all fentanyl-related substances under national control.

In July 2022 testimony, a senior adviser to the Office of National Drug Control Policy stated that as a result, “the direct shipment of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances from China to the United States went down to almost zero.”

What role does China play?

After China regulated fentanyl-related substances, Mexican transnational criminal organizations became the main operators in the production and distribution of illegal fentanyl in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

“The cartels are buying precursor chemicals in the People’s Republic of China (PRC); transporting the precursor chemicals from the PRC to Mexico; using the precursor chemicals to mass produce fentanyl; pressing the fentanyl into fake prescription pills; and using cars, trucks, and other routes to transport the drugs from Mexico into the United States for distribution,” said Anne Milgram, administrator of DEA, at a Senate hearing in February.

Why does the US accuse China of lax cooperation?

Certain precursors used in the production of fentanyl are internationally classified as unscheduled chemicals and legal to produce in China and export. Beijing argues that it cannot restrict the export of precursors that are not illegal.

The U.S. has repeatedly called on China to adopt a “know-your-customer” approach such as identifying and verifying customer identities to ensure that these chemicals are not sold to likely drug traffickers and to alert authorities about such buyers.

However, in an interview with Newsweek in September 2022, Qin Gang, the then-Chinese ambassador to the U.S., said that approach “goes far beyond the obligations of countries under the United Nations Convention on Drug Control.”
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Britain’s medicines regulator has authorized the world’s first gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease, in a move that could offer relief to thousands of people with the crippling disease in the U.K.

In a statement Thursday, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency said it approved Casgevy, the first medicine licensed using the gene editing tool CRISPR, which won its makers a Nobel prize in 2020.

The agency approved the treatment for patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia who are 12 years old and older. Casgevy is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Europe) Ltd. and CRISPR Therapeutics. To date, bone marrow transplants, extremely arduous procedures that come with very unpleasant side effects, have been the only long-lasting treatment.

“The future of life-changing cures resides in CRISPR based (gene-editing) technology,” said Dr. Helen O’Neill of University College London.

“The use of the word ‘cure’ in relation to sickle cell disease or thalassemia has, up until now, been incompatible,” she said in a statement, calling the MHRA’s approval of gene therapy “a positive moment in history.”

Both sickle cell disease and thalassemia are caused by mistakes in the genes that carry hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carry oxygen. 

In people with sickle cell — which is particularly common in people with African or Caribbean backgrounds — a genetic mutation causes the cells to become crescent-shaped, which can block blood flow and cause excruciating pain, organ damage, stroke and other problems.

In people with thalassemia, the genetic mutation can cause severe anemia. Patients typically require blood transfusions every few weeks, and injections and medicines for their entire life. Thalassemia predominantly affects people of South Asian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern heritage.

The new medicine, Casgevy, works by targeting the problematic gene in a patient’s bone marrow stem cells so that the body can make properly functioning hemoglobin.

Patients first receive a course of chemotherapy, before doctors take stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow and use genetic editing techniques in a laboratory to fix the gene. The cells are then infused back into the patient for a permanent treatment. Patients must be hospitalized at least twice — once for the collection of the stem cells and then to receive the altered cells.

“This is so exciting. It’s a new wave of treatments that we can utilize for patients with sickle cell disease,” said Dr. James LaBelle, director of the pediatric stem cell and cellular therapy program at the University of Chicago. He said Britain’s approval suggested the U.S. authorization was likely “imminent.”

Casgevy is currently being reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; the agency is expected to make a decision early next month, before considering another sickle cell gene therapy.

LaBelle said officials at the University of Chicago are “already moving forward to build not only the clinical infrastructure but also the reimbursement infrastructure to get these patients this treatment.”

Britain’s regulator said its decision to authorize the gene therapy for sickle cell disease was based on a study done on 29 patients, of whom 28 reported having no severe pain problems for at least one year after being treated. In the study for thalassemia, 39 out of 42 patients who got the therapy did not need a red blood cell transfusion for at least a year afterwards.

Gene therapy treatments can cost millions of dollars and experts have previously raised concerns that they could remain out of reach for the people who would benefit most.

Last year, Britain approved a gene therapy for a fatal genetic disorder that had a list price of £2.8 million ($3.5 million). England’s National Health Service negotiated a significant confidential discount to make it available to eligible patients.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals said it had not yet established a price for the treatment in Britain and was working with health authorities “to secure reimbursement and access for eligible patients as quickly as possible.”

In the U.S., Vertex has not released a potential price for the therapy, but a report by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review said prices up to around $2 million would be cost-effective. By comparison, research earlier this year showed medical expenses for current sickle cell treatments, from birth to age 65, add up to about $1.6 million for women and $1.7 million for men.

Medicines and treatments in Britain must be recommended by a government watchdog before they are made freely available to patients in the national health care system.

Millions of people around the world, including about 100,000 in the U.S., have sickle cell disease. It occurs more often among people from places where malaria is or was common, like Africa and India, and is also more common in certain ethnic groups, such as people of African, Middle Eastern and Indian descent. Scientists believe being a carrier of the sickle cell trait helps protect against severe malaria.
…

The U.S. flu season is under way, with at least seven states reporting high levels of illnesses and cases rising in other parts of the country, health officials say.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted new flu data Friday, showing very high activity last week in Louisiana, and high activity in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico and South Carolina. It was also high in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory where health officials declared an influenza epidemic earlier this month.

“We’re off to the races,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert.

Traditionally, the winter flu season ramps up in December or January. But it took off in October last year, and is making a November entrance this year.

Flu activity was moderate but rising in New York City, Arkansas, California, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. And while flu activity has been high in Alaska for weeks, the state did not report data last week, so it wasn’t part of the latest count.

Tracking during flu season relies in part on reports of people with flu-like symptoms who go to doctor’s offices or hospitals; many people with the flu are not tested, so their infections aren’t lab-confirmed. COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses can sometimes muddy the picture.

Alicia Budd, who leads the CDC’s flu surveillance team, said several indicators are showing “continued increases” in flu.

There are different kinds of flu viruses, and the version that’s been spreading the most so far this year usually leads to a lesser amount of hospitalizations and deaths in the elderly — the group on whom flu tends to take the largest toll.

So far this fall, the CDC estimates at least 780,000 flu illnesses, at least 8,000 hospitalizations and at least 490 flu-related deaths — including at least one child.

Budd said that it’s not yet clear exactly how effective the current flu vaccines are, but the shots are well-matched to the flu strains that are showing up. In the U.S., about 35% of U.S. adults and 33% of children have been vaccinated against flu, current CDC data indicates. That’s down compared to last year in both categories.

Flu vaccination rates are better than rates for the other two main respiratory viruses — COVID-19 and RSV. About 14% of adults and 5% of children have gotten the currently recommended COVID-19 shot, and about 13.5% of adults 60 and older have gotten one of the RSV shots that became available earlier this year.
…

In the Arctic, the impact of climate change is happening at an accelerated pace, with temperatures rising two to four times faster than the global average.

“It’s called the polar amplification,” explains Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “Snow and ice reflect lots of energy back to space when ice and snow are melting, and the surface turns much darker. So this amount of energy will be absorbed by the surface, and it will make the surface warmer – at the same time making the atmosphere warmer as well.”

Communities in circumpolar regions of Alaska are dealing with a triple challenge of climate change: coastal erosion, thawing of permafrost on which buildings and infrastructure stand, and, for some communities, the challenge of managing encounters with apex predators — polar bears pushed onshore.

“An optimal habitat for polar bears now is basically absent, it’s disappeared,” says Todd Atwood, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey. He has been studying polar bears for the past 12 years and says melting sea ice makes it harder for bears to hunt seals.

“That tends to be the trigger for bears to either stay with the sea ice as it retreats further over those deeper waters, or, for a growing proportion of the population to make the swim to shore.”

In addition to the high risk of succumbing to sea conditions on a long swim, bears trying to adapt to life on land face an additional risk as they search for new sources of food.

“They’re coming ashore in areas where people are active, whether it’s near communities where people are engaged in subsistence activities, or whether it’s in the oil and gas industrial footprint where people are working [outdoors] on a daily basis,” Atwood says. “And that raises the likelihood of human-bear interactions and conflict.”

In the Inupiat village of Kaktovik on Alaska’s North Slope, posters warn people to be on the lookout for polar bears.

Six hundred kilometers from the nearest big city, Kaktovik hosted visitors on polar bear tours before the COVID pandemic. Those restrictions are now lifted, but it’s contractors, not tourists, occupying the main hotel as they work to complete repairs to the local school and maintain infrastructure before the harsh winter weather and darkness set in.

Lee Kyoutak picks up visitors from the landing strip where small planes carrying a few passengers and supplies land when the island’s frequently foggy weather allows it. He says not to worry about hearing shots or firecrackers. “There’s a polar bear patrol patrolling the village,” he said. “If you go out, just make sure you look around when you go out because there’s polar bears hanging around.”

Kaktovik is one of six communities in North Alaska where residents receive special training provided by the North Slope Borough and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to join Polar Bear Patrols that use non-lethal deterrents to haze bears who sneak into areas where people live or work.

In traditional indigenous communities such as Nuiqsut, Utqiagvik (Barrow), and Kaktovik where there is seasonal whale hunting, polar bears attracted to bowhead whale bones discarded outside the village keep those patrols especially busy. Some encounters between bears and humans can be lethal — for either side.

Inupiat wildlife guide Robert Thompson says he rarely walks around the village unarmed, especially at night.

“I had to shoot two bears that came after me,” he said. “I don’t want to do it, but when bears come after you, you got to defend yourself. One was four to five feet from my doorway, and another one tried to jump into the house though my bedroom window.”

Thompson came to Kaktovik more than 50 years ago. Back then, he says “ice was visible all summer. Pack ice, meaning ice that doesn’t melt. And so, recently, we had 700 miles of open water toward the North Pole. So that’s affecting the polar bears. With the ice around us melting, they are trying to swim ashore. The cubs don’t make it.”

Scientists have recorded polar bears swimming as far as 350 kilometers over several days. Even strong swimmers may not survive the challenge.

Research led by the U.S. Geological Survey shows that in the first decade of the 21st century, the number of polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea dropped 40%.

“One of the things that we’re pretty confident of as a polar bear research community is that without sea ice, you’re not going to have polar bears,” Atwood said. “They represent a kind of the canary in the cryosphere in the sense that they are the animal that is probably most associated with the threat of climate change to wildlife persistence.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the polar bear as a vulnerable species most threatened by the loss of sea ice. With an estimated 26,000 bears remaining worldwide, the group says all but a few of those bears could be lost by the end of the century without action on climate change.
…

After a barrage of earthquakes that herald an impending volcanic eruption, some evacuated residents of the Icelandic town of Grindavik wonder if they will ever return.

“There are going to be a lot of people who don’t want to go there. My mother said, ‘I never want to go there again,’” Eythor Reynisson, who was born and raised in Grindavik, told AFP.

The fishing port of 4,000 people on Iceland’s south coast was evacuated on November 11 after magma shifting under the Earth’s crust caused hundreds of earthquakes — a warning of a likely volcanic eruption.

Thousands of smaller tremors have shaken the region since.

With massive crevices ripping roads apart and buildings’ concrete foundations shattered, the once picturesque Grindavik now resembles a war zone.

The damage to the town hall will take months to repair.

Long-term threat

Even if the magma flow stops and no eruption occurs, “there is the issue of whether one should live in a town like this,” Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told AFP.

The Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced an eruption for eight centuries until 2021.

Since then, three eruptions have struck — all in remote uninhabited areas — and volcanologists believe this may be the start of a new era of activity in the region.

Sigmundsson warned that “a difficult period of uncertainty” lies ahead, as eruptions could happen in the coming years.

That has left residents wondering whether it is worth rebuilding their homes.

Sigmundsson said that for the region to be deemed safe, the current activity would first need to cease.

“There is a possibility that the activity will move to another area. And then it could be acceptable to go back to Grindavik,” he said.

Strong community

Despite the conditions, a resilient community spirit was evident as residents this week queued to enter Grindavik to collect belongings they left in their hurried evacuation. 

Residents embraced each other and shared moments of laughter.

“I am really emotional. That’s basically how I am feeling right now,” Johannes Johannesson told AFP.

For some, living around volcanoes comes with the territory.

“We are a strong community, so I think it’s possible to build it up again,” Reynisson said.

Iceland is home to 33 active volcano systems, the highest number in Europe. Towns have been hit before.

In 1973, a fissure erupted just 150 meters (164 yards) from the town center on the island of Heimaey, surprising locals at dawn.

A third of the homes were destroyed, and the 5,300 residents were evacuated. One person died.

In Grindavik, steam fills the air from burst hot water pipes and the electricity grid struggles to keep operating at night because of the infrastructure damage.

Locals are now seeking accommodation in hotels, with friends and family, and at emergency shelters while they wait for life to return to normal.

Authorities have organized occasional trips into the port town, escorting those with homes in the most perilous parts to rescue everything from cherished pets to photo albums, furniture and clothing.

But the operations proceed with utmost caution. On Tuesday the village was quickly emptied as sulfur dioxide measurements indicated the magma was moving closer to the surface.

“There was panic,” Reynisson acknowledged.

Today or in a month

For almost a week, Iceland has been on tenterhooks, prepared for an eruption at any moment.

“There is still a flow of new magma into this crack, and it is widening,” Sigmundsson explained.

As long as there is an inflow of magma into the crack, the likelihood of an eruption remains high.

“We need to be prepared for an eruption happening today or within the coming week or even up to a month,” the researcher said.

The most likely place for an eruption “is from the town of Grindavik northwards,” Sigmundsson said.

For residents, this means an extended and anxiety-filled time over the weeks to come.

“Plans now are to try to manage — try to just get the family into a routine and keep on going,” Johannesson said. 
…

The moon glowed in the predawn Mongolia sky as Agvaantogtokh and his family prepared for another big move. On horseback, he rode to a well with nearly a thousand sheep and goats. Occasionally, he and his wife, Nurmaa, stopped to help struggling young ones, weak after a harsh winter.

Thousands of miles away in Senegal, Amadou Altine Ndiaye’s family led livestock through a sparse African savannah. Horses and donkeys pulled a four-cart caravan along dirt paths in sweltering heat. Cattle followed. The family believed the next village would be richer with vegetation.

“I was born into pastoralism, and since then I’ve known only that,” said Ndiaye, 48, a member of the Muslim Fulani ethnic group who learned the ways of herding alongside his elders. “It’s a source of pride.”

More than 50 million people in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere practice this way of life. As nomadic pastoralists, they keep domestic animals and move with them to seek fresh pastures — often selling some livestock for meat.

Although pastoralism has sustained these populations for millennia, it faces mounting pressures from deteriorating environments, shrinking rangelands, and new generations who seek a less grueling life. At the same time, pastoralism is modernizing, with groups leveraging technology.

The practice has survived for so long because it is designed to adapt to a changing environment — pastoralists move with animals to find fresh pasture and water, leaving behind fallow land to regrow.

Experts say it’s a lesson that could help those who raise livestock at larger scales adapt and reduce the impact on the environment. Pastoralists aren’t only trying to outrun climate change; they’re combating it.

‘We need more rain’

Perhaps more than any other place, Mongolia is known for pastoralism. The practice is enshrined in the nation’s constitution, which calls its 80 million camels, yaks, cows, sheep, goats and horses “national wealth” protected by the state.

For families like Agvaantogtokh’s, pastoralism is more than a profession. It’s a cultural identity that connects generations. At its heart is the human connection to animals.

Agvaantogtokh and his family sell animals for meat. They also sell dairy products such as yogurt and hard cheeses. While they consider animals their property, they also see them as living beings working alongside them.

Researchers say herders believe in “animal agency.” Agvaantogtokh lets his livestock pick grass, flowers or herbs to eat, and find their own water. To him, fencing an animal and asking it to eat the same thing daily is like putting a person in prison.

In Mongolia, weather extremes are a part of life. When Agvaantogtokh thinks about climate change, he worries about humans and livestock.

Chronic drought and warming plague Mongolia. Since 1940, the government says, average temperatures have risen 2.2 degrees Celsius. Dzuds — natural disasters unique to Mongolia caused by droughts and severe, snowy winters — have grown harsher and more frequent.

A dzud pushed Agvaantogtokh and his family to move out after a disastrous winter killed 400 of their animals.

The family lives simply. They have a sink with a rubber pump to limit water use. They live in a tent called a ger, with wooden circular frames insulated with sheepskin and felt, and doors facing east to let in the morning sun.

Nurmaa, who married into this way of life, uses a boiler fired with horse dung to cook and stay warm.

“Year by year,” she said, “I have learned a lot of things.” Herding and birthing animals. Setting up camp. Cooking meals of breads, stews, milk tea and homemade wine.

Surviving on the edge of the Sahara

In Senegal, caravans carry the comforts of a furnished home, such as a metal bed frame and mattress, and water for people and animals.

With the rainy season approaching earlier this year, Ndiaye, his son-in-law Moussa Ifra Ba and the rest of the family prepared for a 170-kilometer, 16-day trek.

“The livestock are hungry, and you sometimes have trouble selling one because it is so thin,” Ndiaye said. Water and plentiful grass have become harder to come by.

Ba said: “Many varieties of tree have disappeared, and even our children are unaware of certain species. The best varieties of grass no longer grow in certain areas, and the most widespread grass is more like rubber: It fills the belly but doesn’t nourish the animals.”

Meals for Ndiaye’s family rarely include meat. Only when they pass through certain villages can they stock up on food — vegetables, rice. Per-person meat consumption in Senegal is among the lowest in the world; rates are more than six times higher in Mongolia.

Ndiaye’s family doesn’t sell animals regularly. Meat is mostly for special occasions: weddings, holidays. When they do, a few head of cattle can provide enough money to get married, buy rice or even emigrate.

Ancient practice, new techniques

To keep their practice alive, pastoralists seek ways to modernize.

In Mongolia, Lkhaebum recently began using a motorbike to more easily search for horses. The family has a solar-powered battery that runs a television and washing machine, a karaoke machine, and a cellphone to keep track of weather and access Facebook groups where herders exchange information.

Though modern tools promise to make things easier, many pastoralists run into obstacles. Those in Senegal, for example, often struggle to find cellphone signals. They rely mostly on older technology and methods. An important advancement in infrastructure has helped: water towers known as forages that have sprung up with government assistance.

Perhaps the biggest threat to pastoralism comes from within, as the next generation chooses other paths.

Nurmaa and Agvaantogtokh’s 18-year-old daughter studies medicine. Their son spoke about becoming a herder in his early teens. But not anymore.

“I won’t regret anything if my child won’t be a herder,” Nurmaa said. “I would like them to do what they aspire to do.”

Four of Ndiaye’s seven living children don’t travel with their parents. Ba, 28, and his wife Houraye, 20, have a 2-year-old daughter and want to expand their family. They mused about a future in which at least one child stays in pastoralism while at least one goes to school.

“I’d like my children to keep up with the changing world,” Ba said. 
…

Hundreds of previously unreported workplace injuries surface at a space industry titan. Plus, the European Space Agency chief’s warning on climate change, and we say goodbye to a space travel pioneer. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. A caution to our viewers – this report contains graphic images some may find disturbing.
…

Advances in childhood cancer are a success story in modern medicine. But in the past decade, those strides have stalled for Black and Hispanic youth, opening a gap in death rates, according to a new report published Thursday.

Childhood cancers are rare and treatments have improved drastically in recent decades, saving lives.

Death rates were about the same for Black, Hispanic and white children in 2001, and all went lower during the next decade. But over the next 10 years, only the rate for white children dipped a little lower.

“You can have the most sophisticated scientific advances, but if we can’t deliver them into every community in the same way, then we have not met our goal as a nation,” said Dr. Sharon Castellino, a pediatric cancer specialist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, who had no role in the new report.

She said the complexity of new cancers treatments such as gene therapy, which can cure some children with leukemia, can burden families and be an impediment to getting care.

“You need at least one parent to quit their job and be there 24/7, and then figure out the situation for the rest of their children,” Castellino said. “It’s not that families don’t want to do that. It’s difficult.”

More social workers are needed to help families file paperwork to get job-protected leave and make sure the child’s health insurance is current and doesn’t lapse.

The overall cancer death rate for children and teenagers in the U.S. declined 24% over the two decades, from 2.75 to 2.10 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

The 2021 rate per 10,000 was 2.38 for Black youth, 2.36 for Hispanics and 1.99 for whites.

Nearly incurable 50 years ago, childhood cancer now is survivable for most patients, especially those with leukemia. The leading cause of cancer deaths in kids is now brain cancer, replacing leukemia.

Each year in the U.S. about 15,000 children and teens are diagnosed with cancer. More than 85% live for at least five years.

The improved survival stems from research collaboration among more than 200 hospitals, said Dr. Paula Aristizabal of the University of California, San Diego. At Rady Children’s Hospital, she is trying to include more Hispanic children, who are underrepresented in research.

“Equity means that we provide support that is tailored to each family,” Aristizabal said.

The National Cancer Institute is working to gather data from every childhood cancer patient with the goal of linking each child to state-of-the-art care. The effort could improve equity, said Dr. Emily Tonorezos, who leads the institute’s work on cancer survivorship.

The CDC’s report is “upsetting and discouraging,” she said. “It gives us a roadmap for where we need to go next.”
…

How was the air breathed by Caesar, the Prophet Mohammed or Christopher Columbus? A giant freezer in Copenhagen holds the answers, storing blocks of ice with atmospheric tales thousands of years old.

The Ice Core Archive, housing 25 kilometres (15 miles) of ice collected primarily from Greenland, is helping scientists understand changes in the climate.

“What we have in this archive is prehistoric climate change, a record of man’s activities in the last 10,000 years,” glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.

Blocks of ice have been his passion for 43 years — and it was while drilling into Greenland’s ice sheet that he met his wife Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, also a top expert in the field of paleoclimatology.

Steffensen has since 1991 managed the repository, one of the biggest in the world, with 40,000 blocks of ice stacked on long rows of shelves in large boxes.

The frozen samples are unique, made up of compressed snow and not frozen water.

“All the airspace between the snowflakes is trapped as bubbles inside (and) the air inside these bubbles is the same age as the ice,” Steffensen explained.

The repository’s antechamber is similar to a library’s reading room: this is where scientists can examine the ice they have withdrawn from the main “library”, or storage room.

But they must be quick: the temperature in the antechamber is kept at -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4F) — decidedly balmy compared to the -30C (-22F) in the storage room.

Here, Steffensen removes a block of ice from a box. Its air bubbles are visible to the naked eye: it’s snow that fell during the winter of year zero.

“So we have the Christmas stuff, the real Christmas snow,” says Steffensen with a big grin, his head covered in a warm winter bonnet with furry ear flaps.

Bedrock

A team of researchers brought the first ice cores to Denmark in the 1960s from Camp Century, a secret US military base on Greenland.

The most recent ones date from this summer, when scientists hit the bedrock on eastern Greenland at a depth of 2.6 kilometres, gathering the oldest ice possible.

Those samples contain extracts from 120,000 years ago, during the most recent interglacial period when air temperatures in Greenland were 5C higher than today.

“The globe has easily been much warmer than it is today. But that’s before humans were there,” Steffensen said.

This recently acquired ice should help scientists’ understanding of rising sea levels, which can only be partly explained by the shrinking ice cap.

Another part of the explanation comes from ice streams, fast-moving ice on the ice sheet that is melting at an alarming rate.

“If we understand the ice streams better, we can get a better idea of how much the contribution will be (to rising sea levels) from Greenland and Antarctica in the future,” Steffensen said.

He hopes they’ll be able to predict the sea level rise in 100 years with a margin of error of 15 centimetres — a big improvement over today’s 70 centimetres.

‘Treasure’

Ice cores are the only way of determining the state of the atmosphere prior to man-made pollution.

“With ice cores we have mapped out how greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane vary over time,” Steffensen said.

“And we can also see the impact of the burning of fossil fuels in modern times.”

This project is separate from the Ice Memory foundation, which has collected ice cores from 20 sites worldwide to preserve them for future researchers at the French-Italian Concordia research station in Antarctica, before they disappear forever due to climate change.

“Storing Greenland’s ice memory is very good,” said the head of the foundation, Jerome Chappellaz.

But, he noted, the storage of samples in an industrial freezer is susceptible to technical glitches, funding woes, attacks, or even wars.

In 2017, a freezer that broke down at the University of Alberta in Canada exposed 13 percent of its precious samples thousands of years old to undesirably warm temperatures.

At Concordia Station, the average annual temperature is -55C, providing optimal storage conditions for centuries to come.

“They have a treasure,” said Chappellaz, appealing to the Danes to join Concordia’s project.

“We must protect this treasure and, as far as possible, ensure that it joins mankind’s world heritage.”
…

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday granted Elon Musk’s SpaceX a license to launch the company’s second test flight of its next-generation Starship and heavy-lift rocket from Texas, the agency said. 

SpaceX said it was targeting Friday for a launch, saying a two-hour launch window opens at 7 a.m. Central Time (1300 GMT) and that local residents “may hear a loud noise” during the rocket’s ascent toward space. 

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency, which oversees commercial launch sites, said in a statement. 

SpaceX’s first attempt to send Starship to space was in April, when the rocket exploded mid-air four minutes after a liftoff that pulverized the company’s launchpad and flung sand and concrete chunks for miles. 

Though Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and founder, hailed the Starship launch attempt as exceeding his expectations, it fell far short of its overall test objectives to reach space, complete nearly a full revolution around Earth, and reenter the atmosphere for a splashdown off a Hawaiian coast. 

First the moon, eventually Mars

Starship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120 meters and designed to be fully reusable, represents SpaceX’s next-generation workhorse rocket system capable of ferrying some 150 tons of satellites into space. Plans also call for the rocket system to be used to carry crews of humans to the moon, and eventually Mars. 

The rocket is crucial for SpaceX’s increasingly dominant launch business. NASA, under a roughly $4 billion development contract with SpaceX, plans to use Starship around 2026 to land the first crew of humans on the moon’s surface since 1972. 

Hundreds of fixes before launch

The upcoming Starship flight will have the same test objectives as the first attempt. SpaceX made hundreds of fixes to the rocket’s design based on the April failure. The FAA required SpaceX to make dozens of fixes before allowing another Starship flight. 

SpaceX determined that an onboard fire prevented Starship — the rocket system’s upper stage — from separating from its Super Heavy first stage booster as planned. The rocket’s explosion was the result of an automated destruction command, which triggered some 40 seconds late. 
…

It began as a familiar old story.

In the early 2000s, multinational mining giant Rio Tinto came to the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to dig a nickel mine.

Environmentalists feared pollution. The company promised jobs.

The usual battle lines were drawn. The usual legal fights ensued.

But this time, something different happened.

The mining company invited a respected local environmental group to be an independent watchdog, conducting pollution testing that goes above and beyond what regulators require.

More than a decade has passed, and no major pollution problems have arisen. Community opposition has softened.

“I was fiercely opposed to the mine, and I changed,” said Maura Davenport, board chair of the Superior Watershed Partnership, the environmental group doing the testing.

The agreement between the mining company and the environmentalists is working at a time when demand for nickel and other metals used in green technologies is on the rise, but the mining activity that supplies those metals faces fierce local resistance around the world.

Historic mines, polluting history

The shift to cleaner energy needs copper to wire electrical grids, rare earth elements for wind turbine magnets, lithium for electric vehicle batteries, nickel to make those batteries run longer, and more. Meeting the goals of the 2015 U.N. Paris climate agreement would mean a fourfold increase in demand for metals overall by 2040 and a 19-fold increase in nickel, according to the International Energy Agency.

That means more mines. But mines rarely open anywhere in the world without controversy. Two nearby copper-nickel mine proposals hit major roadblocks this year over environmental concerns.

For the third year running, mining companies listed environmental, social and governance issues as the leading risk facing their businesses in a survey by consulting firm EY.

Mining is not new to the Upper Peninsula, the northern tip of the state of Michigan that is mostly surrounded by the Great Lakes. The region was the nation’s leading copper and iron producer until the late 1800s. An open-pit iron mine still operates about 20 kilometers (12 miles) southwest of the college town of Marquette.

Most of the historic copper mines closed in the 1930s. But the waste they left behind is still polluting today.

Residue left over from pulverizing copper ore, known as stamp sands, continues to drift into Lake Superior, leaching toxic levels of copper into the water.

“The whole history of mining is so bad, and we feared … for our precious land,” Davenport said.

The ore Rio Tinto sought is in a form known as nickel sulfide. When those rocks are exposed to air and water, they produce sulfuric acid. Acid mine drainage pollutes thousands of kilometers of water bodies across the United States. At its worst, it can render a stream nearly lifeless.

When Rio Tinto proposed building the Eagle Mine about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Marquette, “it divided our community,” Davenport said.

“The Marquette community was against the mine,” she said, but the “iron ore miners, they were all about it.”

Mining dilemma

It’s the same story the world over, according to Simon Nish, who worked for Rio Tinto at the time.

“Communities are faced with this dilemma,” Nish said. “We want jobs, we want economic benefit. We don’t want long-term environmental consequences. We don’t really trust the regulator. We don’t trust the company. We don’t trust the activists. … In the absence of trusted information, we’re probably going to say no.”

Nish came from Australia, where a legal reckoning had taken place in the 1990s over the land rights of the country’s indigenous peoples. Early in his career, he worked as a mediator for the National Native Title Tribunal, which brokered agreements between Aboriginal peoples and resource companies who wanted to use their land.

It was a formative experience.

“On the resource company side, you can crash through and get a short-term deal, but that’s actually not benefiting anybody,” he said. “If you want to get a long-term outcome, you’ve actually really got to understand the interests of both sides.”

“Absolutely skeptical”

When Nish arrived in Michigan in 2011, Rio Tinto’s Eagle Mine was under construction but faced multiple lawsuits from community opponents.

In order to quell the controversy, Nish knew that Rio Tinto needed a partner that the community could trust. So he approached the Superior Watershed Partnership with an unusual offer. The group was already running programs testing local waterways for pollution. Would they be willing to discuss running a program to monitor the mine?

“We were surprised. We were skeptical. Absolutely skeptical,” Davenport said. But they agreed to discuss it.

SWP insisted on full, unfettered access to monitor “anything, any time, anywhere,” Nish said.

SWP’s position toward Rio Tinto was “very, very clear,” he recalled: “‘We’ve spent a long time building our reputation, our credibility here. We aren’t going to burn it for you guys.'”

Over the course of several months — “remarkably fast,” as these things go, Nish said — the environmental group and the mining company managed to work out an agreement.

SWP would monitor the rivers, streams and groundwater for pollution from the mine and the ore-processing mill 30 kilometers (19 miles) south. It would test food and medicinal plants important for the local Native American tribe. And it would post the results of these and other tests online for the public to see.

And Rio Tinto would pay for the work. A respected local community foundation would handle the funds. Rio Tinto’s funding would be at arm’s length from SWP.

“We didn’t want to be on their payroll,” said Richard Anderson, who chaired the SWP board at the time. “That could not be part of the structure.”

Not over yet

The agreement launching the Community Environmental Monitoring Program was signed in 2012. More than a decade later, no major pollution problems have turned up.

But other local environmentalists are cautious.

“I do think [Eagle Mine is] really trying to do a good job environmentally,” said Rochelle Dale, head of the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, another local environmental group that has opposed the mine.

“On the other hand, a lot of the sulfide mines in the past haven’t really had a problem until after closure.

“It’s something that our grandchildren are going to inherit,” she said.

As demand for metals heats up, opposition to new mines is not cooling off. Experts say mining companies are wising up to the need for community buy-in. Eagle Mine’s Community Environmental Monitoring Program points to one option, but also its limitations.

So far, so good. But the story’s not over yet.
…