YCLOAK

Millions of people around the world enjoy a daily cup of coffee; however, their daily caffeine fix could be under threat because climate change is killing coffee plants, putting farmers’ livelihoods at risk.

Inside the vast, steamy greenhouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the leafy suburbs of west London, Aaron Davis leads the research into coffee.

“Arabica coffee, our preferred coffee, provides us with about 60% of the coffee that we drink globally. It’s a delicious coffee, it’s the one we love to drink. The other species is robusta coffee, which provides us with the other 40% of the coffee we drink – but that mainly goes into instant coffees and espresso mixes,” Davis explains.

The cultivation of arabica and robusta coffee beans accounts for millions of livelihoods across Africa, South America and Asia.

“These coffees have served us very well for many centuries, but under climate change they’re facing problems,” Davis says.

“Arabica is a cool tropical plant; it doesn’t like high temperatures. Robusta is a plant that likes even moist conditions; it likes high rainfall. And under climate change, rainfall patters are being modified, and it’s also experiencing problems. In some cases, yields are dramatically reduced because of increased temperatures or reduced rainfall. But in some cases, as we’ve seen in Ethiopia, you might get a complete harvest failure and death of the trees.”

The solution could be growing deep in the forests of West Africa. There are around 130 species of coffee plant – but not all taste good. In Sierra Leone, scientists from Kew helped to identify one candidate, stenophylla, growing in the wild.

“This is extremely heat tolerant. And is an interesting species because it matches arabica in terms of its superb taste,” Davis says.

Two other coffee species also show promise for commercial cultivation in a changing climate: liberica and eugenioides, which “has low yields and very small beans, but it has an amazing taste,” according to Davis.

Some believe the taste is far superior. At the 2021 World Barista Championship in Milan, Australia’s Hugh Kelly won third prize with his eugenioides espresso. Kelly recalled the first time he tasted it at a remote farm in Colombia. “It was a coffee like I’ve never tasted before; as I tasted it, it was unbelievably sweet … I knew that sweetness and gentle acidity were the bones for an incredible espresso,” Kelly told judges in Milan.

Researchers hope Kelly’s success could be the breakthrough moment for these relatively unknown beans.

The team at the Botanic Gardens is working with farmers in Africa on cultivating the new coffees commercially. Catherine Kiwuka of the Ugandan National Agricultural Research Organization, who oversees some of the projects, says challenges still lie ahead.

“What requirements do they need? How do we boost its productivity? Instead of it being dominated by only two species, we have the opportunity to tap into the value of other coffee species.”

It’s hoped that substantial volumes of liberica coffee will be exported from Uganda to Europe this year. Researchers hope it will provide a sustainable income for farmers – and an exciting new taste for coffee drinkers.
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Pope Francis on Sunday decried the genital mutilation of millions of girls and the trafficking of women for sex, including openly on city streets, so others can make money off of them. 

In remarks to the public in St. Peter’s Square, the pope noted that the day was dedicated worldwide to ending the ritual mutilation, and he told the crowd that some 3 million girls each year undergo the practice, “often in conditions very dangerous for the health.”

“This practice, unfortunately widespread in various regions of the world, humiliates the dignity of women and gravely attacks their physical integrity,” Francis said.

Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures that involve changing or injuring female genitalia for non-medical reasons and violates the human rights, health and the integrity of girls and women, the United Nations says in championing an end to the practice.

The practice can cause severe pain, shock, excessive bleeding, infections, and difficulty in passing urine, as well as consequences for sexual and reproductive health. While mainly concentrated in some 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, it is also a problem for girls and women living elsewhere, including among immigrant populations.

According to U.N. figures, at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone the practice.

The pope also told the faithful that on Tuesday, there will be a day of prayer and reflection worldwide against human trafficking.

“This is a deep wound, inflicted by the shameful search of economic interests, without respect for the human person,” Francis said. “So many girls — we see them on the streets — who aren’t free, they are slaves of the traffickers, who send them to work, and, if they don’t bring back money, they beat them,” the pope said. “This is happening today in our cities.”

“In the face of these plagues on humanity, I express my sorrow and I exhort all those who have responsibility to act in a decisive way to impede both the exploitation and the humiliating practices that afflict in particular women and girls,” Francis said.
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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in an address on the nation’s Waitangi Day observance that the country has an obligation to make sure everyone has access to the health care they need, and that no one dies younger than everyone else in New Zealand because they are Maori.”

The commemorative day is named for the region on the North Island where representatives of the British Crown and more than 500 Indigenous Maori chiefs signed a founding treaty in 1840.

The Maori, however, lost most of their land during British colonization and have staged demonstrations on Waitangi Day to rally for their civil and social rights.

Last year New Zealand established the Maori Health Authority to ensure better health care access for the Maori who have been overwhelmed by COVID pandemic.

“We all have a duty to do everything we can to protect our communities with all the tools that science and medicine have given us,” Ardern said Sunday, as she called for a united battle against the coronavirus.

Turkey’s president is the latest world leader to reveal that he has contracted the coronavirus.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed on Twitter Saturday that he and his wife, Emine, have been infected with the omicron variant of the COVID virus and are experiencing mild symptoms.

The news came just two days after the Turkish leader’s visit to Kyiv, where he met with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart.

Two Miami men have each received a sentence of 41 months after stealing 192 ventilators worth approximately $3 million, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

The U.S. Agency for International Development shipment was in a tractor trailer headed for Miami International Airport.  The shipment was stolen when the driver left the trailer on a parking lot overnight.

The ventilators “were part of an aid program to treat critically ill COVID-19 El Salvadorian patients,” according to the statement.  Most of the ventilators were recovered.

The Johns Hopkins Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded more than 393 million global COVID infections and almost 6 million deaths. More than 10 billion vaccines have been administered, according to the center.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.  

 
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In the two years since COVID-19 began ravaging the United States, virtually every aspect of the pandemic has been politicized, often to the detriment of efforts to bring the disease under control and to treat its victims. Now, though, members of Congress are taking the first steps toward a bipartisan effort to understand the pandemic’s origins and to assess the federal government’s response.

The two most senior members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions have begun circulating a proposal to create a 12-member commission of private citizens with broad authority to investigate the origins of the disease – and how the Trump and Biden administrations responded to it. The initiative appears to have broad support among members of both parties.

The two lawmakers, Health Committee Chair Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and the committee’s senior Republican, Richard Burr of North Carolina, have modeled the effort on the commission that was created to investigate the origins of the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001. That body won bipartisan praise for its exhaustive analysis of the events leading up to the attacks.

The proposal is part of a larger piece of legislation called the “Prepare for and Respond to Existing Viruses, Emerging New Threats, and Pandemics Act,” or the “PREVENT Pandemics Act,” for short. In addition to creating the task force, the bill would expand the capacity of public health agencies to respond to disease outbreaks, boost research and development, and strengthen the supply chain for medical products.

National task force

The panel proposed in the bill would be known as the “National Task Force on the Response of the United States to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” and would have the authority to issue subpoenas to compel testimony and the disclosure of records as necessary for the investigation.

Kristin Urquiza, one of the co-founders of an advocacy group for families affected by the pandemic known as Marked by COVID, told VOA she was encouraged by Murray and Burr’s proposal, calling it the best version of a framework for an investigative panel she has seen so far.

“Marked by COVID has been calling for a commission or a task force for well over a year,” Urquiza said. “It’s a top priority for our families to really ensure that we have an accurate record of what happened and why. Not only so we can have answers as to why our loved ones were lost, but so we can pass on learnings to ourselves and future generations for any mistakes that were made, and so that we can do better next time that there’s a public health crisis.”

Political minefield

So far, discussion of the pandemic’s origins and the federal response have tended to be highly politicized. In the earliest days of the pandemic, then-President Donald Trump was eager to downplay the severity of the crisis, a stance many of his political supporters adopted.

This helped create a sharp divide in how Republicans and Democrats across the country viewed the federal response to the pandemic.

As COVID-19 deaths in America grew from the thousands to the tens of thousands, Trump made a very public effort to blame China, the country where the disease was first identified, for the global health crisis. Arguments over the degree of China’s responsibility for the spread of the virus have also taken on a sharply partisan tone.

Efforts to blame China

Many Republicans in Congress have thrown their support behind the theory that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a laboratory in China, where the coronavirus was being studied. This theory is supported by the fact that there is a major infectious disease research facility located near the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected.

Democrats, on the whole, have been more inclined to back the view put forward by the World Health Organization (WHO), which suggested that the virus migrated into the human population through close contact with wild animals – probably bats – that were already infected with a version of it.

The WHO, however, has sent mixed signals about the origins of the virus. A report issued by the body last year argued that it was extremely unlikely that the virus reached the human population through a laboratory leak. However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director, said that China refused to share important data from early cases of COVID-19, hampering the ability of the WHO’s investigators to complete a thorough analysis.

In a series of congressional hearings, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Biden, has been aggressively questioned by Republican members of Congress who have accused him of withholding information about research at the Wuhan institute of Virology that was partially funded by the U.S. government.

For his part, Fauci has publicly supported calls for an investigation into the origin of the virus.

Hope for a balanced inquiry

In the earlier stages of the pandemic, Republicans were suspicious of any commission tasked with investigating the pandemic, out of concern that its findings would be used as a cudgel against the Trump administration.

Urquiza, of Marked by COVID, said that the passage of time has made it less likely that the findings of a committee will be seen as politicized, because both parties can be seen as having some successes and some failures in the COVID-19 response.

“Our worry from day one was that a commission would turn into a witch hunt for either China or President Trump,” she said. “Part of what we’ve seen now, over the course of the last year, is that the Biden administration now has a pandemic track record, and that has opened up the field to allow for both praise and criticism of what has happened.” 

 

 
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The oceans got even warmer last year than the year before, supercharging already extreme weather patterns worldwide, according to a recent report published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

Twenty-three international scientists analyzed thousands of ocean temperature measurements. Since 2018, when the group first began publishing their findings, they have found that ocean temperatures are rising each year.

But the warming isn’t consistent around the planet.

In 2021, the researchers discovered that because of wind patterns and currents, some parts of the Atlantic, Indian and northern Pacific oceans warmed more quickly.

“The motion of water in the world’s oceans distributes the heat in a nonuniform way, so some areas get more heat and others less, meaning certain parts of the oceans warm faster than others,” said John Abraham, a co-author of the study and climate scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases from human activities are making the oceans too hot, Abraham told VOA.

“Last year, the oceans absorbed heat the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs being detonated in the ocean every second of every day, 365 days each year,” he said.

But even a slight rise in the temperature can be devastating.

“Last year, the surface temperatures of the oceans increased about 1 degree Celsius,” said Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and a contributor to the report. “And while that might sound like a small amount of warming, even modest changes in temperature can have a huge impact on the climate system, which can cause fish populations to decline and ice sheets to collapse in Antarctica.”

Only a small amount of heat from greenhouse gases actually gets trapped in the atmosphere. Most of it gets absorbed by the oceans.

“The oceans store 90% of global warming heat and are a robust indicator of climate change. Now, our oceans are warming at an exceptional rate that has serious consequences,” said Lijing Cheng, lead author of the study and an associate professor with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Sea level rise makes coastal communities more susceptible to storm surges that threaten coastal infrastructure,” Cheng told VOA.

Warming oceans are creating havoc on the Earth’s weather systems.

“The oceans drive the weather,” Abraham said. “Warmer oceans are making our weather wilder — going from one extreme to another more rapidly,” he said. “The oceans are heating and moistening the atmosphere, which is creating more intense storms.”

Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and even snowstorms “are all connected to warming oceans,” said Alexey Mishonov, another co-author and an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center.

Mann said greenhouse gases need to be significantly curbed soon or the environmental consequences will become even worse.

“We’ve got to bring carbon emissions down by 50% within this decade,” he said. “We need governments to provide incentives to move the energy and transportation industries away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.” 

 

 
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The Philippines has suspended a heavily criticized policy banning the unvaccinated from public transportation in Metro Manila as a COVID-19 surge, caused by omicron variant, has subsided.

Daily cases in the Philippines rose from 400 in December to more than 39,000 in just a matter of days. The positivity rate, or percentage of positive cases out of those tested, peaked at more than 47%, as the country’s testing capacity remained low.

Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed after a brief holiday lull, but the Health Department said 85% of those admitted to intensive care units had not been vaccinated. Health care workers are exhausted, and many of those testing positive for the virus had to return to work immediately after recovering. Despite the record-breaking COVID-19 cases, the government did not impose a lockdown.

The Transportation Department implemented the “no vaccination, no ride” policy in Metro Manila, covering anyone taking public transportation starting Jan. 17, after President Rodrigo Duterte himself ordered the arrest of unvaccinated individuals who leave their homes.

Under the policy, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals are barred from buses, jeepneys, trains and taxis, although unvaccinated people traveling for medical reasons, such as getting vaccinated, are exempt if they can show proof.

“Because it is a national emergency, it is my position that we can restrain [unvaccinated individuals],” Duterte said in a televised speech Jan. 6.

On the first day of the policy’s implementation, Jan. 17, police and transport officials apprehended hundreds of unvaccinated passengers and prevented them from riding buses, jeepneys and trains.

A TV interview of a partially vaccinated woman who had been prevented from boarding a bus went viral and sparked criticism of the policy.

“I’m so tired. What the government is doing is making me tired. I’m partially vaccinated. It’s not my fault that my second dose is scheduled for February,” she said.

After a barrage of criticism, the government was forced to temporarily walk back the policy on the second day of implementation, introducing exemptions, including for unvaccinated essential workers and those leaving their homes for medical reasons.

Following a trend around the world, the surge quickly subsided in February, as predicted by government and private experts, but the country is still reporting nearly 10,000 cases per day.

As the number of daily reported cases in Metro Manila dropped, the Department of Transportation has now temporarily suspended the policy as of Feb. 1. However, the ban will be reinstated once the city breaches a higher caseload.

Human rights, labor and mobility advocates have called on the government to revoke the ban, saying it restricts the exercise of fundamental rights, and calling it unnecessary, discriminatory and anti-poor, as most of the city’s 14 million people are commuters and cannot afford cars.

“Restricting mobility is not the answer to the gaps in the vaccination campaign, regardless of whether that’s availability or accessibility to vaccines, or for a mere addressing of the continued misinformation about vaccination,” Ira Cruz, director of AltMobility PH, a group advocating sustainable transport, told VOA.

There are more than 50 million fully vaccinated people in the Philippines, according to the government, but the country failed to meet its vaccination target last year.

Like many countries, the Philippines is battling vaccine misinformation, but resistance to vaccination is waning. The most recent poll showed that of Filipinos surveyed in December, only 8% are unwilling to be vaccinated, down from 18% in September 2021.

“Why people don’t want to get vaccinated, that remains to be the responsibility of the government to address. What this is sounding like is that the government is giving up on addressing the gaps of a vaccination campaign and closing its doors to certain people,” Cruz said.

He said it would be more useful for the government to provide a steady supply of buses, trains and jeepneys so there’s enough room to follow public health protocols, including physical distancing.

“We call on the government to revoke the ban altogether regardless of the number of cases in the country,” Cruz said.  

 

 
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NASA says global temperatures are on the rise, and that could spell trouble for future Winter Games. Plus, Australian astronomers discover an unidentified space object, and a pair of satellites touch the sky. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us a Winter Olympics-edition of The Week in Space.
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The World Health Organization’s European region director says that while COVID-19 cases on the continent continue to rise, he sees a plausible endgame for the pandemic in Europe in coming months.

Speaking during his weekly virtual news briefing from his headquarters in Copenhagen, WHO Europe Region Director Hans Kluge told reporters the region recorded 12 million cases in the past week, the highest weekly case incidence since the start of the pandemic, largely driven by the omicron variant.

But Kluge said, while hospitalizations continue to rise – mainly in countries with lower vaccination rates — they have not risen as fast as the rate of new infection, and admissions to intensive care units have not increased significantly. Meanwhile, deaths from COVID-19 have remained steady.

Kluge said the pandemic is far from over, but, for the first time, he sees what he called an opportunity to take control of transmission of disease because of the presence of three factors: an ample supply of vaccine plus immunity derived from a large number of people having had COVID-19; the favorable change of the seasons as the region moves out of winter; and the now-established lower severity of the omicron variant.

The WHO regional director said those factors present the possibility of “a long period of tranquility” and a much higher level of population defense against any resurgence in transmission, even with the more virulent omicron variant.

Kluge called it “a cease-fire that could bring us enduring peace,” but only if nations continue vaccinating and boosting, focusing on the most vulnerable populations, and people continue “self-protecting behavior,” such as masking and social distancing, though he added, “with lower governmental oversight to limit unnecessary socio-economic impacts.”

More nations in Europe are scaling back or removing government-imposed COVID-19-related restrictions.

Kluge said officials need to intensify surveillance to detect new variants. He said new strains are inevitable, but he believes it is possible to respond to them without the disruptive measures that were needed early in the pandemic.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press.
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Crushing fatigue. Brain fog. Trouble breathing weeks after contracting COVID-19. Scientists call it post-acute sequelae of COVID-19. Most people just call it “long COVID.”

For millions of people, these and other symptoms are keeping them from getting back to their lives months after their last positive COVID-19 test.

But what is long COVID, exactly? How common is it? Who gets it, and why?

As with so many things over the past two pandemic years, the answer to the most basic questions is, “We don’t know yet.”

Studies are starting to narrow things down. But a lot still is up in the air.

“I would take everything we have so far with a grain of salt,” Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, founding director of the Boston University Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research, said on a press call organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The silver lining may be that with so many suffering the aftereffects of COVID-19, research may shed light on similar but poorly understood syndromes, such as chronic fatigue syndrome that have debilitated people long before COVID-19 showed up.

With time and support, “the majority — and I would almost say the vast majority — of people with long COVID will get better,” added Dr. Kathleen Bell, chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “But I don’t think, at this point, that anyone can say how long does long COVID last.”

How common is it?

Estimates of how many people get long COVID are all over the map.

An analysis summing up 57 studies on the subject found that on average, more than half of COVID-19 patients still had symptoms six months after infection.

But the range was enormous. In some of the studies, less than a quarter of patients had long-term symptoms, while in others, three-quarters did.

One of the difficulties with pinning down long COVID is defining what it is and what it isn’t.

“Currently, the bucket is very large,” Bhadelia said. “It’s anybody who has persistent symptoms four weeks or longer” after infection.

Fatigue is the most common symptom. Many complain of “brain fog” — memory problems and difficulty concentrating or processing information. Patients frequently have trouble breathing. Other common symptoms include headaches, muscle pain, rapid heartbeat, dizziness or ringing in the ears.

There’s also a lot of anxiety, depression and insomnia, which may be partly reactions to the symptoms but also appear to be related to the virus itself, Bell said.

The challenge for both doctors and patients is that many other things can cause these symptoms besides long COVID, she noted.

Who gets it?

Vaccination cut the rate of long COVID symptoms in half in one study and down to baseline in another.

Diabetes and asthma raise the risk.

People who got seriously ill with COVID-19 are more likely to have prolonged symptoms, but even some people who had only mild to moderate cases are struggling months later.

“In general, you can say that people who have more severe infections will have a longer period of time of recovery. But that’s not the whole story,” Bell said.

Some recent studies are pointing to what may be causing long COVID, but nothing is conclusive yet.

One theory is that long COVID is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the patient’s own body.

In a new study, researchers found patients with long COVID had high levels of antibodies to components of the patient’s own immune system, even though very few of them had a previously diagnosed autoimmune condition.

Viral reawakening?

The study also raised the possibility that COVID-19 wakes up latent infection of another common virus, called Epstein-Barr.

An estimated 90% of the world’s population carries the Epstein-Barr virus, but usually the immune system keeps it under control.

The virus also causes mononucleosis, which “puts you flat on your back with fatigue for a month or more, which is not that different from some long COVID symptoms,” study co-author James Heath, president of the University of Washington Institute for Systems Biology, noted in a YouTube video the institute posted.

Overactive inflammation may be another factor, perhaps involving tiny blood clots carrying inflammatory molecules throughout the body.

Whatever the cause, COVID-19 is not the only ailment to leave patients with lingering symptoms.

Scientists are studying persistent headaches, joint pain and vision problems in Ebola survivors in West Africa. Chikungunya can leave patients with arthritis lasting months. Other viral illnesses may leave patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.

“We just haven’t understood many of these conditions,” Bhadelia, at Boston University, said.

Now that there are millions of people suffering with long-term, debilitating symptoms, scientists may learn a lot more about what causes them and how to treat them.

“This is going to tell us a lot more about other viruses and other pathogens,” Bhadelia said. “Everything that affects us from our environment, everything that triggers a change in our body, leaves a fingerprint on us.” 
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The police chief of Canada’s capital said Wednesday there is likely no policing solution to end a protest against vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions that has snarled traffic around Parliament.

He also said there is a “significant element” of the protest’s funding and organization coming from the United States.

Thousands of protesters descended on Ottawa over the weekend, deliberately blocking traffic around Parliament Hill. Police estimate the protest involved 8,000-15,000 people Saturday but has since dwindled to several hundred. But trucks were still blocking traffic.

“We are now aware of a significant element from the United States that have been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating. They have converged on our city and there are plans for more to come,” Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said.

Organizers, including one who has espoused white supremacist views, raised millions for the cross-Canada “freedom truck convoy” against vaccine mandates. There was a public GoFundMe page.

The protesting truckers also have received praise from former U.S. President Donald Trump and tweets of support from Tesla billionaire Elon Musk.

Ottawa residents frustrated with the incessant blare of truck horns and traffic gridlock are questioning how police have handled the demonstration.

“There is likely no policing solution to this,” Sloly said.

Many Canadians have been angered by some of the crude behavior of the protesters. Some urinated or parked on the National War Memorial. One danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A number carried signs and flags with swastikas.

The most visible contingent of protesters were truck drivers who parked their big rigs on Parliament Hill. Some of them were protesting a rule that took effect Jan. 15 requiring truckers entering Canada to be fully immunized against the coronavirus. The Canadian Trucking Alliance has estimated that 85% of truckers in Canada are vaccinated.

Meanwhile, officials said there had been some movement toward resolving a protest blockade at the United States border in southern Alberta.

Chad Williamson, a lawyer representing truckers blocking access to the crossing at Coutts, Alberta, said they spoke with police and agreed to open some blocked lanes. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Corporal Curtis Peters said there were indications that the lane openings might only be temporary.

Demonstrators began parking their trucks and other vehicles near the crossing Saturday in solidarity with the protest in Ottawa.

The tie-up stranded travelers and cross-border truckers for days. Police tried to peacefully break up the demonstration Tuesday, but demonstrators breached a nearby checkpoint. 

 
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The Biden administration launched a plan Wednesday to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years, a continuation of the 2016 “cancer moonshot” program that President Joe Biden led as vice president in the Obama administration.

“It’s bold. It’s ambitious, but it’s completely doable,” Biden said at the White House launch event. He said his plan would turn cancer from a death sentence into a chronic disease that people can live with, and that it would create a more supportive experience for cancer patients and their families.

Biden urged Americans to get screened, noting that 9 million cancer screenings were missed in the country during the pandemic. He established what he called a “cancer cabinet” — officials who will coordinate and harness the federal government’s approach to fight cancer. He also called on Congress to provide $6.5 billion to boost medical research through a proposed new agency — the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

“This will be bipartisan. This will bring the country together, and quite frankly, other nations as well,” he said.

The fight against cancer is a deeply personal issue for Biden, who lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. The loss is shared by many Americans: The American Cancer Society projects more than 609,000 cancer deaths and more than 1.9 million new cancer cases this year alone.

The administration aims to save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease.

“More people are surviving cancer. More people are enduring cancer after being diagnosed than ever before,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at the event. Harris is a breast cancer survivor whose mother, a cancer researcher, died from colon cancer in 2009.

Dr. Karen E. Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, noted there has been a 32% reduction in the cancer mortality since 1991. But while mortality is a key indicator, Knudsen pointed out that some of the 200 different cancers are on the rise, including pancreatic, advanced prostate and early onset colorectal cancer.

“These are areas for which we still need to understand that dynamic through research and understand how to best put in prevention and mitigation strategies,” Knudsen told VOA. “Real success from the American Cancer Society perspective looks like a reduction in mortality and an approach to a cure for all types of cancer.”

The administration did not announce any new funding during the Wednesday launch. In 2016, as part of the “cancer moonshot” initiative, Congress authorized $1.8 billion over seven years, and roughly $400 million of that money has yet to be allocated. The National Cancer Institute oversees the initiative that aims to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer, foster greater collaboration and improve the sharing of data.

Still, this renewed push will give Americans hope, said first lady Jill Biden, who also spoke at the White House event.

“We will build a future where the word cancer forever loses its power,” she said.

Prevention and cancer disparity

Knudsen and other experts stressed the need for reducing “significant cancer disparities” across the United States.

Effective vaccines are available for some cancers such as cervical or head and neck, while other cancers can be detected early with systematic screenings — but only if people receive them, said Dr. Deb Schrag, chair of medicine at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Right now, we are leaving people, even entire communities, behind,” Schrag told VOA. “To achieve Biden’s goal, laser-sharp focus on equity must continue. Biden’s goal can only be achieved if we focus on prevention as well as treatment.”

If we provide people with what we already know in terms of treatment and prevention, about 25% of current deaths would be prevented, Dr. Otis Brawley said to VOA. Brawley, an expert in cancer prevention and control at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore, pointed to American Cancer Society data showing that cigarette smoking accounted for the highest proportion of cancer cases and deaths, followed by excess body weight and alcohol intake.

“People die because they do not get adequate care,” he said.

But early detection is not just a matter of health care access. For some people, it’s also overcoming the belief that if you feel healthy, you don’t need screening, said Robert K. Brown, who survived leukemia in his early 20s and chronicled his recovery in his memoir, Hundred Percent Chance.

Brown, who has been cancer-free for more than 30 years, spoke to VOA as he was making funeral arrangements for an uncle who died of esophageal cancer just days ago.

“He passed away pretty quickly from something that could have been treatable had it been caught sooner,” Brown said. “And that’s the stuff that I hear over and over again.”

Pandemic impact

“Whenever there was a peak of COVID, there was a decline in screening,” said Knudsen of the American Cancer Society. “Those lead to later diagnoses, patients presenting with more advanced disease that are more difficult to treat.”

Cancer patients are more susceptible to severe symptoms and deaths from a COVID-19 infection, especially those who cannot be vaccinated because of their cancer treatment plan, Knudsen said. But even cancer patients eligible for vaccination can sometimes be immunocompromised, meaning that they can’t mount the same type of immune response compared with a healthy individual.

Knudsen said Biden’s initiative might also impact people outside the U.S; it could help connect with the larger oncology community internationally that wants “to both learn from us and share their successes with us as well.” 
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U.S. intelligence agencies may have ruled out the idea that a rash of mysterious illnesses plaguing American diplomats and other officials is part of a sustained campaign by one of Washington’s adversaries, but they now say that in a small number of cases the only likely explanation is the use of some sort of weapon. 

A report released Wednesday by a panel of experts assembled by U.S. intelligence officials finds that the core symptoms in these cases are “distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature,” making it highly unlikely the cause could be natural. 

“Pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics,” the report said. 

“Sources exist that could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements,” the report added. “Using nonstandard … antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.” 

The mystery illness was first reported in 2016 among diplomats and other employees at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. 

Since then, hundreds of cases have been reported in Russia, China, Poland, Austria and elsewhere, with symptoms ranging from nausea and dizziness to debilitating headaches and memory problems.  

The U.S. government has been engaged in a yearlong effort to find the source of the anomalous health incidents, or AHI, commonly called Havana Syndrome. 

An interim report issued last month by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), concluded most of the cases “can be reasonably explained by medical conditions or environmental and technical factors, including previously undiagnosed illnesses.” 

However, it warned that a smaller number of cases continued to defy explanation and that, in those cases, officials “have not ruled out the involvement of a foreign actor.” 

Wednesday’s report appears to support that conclusion, though officials said the latest effort was not focused on assigning responsibility for the possible attacks. 

“There are a small number of the cases we looked at that had no other plausible mechanism,” according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the expert panel’s work who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity.  

Mystery remains

Exactly how the possible attacks were carried out, though, remains a mystery. 

“We don’t have a specific device,” said a second official, who like the first was familiar with the panel’s work. 

But the official said the idea that some cases of Havana Syndrome are the result of a weapon of some sort is “more than a theory.”  

“We had accounts of people that had been around RF [radio frequency] energy inadvertently and describe symptoms like that,” the official added. 

The notion that a directed, pulsed radio frequency mechanism was behind key symptoms of Havana Syndrome — the quick onset of pain or problems with the inner ear, including a loss of balance, dizziness and nausea — was first raised in 2020 the National Academy of Sciences, which called such as source “the most plausible mechanism in explaining” the growing number of cases. 

Wednesday’s report affirmed that finding, but also left open the possibility that some of the cases could have been caused by a device using ultrasound technology, though it said an ultrasonic device would only be able to produce the right combination of symptoms if deployed in close proximity to the victim. 

Making progress

In a statement Wednesday, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns said the effort to determine the cause of Havana Syndrome is making progress. 

“We continue to pursue complementary efforts to get to the bottom of Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) — and to deliver access to world-class care for those affected,” they said in a statement. 

“We will stay at it, with continued rigor, for however long it takes,” they added. “Nothing is more important than the wellbeing and safety of our colleagues.” 

Officials familiar with the work on Havana Syndrome said Wednesday “it’s frustrating” not being able to get a clear-cut, definitive answer as to what has happened to as many as a couple of dozen of their colleagues and U.S. diplomatic personnel. 

But they said that despite the many unknowns, the latest findings do offer hope for those who have been impacted. 

“We’ve learned a lot,” one of the officials said. “While we don’t have the specific mechanism for each case, what we do know is if you report quickly and promptly get medical care, most people are getting well.” 

The report also recommended the U.S. create a central database to collect information on future reported cases, develop a set of so-called “bio-markers” to better identify new cases, try to develop technology capable of detecting an attack, and improve communications. 

The White House Wednesday welcomed the report’s findings. 

“The [experts] panel undertook a rigorous, multi-disciplinary study that has identified important findings and recommendations,” a National Security Council spokesperson said in a statement. 

The findings “will inform intensive research and investigation moving forward as we continue our government-wide effort to get to the bottom of AHI,” the spokesperson added. 

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday named a top official to lead the government’s interagency response to Havana Syndrome. 
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As several European nations scale back or drop COVID-19 restrictions altogether, the World Health Organization (WHO) is urging caution as the coronavirus remains.

Denmark lifted most of its COVID-19 restrictions Tuesday, including the use of masks in public places or requiring proof of vaccination to enter public venues, with government officials saying they no longer consider COVID-19 a “socially critical disease.” France, Britain and other European nations are following suit.

At a briefing Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory over the pandemic.  

Tedros said because of the omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, it remains highly transmissible and deadly. He said that in the 10 weeks since the omicron variant was identified, almost 90 million cases have been reported, more than in all of 2020. And he said the WHO is now starting to see a very worrying increase in deaths, in most regions of the world.

At same briefing, WHO COVID lead Maria Van Kerkhove urged nations to be cautious about lifting restrictions “all at once.” She suggested a more gradual process because many countries have not yet gone through the peak of their omicron surges, and others have low levels of vaccination coverage, especially among vulnerable populations.  

WHO Emergencies Program chief Mike Ryan agreed with the call for a cautious approach, and noted all countries are not in the same place regarding the pandemic. He said countries that are making decisions to open more broadly also need to be sure they have the capacity to close back down just as quickly.

Ryan said, “It is important that we keep communities informed and maybe ensure that communities understand that measures may have to be reintroduced,” should COVID-19 cases make a rebound.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.
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A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows an extra shot of a COVID-19 vaccine provides solid protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death.

The federal health agency followed more than 400,000 adults in Los Angeles who were infected with either the delta or omicron variants of the coronavirus between November and this past January. Researchers found that unvaccinated residents who were infected with the delta strain between November and December were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who had been vaccinated and gotten the booster shot.

Meanwhile, the study found that in January, when omicron overtook delta as the primary variant in Los Angeles, unvaccinated individuals were more than three times as likely to be infected and 23 times more likely to be hospitalized than people who were fully vaccinated and received a booster.

Elsewhere, France becomes the latest European country to relax its coronavirus restrictions. Effective Wednesday, mandatory outdoor mask-wearing will end, and audience capacity limits for concerts halls, sporting matches and other events are being phased out, according to a report Wednesday by Agence France-Presse. The relaxed mitigation standards are taking effect despite France reaching a record-setting number of new daily cases last month.

France’s actions come a day after Denmark and Norway officially lifted most of their  pandemic restrictions. Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands also have dropped most of their restrictions and containment measures.

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse.
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