CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Last-minute computer trouble nixed Saturday’s launch attempt for Boeing’s first astronaut flight, the latest in a string of delays over the years.
Two NASA astronauts were strapped in the company’s Starliner capsule when the countdown automatically was halted at 3 minutes and 50 seconds by the computer system that controls the final minutes before liftoff.
With only a split second to take off, there was no time to work the latest problem and the launch was called off.
Technicians raced to the pad to help astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams out of the capsule atop the fully fueled Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Within an hour of the launch abort, the hatch was reopened.
The team can’t get to the computers to troubleshoot the problem until the rocket is drained of all its fuel, said Tory Bruno, CEO for the rocket maker, United Launch Alliance.
Bruno said one of the three redundant computers located near the rocket at the pad was sluggish. All three must work properly to proceed with a launch, he said.
Depending on what needs to be fixed, the next launch attempt could be as early as Wednesday. If it doesn’t blast off this coming week, then that would be it until mid-June in order to move the rocket off the pad and replace batteries.
“This is the business that we’re in,” Boeing’s Mark Nappi said. “Everything’s got to work perfectly.”
It was the second launch attempt. The first try on May 6 was delayed for leak checks and rocket repairs.
NASA wants a backup to SpaceX, which has been flying astronauts since 2020.
Boeing should have launched its first crew around the same time as SpaceX, but its first test flight with no one on board in 2019 was plagued by severe software issues and never made it to the space station.
A redo in 2022 fared better, but parachute problems and flammable later caused more delays. A small helium leak in the capsule’s propulsion system last month came on top of a rocket valve issue.
More valve trouble cropped up two hours before Saturday’s planned liftoff, but the team used a backup circuit to get the ground-equipment valves working to top off the fuel for the rocket’s upper stage. Launch controllers were relieved to keep pushing ahead, but the computer system known as the ground launch sequencer ended the effort.
“Of course, this is emotionally disappointing,” NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, the backup pilot, said from neighboring Kennedy Space Center shortly after the countdown was halted.
But he said delays are part of spaceflight. “We’re going to have a great launch in our future.”
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Beijing — China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe successfully landed on the far side of the moon to collect samples, state news agency Xinhua reported Sunday, the latest leap for Beijing’s decades-old space program.
The Chang’e-6 set down in the immense South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system, Xinhua said, citing the China National Space Administration.
It marks the first time that samples will be collected from the rarely explored area of the moon, according to the agency.
The Chang’e-6 is on a technically complex 53-day mission that began on May 3.
Now that the probe has landed, it will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and rocks and carry out experiments in the landing zone.
That process should be complete within two days, Xinhua said. The probe will use two methods of collection: a drill to collect samples under the surface and a robotic arm to grab specimens from the surface.
Then it must attempt an unprecedented launch from the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth.
Scientists say the moon’s dark side, so-called because it is invisible from Earth, not because it never catches the sun’s rays, holds great promise for research because its craters are less covered by ancient lava flows than the near side.
Material collected from the dark side may shed more light on how the moon formed in the first place.
Plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive under President Xi Jinping.
Beijing has poured huge resources into its space program over the past decade, targeting a string of ambitious undertakings in an effort to close the gap with the two traditional space powers: the United States and Russia.
It has notched several notable achievements, including building a space station called Tiangong, or “heavenly palace.”
Beijing has landed robotic rovers on Mars and the moon, and China is only the third country to independently put humans in orbit.
But Washington has warned that China’s space program is being used to mask military objectives and an effort to establish dominance in space.
China aims to send a crewed mission to the moon by 2030 and plans to build a base on the lunar surface.
The United States is also planning to put astronauts back on the moon by 2026 with its Artemis 3 mission.
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Geneva, Switzerland — The World Health Organization annual assembly on Saturday gave member countries another year to agree on a landmark accord to combat future pandemics.
Three years of effort to reach a deal ended last month in failure. But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed what he called historic decisions taken to make a new bid for an accord.
The WHO agreed in 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic eased to launch talks on an accord to counter any new global health crisis. Millions died from COVID-19 which brought health systems in many countries to their knees.
The talks hit multiple obstacles however with many developing countries accusing rich nations of monopolizing available COVID-19 vaccines.
They have sought assurances that any new accord will make provision of medicines and the sharing of research more equitable.
The WHO annual assembly “made concrete commitments to completing negotiations on a global pandemic agreement within a year, at the latest,” said a statement released at the end of the Geneva meeting.
The assembly also agreed on amendments to an international framework of binding health rules. The changes introduce the notion of a “pandemic emergency,” which calls on member states to take rapid, coordinated action, the statement said.
“The historic decisions taken today demonstrate a common desire by member states to protect their own people, and the world’s, from the shared risk of public health emergencies and future pandemics,” Tedros said.
He said the change to health rules “will bolster countries’ ability to detect and respond to future outbreaks and pandemics by strengthening their own national capacities, and [through] coordination between fellow states, on disease surveillance, information sharing and response.”
Tedros added: “The decision to conclude the pandemic agreement within the next year demonstrates how strongly and urgently countries want it, because the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if.”
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GARDI SUGDUB, Panama — On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.
They go voluntarily — sort of.
The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.
On a recent day, the island’s Indigenous residents rowed or sputtered off with outboard motors to fish. Children, some in uniforms and others in the colorful local textiles called “molas,” chattered as they hustled through the warren of narrow dirt streets on their way to school.
“We’re a little sad, because we’re going to leave behind the homes we’ve known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where the tourists come, but the sea is sinking the island little by little,” said Nadin Morales, 24, who prepared to move with her mother, uncle and boyfriend.
An official with Panama’s Ministry of Housing said that some people have decided to stay on the island until it’s no longer safe, without revealing a specific number.
Authorities won’t force them to leave, the official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.
Gardi Sugdub is one of about 50 populated islands in the archipelago of the Guna Yala territory. It is only about 366 meters (1,200 feet) long and 137 meters (450 feet) wide. From above, it’s roughly a prickly oval surrounded by dozens of short docks where residents tie up their boats.
Every year, especially when the strong winds whip up the sea in November and December, water fills the streets and enters the homes. Climate change isn’t only leading to a rise in sea levels, but it’s also warming oceans and thereby powering stronger storms.
The Gunas have tried to reinforce the island’s edge with rocks, pilings and coral, but seawater keeps coming.
“Lately, I’ve seen that climate change has had a major impact,” Morales said. “Now the tide comes to a level it didn’t before, and the heat is unbearable.”
The Guna’s autonomous government decided two decades ago that they needed to think about leaving the island, but at that time it was because the island was getting too crowded. The effects of climate change accelerated that thinking, said Evelio Lopez, a 61-year-old teacher on the island.
He plans to move with relatives to the new site on the mainland that the government developed at a cost of $12 million. The concrete houses sit on a grid of paved streets carved out of the lush tropical jungle just over 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the port, where an eight-minute boat ride carries them to Gardi Sugdub.
Leaving the island is “a great challenge, because more than 200 years of our culture is from the sea, so leaving this island means a lot of things,” Lopez said. “Leaving the sea, the economic activities that we have there on the island, and now we’re going to be on solid ground, in the forest. We’re going to see what the result is in the long run.”
Steven Paton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s physical monitoring program in Panama, said that the upcoming move “is a direct consequence of climate change through the increase in sea level.”
“The islands on average are only a half-meter above sea level, and as that level rises, sooner or later the Gunas are going to have to abandon all of the islands, almost surely by the end of the century or earlier,” he said.
“All of the world’s coasts are being affected by this at different speeds,” Paton said.
Residents of a small coastal community in Mexico moved inland last year after storms continued to take away their homes. Governments are being forced to take action, from the Italian lagoon city of Venice to the coastal communities of New Zealand.
A recent study by Panama’s Environmental Ministry’s Climate Change directorate, with support from universities in Panama and Spain, estimated that by 2050, Panama would lose about 2.01% of its coastal territory to increases in sea levels.
Panama estimates that it will cost about $1.2 billion to relocate the 38,000 or so inhabitants who will face rising sea levels in the short- and medium-term, said Ligia Castro, climate change director for the Environmental Ministry.
On Gardi Sugdub, women who make the elaborately embroidered molas worn by Guna women hang them outside their homes when finished, trying to catch the eye of visiting tourists.
The island and others along the coast have benefitted for years from year-round tourism.
Braucilio de la Ossa, the deputy secretary of Carti, the port facing Gardi Sugdub, said that he planned to move with his wife, daughter, sister-in-law and mother-in-law. Some of his wife’s relatives will stay on the island.
He said the biggest challenge for those moving would be the lifestyle change of moving from the sea inland, even though the distance is relatively small.
“Now that they will be in the forest, their way of living will be different,” he said.
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KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda has rolled out a nationwide yellow fever vaccination campaign to help safeguard its population against the mosquito-borne disease that has long posed a threat.
By the end of April, Ugandan authorities had vaccinated 12.2 million of the 14 million people targeted, said Dr. Michael Baganizi, an official in charge of immunization at the health ministry.
Uganda will now require everyone traveling to and from the country to have a yellow fever vaccination card as an international health regulation, Baganizi said.
Ugandan authorities hope the requirement will compel more people to get the yellow fever shot amid a general atmosphere of vaccine hesitancy that worries health care providers in the East African nation.
The single-dose vaccine has been offered free of charge to Ugandans between the ages of 1 and 60. Vaccination centers in the capital, Kampala, and elsewhere included schools, universities, hospitals and local government units.
Before this, Ugandans usually paid to get the yellow fever shot at private clinics, for the equivalent of $27.
Uganda, with 45 million people, is one of 27 countries on the African continent classified as at high risk for yellow fever outbreaks. According to the World Health Organization, there are about 200,000 cases and 30,000 deaths globally each year from the disease.
Uganda’s most recent outbreak was reported earlier this year in the central districts of Buikwe and Buvuma.
Yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes. The majority of infections are asymptomatic. Symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, headache, loss of appetite and nausea or vomiting, according to the WHO.
Uganda’s vaccination initiative is part of a global strategy launched in 2017 by the WHO and partners such as the U.N. children’s agency to eliminate yellow fever by 2026. The goal is to protect almost 1 billion people in Africa and the Americas.
A midterm evaluation of that strategy, whose results were published last year, found that 185 million people in high-risk African countries had been vaccinated by August 2022.
In Uganda, most people get the yellow fever shot when they are traveling to countries such as South Africa that demand proof of vaccination on arrival.
James Odite, a nurse working at a private hospital which has been designated as a vaccination center in a suburb of the capital, Kampala, told the AP that hundreds of doses remained unused after the yellow fever vaccination campaign closed. They will be used in a future mass campaign.
Among the issues raised by vaccine-hesitant people was the question of whether “the government wants to give them expired vaccines,” Odite said.
Baganizi, the immunization official, said Uganda’s government has invested in community “sensitization” sessions during which officials tell people that vaccines save lives.
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SYDNEY — Australian researchers say a simpler and cheaper method to remove salt from seawater using heat could help combat what they call “unprecedented global water shortages.” The desalination of seawater is a process where salt and impurities are removed to produce drinking water.
Most of the world’s desalination methods use a process called reverse osmosis. It uses pressure to force seawater through a membrane. The salt is retained on one side, and purified water is passed through on the other.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) say that while widespread, the current processes need large amounts of electricity and other expensive materials that need to be serviced and maintained.
Scientists at ANU say they developed the world’s first thermal desalination method. It is powered not by electricity, but by moderate heat generated directly from sunlight, or waste heat from machines such as air conditioners or other industrial processes.
It uses a phenomenon called thermo diffusion, in which salt moves from hot temperatures to cold. The researchers pumped seawater through a narrow channel, which runs under a unit that was heated to greater than 60 degrees Celsius and over a bottom plate that was cooled to 20 degrees Celsius. Lower-salinity water comes from the water in the top section of the channel, closer to the heat.
After repeated cycles through the channels, the ANU study asserts, the salinity of seawater can be reduced from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 parts per million.
Juan Felipe Torres, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the Australian National University and the project’s lead chief investigator, explained his pioneering work.
“We use a phenomenon people have not used before,” he said. “We are exploring its applicability in this context but in essence (it) should be something super simple, something as simple as a channel where you have water flowing through it and you are going to produce some sort of separation, and this is what thermal desalination is doing.”
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has stated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people around the world are likely to face “absolute water scarcity.”
Torres said the ANU’s invention could help ensure water supplies to communities under threat because of climate change.
“Our vision, let’s say, for the future to have a more equitable world in terms of water security and food security is a method that does not require expensive maintenance or to train personnel to continue running it. So, we think thermal desalination would enable that,” he said.
The ANU team is building a multi-channel solar-powered device to desalinate seawater in the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, which is enduring a severe drought.
The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.
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It’s an emergence that’s been more than a decade in the making. Trillions of cicadas that have burrowed underground for 13 or 17 years are now emerging in parts of the Midwestern and Southern United States. And, VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, they are ready to mate.
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GRINDAVIK, Iceland — Lava continued to spurt from a volcano in southwestern Iceland on Thursday but the activity had calmed significantly from when it erupted a day earlier.
The eruption Wednesday was the fifth and most powerful since the volcanic system near Grindavik reawakened in December after 800 years, gushing record levels of lava as its fissure grew to 3.5 kilometers in length.
Volcanologist Dave McGarvie calculated that the amount of lava initially flowing from the crater could have buried the soccer pitch at Wembley Stadium in London under 15 meters of lava every minute.
“These jets of magma are reaching like 50 meters, into the atmosphere,” said McGarvie, an honorary researcher at Lancaster University. “That just immediately strikes me as a powerful eruption. And that was my first impression … then some numbers came out, estimating how much was coming out per minute or per second and it was, ‘Wow.'”
The activity once again threatened Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people, and led to the evacuation of the popular Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions.
Grindavik, which is about 50 kilometers southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, has been threatened since a swarm of earthquakes in November forced an evacuation in advance of the initial December 18 eruption. A subsequent eruption consumed several buildings.
Protective barriers outside Grindavik deflected the lava Wednesday but the evacuated town remained without electricity and two of the three roads into town were inundated with lava.
“I just like the situation quite well compared to how it looked at the beginning of the eruption yesterday,” Grindavik Mayor Fannar Jónasson told national broadcaster RUV.
McGarvie said the eruption was more powerful than the four that preceded it because the largest amount of magma had accumulated in a chamber underground before breaking the earth’s surface and shooting into the sky.
The rapid and powerful start of the eruption followed by it diminishing quickly several hours later is the pattern researchers have witnessed with this volcano, McGarvie said. It’s unknown when eruptions at this volcano will end.
“It could go on for quite some considerable time,” McGarvie said. “We’re really in new territory here because eruptions like this have never been witnessed, carefully, in this part of Iceland.”
Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, sees regular eruptions. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.
None of the current cycle of eruptions have had an impact on aviation.
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May 31 is World No Tobacco Day, a day when many health advocacy groups raise awareness about the dangers of tobacco. These groups have reason to celebrate: In most countries, tobacco use is declining. But not in Indonesia, where smoking rates are rising, according to the World Health Organization. Dave Grunebaum has the story.
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Geneva — Despite the failure of negotiators to reach a pandemic accord ahead of this week’s World Health Assembly, a senior U.S. official remains optimistic that an agreement to lessen the threats of global killer disease outbreaks is in sight.
“We think the elements of a good deal are already on the table and that is why we feel optimistic because those are pretty good deals. It is just a matter now of fine-tuning it to make sure everybody says we are ready to sign on the dotted line,” Xavier Becerra, U.S. secretary of health and human services, told journalists at a briefing in Geneva Wednesday.
While disappointing, Becerra indicated that it was not surprising that an accord was not reached after two-and-a-half years of negotiations.
“Negotiations go on forever,” he said. “I think we have to put this in perspective. You do not build a nation overnight. You do not build an Empire State Building overnight. It takes a long time. Name me a major international achievement that came overnight.
“I think there is clear consensus that we cannot let the status quo be upon us if another pandemic comes,” he said.
His view reflects that of World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who, in his opening remarks at the World Health Assembly on Monday, assured delegates that the negotiations were on track and were not a failure.
“Of course, we all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly and cross the finish line,” he said. “But I remain confident that you still will—because where there is a will, there is a way.”
WHO says 7,010,681 people have died from the COVID-19 outbreak as of April 13 and that a total of 704,753,890 cases have been confirmed in 229 countries and territories.
Becerra noted that threats against global health have an outsized influence on broader global political and economic interests.
“There is no stability without health. There is no security without health. Our nations cannot be strong unless they are healthy.
“Getting out of COVID is our main health priority,” Becerra said, noting that U.S. President Joe Biden was committed to achieving a pandemic treaty.
“When the president came in, we were experiencing two or three 9/11s every day in America in terms of loss of life. That is where we started. Today, we are walking around without masks. We are treating COVID the way we treat the flu,” he said, indicating that now is not the time to become complacent.
“I think we realize that another pandemic could be upon us. I mean, we are dealing with avian flu in the U.S. right now. We do not know how long it is going to be before we get another type of COVID kind of tragedy. We do not want to wait,” he said.
Sticking points to a pandemic treaty include disagreements over sharing information about pathogens that cause pandemics, a formula for global sharing of vaccines and medicine during international health emergencies, and financing to set up surveillance systems.
The WHO says that member states have agreed to continue to work during the World Health Assembly “to develop the world’s first pandemic accord” to prevent a repeat of the “global health, economic and social impacts” of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We really have an incredible opportunity this week,” Loyce Pace, assistant secretary for global affairs at HHS, said.
“We have spent so long trying to come together and finding compromise and consensus. I think we talk about what is left to do, but I do not know if we talk enough about what has been done toward reaching an agreement.”
“So, whatever happens this week, we need some deliverable, if only to keep this momentum on towards any other work that should continue. We shouldn’t be leaving Geneva and go home without an accord, not after all that has been done,” Pace said.
Secretary Becerra agrees, saying that he does not think there are substantive disagreements about the essential elements of a pandemic treaty.
“It is more how they are packaged, how they are defined. People generally agree with what we have to do in order to be ready to take on any pandemic that may come across our path,” Becerra said.
“I am the son of immigrants. Optimism is in my DNA and so, I believe we are going to get this done because it would be tragic, especially given how far we have come and not get it done.
“We have to be ready,” he said. “Who knows what is coming around the corner. Something is going to broadside us. We just have to be ready.”
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TOKYO — The operator of Japan’s destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant demonstrated Tuesday how a remote-controlled robot would retrieve tiny bits of melted fuel debris from one of three damaged reactors later this year for the first time since the 2011 meltdown.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings plans to deploy a “telesco-style” extendable pipe robot into Fukushima Daiichi No. 2 reactor to test the removal of debris from its primary containment vessel by October.
That work is more than two years behind schedule. The removal of melted fuel was supposed to begin in late 2021 but has been plagued with delays, underscoring the difficulty of recovering from the magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami in 2011.
During the demonstration at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in Kobe, western Japan, where the robot has been developed, a device equipped with tongs slowly descended from the telescopic pipe to a heap of gravel and picked up a granule.
TEPCO plans to remove less than 3 grams (0.1 ounce) of debris in the test at the Fukushima plant.
“We believe the upcoming test removal of fuel debris from Unit 2 is an extremely important step to steadily carry out future decommissioning work,” said Yusuke Nakagawa, a TEPCO group manager for the fuel debris retrieval program. “It is important to proceed with the test removal safely and steadily.”
About 880 tons of highly radioactive melted nuclear fuel remain inside the three damaged reactors. Critics say the 30- to 40-year cleanup target set by the government and TEPCO for Fukushima Daiichi is overly optimistic. The damage in each reactor is different, and plans must accommodate their conditions.
Better understanding the melted fuel debris from inside the reactors is key to their decommissioning. TEPCO deployed four mini drones into the No. 1 reactor’s primary containment vessel earlier this year to capture images from the areas where robots had not reached.
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Yaounde — Cameroon is observing World Menstrual Hygiene Day (May 28) with caravans visiting schools and public spaces to educate people about social taboos that women should not be seen in public during their menstrual periods. Organizations are also donating menstrual kits to girls displaced by terrorism and political tensions in the central African state.
Scores of youths, a majority of them girls, are told that menstruation is a natural part of the reproductive cycle.
Officials in Cameroon’s social affairs and health ministries say the monthly flows are not a curse and girls and women should never be isolated from markets, schools, churches and other public places because of their menstrual cycle.
The government of the central African state says it invited boys to menstrual health day activities because boys often mock girls in schools when they see blood dripping on their legs or skirts.
Tabe Edwan is the spokesperson of Haven of Rebirth Cameroon, an association that takes care of victims of sexual and gender-based violence. She says she participates in in activities to mark World Menstrual Health Day to battle taboos about menstruation that persist in Cameroon.
“We are looking at instances of stigmatization such as prohibition from cooking, prohibition from attending religious ceremonies or visiting such spaces,” she said. “Most often a young girl who is having her menstrual flow is considered to be unclean and so anything that she touches becomes unclean or it also becomes contaminated.”
Cameroon’s government says World Menstrual Day activities took place in many towns and villages, especially in the northwest and southwest regions, where a separatist conflict, now in its seventh year, has displaced about 750,000 people.
The country’s Social Affairs Ministry says displaced women and girls have lost nearly everything and lack even the $2 needed to buy sanitary pads each time they are on their monthly cycle.
Mirabelle Sonkey is founder of the Network for Solidarity Hope and Empowerment, a founding member of the International Menstrual Hygiene Coalition.
Sonkey says she is disheartened when women and girls use rags, papers and tree leaves or just anything unhealthy to stop blood flow because they cannot afford sanitary pads.
“We usually give about 1,000 dignity kits which include buckets, soap, pants and reusable, washable menstrual pads,” she said. “We are still advocating for pads to be free. Our mission is to have an environment where pads will be accessible, that is why we are opening pad banks now where vulnerable women and girls can go there and have pads.”
Sonkey pleaded with donors to provide sanitary pads to give to several thousand northern Cameroonian girls and women displaced by Boko Haram terrorism.
Cameroon’s government says 70% of menstruating women and girls lack access to regular basic sanitation products but it has not reacted to pleas from NGOs to distribute sanitary pads free of charge.
The central African state’s officials say families and communities should help put an end to stigmas by openly discussing menstrual flow and letting everyone know that menstruation is a normal and natural biological function.
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Geneva — The World Health Organization chief on Monday urged countries to nail down a landmark global agreement on handling of future pandemics after they missed a hard deadline.
Scarred by COVID-19 — which killed millions, shredded economies and crippled health systems — nations have spent two years trying to forge binding commitments on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
Negotiators failed to clinch a deal ahead of this week’s World Health Assembly — the annual gathering of WHO’s 194 member states — the deadline for concluding the talks.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus opened the assembly Monday, saying he was confident that an agreement would be secured.
“Of course, we all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly and crossed the finish line,” he said.
“But I remain confident that you still will, because where there is a will, there is a way.”
Tedros said the task before negotiators had been “immense, technically, legally, and politically”, and that they had been “operating on a very ambitious timeline.”
“You have demonstrated a clear commitment to reaching an agreement,” he said, adding that negotiators had “worked long days and nights,” closing meetings as late as 4:00 a.m.
He hailed their dedication to push forward despite “a torrent of misinformation that was undermining your negotiations.”
While missing Friday’s deadline, countries have voiced a commitment to keep pushing for an accord.
Negotiators are due on Tuesday to present the outcome of the talks to the assembly, which runs until June 1, and the assembly will take stock and decide what to do next.
“I know that there remains among you a common will to get this done, so, there must always be a way,” Tedros said.
“Meaning the solution is in your hands,” he stressed.
Parallel talks have also taken place on revising the International Health Regulations, which were first adopted in 1969 and constitute the existing international legally binding framework for responding to public health emergencies around the world.
The proposed amendments to the IHR, including adding more nuance to a system meant to alert countries to potential health emergencies of global concern, might have a better chance of being adopted during this week’s assembly, observers said.
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OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — Generations of American families have grown up not knowing exactly what happened to their loved ones who died while serving their country in World War II and other conflicts.
But a federal lab tucked away above the bowling alley at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha and a sister lab in Hawaii are steadily answering those lingering questions, aiming to offer 200 families per year the chance to honor their relatives with a proper burial.
“They may not even have been alive when that service member was alive, but that story gets carried down through the generations,” said Carrie Brown, a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab manager at Offutt. “They may have seen on the mantle a picture of that person when they were little and not really understood or known who they were.”
Memorial Day and the upcoming 80th anniversary of D-Day on June 6 are reminders of the urgency of Brown’s work. The forensic anthropologists, medical examiners and historians who work together to identify lost soldiers are in a race against time as remains buried on battlefields around the globe deteriorate.
But advances in DNA technology, combined with innovative techniques including comparing bones to chest X-rays taken by the military, mean the labs can identify more of the missing soldiers every year. Some 72,000 World War II soldiers remain unaccounted for, along with roughly 10,000 more from all the conflicts since. The experts believe about half of those are recoverable.
The agency identified 59 servicemembers in 2013, when the Offutt lab first opened. That number has steadily risen — 159 service members last year, up from 134 in 2022 — and the labs have a goal of 200 identifications annually.
The labs’ work allowed Donna Kennedy to bury her cousin, Cpl. Charles Ray Patten, with full military honors this month in the same Lawson, Missouri, cemetery where his father and grandfather are buried. Patten died 74 years ago during the Korean War, but spent decades buried as an unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
“I just I ached. I mean, it hurt. You know, I just felt so bad. Even though I didn’t know him, I loved him,” Kennedy said.
Patten’s funeral was a simple affair with just a few family members. But often when veterans who fought decades earlier are identified, people waving flags and holding signs line the streets of their hometowns to herald the return of their remains.
“This work is important first and foremost because these are individuals that gave their lives to protect our freedom, and they paid the ultimate sacrifice. So we’re here holding that promise that we’ll return them home to their families,” Brown said.
“It’s important for their families to show them that we’ll never stop, no matter what,” she said.
Often there are compelling details, Brown said.
One of her first cases involved the intact remains of a World War I Marine found in a forest in France with his wallet still in his pocket. The wallet, initialed G.H., contained a New York Times article describing plans for the offensive in which he ultimately died. He also had an infantryman badge with his name and the year he received it on the back.
Before leaving France with the remains, the team visited a local cemetery where other soldiers were buried and learned there were only two missing soldiers with the initials G.H.
Brown had a fair idea who that soldier was before his remains even arrived in the lab. That veteran was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and Brown often visits his grave when she is in Washington D.C.
Most cases aren’t that easy.
The experts who work at the lab must piece together identities by looking at historical records about where the remains were found and which soldiers were in the area. They then consult the list of possible names and use the bones, objects found with them, military medical records and DNA to confirm their identities. They focus on battles and plane crashes where they have the greatest chance of success because of available information.
But their work can be complicated if soldiers were buried in a temporary cemetery and moved when a unit was forced to retreat. And unidentified soldiers were often buried together.
When remains are brought to the lab, they sometimes include an extra bone. Experts then spend months or even years matching the bones and waiting for DNA and other test results to confirm their identities.
One test even can identify if the soldier grew up primarily eating rice or a corn-based diet.
The lab also compares specific traits of collar bones to the chest X-rays the military routinely took of soldiers before they were deployed. It helps that the military keeps extensive records of all soldiers.
Those clues help the experts put together the puzzle of someone’s identity.
“It’s not always easy. It’s certainly not instantaneous,” Brown said. “Some of the cases, we really have to fight to get to that spot, because some of them have been gone for 80 years.”
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London — Life expectancy in Europe has returned to the level it reached before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, while the U.S. is still trying to regain lost ground. Overall, new numbers show life expectancy has increased in most parts of the world, with eastern sub-Saharan Africa showing the biggest gains over the past three decades.
Latest European Union figures released this month show the average life expectancy across the bloc in 2023 was 81.5 years — almost a year’s gain over 2022, as the coronavirus pandemic was coming to an end.
Jennifer Beam Dowd is a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford.
“Within Europe, we’re seeing really high life expectancy in countries like Spain and Italy, Sweden, Norway, but some countries are falling behind their peers and that includes the UK. And then Eastern Europe has made a lot of progress since the post-Soviet mortality crisis of the 1990s, but they’re still lagging behind a bit,” she said.
A recent study in the Lancet journal showed that globally, life expectancy increased by 6.2 years between 1990 and 2021 — with eastern sub-Saharan Africa experiencing the largest increase of some 10.7 years.
“I think that’s really good news and reflects a lot of continued progress all over the world in falls and infectious disease and infant and child mortality, which makes a big difference to life expectancy because you’re saving a lot of years of life if you save lives at young ages,” said Jennifer Beam Dowd.
Figures released in March showed average life expectancy in the United States in 2022, the most recent data available, was 77.5 years — still more than a year lower than the life expectancy before the pandemic. Figures for 2023 have not yet been released.
“A lot of countries have bounced back close to pre-pandemic life expectancy, but some countries such as the U.S. have not returned yet to the levels they were at in 2019,” said Jennifer Beam Dowd. “Another thing that’s having a big impact, we think right now, is the obesity epidemic, which started taking off, especially in the U.S., in the early 1980s. And in fact, we are seeing major slowdowns in improvements from cardiovascular disease that are driving a lot of the stalling life expectancy in high-income countries.”
The European principality of Monaco — a favorite home for the super-rich — had the world’s highest life expectancy in 2023, at almost 90 years, according to U.S. figures.
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Geneva — The World Health Organization and STOP, a global tobacco industry watchdog, warn the tobacco industry is using a variety of manipulative tactics to hook a new generation of young people into becoming users of their addictive, toxic tobacco and nicotine products for life.
“The terrible truth is that eight million people every year die from tobacco use. The single greatest cause for these deaths is a vast industry that works relentlessly to sell products that are essentially poison,” Jorge Alday, director of STOP at Vital Strategies, said at the recent launch of a new tobacco interference report, “Hooking the next generation.”
Speaking in advance of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, Alday asserted that the tobacco industry’s products kill at least half of the people who use them, therefore, he said, “It has an endless need to replace its customers.”
“From the perspective of a tobacco company, an addictive customer means a lifetime of profits. So, the younger someone gets hooked the more money they can make at the expense of that person’s health,” he said.
The report shows that globally, an estimated 37 million children ages 13 to 15 use tobacco, and in many countries, the rate of e-cigarette use among adolescents exceeds that of adults.
While significant progress has been made in reducing tobacco use, the report says the emergence of e-cigarettes and other new tobacco and nicotine products presents “a grave threat to youth and tobacco control.”
“Studies demonstrate that e-cigarette use increases conventional cigarette use, particularly among non-smoking youth, by nearly three times,” it says.
Ruediger Krech, director of health promotion at WHO, told journalists attending the global launch of the report last week that the industry is “exploiting digital and social media, delivery apps, and other innovative ways to reach our children. At the same time, they are continuing with old tricks such as giving away free samples to recruit a new generation as customers.”
He said the use of child-friendly flavored e-cigarettes combined with sleek and colorful designs that resemble toys “is a blatant attempt” by tobacco and related industries “to addict young people to these harmful products.”
“Currently, we have about 16,000 flavors that are very appealing to children and young people—fruity flavors, candy, bubble gum and vanilla ice-cream,” he said, noting that most adult tobacco users start their deadly habit when they are young.
“Most of them have started before the age of 21. Then they stay tobacco or nicotine users for the rest of their lives,” he said. “That is alarming when we are now seeing that with these novel products, so many children and young people are taking up this nicotine use.
“So, there is an urgency to act now to regulate those products, ban them if possible. But to be very, very serious about this,” he added.
One of many youth advocates around the world taking a stand against “the destructive influence and manipulative marketing practices” of the tobacco and nicotine industry is Given Kapolyo of Zambia. She is the Global Young Ambassador of the Year with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, CTFK.
“I totally agree with the sentiments shared already today that the industry continues to hook young people,” she said, speaking from the Zambian capital, Lusaka.
“It is extremely sad here in Africa because they continue to target low-income communities because they know that these young people do not have access to information on just how deadly these products are. … They tell young people that vaping is cooler, that electronic cigarettes are cooler, and they continue to hook young people as early as 10 years and 13 years old.
“Their only interest is profits, and they want to hook young people while they are young, so they can have lifelong customers, which means more profits for them, without caring how many lives we are losing due to non-communicable diseases caused by tobacco abuse,” she said.
The World Health Organization is urging governments to protect young people from taking up tobacco, e-cigarettes and other nicotine products by banning or tightly regulating them. Its recommendations include the creation of smoke-free indoor public places, bans on flavored e-cigarettes, as well as bans on marketing, advertising, and promotions, and the enactment of higher taxes.
Authors of the reports say these measures work. They cite an example from the United States where research found that “more than 70 percent of youth e-cigarette users would quit if the products were only available in tobacco flavor.”
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SACRAMENTO, California — California could eventually join the European Union in requiring all new cars to alert drivers when they break the speed limit, a proposal aimed at reducing traffic deaths that would likely impact motorists across the country should it become law.
The federal government sets safety standards for vehicles nationwide, which is why most cars now beep at drivers if their seat belt isn’t fastened. A bill in the California Legislature — which passed its first vote in the state Senate on Tuesday — would go further by requiring all new cars sold in the state by 2032 to beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 16 kph.
“Research has shown that this does have an impact in getting people to slow down, particularly since some people don’t realize how fast that their car is going,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco and the bill’s author.
The bill narrowly passed Tuesday, an indication of the tough road it could face. Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle said he voted against it in part because he said sometimes people need to drive faster than the speed limit in an emergency.
“It’s just a nanny state that we’re causing here,” he said.
While the goal is to reduce traffic deaths, the legislation would likely impact all new car sales in the U.S. That’s because California’s auto market is so large that car makers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply with the state’s law.
California often throws its weight around to influence national — and international — policy. California has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.
The technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS technology to compare a vehicle’s speed with a dataset of posted speed limits. Once the car is at least 16 kph over the speed limit, the system would emit “a brief, one-time visual and audio signal to alert the driver.”
It would not require California to maintain a list of posted speed limits. That would be left to manufacturers. It’s likely these maps would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.
The bill states that if the system receives conflicting information about the speed limit, it must use the higher limit.
The technology is not new and has been used in Europe for years. Starting later this year, the European Union will require all new cars sold there to have the technology — although drivers would be able to turn it off.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were speeding related — including an 8% increase in speeding-related fatalities. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.
Last year, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when speeding. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022 when a man with a history of speeding violations was traveling more than 100 miles per hour when he ran a red light and hit a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.
The NTSB has no authority and can only make recommendations.
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TRENTO, Italy — In a lush greenhouse high in the Alps, butterflies of various species and colors flutter freely while butterfly pupae are suspended in a structure as they grow into adult insects.
This is the Butterfly Forest in the tropical mountain greenhouse in Trento, Italy, a project by the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), an Italian science museum. It’s modeled on Udzungwa Mountains, a mountain range and rainforest area in south-central Tanzania that’s one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. The Butterfly Forest features plant species endemic to the region, as well as birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates from different parts of the world, all inside 600 square meters of forest with cliffs, inclinations and a waterfall.
The Butterfly Forest was created this spring to create public awareness on some of the research that MUSE is doing in Udzungwa Mountains to study and protect the world’s biodiversity against threats such as deforestation and climate change.
Deforestation leads to habitat loss, which causes declines in nectar sources for butterflies, changing the functioning of the ecosystem. It can also limit the movements of the insects causing a decline in biodiversity and potential extinction of vulnerable butterfly species. Changes to soil and air temperatures are altering the life cycles of the insects, impacting their development rates, mating behaviors, and migration patterns. Butterfly populations are declining in many areas, especially in places under intensive land use.
“Our aim is that of being able to study better, to understand better what is happening,” said Lisa Angelini, a botanist and director of the MUSE greenhouse. “Our work consists of monitoring and trying to develop projects in order to bring attention to biodiversity-related issues.”
Butterflies are pollinators that enable plants to reproduce and therefore facilitate food production and supply. They are also food for birds and other animals.
Because of the multiple roles of butterflies in the ecosystem and their high sensitivity to environmental changes, scientists use them as indicators of biodiversity and a way to study the impact of habitat loss and other threats. “Insects in general play a fundamental role in the proper functioning of ecosystems,” said Mauro Gobbi, an entomologist and researcher at MUSE.
Through a partnership with the Tanzania National Parks Authority, MUSE established the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Center in 2006 to support research as well as in development of environmental education programs for schools.
“Research on butterflies is essential for informing conservation efforts and ensuring the long-term survival of the insects,” said Arafat Mtui, research coordinator at Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre. Conservation efforts such as habitat restoration and good land management practices, which address climate change impacts, are essential for protecting butterfly populations, he added.
With at least 2,500 plant species, more than 120 mammals, and thousands of invertebrate species, Udzungwa Mountains is rich in biological diversity. It’s part of the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania that are a proposed UNESCO Heritage site. It has more than 40 endemic species of butterflies.
MUSE’s work here is vital because of this variety, said Sevgan Subramanian, principal scientist and head of environmental health at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.
“If you want to have a monitoring of the health of the ecosystem, monitoring such indigenous or endemic insect population diversity is very critical, so that we have an idea whether the ecosystem is still healthy or not,” he said.
Gobbi, the entomologist, said high-altitude environments like Udzungwa Mountains National Park are suitable for studying the effects of climate change because they usually have no direct human impact.
He and other scientists have warned that failure to protect insects from climate change effects will drastically reduce the planet’s ability to build a sustainable future.
Scientists at MUSE said the main challenge in butterfly conservation is changing the current farming policies to increase the amount of low-intensity farmland, and promote diverse landscapes preserving the remaining patches of natural habitats.
“Often our grandparents used to say ‘there are no longer as many butterflies as there used to be,'” he said. This is “absolutely supported by scientific research, which confirms that butterflies, like other insects, are in crisis. We are losing species, we’re losing them forever, and this is going to break the balance of ecosystems.”
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