Meta Platforms’ Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone. 

Threads has been setting records for user growth since its launch on Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers joining the platform seen by analysts as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned microblogging app. 

“That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone. 

The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much speedier than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history in January about two months after its launch, according to a UBS study. 

Still, Threads has some catching up to do. Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, according to the company’s last public disclosure before Musk’s takeover. 

Twitter has responded to Threads’ arrival by threatening to sue Meta, alleging that the social media behemoth used its trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app. 

That claim, legal experts say, could be hard to prove. 

Threads bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, as do numerous other social media sites that have cropped up in recent months as users have chafed at Musk’s management of the service. It allows posts that are up to 500 characters long and supports links, photos and videos of up to 5 minutes. 

The app also does not yet have a direct messaging function and lacks a desktop version that certain users, such as business organizations, rely on. 

It also currently lacks hashtags and keyword search functions, which limits both its appeal to advertisers and its utility as a place for following real-time events like users frequently do on Twitter. 

Still, analysts said the turmoil at Twitter, including recently imposed limits on the number on tweets users can see, could help Threads to attract users and advertisers.  

Currently, there are no ads on the Threads app and Zuckerberg said the company would only think about monetization once there was a clear path to 1 billion users. 

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last week Meta was not trying to replace Twitter and that Threads aimed to focus on light subjects like sports, music, fashion and design.  

He acknowledged that politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads, in what would be a challenge for the app pitching itself as the “friendly” option for public discourse online. 
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Health officials are reporting a deadly outbreak of cholera in the South African province of Gauteng.

Authorities say nearly 50 people have died, with most of the deaths concentrated in the Hammanskraal area. Cases have been reported in other areas as well.

Medical officials have urged residents to be vigilant about what they consume and to practice good hygiene, like hand washing.

Cholera mainly spreads through contaminated water or food.

Symptoms include diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration.
…

Two years after Brazil began emerging from its pandemic horror show thanks to a massive immunization campaign, officials face a paradoxical predicament: vaccination rates have plunged, and not just for COVID-19. 

The troubling trend has left millions exposed to once-eradicated diseases.    

Doctors, public officials and UNICEF have sounded the alarm over collapsing immunization rates in Brazil, where overall vaccination coverage has fallen from an impressive 95% in 2015 to just 68% last year, according to official figures.  

For polio, the figure fell from 85% to 68%, triggering warnings that the disease could make a comeback in Brazil, where it was eradicated in 1989.  

The figures are similar for other vaccines, allowing diseases to spread. Measles, officially eliminated in Brazil in 2016, returned two years later. There are fears diphtheria is making a resurgence, too.  

Health experts say vaccine hesitancy is a growing problem worldwide. But it is particularly worrying in Brazil, a sprawling country of 203 million people that until recently was hailed as a champion of mass vaccination drives.    

Then an anti-vax movement started spreading around 2016, soon gaining outsize influence via a powerful ally: far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, president from 2019 to 2022, who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, joking the jab could “turn you into an alligator.”    

“It’s very sad to see how a country whose vaccination programs set an example for the world can suddenly suffer from an anti-vaccine movement,” Natalia Pasternak, head of the Question of Science Institute (IQC), a public policy think tank, told AFP.   

“It’s very sad to see how 50 years of work can be so easily destroyed in three.” 

Hope after haunting images

COVID-19 highlighted the shots-in-arms capacities of Brazil’s struggling but lauded universal public health system.  

Back in 2020, some of the most haunting images of the pandemic were of mass graves and corpses piled in refrigerator trucks in places such as Manaus, in northern Brazil, whose overwhelmed hospitals ran out of oxygen.  

Then new images started emerging in 2021, of public health workers turning Rio de Janeiro’s carnival parade venue into a drive-through immunization center or boating deep into the Amazon rainforest to administer vaccines in Indigenous villages.  

Experts credit the campaign’s success with stopping a far bigger tragedy in Brazil, where more than 700,000 people have died of COVID-19, second only to the United States.  

Despite a slow start — widely blamed on Bolsonaro — Brazil had by early last year vaccinated 93% of adults against COVID-19.  

Then rates fell, not only for COVID-19 vaccines but across the board. 

‘The infodemic’ 

Many factors are driving the decline, experts say.   

They include failure to catch up on vaccines delayed during the pandemic, inaccessible health care and declining awareness of the dangers of once-ubiquitous diseases.  

But experts say a new element is making things much worse: the toxic mix of politics, polarization and disinformation that exploded during the pandemic and is increasingly familiar worldwide.  

In Brazil, despite Bolsonaro losing a divisive 2022 election to veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the anti-vax movement still thrives.  

“We’re facing a post-trust scenario, in which families are being attacked by disinformation and lies. It’s not just the occasional fake news story, it’s very structured,” said Isabella Ballalai of the Brazilian Immunization Society. “The consequences of that ‘infodemic’ will be worse than the pandemic itself.”  

Brazilian Health Minister Nisia Trindade says the government is evaluating how to punish doctors spreading anti-vax disinformation.  

“Criminal fake news is sowing doubt and fueling vaccine hesitancy,” she told AFP.    

Going local  

A recent survey by the Brazilian Pediatrics Society (SBP) and IQC found that doctors said parents’ most common reasons for not vaccinating their children were fears of side effects and mistrust of vaccines.  

Experts say health workers are desperate for reliable information to counter the flood of anti-vax disinformation.    

Pasternak, whose organization is working on creating just that, says health officials also need to think locally.  

“Studies show the best way to convince people to get vaccinated is working with local leaders … People listen to those they trust: pastors, community leaders,” she said.  

But reversing the trend will not be easy, Pasternak admitted. “We have lots of work to do.” 
…

One person is dead and three missing in landslides in southwestern Japan, authorities said Monday, as the country’s weather agency warned of the “heaviest rain ever” in the region. 

A 77-year-old woman was confirmed dead in a landslide that entered her home overnight in rural Fukuoka, the local fire department told AFP. 

Her husband was recovered conscious and taken to hospital. 

Three people were also missing after a landslide in Karatsu City, in Saga prefecture, which neighbors Fukuoka, local authorities there said. 

The Japan Meteorological Agency urged people to take shelter as the heavy downpours risked flooding and landslides across the Fukuoka and Oita regions. 

“A special heavy rain warning has been issued for municipalities in Fukuoka Prefecture. This is the heaviest rain ever experienced” by the region, Satoshi Sugimoto of the JMA’s forecast division told reporters. 

“There is a very high possibility that some kind of disaster has already occurred. … The situation is such that lives are in danger and safety must be secured,” he added. 

Noncompulsory evacuation orders were issued to parts of Fukuoka, Oita and neigboring prefectures, which were opening shelters to accommodate those leaving their homes.

The prime minister’s office said a taskforce had been established to coordinate a response to the rains. 

The downpour forced the stoppage of bullet train service between western Hiroshima and Fukuoka, operator JR West said.

Japan is currently in its annual rainy season, which often brings heavy downpours, and sometimes results in flooding and landslides, as well as casualties.   

Scientists say climate change is intensifying the risk of heavy rain in Japan and elsewhere, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water. 

In 2021, rain triggered a devastating landslide in the central resort town of Atami that killed 27 people. 

And in 2018, floods and landslides killed more than 200 people in western Japan during the rainy season.
…

Natural disasters can be dramatic — barreling hurricanes, building-toppling tornadoes — but heat is more deadly.

Chicago learned that the hard way in 1995.

That July, a weeklong heat wave that hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) killed more than 700 people. Most of the deaths occurred in poor and majority Black neighborhoods, where many elderly or isolated people suffered without proper ventilation or air conditioning. Power outages from an overwhelmed grid made it all worse.

Initially slow to react, Chicago has since developed emergency heat response plans that include a massive push to alert the public and then connect the most vulnerable to the help they may need. Other cities like Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix now have “chief heat officers” to coordinate planning and response for dangerous heat. Around the world, cities and countries have adopted similar measures.

But experts warn those steps might not be enough in a world that is seeing heat records consistently shatter and with continuing inequality in who is most vulnerable.

“I don’t know a single city that is truly prepared for the worst-case scenario that some climate scientists fear,” said Eric Klinenberg, a professor of social sciences at New York University who wrote a book about the Chicago heat wave.

Heat preparedness has generally improved over the years as forecasting has become more accurate, and as meteorologists, journalists and government officials have focused on spreading the word of upcoming danger. Chicago, for example, has expanded its emergency text and email notification system and identified its most vulnerable residents for outreach.

But what works in one city might not be as effective in another. That’s because each has its own unique architecture, transportation, layout and inequities, said Bharat Venkat, an associate professor at UCLA who directs the university’s Heat Lab, aimed at tackling what he calls “thermal inequality.”

Venkat thinks cities should address inequality by investing in labor rights, sustainable development and more. That may sound expensive — who pays, for instance, when a city tries to improve conditions for workers in blistering food trucks? — but Venkat thinks doing nothing will ultimately cost more.

“The status quo is actually deeply expensive,” he said. “We just don’t do the math.”

France launched a heat watch warning system after an extended heat wave in 2003 was estimated to have caused 15,000 deaths — many of them older people in city apartments and homes without air conditioning. The system includes public announcements urging people to hydrate. Just last month, Germany launched a new campaign against heatwave deaths that it said was inspired by France’s experience.

In India, a powerful heat wave in 2010 with temperatures over 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) led to the deaths of over 1,300 people in the city of Ahmedabad. City officials now have a heat action plan to improve awareness among the local population and health care staff.  

Ladd Keith, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, cited Baltimore’s Code Red Extreme Heat alerts as an example of a well-designed alert system. The alerts go out when the forecast calls for a heat index of 105 Fahrenheit or higher, and sets in motion things like more social services in communities most vulnerable to heat risks.

He lauded the heat officers in cities like Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix, but said there are “still over 19,000 cities and towns without them.”

Inkyu Han, an environmental health scientist at Temple University in Philadelphia, noted that cities are still struggling to get aids such as cooling centers and subsidized air conditioning into poorer neighborhoods. He said more can be done, too, with simple and sustainable solutions such as improving tree canopy.

“Notably, low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in Philadelphia often lack street trees and green spaces,” Han said.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the Atlantic Ocean typically moderates temperatures, but the region can still get heat waves. Kate Moretti, an emergency room physician, said the city’s hospitals see more patients when the heat strikes — with increases in illnesses that may not be obviously related to heat, like heart attacks, kidney failure and mental health problems.

“We definitely notice that it puts a strain on the system,” Moretti said. Older people, people who work outdoors, people with disabilities and people who are homeless make up a big share of those admissions, she said.

Miami — considered ground zero for the climate change threat due to its vulnerability to sea level rise, flooding, hurricanes and extreme heat — appointed its heat officer two years ago to develop strategies to keep people safe from the heat.

Robin Bachin, an associate professor of civic and community engagement at the University of Miami, noted that the federal government has laws to protect people in cold climates from having their heat shut off in dangerous conditions, but doesn’t have something similar for cooling.

“For people in apartments that are not publicly subsidized, there is no requirement for landlords to provide air conditioning,” Bachin said. “That’s incredibly dangerous to particularly our local low-income population, let alone people who are unhoused or are outdoor workers.”

Klinenberg said that the United States has so far gotten lucky with the duration of most heat waves, but that electrical grids vulnerable to high demand in some regions, along with persistent social inequities, could spell serious trouble in the coming decades.

That’s partly because the underlying social problems that make heat events so deadly are only getting worse, Klinenberg said. Chicago’s 1995 deaths were clustered not only in poor and segregated neighborhoods, but also specifically within what he calls “depleted” neighborhoods, places where it’s harder for people to gather and where social connections have been worn thin. Empty lots, abandoned restaurants and poorly maintained parks mean that people are less likely to check up on each other.
…

Partnership is opening eyes of students of color who never pictured themselves fighting forest fires
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RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met Saturday with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, to build momentum for an upcoming regional summit on the Amazon rainforest and enhance efforts for its protection.

The meeting took place in Colombia’s Leticia, a town in the Amazon’s triple border region between Colombia, Brazil and Peru, where organized crime has recently increased its hold.

The meeting aimed to lay groundwork for the Amazon Summit that the Brazilian government is organizing in Belem next month. That summit will be attended by leaders of the countries that are party to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

Lula is pushing for a joint declaration from the summit, which would be presented at the United Nation’s climate conference, known as COP28, in Dubai in November.

“We will have to demand together that rich countries fulfil their commitments,” Lula said in Leticia, sitting next to Petro.

Petro also stressed the need for a common front to exert pressure on developed countries.

“We believed that progress was the destruction of trees. … Today that is nothing other than the destruction of life,” he said.

The Colombian leader said tackling the climate crisis will require spending trillions of dollars. This could be achieved by transforming the global debt system and “trading debt for climate action,” he said.

The final document will comprise measures for the sustainable development of the Amazon, protecting the biome, and promoting social inclusion, science, technology and innovation while valuing Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, Brazil’s presidential palace said in a statement.

“Joint action of the countries that share the Amazon biome is fundamental for facing the multiple challenges in the region,” the statement said.

One challenge is the tightened grip of organized crime, particularly in tri-border regions like where Leticia is located. British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira were killed in the neighboring Javari valley region last year.

These areas have become violent hotspots, according to a report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released in June. It noted criminal groups are simultaneously engaged in cocaine trafficking, as well as natural resource exploitation.

Indigenous groups are disproportionately affected by the criminal nexus in the Amazon, the report added, pointing to forced displacements, mercury poisoning and other health-related impacts as well as increased exposure to violence.

In 2019, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Guyana and Suriname signed the Leticia Pact to strengthen coordinated actions for the preservation of the natural resources of the Amazon.

But the goals are vague and lack ways to measure progress, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an umbrella organization of environmental groups.

Since taking office in January, Lula has strived to put environmental protection and respect for Indigenous peoples’ rights at the heart of his third term. He successful pursued resumption of international donations for the Amazon Fund that combats deforestation, launched a military campaign to eject illegal miners from Yanomami territory, committed to ending all illegal deforestation by 2030 and restarted the demarcation of Indigenous areas.

Petro has also been vocal about the need to halt destruction in the Amazon. The Colombian leader has proposed the creation of multilateral 20-year financing fund to support farming communities contributing to deforestation. The idea is to compensate them for conservation and regenerative activities instead.

Historically, collaboration between Brazil and Colombia, which share a border longer than 1,500 kilometers, has been lacking, according to Wagner Ribeiro, a geographer and expert in environmental policy from the University of Sao Paulo.

“We hope that opportunities for academic cooperation will arise from the meeting, which will later generate public policies that promote environmental conservation,” Ribeiro said. 
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A solar storm forecast for Thursday is expected to give star gazers in 17 U.S. states a chance to see the northern lights, the colorful sky show that happens when solar wind hits the atmosphere.

Northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, are most often seen in Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia, but an 11-year solar cycle that’s expected to peak in 2024 is making the lights visible in places farther south.

Three months ago, the light displays were visible in Arizona, marking the third severe geomagnetic storm since the current solar cycle began in 2019.

The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks has forecast auroral activity on Thursday in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Indiana, Maine and Maryland.

Auroral activity also has been forecast for Canada, including Vancouver. 

Light displays are expected to be visible overhead in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Helena, Montana, and low on the horizon in Salem, Oregon; Boise, Idaho; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Annapolis, Maryland; and Indianapolis, according to the institute.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center said people who want to experience an aurora should get away from city lights and that the best viewing times are between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time.

Northern lights occur when a magnetic solar wind hits the Earth’s magnetic field and causes atoms in the upper atmosphere to glow. The lights appear suddenly, and the intensity varies.

A geomagnetic index known as Kp ranks auroral activity on a scale from zero to nine, with zero being not very active and nine being bright and active. The Geophysical Institute has forecast Kp 6 for Thursday’s storm.
…

WASHINGTON – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Friday on dozens of countries to work together to combat synthetic drugs, but China — facing blame in Washington over an addiction epidemic — denounced the effort. 

Inaugurating a new U.S.-led “coalition” on the scourge, Blinken told ministers from more than 80 countries that the United States — where nearly 110,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids — was “a canary in the coal mine.” 

“Having saturated the United States market, transnational criminal enterprises are turning elsewhere to expand their profits,” Blinken said. 

“If we don’t act together with fierce urgency, more cities around the world will bear the catastrophic costs” witnessed in the United States, he said. 

Americans’ addictions began soaring in the 1990s as painkillers were aggressively marketed by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies, with a disproportionate effect on veterans from U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

As the drugs’ addictiveness became increasingly clear, the United States pressured China, the chief source of fentanyl, to ban exports, which it did in 2019. 

But China is still a major producer of precursor chemicals, which are then shipped to Mexico and Central America where cartels produce fentanyl for smuggling into the United States. 

With China increasingly seen as hostile in the United States, lawmakers facing addicted constituents have again put blame on Beijing.  

Some Republicans have called for military action against cartels in Mexico. 

China refused an invitation to participate in the coalition, saying it believed in international cooperation against drugs but that the United States has sent the wrong message by imposing sanctions on Chinese companies over fentanyl. 

China “firmly opposes smearing and attacking other countries or imposing unilateral sanctions on other countries in the name of counternarcotics,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Weng Wenbin said in Beijing.

Global coordination

Todd Robinson, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, said the United States would welcome China’s participation in future meetings and hoped that other countries would reach out to Beijing. 

“Part of the reason we’re trying to bring this coalition together is to engage other countries in their efforts against these supply chains, and part of their responsibility is going to be engaging with the PRC,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. 

Blinken implicitly acknowledged that action by China alone would not end the epidemic. 

“When one government aggressively restricts a precursor chemical, traffickers simply buy it elsewhere,” he said. 

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin said that COVID-19 showed the need for global coordination on emerging epidemics, including drugs. 

“We once prided ourselves as a drug-free country. Yet today we are witnessing a significant increase in drug consumption, especially among our youth,” Park said. 

Blinken said the coalition would also look at best practices domestically in treating addiction. 

Members of the coalition will meet in person in September on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Blinken said. 

The new grouping will also address other synthetic drugs including captagon, the amphetamine-like stimulant that has seen a surge of use in Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, which was participating in Friday’s meeting. 

An AFP investigation in November found that Syria has developed a $10 billion industry in captagon, dwarfing all other industries in the war-ravaged country and funding President Bashar al-Assad and many of his enemies. 
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Officials in Cameroon say vaccine hesitancy is preventing them from inoculating millions of children for childhood diseases in the first major campaign since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

The country has an outbreak of measles and rubella that has killed 18 children and sickened more than 4,000 this year. The public health ministry said several thousand vaccinators have been dispatched to over 200 hospitals in Cameroon to inoculate more than 5.5 million children against measles and rubella. 

The government says the vaccinators are also visiting homes, churches, mosques, markets and camps to make sure every child under 10 years old is inoculated.

Thirty-six-year-old carpenter Ongene Pierre says he stopped the vaccinators from inoculating his three children at Nyom, a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. 

He said he doesn’t understand why the government wants all children under 10 to be vaccinated, adding that health workers should not be visiting public places to vaccinate children without the approval of parents.

Ongene said he has never received a vaccine and sees no reason for his children to be vaccinated.

Jeanette Moloua, a medical staff member in the public health ministry, said the nationwide vaccination campaign targets children from 9 months to 5 years who are the most affected by the measles outbreak. 

“We should make sure our children take the two doses of the vaccine because this will boost their immune system,” she said. “We should sensitize the public, those with rubella, we direct them to the hospital for them to get treatment, and also it is treated by the same vaccine, the MMR vaccine which fights against measles, mumps and rubella.”

Moloa said the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is safe and there is no harm getting another dose.

Cameroon’s ministry of health says less than 30% of about 5.5 million children targeted for vaccination in the five-day campaign launched Wednesday have been vaccinated. The government says a lack of trust is the leading cause of vaccine hesitancy. In addition, a lack of access to vaccination information and long distances from vaccination centers and hospitals prevent mothers from getting their children vaccinated.

The National Institute of Statistics says that Cameroon has a high proportion of he world’s zero-dose or unvaccinated children. The center says several pockets in Cameroon traditionally miss essential health care services, including vaccinations.

Health officials say parents should make sure their children get two doses of MMR vaccine, starting with the first dose at 12 to 15 months of age, and the second dose at 4 through 6 years of age.

The ongoing vaccination campaign is the biggest since Cameroon reported its first cases of COVID-19 in March 2020. The government says when COVID-19 was reported in the central African state, parents were afraid to take their children to hospitals for vaccinations because hospitals were also COVID-19 test and treatment centers.

Health workers say a major challenge for them now is having access to some parts of western English-speaking regions. Separatist fighters have declared that they don’t want workers from the central government in Yaounde in English-speaking towns and villages.

Cameroon’s military says it is protecting health workers and is asking civilians to denounce fighters against government troops so the vaccination drive can be successful. 
…

Earth’s average temperature set a new unofficial record high on Thursday, the third such milestone in a week that already rated as the hottest on record.

The planetary average hit 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17.23 degrees Celsius), surpassing the 62.9-degree mark (17.18-degree mark) set Tuesday and equaled Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition.

That average includes places that are sweltering under dangerous heat — like Jingxing, China, which checked in almost 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) — and the merely unusually warm, like Antarctica, where temperatures across much of the continent were as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) above normal this week.

The temperature is ramping up across Europe this week, too. Germany’s weather agency, DWD, has predicted highs of 37C (99F) on Sunday and the Health Ministry has issued a warning to vulnerable people.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday issued a note of caution about the Maine tool’s findings, saying it could not confirm data that results in part from computer modeling.

“Although NOAA cannot validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis, we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change,” NOAA said.

Still, the Maine data has been widely regarded as another troubling sign of climate change around the globe. Some climate scientists said this week they weren’t surprised to see the unofficial records.

Robert Watson, a scientist and former chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said governments and the private sector “are not truly committed to address climate change.” Nor are citizens, he said.

“They demand cheap energy, cheap food and do not want to pay the true cost of food and energy,” Watson said.
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WASHINGTON – South Korean officials are seeking to tamp down domestic opposition to the likely release of treated wastewater from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The release has the potential to undermine a recent warming of relations between the two countries in the face of an increasingly aggressive China, and some analysts worry that Beijing could use it to try to drive a wedge between them.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi is expected to visit Seoul from Friday to Sunday to explain his approval for Japanese plans to release the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.

Grossi issued the approval Tuesday during his trip to Tokyo where he presented a 140-page IAEA report to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Grossi said in the report the release of the water into the ocean would have a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”

However the plan to release the water has fueled protests in South Korea. Thousands of people have been gathering in Seoul, demanding the Yoon government block it.

Opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung said Thursday at an overnight protest at the National Assembly that the government of President Yoon Suk Yeol is “forcing people to believe Japan and the IAEA report.”

However the Yoon administration has declared it is satisfied with the IAEA’s safety review. During a news briefing on Wednesday, Park Ku-yeon, the first deputy chief of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, said the government recognizes the IAEA “as a prestigious internationally agreed-upon agency and we respect its findings.”

Experts said Beijing could use the protests against the dumping of the water into the ocean as a political tool to separate the renewed Seoul-Tokyo ties. Washington views the bilateral ties between its key allies as important in its effort to counter China’s regional assertiveness.

Dennis Wilder, senior director for East Asia Affairs at the White House’s National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said, “Beijing has been working hard to try to find ways to divide the increasingly effective trilateral relationship so it would not be a surprise if they try to exploit this issue by attempting to scare the public in South Korea and elsewhere in the region.”

He continued, “Nuclear power and nuclear waste are highly charged issues, and it is easy to mislead the public with disinformation even if a credible international organization like the IAEA has ruled the activity safe.”

During a press briefing Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “The report should not be the ‘shield’ or ‘green light’ for Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean.”

Wang continued to say the report does not address “the strong opposition” to the discharge by the people of Japan, South Korea, Pacific Island countries and elsewhere.

The IAEA report concluded the discharge of 1.3 million metric tons of wastewater from the Fukushima plant, which has been filtered through the Advanced Liquid Processing System, would be safe as it meets the international safety standard. The system removes most radioactive contamination with the exception of tritium.

The findings were based on a two-year assessment by an IAEA task force advised by experts from 11 countries, including China, South Korea, and the U.S., according to the IAEA.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was damaged by a deadly combination of an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, causing reactors to overheat and contaminate water in the plant with radioactive material.

New water was used to cool the damaged reactors, and now that water is stored in about 1,000 tanks, the amount equivalent to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Japan is planning to release the water over the next 30 to 40 years, starting around August, according to the IAEA.

South Korea sent a team of 21 experts to examine the safety of the treated water in the Fukushima plant in May and plans to release its own report soon.  Yoon and Kishida are expected to discuss the discharge of the water on the sidelines of a NATO summit next week in Lithuania.

The U.S. “welcomes” the IAEA report, “noting Japan’s plans to release treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site are safe and consistent with internationally accepted nuclear safety standards,” Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the State Department, said on Wednesday.

Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimaging U.S. Grand Strategy Program, said Beijing could use the issue “to drive a wedge between Seoul and Tokyo and halt the trajectory of South Korea-Japan security and economic cooperation.” He noted that China has tried to “inflame South Korean historic distrust of Japan” in the past.

Yoon reached out to Tokyo in March to mend ties frayed over a longtime dispute with roots in the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. The rapprochement resulted in summits with Kishida in March and May, the first for the two nations in 12 years.

The two leaders also met on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima and held a trilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden. He invited them to Washington for a trilateral summit on an unspecified date later this summer.

Andrew Yeo, the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy, said despite Beijing being “very vocal” about the discharge and attempting “to find common cause with Seoul in driving a wedge between Tokyo and Seoul,” the U.S. should not be “too worried.”

Yeo continued, “Trilateral cooperation is proceeding with strong understanding that ongoing cooperation is necessary to deter and defend against North Korean threats and also coordinate on broader Indo-Pacific issues.” 
…

The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency is visiting the Asia-Pacific region this week after giving Tokyo the green light on Tuesday to release more than 1 million metric tons of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The IAEA says the water is safe for release, but the decision has done little to ease concerns of fishing and environmental communities throughout the region. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports.
…