As politicians haggle at a U.N. climate conference in Poland over ways to limit global warming, the industries and machines powering our modern world keep spewing their pollution into the air and water.

The fossil fuels extracted from beneath the Earth’s crust — coal, oil and gas — are transformed into the carbon dioxide that is now heating the planet faster than scientists had expected even a few years ago.

The devastating wildfires, droughts, floods and hurricanes of recent months and years are intensifying the urgency of the two-week conference in Katowice, which is due to end Friday.

But not far from the conference center, plumes of smoke rise from Europe’s largest lignite, or brown coal, power plant, in the central Polish town of Belchatow. Of the 50 most polluted cities in the European Union, 36 are in Poland.

IN PHOTOS: The Urgency of Climate Talks 

Elsewhere, from the U.S. to Japan and China, the coal plants, oil refineries and other installations needed to power factories and heat homes are playing their role in a warming Earth.

The negotiators at the international talks are also discussing financial support to poor countries, which are bearing the brunt of drought and flooding, which translate often into agricultural disaster and famine and are a factor behind greater migration.

The challenge of reducing emissions is made more difficult by the growing demand in the developing world for fuel as people there also seek to achieve the benefits and comforts of the industrialized world.

In Africa and Asia, which have become dumping grounds for the rich world’s waste, it is now common to see poor people scavenging for scraps of paper and other recyclable materials at garbage dumps, competing sometimes with crows or storks.

Fumes from cars are also playing their role in poisoning the air in many cities, from Jakarta and Katmandu to Moscow to Brussels.

Environmentalists in Katowice are warning that time is running out to prevent ecological disaster, a message also being taken up by artists.

In London, 24 large blocks of glacial ice from the waters surrounding Greenland have been placed in front of the Tate Modern and six at other city locations. Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson hopes his installation, called “Ice Watch” and launched Tuesday to coincide with the climate conference in Katowice, will impact people emotionally and inspire urgent public action.

The installation will be on show until the ice melts.
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More than 60 people graduated in Juba this week with diplomas in midwifery and nursing. Their goal?  To reduce South Sudan’s high rate of maternal mortality.

Eight men were among the 66 graduates of the Kajo Keji Health Science Institute — an unusual occurrence in South Sudan, where midwifery is associated almost exclusively with women.

Samuel Ladu Morish, 26, says he felt he could no longer sit by and watch young women die because of childbirth.

“A lot of mothers are dying so [for] me particularly it pains me. That is why I felt I have to do that course, to try my level best to stop maternal mortality rate in South Sudan,” Morish told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.

Twenty-one-year-old Leju Henry, another male graduate, said he’s been asked many times why he decided to pursue a course in midwifery. Like Morish, Henry said he wants to help South Sudanese women, especially those who suffer complications in child labor.

“Most people think midwifery is a job for females only, but that is not the truth. … the definition of midwifery [is] that a midwife simply means someone who assists in child above all, but not necessarily means a fellow woman,” Henry said.

According to figures published by the World Health Organization in 2017, South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world — 789 women per 100,000 live births.

The rate has actually fallen in recent years, a trend that Makur Koriom, the undersecretary of South Sudan’s Ministry of Health, attributes to increased training of midwives and nurses.

He says South Sudan has added more than 800 midwives and nurses since 2010.

“We believe that’s important, because to address the current health challenges, investing in human resource is very important. But, of course, investment at [the] secondary level without concurrent development at the community level also will not yield [good results], because most of the issues happen at the community level,” Koriom told VOA.
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Most years, December offers up a spectacular light show in the skies, known to astronomy enthusiasts as the Geminid meteor shower.

This year, the celestial show is set to peak overnight Thursday and Friday, followed on Sunday by a bonus close-up visit by 46P/Wirtanen, the brightest comet to be seen from Earth this year.  

The comet will be visible to the naked eye when it flies by Sunday. According to Sky & Telescope magazine, it will also be among the 10 closest comet approaches to Earth since 1950 and the 20th-closest approach of a comet dating as far back as the ninth century.

The comet was first spotted in 1948 by U.S. astronomer Carl Wirtanen of Wisconsin.

While the Perseid meteor shower in August is more well-known, astronomers said Geminid puts on a better show with the best display of shooting stars. 

Geminid will be visible in both Northern and Southern hemispheres.
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The head of the Maldives delegation to the U.N. climate conference questioned on Thursday the point of the yearly summits, saying they are failing to produce meaningful results. 

Former President Mohamed Nasheed attended the 24th edition of the U.N. talks, being held this year in Poland and set to end Friday. After almost two weeks of talks, negotiators from almost 200 countries have not yet agreed on the rules for implementing the 2015 treaty from Paris on fighting global warming. 

“What’s the point,” Nasheed asked, of having such negotiations if they don’t lead to progress or solutions to problems that are related to the lives of people worldwide? 

“There is a view among many of us that this is failing,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. 

Nasheed said there is an urgent need to implement the Paris Agreement’s call for keeping global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) during this century. Without that, he said, the existence of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, will be threatened. 

He said a lack of agreement in Katowice would only worsen the situation. 

He said the Indian Ocean nations, thousands of years old, want to live “in our own homelands. We want to live with our communities with our culture, with our people.” 

“We don’t think that this is asking for much,” Nasheed said. “We are just only saying: Please do not kill us.”  
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Negotiators from nearly 200 countries produced a draft text Thursday on how to implement the Paris Agreement on combating global warming, but some disputes remain with only one day left before the official end of the conference.

The presidency of the climate talks in Katowice, Poland, had asked for a draft of the final package to be ready by Thursday afternoon after almost two weeks of negotiations, but work continued into the evening to get it ready.

The draft lays out options on ways to implement the 2015 Paris pact which aims to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius.

“We can implement the Paris Agreement as you all designed it. It is now time to move forward. We need to move. Climate change will not wait for us,” Poland’s Michal Kurtyka, president of the talks, told delegates.

Ministers are expected to continue working on sticking points through the night into Friday.

Disputes over finance have been a stumbling block at the talks, as well as monitoring and reporting countries’ efforts to reduce emissions. The United States, which intends to withdraw from the pact, is trying to ensure a level playing field for U.S. businesses against China.

“Money is the most difficult part of it. This is all money talk. This (meeting) is about technical decisions although it turned political,” one delegate told Reuters.

Groups of small island states and poorer countries, representing over 920 million people, issued a statement to Kurtyka expressing their frustration with the slow pace and lack of ambition of the talks.

“(We are) deeply concerned over the direction in which the outcomes … are heading,” the statement said, adding that a robust rulebook is needed to ensure ambitious emissions cuts are made.

The text still contains some wording in brackets, denoting it has yet to be agreed, but less than previous drafts.

The talks are formally scheduled to end Friday, but in the past they have often over-run into the weekend.
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A tourism spaceship soared to the edge of space Thursday, the first U.S. commercial flight to achieve the feat since the U.S. shuttle program ended in 2011.

The Virgin Galactic rocket plane, developed by British billionaire Richard Branson, climbed more than 80 kilometers above Earth, which the company considers the boundary of space.

The test flight signals a new age of civilian space travel, with Virgin Galactic competing with other ventures such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Virgin’s carrier airplane holding the VSS Unity spaceliner took off early Thursday from the Mojave Air and Space Port, about 145 kilometers north of Los Angeles, California. It returned to Earth minutes later.

After the spaceliner and its two test pilots topped an altitude of 80 kilometers, a crying Branson hugged and high-fived some of the hundreds of spectators who gathered in the California desert to witness the launch.

The test flight comes four years after Virgin Galactic’s original spaceliner crashed, killing the co-pilot and seriously injuring the pilot.

“We’ve had our challenges and to finally get to the point where we are at least within range of space altitude is a major deal for our team,” said Virgin Galactic CEO George Whiteside.

Virgin Galactic is spaceflight company within the London-based Virgin Group.
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Roaches are tough, they’re resilient, they’re filthy, and they’re big business in China. Entrepreneurs are breeding the crawly critters for use in everything from waste management to medicine. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Africans who have the blood disorder sickle cell anemia met this week in the northern Cameroon town of Garoua to step up an awareness campaign.

One hundred people with sickle cell from Cameroon and five other African countries sit and talk at the Garoua market square in northern Cameroon.  

They say their aim is to educate people about sickle cell, an inherited, generally incurable disease that causes tiredness, swelling of the hands and feet, vision problems, and episodes of severe pain.

The patients want to end superstitions about the disease and stop doctors from pushing harmful practices like bloodletting and concoctions that will supposedly fix their blood.

Among the patents here is 26-year old Hayatou Alimatu who lost two children to the disease.

She came out today with her only surviving child, an eight year old girl who also has sickle cell.

Painkillers are expensive, and she hopes to one day take the child to a developed country in the hopes of getting more advanced treatment that could improve her quality of life.

She said her daughter normally gets outstanding grades at school and her averages grades are at the top.  When she has severe episodes, known as crises, her grades drop.

Sickle cell anemia affects red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen throughout the body.  

Cells that are normally round become hard and look like the C-shaped farm tool called a sickle.  They get stuck in blood vessels, causing pain.  The cells also die early, causing a constant shortage of red blood cells.

Shattered dreams

Twenty-four-year old Blaise Fora said his hopes of getting married were shattered because he is a sickle cell patient.

He said he has decided to remain single because when he fell in love once and was preparing to get married, his fiancee’s family was vehemently opposed. They did not want him to – in their words – contaminate their daughter with sickle cell.  

Fora said the family was concerned that the couple’s children might be born with the disease.  Those types of concerns are shared by many people, and aid agencies are responding by suggesting couples that are about to marry to get genetic tests done first.

Haminatu Hadza Karim from Chad, is among those leading the largely informal campaign, organized by associations of sickle cell patients.

She says many of the women she works with have been thrown out by their husbands for delivering babies with sickle cell. She says she invites other women dealing with these prejudices to join them so they can fight for their rights and eradicate the disease.

Genetic counseling

Some people have the sickle cell trait without having the disease.  To pass on the disease to a baby, both parents must be carriers.

Dr. Oumar Zacki, who takes care of sickle cell patients in Garoua, says a lack of genetic counseling means many people are without crucial knowledge.

He says the population of Central and West Africa move about with no visible symptoms but who carry sickle cell genes, passed from generation to generation in a pattern of inheritance.

The World Health Organization reports that in Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Ghana and Nigeria, between 20 and 30 percent of the population carries the sickle cell trait.  In Uganda, more than 40 percent carry the trait.
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Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran have pledged to increase cooperation and information-sharing for effectively combating the trafficking of Afghan opiates.

War-shattered Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer of opium, though the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime noted in its latest survey the opium cultivation decreased by 20 percent in 2018 due to a severe drought and reduced prices.

The illegal opiates are largely smuggled to international markets through Pakistan and Iran.

Need for more initiatives

Afghan, Pakistan and Iranian counternarcotics officials concluded their two-day UNODC-facilitated interaction Wednesday in Islamabad, where delegates underscored the need for more efforts against the massive flow of illicit drugs.

Participants at the “Triangular Initiative” meeting called for timely sharing of information and conducting simultaneously interdiction operations along their shared largely porous borders.

The forum was established in 2007 with a mission to promote regional cooperation to reduce the poppy cultivation, trafficking, and consumption of drugs in the region and beyond.

Officials acknowledged that despite Afghanistan’s political tensions with Pakistan and Iran anti-drugs cooperation largely continues.

Renewed attitude

Cesar Guedes, UNODC representative in Pakistan, noted the three countries attended the Islamabad meeting with “a revived attitude and role”, raising prospects for more effective counternarcotics efforts in 2019.

“More needs to be done because the level of [Afghan opium] production has also increased. They need really to coordinate closer in their joint efforts,” he told VOA

Guedes also called for increased international assistance, saying Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran alone cannot curb the menace of drugs.

“This has to be done in the framework of shared responsibility. All the countries, producers, consumers and transit need to join the effort,” he said.

Despite many challenges facing the government, the head of the Afghan delegation said authorities have taken significant steps to eradicate drug trafficking.

US assistance

Director General for Policy Planing at the Afghan Ministry of Narcotics, Mohammad Osman Frotan, said 89 percent of poppy cultivation this year has taken place in the Afghan provinces most hit by insurgent activities. He said counternarcotics authorities during 2018 have seized more than 433 tons of different types of drugs, and arrested and prosecuted almost 4,000 suspects.

The United States has spent more than $8 billion in the past 17 years to assist Afghanistan in eradication efforts. But the effort has failed to stop opium production, which increased to record highs and stood at an estimated 9,000 tons in 2017. Critics blamed insecurity, rampant corruption and patronage by influential Afghans for the unprecedented growth.
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The United Nations secretary-general flew back to global climate talks in Poland Wednesday to appeal to countries to reach an agreement, as some observers feared the meeting might end without a deal.

U.N. chief Antonio Guterres opened the talks last week, telling leaders to take the threat of global warming seriously and calling it “the most important issue we face.”

But as the two-week meeting shifted from the technical to political phase, with ministers taking over negotiations, campaign groups warned of the risks of failure in Katowice.

Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International said the main holdouts were the United States, Australia and Japan, while the European Union was “a mere spectator.”

“A new leadership must step up,” said Vanessa Perez-Cirera of the environmental group WWF. “We cannot afford to lose one of the twelve years we have remaining.”

She was referring to a recent scientific report by a U.N.-backed panel that suggested average global warming can only be halted at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) if urgent action is taken by 2030, including a dramatic reduction in use of fossil fuels.

Endorsing the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change became a crunch issue over the weekend, with the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait opposing the move.

Jean-Pascal Ypersele, a former deputy chair of the panel, said whether or not countries believe the conclusions of the report was irrelevant because the science was clear.

“Nobody, even the so-called superpowers, can negotiate with the laws of physics,” he said.

Ypersele called for the 1.5-degree target — already mentioned in the 2015 Paris accord — to be recognized in the final text.

“It’s a question of survival for a large part of humanity, and many other species,” he said.

Poland, which is chairing the talks, was expected to circulate a condensed draft text Wednesday running to about 100 pages, down from about 300 at the start of the talks.

The Dec. 2-14 meeting is supposed to finalize the rules that signatories of the Paris accord need to follow when it comes to reporting their greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to reduce them.

Li Shuo, a climate expert at Greenpeace, warned that the current text was riddled with loopholes. “A Swiss cheese rulebook is unacceptable,” he said.

Poor countries also want assurances on financial support to tackle climate change.

A third objective of the talks is getting governments to make a firm commit to raising ambitions in the coming two years, albeit without any precise figures.

One issue that has risen to the fore at the talks is the proposal by Poland for countries to back the idea of a “just transition” for workers in fossil fuel industries facing closure from emissions-curbing measures.

Germany’s environment minister, Svenja Schulze, told reporters that her country is committed to phasing out the use of coal, though the exact deadline has yet to be determined.

But in a nod to the recent protests in France over fuel prices, Schulze warned against governments forcing through measures, saying they would lose public support “faster than you can spell climate protection, and then people pull on yellow vests.”
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Anyone who has cats knows they are smart. But anyone who knows cats knows they can also seem a bit aloof, at least until dinnertime. But do not let them fool you, turns out your cat is watching you closely, and taking behavioral cues from their humans. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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