Public health officials say one of the effects of the coronavirus lockdowns was that more people drank alcohol more heavily, with the World Health Organization warning of exacerbated health concerns and an increase in risky behaviors. As more bars reopen, Svitlana Prystynska takes us to one with a novel approach to drinking.
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Month: July 2022
The quickly changing coronavirus has spawned yet another super contagious omicron mutant that’s worrying scientists as it gains ground in India and pops up in numerous other countries, including the United States.
Scientists say the variant — called BA.2.75 — may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infection. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other omicron variants, including the globally prominent BA.5.
“It’s still really early on for us to draw too many conclusions,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “But it does look like, especially in India, the rates of transmission are showing kind of that exponential increase.” Whether it will outcompete BA.5, he said, is yet to be determined.
Still, the fact that it has already been detected in many parts of the world even with lower levels of viral surveillance “is an early indication it is spreading,” said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The latest mutant has been spotted in several distant states in India and appears to be spreading faster than other variants there, said Lipi Thukral, a scientist at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in New Delhi. It’s also been detected in about 10 other countries, including Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Two cases were recently identified on the West Coast of the U.S., and Helix identified a third U.S. case last week.
Fueling experts’ concerns are a large number of mutations separating this new variant from omicron predecessors. Some of those mutations are in areas that relate to the spike protein and could allow the virus to bind onto cells more efficiently, Binnicker said.
Another concern is that the genetic tweaks may make it easier for the virus to skirt past antibodies — protective proteins made by the body in response to a vaccine or infection from an earlier variant.
But experts say vaccines and boosters are still the best defense against severe COVID-19. In the fall it’s likely the U.S. will see updated formulations of the vaccine being developed that target more recent omicron strains.
“Some may say, ‘Well, vaccination and boosting hasn’t prevented people from getting infected.’ And, yes, that is true,” he said. “But what we have seen is that the rates of people ending up in the hospital and dying have significantly decreased. As more people have been vaccinated, boosted or naturally infected, we are starting to see the background levels of immunity worldwide creep up.”
It may take several weeks to get a sense of whether the latest omicron mutant may affect the trajectory of the pandemic. Meanwhile Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies viruses at India’s Christian Medical College in Vellore, said the growing concern over the variant underlines the need for more sustained efforts to track and trace viruses that combine genetic efforts with real world information about who is getting sick and how badly. “It is important that surveillance isn’t a start-stop strategy,” she said.
Luo said BA.2.75 is another reminder that the coronavirus is continually evolving — and spreading.
“We would like to return to pre-pandemic life, but we still need to be careful,” she said. “We need to accept that we’re now living with a higher level of risk than we used to.”
The world will get its first view of a full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope at a White House event Monday.
U.S. President Joe Biden is set to release the image, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson giving remarks.
NASA plans to release more full-color images Tuesday that it says will show the telescope “at its full power as it begins its mission to unfold the infrared universe.”
The $10 billion telescope with a primary mirror measuring 6.5 meters in diameter launched in December 2021.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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As Uber aggressively pushed into markets around the world, the ride-sharing service lobbied political leaders to relax labor and taxi laws, used a “kill switch” to thwart regulators and law enforcement, channeled money through Bermuda and other tax havens and considered portraying violence against its drivers as a way to gain public sympathy, according to a report released Sunday.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit network of investigative reporters, scoured internal Uber texts, emails, invoices and other documents to deliver what it called “an unprecedented look into the ways Uber defied taxi laws and upended workers’ rights.”
The documents were first leaked to the British newspaper The Guardian, which shared them with the consortium.
In a written statement. Uber spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker acknowledged “mistakes” in the past and said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, hired in 2017, had been “tasked with transforming every aspect of how Uber operates … When we say Uber is a different company today, we mean it literally: 90% of current Uber employees joined after Dara became CEO.”
Founded in 2009, Uber sought to skirt taxi regulations and offer inexpensive transportation via a ride-sharing app. The consortium’s Uber Files revealed the extraordinary lengths that the company undertook to establish itself in nearly 30 countries.
The company’s lobbyists — including former aides to President Barack Obama — pressed government officials to drop their investigations, rewrite labor and taxi laws and relax background checks on drivers, the papers show.
The investigation found that Uber used “stealth technology” to fend off government investigations. The company, for example, used a “kill switch” that cut access to Uber servers and blocked authorities from grabbing evidence during raids in at least six countries. During a police raid in Amsterdam, the Uber Files reported, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick personally issued an order: “Please hit the kill switch ASAP … Access must be shut down in AMS (Amsterdam).”
The consortium also reported that Kalanick saw the threat of violence against Uber drivers in France by aggrieved taxi drivers as a way to gain public support. “Violence guarantee(s) success,” Kalanick texted colleagues.
In a response to the consortium, Kalanick representative Devon Spurgeon said the former CEO “never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety.”
The Uber Files say the company cut its tax bill by millions of dollars by sending profits through Bermuda and other tax havens, then “sought to deflect attention from its tax liabilities by helping authorities collect taxes from its drivers.”
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The Yellowstone National Park area’s weather forecast the morning of June 12 seemed fairly tame: warmer temperatures and rain showers would accelerate mountain snow melt and could produce “minor flooding.” A National Weather Service bulletin recommended moving livestock from low-lying areas but made no mention of danger to people.
By nightfall, after several inches of rain fell on a deep spring snowpack, there were record-shattering floods.
Torrents of water poured off the mountains. Swollen rivers carrying boulders and trees smashed through Montana towns over the next several days. The flooding swept away houses, wiped out bridges and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 tourists, park employees and residents near the park.
As a cleanup expected to last months grinds on, climate experts and meteorologists say the gap between the destruction and what was forecast underscores a troublesome aspect of climate change: Models used to predict storm impacts do not always keep up with increasingly devastating rainstorms, hurricanes, heat waves and other events.
“Those rivers had never reached those levels. We literally were flying blind not even knowing what the impacts would be,” said Arin Peters, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service.
Hydrologic models used to predict flooding are based on long-term, historical records. But they do not reflect changes to the climate that emerged over the past decade, said meteorologist and Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters.
“Those models are going to be inadequate to deal with a new climate,” Masters said.
Another extreme weather event where the models came up short was Hurricane Ida, which slammed Louisiana last summer and then stalled over the Eastern Seaboard — deluging parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York with unprecedented rainfall that caused massive flooding.
The weather service had warned of a “serious situation” that could turn “catastrophic,” but the predicted of 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) of rain for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania was far short of the 9 to 10 inches (23 to 25 centimeters) that fell.
The deadly June 2021 heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest offered another example. Warmer weather had been expected, but not temperatures of up to 116 degrees (47C degrees) that toppled previous records and killed an estimated 600 or more people in Oregon, Washington state and western Canada.
The surprise Yellowstone floods prompted a nighttime scramble to close off roads and bridges getting swept away by the water, plus rushed evacuations that missed some people. No one died, somewhat miraculously, as more than 400 homes were damaged or destroyed.
As rockslides caused by the rainfall started happening in Yellowstone, park rangers closed a heavily used road between the town of Gardiner and the park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming. The road was later washed out in numerous places.
The rain and snowmelt was “too much too fast and you just try to stay out of the way,” Yellowstone Deputy Chief Ranger Tim Townsend said.
If the road hadn’t been closed, “we probably would have had fatalities, unquestionably” park Superintendent Cam Sholly said.
“The road looks totally fine and then it’s like an 80-foot drop right into the river,” Sholly said.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was scheduled to visit Yellowstone on Friday to survey the damage and ongoing repairs.
Within a matter of hours on June 12, Rock Creek, which runs through the city of Red Lodge and normally is placid and sometimes just ankle deep, became a raging river. When the weather service issued a flood warning for the creek, the water already had surged over its banks and begun to knock down bridges.
By the time the warning was sent, “we already knew it was too late,” said Scott Williams, a commissioner for Carbon County, Montana, which borders Yellowstone.
Red Lodge resident Pam Smith was alerted to the floods by something knocking around in her basement before dawn. It was her clothes dryer, floating in water pouring through the windows.
Smith says her partner keeps track of the weather on his computer and they were aware rain was coming and that the creek was running high. But they were not aware of flooding threat when they went to bed the night before, she said.
In a scramble to save belongings including her violins, the music teacher slipped on the wet kitchen floor and fell, shattering a bone in her arm. Smith recalls biting back tears and trudging through floodwaters with her partner and 15-year-old granddaughter to reach their pickup truck and drive to safety.
“I went blank,” Smith said. “I was angry and like, ‘Why didn’t anybody warn us? Why was there no knock on the door? Why didn’t the police come around and say there’s flooding, you need to get out?'”
Local authorities say sheriff’s deputies and others knocked on doors in Red Lodge and a second community that flooded. But they acknowledged not everyone was reached as numerous rivers and streams overflowed, swamping areas never known previously to flood.
While no single weather event can be conclusively tied to climate change, scientists said the Yellowstone flooding was consistent with changes already documented around the park as temperatures warm.
Those changes include less snowfall in mid-winter and more spring precipitation — setting the stage for flash floods when rains fall on the snow, said Montana State University climate scientist Cathy Whitlock.
Warming trends mean spring floods will increase in frequency — even as the region suffers from long-term drought that keeps much of the rest of the year dry, she said.
Masters and other experts noted that computer modeling of storms has become more sophisticated and is generally more accurate than ever. But extreme weather by its nature is hard to predict, and as such events happen more frequently there will be many more chances for forecasters to get it wrong.
The rate of the most extreme rainstorms in some areas has increased up to a factor of five, Masters said. So an event with a 1% chance of happening in any given year — commonly referred to as a “one in 100-year” event — would have an approximately 5% chance of happening, he said.
“We are literally re-writing our weather history book,” said University of Oklahoma Meteorology Professor Jason Furtado.
That has widespread implications for local authorities and emergency officials who rely on weather bulletins to guide their disaster response approaches. If they’re not warned, they can’t act.
But the National Weather Service also strives to avoid undue alarm and maintain public trust. So if the service’s models show only a slim chance of disaster, that information can get left out of the forecast.
Weather service officials said the agency’s actions with the Yellowstone flooding will be analyzed to determine if changes are needed. They said early warnings that river levels were rising did help officials prepare and prevent loss of life, even if their advisories failed to predict the severity.
Computer-based forecasting models are regularly updated to account for new meteorological trends due to climate change, Peters said. Even with those refinements, events like the Yellowstone flooding still are considered low-probability and so often won’t make it into forecasts based on what the models say is most likely to occur.
“It’s really difficult to balance that feeling that you’ve got that this could get really bad, but the likelihood of it getting really bad is so small,” Peters said. He added that the dramatic swing from drought to flood was hard even for meteorologists to reconcile and called it “weather whiplash.”
To better communicate the potential for extreme weather, some experts say the weather service needs to change its forecasts to inform the public about low probability hazardous events. That could be accomplished through more detailed daily forecasts or some kind of color-coded system for alerts.
“We’ve been slow to provide that information,” North Carolina State University atmospheric scientist Gary Lackmann said. “You put it on people’s radars and they could think about that and it could save lives.”
Drawing back the curtain to a photo gallery unlike any other, NASA will soon present the first full-color images from its James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary apparatus designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the universe.
The highly anticipated July 12 unveiling of pictures and spectroscopic data from the newly operational observatory follows a six-month process of remotely unfurling various components, aligning mirrors and calibrating instruments.
With Webb now finely tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a competitively selected list of science projects exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
The first batch of photos, which have taken weeks to process from raw telescope data, are expected to offer a compelling glimpse at what Webb will capture on the science missions that lie ahead.
NASA on Friday posted a list of the five celestial subjects chosen for its showcase debut of Webb, built for the U.S. space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp.
Among them are two nebulae – enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions that form nurseries for new stars – and two sets of galaxy clusters.
One of those, according to NASA, features objects in the foreground so massive that they act as “gravitational lenses,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects farther away and further back in time. How far back and what showed up on camera remains to be seen.
NASA will also publish Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, revealing the molecular signatures from patterns of filtered light passing through its atmosphere. The exoplanet in this case, roughly half the mass of Jupiter, is more than 1,100 light years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year – 9.5 trillion kilometers.
‘Moved me as a scientist … as a human being’
All five of the Webb’s introductory targets were previously known to scientists. One of them, the galaxy group 290 million light-years from Earth known as Stephan’s Quintet, was first discovered in 1877.
But NASA officials promise Webb’s imagery captures its subjects in an entirely new light, literally.
“What I have seen moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy, who has reviewed the images, told reporters during a June 29 news briefing.
Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where mission control engineers operate the telescope, has promised the first pictures would “deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public.”
The $9 billion infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent to space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.
A month later, the 6,350-kilogram instrument reached its gravitational parking spot in solar orbit, circling the sun in tandem with Earth more than 1.6 million kilometers from home.
Webb, which views its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum, is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth from 547 kilometers away and operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The larger light-collecting surface of Webb’s primary mirror – an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
Its infrared sensitivity allows it to detect light sources that would otherwise be hidden in the visible spectrum by dust and gas.
Taken together, these features are expected to transform astronomy, providing the first glimpse of infant galaxies dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.
Webb’s instruments also make it ideal to search for signs of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented planets orbiting distant stars and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
Besides a host of studies already lined up for Webb, the telescope’s most revolutionary findings may prove to be those that have yet to be anticipated.
Such was the case in Hubble’s surprising discovery, through observations of distant supernovas, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing down, opening a new field of astrophysics devoted to a mysterious phenomenon scientists call dark energy.
The Webb telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies.
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Tehran residents accustomed to seething at slow-moving traffic, sweltering in summer heat and suffocating in smog may be surprised to find a growing number of outdoor painters reveling in the Iranian capital’s historic charm.
The overcrowded metropolis may be dusty and in need of beautification, but the honeycomb of alleyways that make up old Tehran is drawing throngs of artists out of their cramped studios and into the open streets — a trend that accelerated during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic.
These devotees aim not only to capture Tehran’s vanishing old neighborhoods, but also help preserve them. Many areas have been bulldozed. Cranes punctuate the skyline as storied 19th-century quarters make room for modern high-rises.
“The paintings link us to past designs and feelings that are disappearing,” said Morteza Rahimi, a 32-year-old carpenter, art aficionado and resident of downtown Tehran. “They help us remember. … See how many old beautiful buildings have turned to rubble.”
Beside him, painter Hassan Naderali used loose brushstrokes and bright colors to capture the play of light and flicker of movement in an impressionist style. With a passion for painting en plein air, French for “in the open air,” Naderali seeks to depict the beauty in his dilapidated surroundings.
Population growth transforms city
Tehran has transformed into a teeming city of over 10 million people from just 4.5 million at the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The young theocracy’s population surge coincided with mass migration to Tehran after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion in the 1980s. As job and education opportunities lured even more people to the capital, the government responded to an emerging housing crisis with massive real estate developments.
Some of the city’s 19th-century gems, built by the Qajar kings not long after they moved Iran’s capital to Tehran in 1796, have been lost to new apartment towers in the past few decades.
Through social media, however, artists and historians have sought to counter the cultural amnesia amid escalating demolitions.
“Social media has caused awareness among people about the risks that jeopardize historic, old buildings,” said art expert Mostafa Mirzaeian, referring to the decadent palaces of the Qajars, best known for their elaborate mirrored mosaics. “People are learning about the value of older places and paying attention to their cultural and artistic dimensions.”
‘Our roots, our heritage’
For open-air painting fan Somayyeh Abedini, a government employee and resident of Tehran’s historic Oudlajan neighborhood, the conservationist thrust is personal. The arched horizons, leafy alleys and walled villas of Oudlajan serve as her muse, she said, evoking the spirit of her father who spent his entire life in the neighborhood.
“The old places in the neighborhood are our roots, our heritage,” Abedini said. “It’s a pity many of them were destroyed.”
The practice of outdoor painting in Tehran thrived during the pandemic, artists say, as many found solace and inspiration under the open sky when galleries and museums shuttered for months, and construction projects sputtered to a halt. The health crisis exacted a devastating toll on Iran, infecting over 7.2 million and killing over 141,000 people — the worst death toll in the Middle East.
As the chaos eased on Tehran’s streets, 58-year-old Naderali set up his studio outside. Venturing out with brushes, pencils, paint, a portable easel and papers, he painted away where he felt most alive — under the sun, feeling the breeze.
“I went out every day. Outdoor places were not so crowded, and I found more access to the places I liked to paint,” he said of his pandemic experience.
Naderali sells dozens of his paintings, many depicting old Persian palaces and traditional Tehran homes, to domestic and foreign clients.
A yearning for bygone eras drives high demand among Iranian buyers abroad, he said — excitement about a time when Achaemenids carved bas-reliefs into the walls of Persepolis in 500 B.C. and Isfahan thrived as a blue-tiled jewel of Islamic culture in the 17th century.
That nostalgia has sharpened as Iran, devastated by sanctions and cut off from the world economy, seethes with public anger over rising prices and declining living standards.
Talks to revive Tehran’s nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump abandoned four years ago, have made no progress in the past year. The country’s poverty has deepened. But in many ways, Iran’s contemporary art scene has flowered despite the challenges.
For years after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution ousted the Western-backed monarchy and brought Shiite clerics to power, hard-liners outlawed modern art and even sought to ban painting. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s extensive collection, worth billions of dollars, sat in its vaults.
But the clerical establishment came to appreciate the art form during the grisly Iran-Iraq war that began in 1980. Paintings that paid tribute to the war-dead and lionized the leaders of the Islamic Revolution sprung up on the city’s drab walls.
Western art exhibited again
Many of the contemporary art museum’s works — including Monets, Picassos and Jackson Pollocks bought during Iran’s oil boom under the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — have been brought out in recent decades as cultural restrictions eased.
Last summer, just days before the election of President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric hostile to the cultural influence of the West, the museum reopened with a retrospective of American pop artist Andy Warhol.
Today, successful Iranian artists — including stars who exhibit abroad — have helped transform Tehran’s once-staid art market into a dynamic scene. Auction houses across the city fetch high prices for homegrown painters. An auction last Friday recorded sales of more than $2.2 million for 120 works.
Iranian state TV regularly broadcasts paint-along lessons, including the late American painter Bob Ross’ beloved PBS show “The Joy of Painting,” inspiring amateurs to create their own masterpieces.
Iran’s art schools are flourishing, with a majority of female students. Although exhibits require government licenses, swanky Tehran galleries showing new work by Iranian painters bustle with young crowds.
“Once a passerby told me, ‘Art gives birth in poverty and dies in wealth,'” remarked Naderali.
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Tony Sirico, who played the impeccably groomed mobster Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos and brought his tough-guy swagger to films including Goodfellas, died Friday. He was 79.
Sirico died at an assisted living facility in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said his manager, Bob McGowen. There was no immediate information on the cause of death.
A statement from Sirico’s family confirmed the death of Gennaro Anthony “Tony” Sirico “with great sadness, but with incredible pride, love and a whole lot of fond memories.”
McGowan, who represented Sirico for more than two decades, recalled him as “loyal and giving,” with a strong philanthropic streak. That included helping ex-soldiers’ causes, which hit home for the Army veteran, his manager said.
Steven Van Zandt, who played opposite Sirico as fellow mobster Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, saluted him on Twitter as “legendary.”
“A larger-than-life character on and off screen. Gonna miss you a lot my friend,” the actor and musician said.
Michael Imperioli, who portrayed Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, called Sirico his “dear friend, colleague and partner in crime.”
“Tony was like no one else: he was as tough, as loyal and as big hearted as anyone I’ve ever known,” Imperioli said on Instagram.
Sirico was unconcerned about being cast in a string of bad guy roles, McGowan said, most prominently that of Peter Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri in the 1999-2007 run of the acclaimed HBO drama starring James Gandolfini as mob boss Tony Soprano. (Gandolfini died in 2013 at age 51).
“He didn’t mind playing a mob guy, but he wouldn’t play an informant,” or as Sirico put it, a “snitch,” McGowan said.
Sirico, born July 29, 1942, in New York City, grew up in the Flatbush and Bensonhurst neighborhoods where he said “every guy was trying to prove himself. You either had to have a tattoo or a bullet hole.”
“I had both,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 interview, calling himself “unstable” during that period of his life. He was arrested repeatedly for criminal offenses, he said, and was in prison twice. In his last stint behind bars, in the 1970s, he saw a performance by a group of ex-convicts and caught the acting bug.
“I watched ’em and I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I knew I wasn’t bad looking. And I knew I had the (guts) to stand up and (bull) people,” he told the Times. “You get a lot of practice in prison. I used to stand up in front of these cold-blooded murderers and kidnappers — and make ’em laugh.”
Sirico also was cast outside the gangster mold, playing police officers in the films Dead Presidents and Deconstructing Harry. Among his other credits were Woody Allen films including Bullets over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite, and appearances on TV series including Miami Vice and voice roles on the Family Guy and American Dad!
Sirico is survived by daughter Joanne Sirico Bello; son Richard Sirico; his brother, Robert Sirico, a priest; and other relatives.
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Elena Rybakina dropped the first set but roared back to defeat No. 3 seed Ons Jabeur and win the women’s singles title at Wimbledon on Saturday.
Rybakina, the No. 17 seed who was born in Moscow but has represented Kazakhstan since 2018, triumphed 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 over the Tunisian at the All England Club in London.
Saturday’s clash marked the first Wimbledon title match between two first-time Grand Slam finalists in the Open Era.
Jabeur, who entered as the heavy favorite, jumped out to a 2-1 lead when she broke Rybakina’s serve early in the first set. With Rybakina serving to stay in the set at 3-5, Jabeur broke once again.
But the second set was a different story.
After winning points on just 53 percent of her first serves in the first set, Rybakina changed her strategy, serving primarily to Jabeur’s backhand. It paid off as she won 73 percent of the first points on her serve and hit 13 winners to seven unforced errors.
And as frustration set in for Jabeur in the second set, so did the miscues. Her percentage of points won on first serve dropped from 80 percent in the first set to 59 percent, and her serve was broken twice by Rybakina, who saved all four of her break points. Jabeur had seven winners against nine unforced errors.
Jabeur dropped serve in the first game of the third set but had a chance to turn the momentum. With the 23-year-old Rybakina serving up 3-2, Jabeur quickly put her down 0-40 and had a triple break point to tie the match.
But Rybakina fought back, winning five straight points to take a commanding 4-2 lead and then the title.
In her on-court interview, Rybakina said her goal was just to last until the second week of Wimbledon. Her win shocked even her.
“I’m gonna be honest. In [the] second week of Grand Slam at Wimbledon to be a winner, I mean it’s just amazing,” she said.
Asked later about her low-key reaction to the victory, Rybakina said that’s just her personality.
“I’m always very calm. I don’t know what should happen,” she said. “When I was giving [my] speech in the end I was thinking, ‘I’m going to cry right now,’ but somehow, I hold it. Maybe later when I’m going to be alone in the room, I’m going to cry nonstop. I don’t know.
“Maybe because I believe that I can do it deep inside. But [the] same time it’s, like, too many emotions. I was just trying to keep myself calm. Maybe one day you will see [a] huge reaction from me, but unfortunately not today.” Jabeur, 27, was the first Arab woman and the first woman from Africa to play for a Grand Slam title.
“I love this tournament so much and I feel really sad, but I mean it’s tennis,” she said after receiving her runner-up trophy from Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge. “There is only one winner. … I’m trying to inspire, you know, many generations from my country. I hope they’re listening.”
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When Melissa, a nurse in the U.S. state of Alabama, went to pick up her regular prescription medication for rheumatoid arthritis last week, she was told the drug was on hold while the pharmacist checked she wasn’t going to use it to induce an abortion.
“He said, ‘Well I have to verify if you’re on any contraceptives to prevent pregnancy.’ ”
“The hell you do,” she recalled thinking.
Melissa, who is in her early 40s and asked to be identified only by her first name for fear that speaking out might affect her livelihood, then called her doctor, who succeeded in having the pharmacy in the Southern U.S. state release the medicine.
“I picked it up a couple hours later, but I felt violated,” she told AFP. She said that she’d had a hysterectomy six years ago and that her lack of recent contraceptive history might have led the pharmacist to suspect she was pregnant.
Consequence of court ruling
Stories of people facing similar struggles have come to light in the weeks since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, highlighting an overlooked consequence of new state-level bans or severe restrictions on abortion.
It’s not yet clear how widespread the cases are, but national organizations including the Lupus Foundation of America and the American College of Rheumatology said they were aware of such concerns and were asking people affected to come forward.
“The Arthritis Foundation supports unencumbered access to and coverage of FDA-approved drugs for managing arthritis in alignment with scientific and clinical guidelines, as well as evidence-based medical recommendations,” the organization said.
The issue centers on methotrexate, a drug that tempers inflammation and is commonly used against autoimmune conditions including inflammatory arthritis, psoriasis and lupus.
Methotrexate stops cell division and is given in higher doses as a cancer drug.
It can also sometimes be used in medical abortions, though not as frequently as the Food and Drug Administration-approved combination of two other drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol.
Nevertheless, many states have passed laws carrying threats of legal action against health care workers and pharmacies providing methotrexate.
Another woman contacted by AFP, a 20-year-old university student from Ohio, said she has had a methotrexate prescription since 2020 to treat her lupus, which affects her kidneys and liver and causes joint pain.
A pharmacist at a national chain told her they were “no longer accepting prescriptions for methotrexate unless it was for the FDA-approved use of [treating] breast cancer, or the patient was not presumably fertile,” she said.
She tried again, without success, to fill her prescription at a family-owned pharmacy, and this week got a letter from her doctor’s office stating the practice would no longer be prescribing methotrexate because of the number of patients having difficulty accessing it.
Though the first pharmacy later changed its position, the experience left her “annoyed and angry,” she said.
‘Provider approval’ needed
A third woman, Jennifer Crow, 48, a writer and produce gardener in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, told AFP she’d received an automated call from CVS Pharmacy saying her methotrexate refill had been declined “pending provider approval.”
Crow said methotrexate had helped her enormously in managing her inflammatory arthritis, allowing her to roll out of bed and get dressed without severe pain, and walk without a cane for the first time in years.
Though her doctor was able to resolve the situation, Crow, who has also had a hysterectomy, said she was worried for others with chronic illnesses who don’t have the same access to resources that she does.
In statements to AFP, national pharmacy chains CVS and Walmart confirmed they were working to adhere to new state regulations in light of the high court’s decision to revoke the constitutional right to an abortion.
“We encourage providers to include their diagnosis on the prescriptions they write to help ensure patients have quick and easy access to medications,” CVS added.
Alisa Vidulich, policy director of the Arthritis Foundation, told AFP she was hopeful the situation might be remedied quickly as medical professionals and pharmacies developed new guidelines.
“But that may not actually be the case in all states, and it may in fact turn into a longer-term issue,” she said.
Melissa, the nurse, said she was incensed at the double standard that allowed one of her best friends, who is a man, to get his methotrexate prescription filled right away with no questions asked.
“We’re headed in the wrong direction and it’s terrifying. I have two daughters. I don’t want to see this,” she said.
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A Texas judge issued an order Friday to continue blocking the state from investigating two families of transgender youth who have received gender affirming medical care and said she was considering whether to prevent additional investigations.
The ruling extends in part a temporary order issued last month blocking investigations against three families who sued and preventing any similar investigations against members of the LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG Inc. The group has more than 600 members in Texas.
In her order Friday, Judge Amy Clark Meachum said she was still weighing whether to issue a similar order prohibiting similar investigations against the third family and PFLAG members. An order preventing those investigations had been set to expire Friday. An attorney last month said the third family of a transgender minor had learned after the lawsuit’s filing that the state had dropped its investigation into them.
The two families to whom Friday’s order applies would “suffer probable, imminent, and irreparable injury in the interim” without the order, Meachum wrote.
The ruling was the latest against the state’s efforts to label gender affirming care as child abuse.
The Texas Supreme Court in May allowed the state to investigate parents of transgender youth for child abuse while also ruling in favor of one family that was among the first contacted by child welfare officials following order by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The latest challenge was brought by Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the families of three teenage boys — two 16-year-olds and a 14-year-old — and PFLAG.
“The Court recognized yet again that being subjected to an unlawful and unwarranted investigation causes irreparable harm for these families who are doing nothing more than caring for and affirming their children and seeking the best course of care for them in consultation with their medical providers,” the groups said in a statement.
The families had talked in court filings about the anxiety that the investigations created for them and their children. The mother of one of the teens said her son attempted suicide and was hospitalized the day Abbott issued his directive. The outpatient psychiatric facility where the teen was referred reported the family for child abuse after learning he had been prescribed hormone therapy, she said in a court filing.
A judge in March put Abbott’s order on hold after a lawsuit was brought on behalf of a 16-year-old girl whose family said it was under investigation. The Texas Supreme Court in May ruled that the lower court overstepped its authority by blocking all investigations going forward.
The lawsuit that prompted that ruling marked the first report of parents being investigated following Abbott’s directive and an earlier nonbinding legal opinion by Paxton labeling certain gender-confirming treatments as “child abuse.” The Texas Department of Family and Protective Service has said it opened nine investigations following the directive and opinion.
Abbott’s directive and the attorney general’s opinion go against the nation’s largest medical groups, including the American Medical Association, which have opposed Republican-backed restrictions filed in statehouses nationwide.
Arkansas last year became the first state to pass a law prohibiting gender-confirming treatments for minors, and Tennessee approved a similar measure. Judges have blocked laws in Arkansas and Alabama, and both of those states are appealing.
Meachum set a Dec. 5 trial on whether to permanently block Texas’ investigations into the families.
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Millions of Canadians found out Friday what it is like to live without access to the internet and mobile phone service.
Rogers Communications, the country’s largest mobile and internet provider, experienced a major outage, beginning Friday morning and lasting most of the day.
The outage affected retailers, credit card and debit transactions, court proceedings, government agencies, calls to emergency services and much more.
“Today we have let you down,” Rogers posted on Twitter, without offering an explanation. “We are working to make this right as quickly as we can. We will continue to keep you updated, including when services will be back online.”
Late Friday, the Toronto-based telecommunications firm said it had begun restoring services.
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The Canadian government is set to put health warnings on each cigarette and ban certain types of plastics, parts of a new round of regulations from the Trudeau government.
“Poison in every puff.” By 2023, this is the warning the Canadian government is planning on having on each cigarette sold in the country. This will make Canada the first in the world to do so, much as it did with graphic health warnings on packages of cigarettes in 2001.
Changes are also proposed for the health warnings on packages; they would be required to cover 75 percent of the back and front of each package and include warnings about colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, cervical cancer and diabetes. These are among the 16 diseases — besides lung cancer — believed caused by cigarettes.
Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society, said putting a warning on each cigarette will make sure the health message gets delivered every single time one is lit.
“Sometimes you experiment by smoking, by ‘borrowing’ a cigarette from a friend or a brother or sister without directly touching the package. And so … this type of reach to kids experimenting is a very positive thing,” he said. “Sometimes smokers who go out for a smoke break will just take a cigarette, not the full package, when they go outside.”
The Canadian government is also banning the importing or manufacturing of plastic bags and containers, like those used for restaurant takeout meals, by the end of 2022. It will ban sales of the bags and containers by the end of 2023 and exports of them by year’s end in 2025.
The government is also working toward abolishing many single-use plastics, like those for straws, stir sticks for drinks, cutlery and the plastic rings used to hold together six- and 12-packs of cans and bottles.
Plastic was listed as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in 2021.
Sarah King, head of Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign, said the move is a good start, but there is still more work to be done.
“We still aren’t even at the starting line in terms of tackling Canada’s plastic waste and pollution problem,” she said. “So, you know, we definitely are keen to see the government take plastic reduction more seriously and start accelerating our transition to more reuse-, refill-centered systems.”
But Stewart Prest, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, said some Canadians would be upset by the new initiatives, seeing them as examples of over-regulation and the extension of a so-called “nanny state.”
“I think reactions will be divided,” he said. “I think this is the kind of issue that’s going to fit very well within the existing political dynamic polarization that we see in Canada, where any attempt by the government to regulate — to try to nudge Canadians in a particular direction — is going to be met with great, extreme skepticism in some quarters.”
The next general election is expected to occur in October 2025, which is well after the new regulations take effect.
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Ghana’s health authorities say they have, for the first time, confirmed two fatal cases of the Marburg virus, a relative of the Ebola virus.
In a statement on Thursday, the Ghana Health Service said the two cases of Marburg Virus Disease (MVD) were detected in the Ashanti region – about 250 kilometers from the capital, Accra.
“Blood samples were sent to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research,” the statement said, adding, “Preliminary results suggest the infection is due to the Marburg virus.”
Applying standard procedure, the samples have been sent to the Institut Pasteur in Senegal, a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating center, for confirmation, the statement added.
The two patients from the southern Ashanti region – both deceased and unrelated – showed symptoms that included diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting, the WHO said on its website.
So far, 34 persons have since been quarantined and are being monitored for coming in contact with the two infected persons.
The health directorate in the region, according to the statement, is “currently conducting further investigations on the cases and contacts.”
It would be the second time Marburg is being detected in West Africa, if Ghana’s case is confirmed by the WHO. Guinea confirmed a single case in September 2021.
Marburg virus is transmitted by infected persons or animals from direct contact with body fluids, blood and other discharges from the affected person or animal. The incubation period for the disease is two to 21 days.
The WHO said Marburg is a disease with a case fatality rate of up to 88%.
Prospective patients may suffer from fever, bloody diarrhea, bleeding from gums, bleeding of the skin, bleeding of the eyes and bloody urine.
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There is public outrage in India over the depiction of a Hindu goddess that critics say disparages the religious figure.
The image appears in a poster promoting the new short film Kaali by Canadian-based Indian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai. The poster depicts Hindu goddess Kaali smoking a cigarette and holding an LGBTQ+ flag.
After filmmaker Leena Manimekalai shared the poster in a tweet Saturday, the day a museum in Toronto hosted the film’s first showing, the image of the smoking goddess sparked a furor in India with angry Hindus demanding a ban on the film and legal action against the filmmaker.
Monday, the Indian High Commission in Canada said it had received complaints from Hindu community leaders over the “disrespectful depiction of Hindu gods” in the poster, and it urged the Canadian authorities and the event organizers to withdraw all “provocative” materials related to the film.
A day later, the museum issued an apology, saying the film was no longer being shown there, and that it regretted having “inadvertently caused offense to members of the Hindu and other faith communities.”
Manimekalai wrote and directed Kaali as an academic project in her graduate study program at Toronto Metropolitan University. In the film, Manimekalai is an incarnation of the goddess Kaali. Living as a queer female filmmaker in Toronto, she attempts to find belonging in a land stolen from its rightful inhabitants— the First Nations.
As the goddess of death, time and change, the dilemma of the reincarnated goddess in the film finds a resolution only at the end, when it dawns on her that ultimately, the land can be owned by no one; the universe is in a state of constant flux. The promotional poster shows a scene in which, dressed as the goddess Kaali, Manimekalai shares a cigarette with a homeless man.
“When I embody Kaali, I am Kaali myself. My Kaali is queer. She is a free spirit. She spits at the patriarchy. She dismantles Hindutva. She destroys capitalism,” Manimekalai told VOA. “She embraces everyone with all her thousand hands.”
Death threats
Manimekalai’s tweet of the poster went viral Saturday with tens of thousands of members of the Hindu community retweeting it with a hashtag reading “Arrest Leena Manimekalai.”
Police cases were filed against her in several states for “hurting the religious sentiments” of Hindus.
One Hindu group said in a police complaint that the depiction of the goddess Kaali in the poster was “completely unacceptable to Hindus” and Manimekalai “deliberately distorted the Hindu religion and culture with malicious intent to insult Hindu religious feelings.”
Manimekalai said she and her family members received death and rape threats from more than 200,000 social media accounts. In a video that surfaced online, a Hindu priest from the north Indian temple town Ayodhya threatened: “Do you want your head to be severed from your body?”
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Manimekalai’s native state in India, police arrested the female leader of a Hindu right-wing group for allegedly threatening her with death. The leader allegedly posted a video online in which she condemned her using strong words and threatened to kill her.
Twitter on Wednesday removed Manimekalai’s poster tweet.
Reacting to Twitter’s action, she said in a tweet, “Will @TwitterIndia withhold the tweets of the 200000 hate mongers?! These lowlife trolls tweeted and spread the very same poster that they find objectionable. Kaali cannot be lynched. Kaali cannot be raped. Kaali cannot be destroyed. She is the goddess of death.”
The filmmaker said that the reaction in India against her film cannot be termed just an “outrage.”
“If a person in the street pounces upon you, it is a crime. If a person violates your body in a public place, it is sexual harassment. If a person throws acid on your face, it is an attempt of murder. If a person uses foul language against you, it is abuse. If a person goes after your family and friends and supporters and threatens them, it is violence. If all this is done by a mob, how can you call it just an ‘outrage’?” she asked.
“How can I report 200000 ids? Where should I report? Who is going to take action? There is no law in India. The Constitution of the country is dead.”
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In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare, liquefied gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.
Scientists are pretty sure the invisible stuff makes up most of the universe’s mass and say we wouldn’t be here without it — but they don’t know what it is. The race to solve this enormous mystery has brought one team to the depths under Lead, South Dakota.
The question for scientists is basic, says Kevin Lesko, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “What is this great place I live in? Right now, 95% of it is a mystery.”
The idea is that a mile of dirt and rock, a giant tank, a second tank and the purest titanium in the world will block nearly all the cosmic rays and particles that zip around — and through — all of us every day. But dark matter particles, scientists think, can avoid all those obstacles. They hope one will fly into the vat of liquid xenon in the inner tank and smash into a xenon nucleus like two balls in a game of pool, revealing its existence in a flash of light seen by a device called “the time projection chamber.”
Scientists announced Thursday that the five-year, $60 million search finally got underway two months ago after a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, the device has found nothing. At least no dark matter.
That’s OK, they say. The equipment appears to be working to filter out most of the background radiation they hoped to block.
“To search for this very rare type of interaction, job number one is to first get rid of all of the ordinary sources of radiation, which would overwhelm the experiment,” said University of Maryland physicist Carter Hall.
And if all their calculations and theories are right, they figure they’ll see only a couple fleeting signs of dark matter a year. The team of 250 scientists estimates they’ll get 20 times more data over the next couple of years.
By the time the experiment finishes, the chance of finding dark matter with this device is “probably less than 50% but more than 10%,” said Hugh Lippincott, a physicist and spokesman for the experiment in a Thursday news conference.
While that’s far from a sure thing, “you need a little enthusiasm,” Lawrence Berkeley’s Lesko said. “You don’t go into rare search physics without some hope of finding something.”
Two hulking Depression-era hoists run an elevator that brings scientists to what’s called the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment in the Sanford Underground Research Facility. A 10-minute descent ends in a tunnel with cool-to-the-touch walls lined with netting. But the old, musty mine soon leads to a high-tech lab where dirt and contamination is the enemy. Helmets are exchanged for new, cleaner ones and a double layer of baby blue booties go over steel-toed safety boots.
The heart of the experiment is the giant tank called the cryostat, lead engineer Jeff Cherwinka said in a December 2019 tour before the device was closed and filled. He described it as “like a thermos” made of “perhaps the purest titanium in the world” designed to keep the liquid xenon cold and keep background radiation at a minimum.
Xenon is special, explained Aaron Manalaysay, experiment physics coordinator, because it allows researchers to see if a collision is with one of its electrons or with its nucleus. If something hits the nucleus, it is more likely to be the dark matter that everyone is looking for, he said.
These scientists tried a similar, smaller experiment here years ago. After coming up empty, they figured they had to go much bigger. Another large-scale experiment is underway in Italy run by a rival team, but no results have been announced so far.
The scientists are trying to understand why the universe is not what it seems.
One part of the mystery is dark matter, which has by far most of the mass in the cosmos. Astronomers know it’s there because when they measure the stars and other regular matter in galaxies, they find that there is not nearly enough gravity to hold these clusters together. If nothing else was out there, galaxies would be “quickly flying apart,” Manalaysay said.
“It is essentially impossible to understand our observation of history, of the evolutionary cosmos without dark matter,” Manalaysay said.
Lippincott, a University of California, Santa Barbara, physicist, said “we would not be here without dark matter.”
So while there’s little doubt that dark matter exists, there’s lots of doubt about what it is. The leading theory is that it involves things called WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles.
If that’s the case, LUX-ZEPLIN could be able to detect them. And scientists want to find “where the WIMPs can be hiding,” Lippincott said.
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Cases of COVID-19 are surging again globally, due in large part to the rise of virus variant Omicron BA.5, which is much more contagious than its predecessors and is able to circumvent existing immunity in many people.
In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week released data indicating that the BA.5 variant is now responsible for more than half of new cases and is poised to continue outcompeting older versions of the Omicron variant that remain in circulation.
The new variant is also carving its path across other countries. In the Americas, Brazil and Mexico are both experiencing upticks. In Europe, cases are on the rise across the continent, including in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Greece, among others. The United Kingdom is experiencing a rise as well.
In Asia, cases are rising in Japan, South Korea and India, among others. Cases are also climbing in Australia and New Zealand.
‘Worst’ variant yet
Public health experts are warning that despite the fact that death rates from COVID-19 remain low in the U.S., the Omicron BA.5 variant remains a major concern. Evidence suggests that a recent prior infection with COVID-19 offers little or no protection against reinfection with the new variant.
During past waves, it has typically been assumed that an individual who had recovered from a bout of COVID-19 would have enhanced immune protection against reinfection for a significant period of time.
“The Omicron subvariant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen,” Dr. Eric Topol, a member of the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, wrote in his popular Substack newsletter. “It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility, well beyond Omicron (BA.1) and other Omicron family variants that we’ve seen.”
Even though people appear to be less likely to get extremely sick from the new variant, public health experts say that they are concerned about the possibility that as infections increase, more people will come down with lingering symptoms. So-called long COVID, which can include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction and other adverse health events, has been detected in as many as one in five people who survive an infection.
Public health challenge
Rising case counts have public health experts deeply concerned about what will take place in the coming months.
“Right now, the public health stance should be maximizing vaccination, including boosters for those who are eligible and primary vaccination and boosters for children,” David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a public health foundation, told VOA. “That’s the absolutely critical, essential first step in a public health campaign to reduce the impact of COVID. That also should include planning for, we hope, a more specific vaccine in the fall against the Omicron variants.”
Blumenthal said he believed that the threat of long COVID meant that it also makes sense for people to continue wearing masks in public during surges in infection. However, he said he recognized that calling for more restrictions presented a serious challenge to public health officials, who will find themselves trying to persuade a pandemic-weary public to embrace masking again.
“I think that civic leaders — respected, nonmedical leaders, as well as personal physicians — are probably the best communicators at this point,” he said.
US in detail
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, in the 90 days ending on July 6, the average number of daily cases over the previous seven days in the U.S. rose to 106,193, from 34,795. However, the actual number of cases is believed to be far higher, because the prevalence of at-home testing means that the majority of cases are not reported to public health agencies.
The same data set shows that over the same 90-day period, the seven-day average of people hospitalized for COVID-19 rose to 35,637, from 14,904. While that marked a significant upward move in percentage terms, the absolute number of people currently hospitalized for the disease remains far below the more than 807,000 recorded at the peak in January.
Deaths from COVID-19 have actually fallen over the past 90 days, with a seven-day average of 309 recorded on July 6, compared with 507 recorded 90 days earlier. The current death rate remains near all-time lows since the beginning of the pandemic.
China changes direction
In China this week, Beijing became the first major city in the mainland to adopt a vaccination requirement for people to enter public spaces. Starting Monday, individuals will have to provide proof of vaccination to enter a broad range of public buildings in the city.
As recently as September of last year, the Chinese government had been explicitly against mandatory vaccination.
Wu Liangyou, a senior official with the National Health Commission, criticized municipalities that had instituted requirements like those coming into force in the capital, and said that all vaccination programs ought to remain voluntary.
Unlike many other countries, China has pursued what has been called a zero-COVID approach to managing the pandemic. The government has implemented major lockdowns across the country in efforts to slow or stop the spread of the disease.
The city of Xian, in the northwest of the country, is currently locked down because of a major outbreak of the disease caused by the new variant.
China was initially slow to roll out vaccines, even to older members of the population, who remain the most vulnerable to the disease. Now, however, Johns Hopkins data indicate that nearly 90% of the population is fully vaccinated.
Whether Beijing’s decision to mandate vaccination for access to public spaces marks the beginning of a turn away from the lockdown-focused, zero-COVID policy is unclear.
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NASA sees success on a pair of launches from the Southern Hemisphere. Plus, prospective lunar rovers run the gauntlet on Earth, and an Independence Day anniversary for the American space program. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Twitter said Thursday it removes more than 1 million spam and bot accounts every day.
The removals come as Tesla founder Elon Musk, who is in the process of acquiring the company, continues to pressure Twitter to reduce spam accounts.
He has threatened to cancel the $44 billion deal if Twitter cannot prove spam and bot accounts account for less than 5% of Twitter users.
Musk has vowed to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.”
Twitter has maintained that spam and bot accounts make up less than 5% of the user base since at least 2013. Musk has argued that Twitter underestimates the amount of spam accounts.
Twitter says humans conduct manual reviews of thousands of accounts each quarter to determine if they are bots.
Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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American actor James Caan, known best for his role as the hot-headed Sonny Corleone in the classic 1972 film, “The Godfather,” has died at the age of 82.
A message posted to the actor’s Twitter account on Thursday read “It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Jimmy on the evening of July 6. The family appreciates the outpouring of love and heartfelt condolences and asks that you continue to respect their privacy during this difficult time. End of tweet.”
“End of tweet” became a signature phrase for the actor as he became more active on the social media platform in recent years.
The Associated Press reports Caan’s manager, Matt DelPiano, confirmed that Caan died at his home in Los Angeles late Wednesday. No cause was given.
Caan was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in “The Godfather,” playing the oldest sibling in the Corleone crime family.
He told an interviewer earlier this year — the 50th anniversary of the film’s release — that he knew the film would be something special when he made it, largely because of the rapport he had with fellow cast members.
Caan was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx in 1940 and was raised in the New York City area.
According to his biography on the IMDB website, Caan studied economics and played football at Michigan State University. That experience would serve him well in one of his first big roles, the 1971 television movie “Brian’s Song,” a drama about professional football player Brian Piccolo who had died of cancer the year before at age 26.
After “Brian’s Song” and “The Godfather,” Caan became one Hollywood’s busiest actors, appearing in “Hide in Plain Sight” (which he also directed), “Funny Lady” (opposite Barbra Streisand), “The Killer Elite” and Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two,” among others. He also made a brief appearance in a flashback sequence in “The Godfather, Part II.”
In later years, he starred in the Stephen King thriller “Misery” and the Christmas holiday comedy “Elf.”
Caan was married and divorced four times and has a daughter, Tara, and sons Scott, Alexander, James and Jacob.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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African and European researchers are meeting in France to give fresh impetus to Africa’s ambitious Great Green Wall project, intended to fight climate change and support communities across the Sahel region. Much of the area is plagued by conflict and hunger, but scientists are looking at new ways to move ahead.
It’s been slow-going building Africa’s so-called Great Green Wall of trees and bushes intended to stretch nearly 8,000 kilometers from Mauritania in the west to tiny Djibouti in the east. Fifteen years into the project set to be complete in 2030, only a fraction of the reforestation has been realized. Eight of the 11 countries involved are grappling with unrest. Funding hasn’t matched the development challenge.
Still, environment professor Aliou Guissé points to tangible successes. In the Sahel area of his native Senegal, reforested areas are gaining ground. He said they’re home to larger and more diverse populations of animals, birds and insects than areas where trees haven’t been planted. Scientists are finding health and other benefits of local plants like desert date palms, which are valued by communities, might be commercialized and generate revenue.
Guissé is co-director of the Tessekere Observatory in northern Senegal, which seeks a holistic approach to Green Wall development spanning areas like health, agriculture, the economy — and of course, the environment.
He and other experts meeting this week in the western French city of Poitiers want to widen their collaboration, currently happening in Burkina Faso and Senegal, to include researchers from other Sahel countries like Niger, Chad and possibly Mali. Despite unrest in those countries, they say progress — like building baseline data — can happen.
The Tessekere Observatory’s other co-director, French anthropologist Gilles Boëtsch, said another goal is building partnerships between researchers and government agencies managing Green Wall development. The group is diving into new areas, like exploring the impact of animal-to-human-transmitted diseases, such as Ebola and COVID-19.
Boetsch says their research doesn’t just benefit Africa’s Sahel, but also countries like France — already facing the fallout of a warming and changing climate.
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An American basketball player held in Russia since February for possession of cannabis oil pleaded guilty in a Russian court Thursday.
“I’d like to plead guilty, your honor. But there was no intent. I didn’t want to break the law,” Brittney Griner, 31, said, speaking English, which was then translated into Russian for the court.
“I’d like to give my testimony later. I need time to prepare,” she added.
The WNBA star, who also played in Russia, could face 10 years in prison.
She is due back in court on July 14.
The trial began Friday, July 1, and resumed Thursday.
On Monday, Griner sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden asking him to “do all you can” for her and other Americans detained or held hostage in Russia.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that Biden has read the letter.
Griner’s representatives shared parts of the letter Monday.
“As I sit here in a Russian prison, alone with my thoughts and without the protection of my wife, family, friends, Olympic jersey, or any accomplishments, I’m terrified I might be here forever,” Griner wrote.
The White House said Wednesday that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with the detained basketball player’s wife, Cherelle Griner, to stress that the administration is working to secure her release from Russia as soon as possible.
Russian officials have maintained a hard line toward Griner.
“This is a serious offense, confirmed by indisputable evidence. … Attempts to present the case as if the American was detained illegally do not hold up,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev said Wednesday.
In a tweet, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said officials with the U.S Embassy in Moscow attended Brittney Griner’s trial “and delivered to her a letter from President Biden.”
“We will not relent until Brittney, Paul Whelan, and all other wrongfully detained Americans are reunited with their loved ones,” he added.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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The World Health Organization warns new variants of COVID-19 are spreading and people must remain vigilant and employ public health measures to protect themselves from contracting and transmitting the deadly disease.
The latest WHO figures show reported cases of COVID-19 have increased nearly 30 percent globally over the past two weeks. Current figures stand at nearly 558 million, including more than 6.3 million deaths.
Data show BA.4 and BA.5 variants are driving new waves of the disease in Europe and the United States, while a different variant has been found in countries like India.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said testing for COVID-19 has gone down dramatically, obscuring the true extent of the current disease surge. That, he warned, means too many people are not getting the treatments needed to prevent serious illness or death.
“As the virus evolves, vaccine’s protection, while it still is really effective at preventing serious diseases and death, does wane. Decreasing immunity underscores the importance of boosters, especially for the most at risk,” Tedros said.
Tedros said the dangers posed by the new variants are high in developed countries, but are even greater in poorer countries, where people do not have access to new treatments and oral antivirals.
The WHO executive director for health emergencies, Mike Ryan, said every country has gaps in its national readiness, preparedness, and surveillance plans. He said countries can and must do more to boost their pandemic response in tackling the new surge in COVID-19 cases.
“We will see differential impacts in countries. So, depending on how strong that wall of immunity is in your community, depending on how well you deal with the vulnerabilities that people have, and depending on how well you are prepared to deal with that, I think we are going to see further waves of disease. And I think we will see them have a very differential impact between countries,” Ryan said.
The World Health Organization urges people to implement tried and tested public health measures, such as testing, masking and vaccinating to protect themselves.
Additionally, the WHO says it is crucial to accelerate research and development into next generation vaccines, tests and treatments to keep pace with the evolution of the coronavirus.