Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said it began releasing a second batch of treated radioactive wastewater into the sea on Thursday after the first round of discharges ended smoothly.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings said workers activated a pump to dilute the treated water with large amounts of seawater, slowly sending the mixture into the ocean through an underground tunnel.

The wastewater discharges, which are expected to continue for decades, have been strongly opposed by fishing groups and neighboring countries including South Korea, where hundreds of people staged protest rallies. China banned all imports of Japanese seafood, badly hurting Japanese seafood producers and exporters.

The plant’s first wastewater release began Aug. 24 and ended Sept. 11. During that release, TEPCO said it discharged 7,800 tons of treated water from 10 tanks. In the second discharge, TEPCO plans to release another 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean over 17 days.

About 1.34 million tons of radioactive wastewater is stored in about 1,000 tanks at the plant. It has accumulated since the plant was crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

TEPCO and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks will reach capacity early next year and space at the plant will be needed for its decommissioning, which is expected to take decades.

They say the water is treated to reduce radioactive materials to safe levels, and then is diluted with seawater to make it much safer than international standards.

Some scientists say, however, that the continuing release of low-level radioactive materials is unprecedented and needs to be monitored closely.

Japan’s government has set up a relief fund to help find new markets and reduce the impact of China’s seafood ban. Measures also include the temporary purchase, freezing and storage of seafood and promotion of seafood sales at home.

Cabinet ministers have traveled to Fukushima to sample local seafood and promote its safety.

TEPCO is tasked with providing compensation for reputational damage to the region’s seafood caused by the wastewater release. It started accepting applications this week and immediately received hundreds of inquiries. Most of the damage claims are linked to China’s seafood ban and excess supply at home causing price declines, TEPCO said.

Agriculture Minister Ichiro Miyashita promoted Japanese scallops at a food fair in Malaysia on Wednesday on the sidelines of a regional farm ministers’ meeting.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has reviewed the safety of the wastewater release and concluded that if carried out as planned, it would have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health.
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More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care staff across the U.S. began a three-day strike Wednesday, which will likely hold up appointments, test results and prescriptions at locations across the nation.

Kaiser Permanente, a California-based chain of hospitals, pharmacies and clinics, serves nearly 13 million Americans.

The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which represents about 85,000 company workers, announced a three-day strike in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington state, and a daylong strike in Virginia and Washington, D.C., after contract negotiations stalled overnight.

More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente employees are expected to join in.

Talks restarted Wednesday.

A key complaint from those on the picket line is that understaffing is inundating workers and delaying vital care.

“We’re striking for our patients,” said Mikki Fletchall, a licensed vocational nurse at a Kaiser clinic in Camarillo, California.

Kaiser Permanente promised that its 39 hospitals, including emergency rooms, would stay open as doctors and many nurses are not picketing. But non-emergency procedures could be delayed and wait times on customer service calls could soar.

Kaiser workers’ unions demanded a $25 hourly minimum wage in August followed by increases of 7% in the next two years and 6.25% in the two years after that.

Union members say understaffing is helping Kaiser Permanente reap massive profits at the cost of patients’ health, accusing executives of bargaining in bad faith.

Kaiser proposed minimum hourly wages of $21 to $23 in 2024.

Since 2022, Kaiser has hired 51,000 employees and is looking to add 10,000 more before the end of the month.

The hospital system’s operating revenue was $25 billion in this year’s second quarter, a 7% jump from previous figures. Kaiser credited shrewd investments for its $2.1 billion profit that quarter, which helped the company rebound from a $1.3 billion hit last year.

But the health care giant is still fending off national labor shortages and rising inflation, the company said.

The strike comes in a year that saw laborers in entertainment, hospitality and transportation picket for more competitive contracts. In late September, President Joe Biden joined autoworkers in Michigan on the picket line. Political commentators say his action has emboldened unionists across the nation.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press. 
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France has urged the public not to worry about reports of bedbug outbreaks on public transportation in Paris and throughout the country.

At least 37 sightings of bedbugs on public transportation have been reported over the past few weeks by national rail operator SNCF, with a dozen additional reports made to Paris public transport operator RATP.

French Transport Minister Clément Beaune said that each report had been checked out, and that none were proved to be true.

“When there is a problem, we deal with it. We won’t deny it,” Beaune said. “There is no outbreak of bedbugs in public transportation.”

French media have reported extensively about bedbugs on trains and in cinemas, and the government worries about the impact on tourism and the Paris Olympics, which start in less than a year.

Despite the denials, France will be taking preventative measures against a potential outbreak, using sniffing dogs on trains to detect the pests.

Beaune also plans to meet with pest control companies to preemptively come up with a solution if bedbugs were to infest public transportation.

He has promised transparency and said he would publish data every three months citing all reports and confirmed bedbug infestations.

On a radio spot Tuesday, French Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau told the French public there’s “no reason for panic” about “widespread” reports of bedbugs in Paris.

According to a report Tuesday by CNN, Marie Effroy, head of the Paris-based National Institute for the Study and Control of Bedbugs, said the level of bedbug infestation in France, which tends to spike toward the end of each summer season, is worse than previous years but treatable.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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Scientists Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots,” which illuminate computer monitors and television screens and are used by doctors to map tumors.

“The Nobel Laureates … have succeeded in producing particles so small that their properties are determined by quantum phenomena. The particles, which are called quantum dots, are now of great importance in nanotechnology,” the Nobel Committee for Chemistry said in a statement.

“Researchers believe that in the future they could contribute to flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication.”

Nanoparticles and quantum dots are used in LED-lights and can also be used to guide surgeons while removing cancer tissue.

The more than century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($997,959).

Earlier on Wednesday, the academy appeared to have inadvertently published the names of the three scientists it said had won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Bawendi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brus is professor emeritus at Columbia University and Ekimov works for Nanocrystals Technology Inc.

Brus was hired by AT&T Bell Labs in 1972 where he spent 23 years, devoting much of the time to studying nanocrystals.

Bawendi was born in Paris and grew up in France, Tunisia, and the U.S. Bawendi did his postdoctoral research under Brus then joined MIT in 1990 and became professor in 1996.

Ekimov was born in the Soviet Union worked for the Vavilov State Optical Institute before moving to the United States. In 1999, Ekimov was named chief scientist at Nanocrystals Technology Inc.

The third of this year’s crop of awards, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.

Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and chemist Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901 with a few interruptions, primarily due to the world wars.

The economics prize is a later addition funded by the Swedish central bank.

While the chemistry awards are sometimes overshadowed by the physics prize and its famous winners such as Albert Einstein, chemistry laureates include many scientific greats, including radioactivity pioneer Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, who also won the physics prize.

Last year’s chemistry award went to scientists Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless for pioneering work in “click chemistry,” discovering reactions that let molecules snap together to create new compounds.
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Wearing an “I Love Pandas” T-shirt and clutching a panda-covered diary, 10-year-old Kelsey Lambert bubbled with excitement as she glimpsed the real thing. She and her mother, Alison, had made a special trip from San Antonio, Texas, just to watch the National Zoo’s furry rock stars  munch bamboo and roll on the grass. 

“It felt completely amazing,” Kelsey said on Friday. “My mom has always promised she would take me one day. So, we had to do it now that they’re going away.” 

The National Zoo’s three giant pandas — Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji — are set to return to China in early December with no public signs that the 50-year-old exchange agreement struck by President Richard Nixon will continue. 

National Zoo officials have remained tight-lipped about the prospects of renewing or extending the agreement, and repeated attempts to gain comment on the state of the negotiations did not receive a response. However, the public stance of the zoo has been decidedly pessimistic — treating these remaining months as the end of an era. 

‘Punitive panda diplomacy’

The zoo just finished a weeklong celebration called Panda Palooza: A Giant Farewell. 

The potential end of the National Zoo’s panda era comes amid what veteran China-watchers say is a larger trend. With diplomatic tensions running high between Beijing and a number of Western governments, China appears to be gradually pulling back its pandas from multiple Western zoos as their agreements expire. 

Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, called the trend “punitive panda diplomacy,” noting that two other American zoos have lost their pandas in recent years, while zoos in Scotland and Australia are facing similar departures with no signs of their loan agreements being renewed. 

Beijing currently lends out 65 pandas to 19 countries through “cooperative research programs” with a stated mission to better protect the vulnerable species. The pandas return to China when they reach old age and any cubs born are sent to China around age 3 or 4. 

The San Diego Zoo returned its pandas in 2019, and the last bear at the Memphis, Tennessee, zoo went home earlier this year. The departure of the National Zoo’s bears would mean that the only giant pandas left in America are at the Atlanta Zoo — and that loan agreement expires late next year. 

Wilder said the Chinese possibly could be “trying to send a signal.” 

He cited a litany of Chinese-American flashpoints: sanctions imposed by the U.S. government on prominent Chinese citizens and officials; restrictions on the import of Chinese semiconductors; accusations that Chinese-made fentanyl is flooding American cities; suspicion over Chinese ownership of the social media platform TikTok; and the uproar early this year over the Chinese balloon floating over America. 

Beijing, Wilder said, is convinced that “NATO and the United States are lining up against China.” 

The panda-related tension has even spilled into the hallways of the U.S. Senate. Last week, Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman complained about China buying up American farmland and added, “I mean, they’re taking back our pandas. You know, we should take back all their farmland.” 

Petition to return panda

That animosity has been at least partially shared by the public in China, where anti-American sentiments are on the rise. Those sentiments developed into a perfect panda storm earlier this year when Le Le, a male panda on loan to the zoo in Memphis, died suddenly in February at the age of 24. Pandas generally live 15 to 20 years in the wild, while those in human care often live to be around 30. 

Le Le’s unexpected death prompted an explosion on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, with widespread allegations that the Memphis Zoo had mistreated the bear and its female companion, Ya Ya. The campaign gained intensity when photos circulated on the Internet of Ya Ya looking dirty and gaunt (by panda standards) with patchy fur. 

An online petition on Change.org demanded Ya Ya be returned immediately, alleging malnourishment and deprivation of proper medical care. Slogans such as “the panda’s life matters” surfaced in China’s social media along with emotional memes pleading with authorities to rescue the bear. One particular meme depicts a miserable-looking Ya Ya gazing at a plane flying overhead with the caption: “Mama, I have worked away from home for 20 years. Have I earned enough for a plane ticket to return home?” 

The heat grew so intense that the Memphis Zoo released a statement responding to what it called “misinformation” about its pandas and stating that Ya Ya has “a chronic skin and fur condition” that “makes her hair look thin and patchy” and that Le Le died of natural causes. 

Even an official Chinese scientific delegation that visited Memphis and announced that Le Le was not mistreated and died of a heart condition failed to quell the outrage. Ya Ya was returned to China on schedule in April when the loan agreement expired and received a celebrity’s welcome at Shanghai’s airport. 

The Chinese government, which gifted the first pair of pandas — Hsing Hsing and Ling Ling — to the U.S., now leases the pandas out for a typical 10-year renewable term. The annual fee ranges from $1 million to $2 million per pair, plus mandatory costs to build and maintain facilities to house the animals. Any cub born to the pandas belongs to the Chinese government but can be leased for an additional fee until it reaches mating age. 

Over the 50 years of American panda loan agreements, the arrangement has hit more than one rough patch. In 2010, Daniel Ashe, then head of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, traveled to China to help resolve a technical bureaucratic issue that was threatening the renewal of the National Zoo’s agreement. The problem was quickly resolved, and the agreement was extended. 

“But the situation now is completely different,” said Ashe, now CEO of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “What we’re seeing now is tensions between our governments at a much higher level, and they need to be addressed and resolved at that level.” 

Observers are holding out hope that exactly this sort of 11th-hour high-level intervention will come through. Wilder pointed to the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco in November as a potential forum for President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping to make headlines by breaking the deadlock. And Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng has sounded semi-optimistic in his public statements. 

“I will do my utmost to do that, and here, in Aspen, there also will be (pandas),” Xie said during the Aspen Security Forum in July in Aspen, Colorado. 
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Belize is developing a pilot project to convert the masses of foul-smelling sargassum seaweed swamping its pristine beaches into biofuel, its prime minister said in a statement published by regional Caribbean bloc CARICOM on Tuesday.

Many Caribbean countries depend economically on drawing travelers from around the world to their white sand beaches, but since 2010 heaps of rotting seaweed have been massing on the shores for reasons scientists do not yet fully understand but suspect are related to climate change.

Floating sargassum provides shelter and food for marine animals but as it washes ashore it can smother ecological habitats and begins to rot, becoming harmful to humans.

Belize Prime Minister John Briceno said in the statement that the $50 million facility, the result of a public-private partnership with German company Variodin, would convert municipal solid waste and sargassum into diesel fuel replacements.

The facility could be scaled up with more financing, he said, adding that it would sign a power purchase agreement for energy generated from the plant.

“The sargassum seaweed invasion [is] causing economic, social and environmental wreckage across Belize and the Caribbean,” CARICOM said, citing estimates that the region spends $120 million a year to collect and dispose of it.

“Removal is a vicious cycle of never-ending sargassum, a cycle that removes the seaweed but also the sand, causing further damage to the coastline,” it said, noting that 24 million tons landed on Caribbean coasts last year — damaging tourism, the fishing industry and people’s health.

Briceno said that while complete mitigation is no longer possible, control is within reach.

“Research conducted shows that conversion of sargassum into the Belize energy mix is a viable solution to the problem,” he said, without detailing when the plant would be operational.
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A charity group in Zimbabwe is raising funds for a basic product that can be critical for people living with albinism – sunscreen. The group, called “The Noble Hands of Zimbabwe,” released a report in September saying 1 in 3 people with albinism in Zimbabwe die of skin cancer before the age of 40, including children as young as 8. Columbus Mavhunga has more from Harare, Zimbabwe. VOA footage by Blessing Chigwenhembe.
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The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to three scientists who look at electrons in atoms during the tiniest of split seconds.

Pierre Agostini of The Ohio State University in the U.S.; Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany; and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden won the award.

Their experiments “have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the prize in Stockholm. They “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”

At the moment, this science is about understanding our universe rather than practical applications, but the hope is that it will eventually lead to better electronics and disease diagnosis.

“Attosecond science allows us to address fundamental questions such as the time scale of the photoelectric effect for which Einstein, Albert Einstein, received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921,” according to Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

The Nobel Prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896.

Last year, three scientists jointly won the physics prize for proving that tiny particles could retain a connection with each other even when separated. The phenomenon was once doubted but is now being explored for potential real-world applications such as encrypting information.

The physics prize comes a day after Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

Nobel announcements will continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 9.

The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. The prestigious peace prize is handed out in Oslo, according to his wishes, while the other award ceremony is held in Stockholm.
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The World Health Organization on Monday announced the recommendation of a second malaria vaccine, with the aim of giving countries a cheaper and more readily available option to tackle the deadly disease.

Developed by Oxford University with the help of the Serum Institute of India, the new vaccine, known as R-21, will be rolled out in some African countries early next year, and expand into other countries later in 2024, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Research that has not yet undergone the usual process of scientific review suggests the three-dose vaccine to be around 75% effective. Boosters would be available for continued protection.

“Almost exactly two years ago, WHO recommended the broad use of the world’s first malaria vaccine called RTS,S” also known as Mosquirix, Tedros told a briefing in Geneva.

Developed by British pharmaceutical GSK, Mosquirix requires four doses, is only about 30% effective, and fades within months. The WHO says there is not enough data available to confirm whether the newly developed Oxford vaccine will be more effective.

The Serum Institute has said it could produce 200 million doses of the R-21 vaccine per year, while GSK is able to produce only 15 million doses of Mosquirix annually.

The aim of widespread rollout of the vaccine would be to significantly curb infection rates and spread of the disease. However, experts have urged the public not to see vaccines as a replacement for other preventative measures, such as bed nets and the spraying of insecticides.

The WHO also issued a recommendation on a Takeda Pharmaceuticals-produced vaccine against dengue, a disease prevalent in subtropical climates which, like malaria, is spread by mosquitoes.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ vaccine was shown to be effective in all four stereotypes of the virus in previously infected individuals, but it showed a lower performance in some stereotypes of people not previously infected.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Two scientists who jointly worked on the ground-breaking technology behind some of the most effective COVID-19 vaccines have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for medicine, one of the most prestigious accolades in the field.

Hungarian American scientist Katalin Kariko and her American colleague, Drew Weissman, began working on so-called “mRNA” technology in the early 1990s at the University of Pennsylvania. Their breakthrough was crucial in developing the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNtech coronavirus vaccines, which have proved among the most effective in tackling COVID-19.

Lifesaving vaccines

The Nobel Prize in Medicine Committee in Sweden said the discovery had helped defeat one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.

“mRNA vaccines, together with other COVID-19 vaccines, have been administered over 13 billion times. Together, they have saved millions of lives, prevented severe COVID-19, reduced the overall disease burden, and enabled societies to open up again,” Nobel committee member Rickard Sandberg told reporters following the announcement Monday.

“mRNA technologies are now being used to develop vaccines against other infections. The technology may also be used for therapeutic protein delivery and cancer treatment in the hope of further improving human health,” Sandberg said.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus congratulated the Nobel Prize winners Monday. “Today is a great day for health, a great day for science and a great day for vaccines,” he told reporters in Geneva.

mRNA Technology

mRNA — or messenger RNA — instructs cells to make proteins that match those found on the surface of pathogens, like the coronavirus. The body sees these as invaders and makes antibodies and T-cells to attack them; thus, training it to deal with a real virus in the future.

Kariko and Weissman first met while lining up to use a photocopier machine at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s.

By 2005, the pair had worked out a way to stop the immune system from attacking RNA made in the laboratory, previously seen as a major hurdle against its use.

Kariko said Monday they made a good team.

“I was the RNA person and Drew was [the] immunologist, and we educated each other. And together we learned [from] each other and developed mRNA,” she told The Associated Press.

Future applications

Weissman said the future potential for mRNA was incredible.

“We’ve been thinking for years about everything that we could do with RNA, and now it’s here,” he told AP.

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the development of mRNA technology, said Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

“Prior to COVID, people knew that work was being done on mRNA vaccines,” he told VOA. “But I don’t think we were ever close to getting real-world use of the technology. Now that it’s been shown to work — to work probably better than many if not most other vaccine types — I think is a big boost to it, and there are a substantial number of potential uses of this technology.

“Then there is the speed of the development of this technology,” he added. “It’s a lot easier now and a lot quicker to develop new vaccines.”

Cancer hope

The chair of the Nobel Committee for Medicine, Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam, expressed hope that mRNA technology could one day be used to fight cancer.

“Vaccines that are targeted towards specific kinds of tumors, maybe even to specific individuals or personalized cancers. That will become an area that this platform is really ideally suited for, because of the flexibility,” she told Reuters.

Kariko and Weissman share the prize of $1 million and will receive their medals at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.
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