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President Joe Biden has directed his administration to buy an additional 10 million courses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill, Paxlovid, bringing the total to at least 20 million courses, as part of his strategy to combat omicron. He addressed the American public Tuesday as COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surge to record levels following the holidays. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Illinois farmer Jack McCormick planted 350 acres of barley and radishes last fall as part of an off-season crop that he does not intend to harvest. Instead, the crops will be killed off with a weed killer next spring before McCormick plants soybeans in the same dirt. 

The barley and radishes will not be used for food, but Bayer AG will pay McCormick for planting them as the so-called cover crops will generate carbon offset credits for the seeds and chemicals maker. 

The purpose of cover crops is to restore soil, reduce erosion and to pull climate-warming carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The carbon trapped in roots and other plant matter left in the soil is measured to create carbon credits that companies can use to offset other pollution. 

The practice shows how the agriculture industry is adapting as a result of climate change. Farmers no longer make money merely by selling crops for food and livestock feed – they may also be paid for the role crops can play in limiting planet-warming emissions. 

More and more U.S. farmers are planting cover crops, from grasses like rye and oats to legumes and radishes. While some are converted into biofuels or fed to cattle, most are not harvested because their value is greater if they break down in the soil. 

Cover crops are a pillar of regenerative agriculture, and they are generally seen by environmentalists as an improvement over traditional agriculture. It is an approach to farming that aims to restore soil health and curb emissions through crop rotation, livestock grazing, cutting chemical inputs and other practices. 

Rob Myers, director for the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri, estimates cover crop plantings swelled to as much as 22 million acres in 2021. That is up 43% from the 15.4 million acres planted in 2017, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. 

“There are so many things pushing cover crops forward. The carbon payments are the newest thing. We’ve seen a tremendous farmer interest in soil health,” he said. 

Myers estimates that by the end of the decade between 40 million and 50 million acres of cover crops will be planted annually. 

The surge will likely accelerate as government and private conservation programs expand, experts say. 

An even greater expansion of cover crop acreage in coming years could be a boon to seed and fertilizer companies, though the companies say it is hard to predict which cover crops farmers will decide to plant. 

Companies including Bayer, Land O’Lakes and Cargill Inc have launched carbon farming programs over the past two years that pay growers for capturing carbon by planting cover crops and reducing soil tillage. 

Land O’Lakes subsidiary Truterra paid out $4 million to U.S. farmers enrolled in its carbon program in 2021 for efforts the company says trapped 200,000 metric tons of carbon in soils. 

Others are expanding from small pilot programs, including Cargill, which aims to increase its sponsored sustainable farming programs to 10 million acres by the end of the decade, up from around 360,000 acres currently. Seedmaker Corteva Inc boosted its carbon offering from three U.S. states to 11 for the 2022 season. 

Federal conservation programs have for years paid farmers to set aside environmentally sensitive lands such as flood plains or wildlife habitat, and the Biden administration plans to expand those programs. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation targeted some $28 billion for conservation programs, including up to $5 billion in payments to farmers and landowners for planting cover crops, though the bill’s fate remains unclear. 

‘Want to do it’ 

Much of the growth in cover crop plantings to date has been led by a limited number of conservation-conscious farmers pursuing other goals such as soil fertility or water management. Program payments rarely cover the cost of seeds and labor. 

“You’ve got to want to do it,” said McCormick, who has increased his cover crop acres more than tenfold over the past six years and received his first payment from Bayer this autumn. 

“If somebody wants to hand me a couple of bucks an acre for something I’m doing, I’ll take it. But I wouldn’t do it just for the incentive. I don’t think the incentives are great enough,” he said, adding that his main motivation is the role played by cover crops in improving soil and making his farm more drought tolerant. 

Similarly, Ohio farmer Dave Gruenbaum rapidly increased his cover crop plantings beginning five years ago after liquidating his dairy herd, expanding to all of his 1,700 acres in each of the past two years. 

“It’s about having something green growing year-round,” he said. “It’s amazing how the soil is changing.” 

Gruenbaum enrolled in a program administered by Truterra, which has helped to offset a portion of his planting and labor cost. 

Some experts caution that the shift to planting more off-season cover crops could result in narrower planting windows for farmers’ main cash crops, particularly if climate change triggers more volatile spring weather. 

Cover crop seed shortages are also likely. 

“There’s an incredible pulse of demand coming … The demand for seed is going to exceed supply so there’s going to be a huge supply challenge,” Jason Weller, president of Truterra, told an American Seed Trade Association conference in Chicago last month. 

While emissions from destroying the crops are minimal, some critics still say the practice will increase applications of farm chemicals as acres expand. 

Environmentalists say cover crop planting is still an improvement on traditional agriculture, which normally leaves fields fallow for half the year and foregoes an enormous amount of plants’ carbon-capture potential. 

“Cover crops can be a really important part of organic and regenerative farming systems,” said Amanda Starbuck, research director with Food and Water Watch. “But it all depends on how they’re being implemented.” 
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On the 40th anniversary of a famous skin cancer campaign, research has revealed that a high number of young Australians are not using sun protection. 

Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. A new multi-million-dollar awareness campaign hopes to repeat the success of the ‘Slip Slop Slap’ advertisement of the early 1980s.  

“Sid the seagull” the voice of the advertisement’s jingle, urged Australians to protect themselves from the sun with a shirt, sunscreen and a hat. It is an enduring message that has educated generations of people since it was released 40 years ago. 

But the government believes rates of skin cancer are too high. The disease kills about 1,300 Australians each year. Research has shown that more than a quarter of Australians do not use any protection from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation. 

Heather Walker, from the charity, the Cancer Council, says teenagers need to be reminded of the sun’s dangers. 

“We do have a lot of work to do particularly in the secondary school setting and with young adults. But encouragingly, older adults are using sun protection more. So, it does seem to be a dip in the lifecycle and then people do come back to sun protection, which is really encouraging. But the other group that needs a reminder in particular is men. So, in Australia twice as many men as women die from melanoma and that is a huge disparity,” Walker said.

Now, Australia is launching the first national skin cancer campaign in more than a decade. Sid the seagull’s famous ‘slip, slop, slap’ message has been updated to encourage Australians to also seek shade and slide on a pair of sunglasses. 

Health authorities have said that skin cancer is Australia’s most common cancer, and it is almost entirely preventable. 

The World Cancer Research Fund states that Australia has the highest melanoma rates in the world followed by New Zealand, Norway and Denmark. It is expected that 16,000 Australians will be diagnosed this year with melanoma, a malignant tumor associated with skin cancer, according to government figures. 

The Australian Cancer Council lists three main types of skin cancers: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma. 
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A community health service in Africa’s largest urban slum is helping poor people get affordable emergency services during the COVID pandemic.  The Kibera community emergency response team in Nairobi is offering a $1 monthly fee for access to emergency services, including an ambulance.  Victoria Amunga has more from Nairobi.

Camera:  Robert Lutta
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Conservationists are blaming climate change, land clearing and pesticides for the population crash of one of Australia’s most famous insects. Once a common sight, bogong moths have become rare in recent years. They are now recognized as endangered by the world’s leading scientific authority on vulnerable species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

The bogong moth is native to Australia. The mass migration of billions of the small insects has long been a spectacular sight in eastern Australia.   

Scientists say the moths are guided by the stars and the earth’s magnetic fields.  

They fly up to 1,000 kilometers from Queensland to the mountains of Victoria to shelter in caves from the heat of summer. In the caves, it was once estimated there were as many as 17,000 moths per square meter.  

But Jess Abrahams, a nature campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation says bogong moth numbers have collapsed.   

“It is a dramatic decline, and this population crash has been caused by climate change-fueled extreme drought in their breeding grounds in western Queensland. There has also been land clearing over many years, use of pesticides as well and the consequence is a huge crash in numbers and the flow-on affects to other species is of huge concern. This should be an alarm bell because we are in the midst of an extinction crisis. We are seeing (a) million species globally at risk of extinction and literally these things are disappearing before our very eyes,” Abrahams said.  

The decline of the bogong moth has a cascading effect on other species. They were a major source of food for another critically endangered animal, the mountain pygmy-possum. Fewer than 2,000 of Australia’s only hibernating marsupials are thought to be left in the wild.    

The moth is one of 124 Australian animals and plants that were added in December to the “Red List” of threatened species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They include several other types of insects and the grey-headed flying fox, which is Australia’s largest bat.    

The Red List classifies how close global animal, plant and fungi species are to dying out, and includes sharks, rays and birds. Many populations are strained by global warming, deforestation, habitat loss and pollution.    

Campaigners are urging the Australian government to do more to save the moths that were once in such abundance in cities such as Sydney and Canberra that their vast numbers disrupted sporting events.  
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As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week. 

Under that Dec. 27 guidance, isolation restrictions for people infected with COVID-19 were shortened from 10 days to five days if they are no longer feeling symptoms or running a fever. After that period, they are asked to spend the following five days wearing a mask when around others.  

The guidelines have since received criticism from many health professionals for not specifying a negative antigen test as a requirement for leaving isolation.  

“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested,” Fauci said. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.” 

Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. has been seeing almost a “vertical increase” of new cases, now averaging 400,000 cases a day, with hospitalizations also up. 

“We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” he said. “The acceleration of cases that we’ve seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before.” 

Fauci said he’s concerned that the omicron variant is overwhelming the health care system and causing a “major disruption” on other essential services. 

“When I say major disruptions, you’re certainly going to see stresses on the system and the system being people with any kind of jobs … particularly with critical jobs to keep society functioning normally,” Fauci said. “We already know that there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities that 10, 20, 25 and sometimes 30% of the people are ill. That’s something that we need to be concerned about, because we want to make sure that we don’t have such an impact on society that there really is a disruption. I hope that doesn’t happen.” 

The surging variant is ravaging other sectors of the workforce and American life. 

Wintry weather combined with the pandemic were blamed for Sunday’s grounding of more than 2,500 U.S. flights and more than 4,100 worldwide. Dozens of U.S. colleges are moving classes online again for at least the first week or so of the semester — and some warn it could stretch longer if the wave of infection doesn’t subside soon. Many companies that had been allowing office workers to work remotely but that were planning to return to the office early in 2022 have further delayed those plans.

The White House Correspondents’ Association announced on Sunday that the number of journalists allowed in the briefing room for at least the first few weeks of the year would be scaled back because of concerns about the fast-spreading virus. Typically, 49 reporters have seats for the daily briefing, but only 14 reporters will be seated under the restrictions. The White House limited capacity in the briefing room early in the pandemic but returned to full capacity in June 2021. 

While there is “accumulating evidence” that omicron might lead to less severe illness, he cautioned that the data remains early. Fauci said he worries in particular about the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans because “a fair number of them are going to get severe disease.” 

He urged Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated and boosted to do so and to mask up indoors to protect themselves and blunt the current surge of U.S. cases. 

The Food and Drug Administration last week said preliminary research indicates at-home rapid tests detect omicron but may have reduced sensitivity. The agency noted it’s still studying how the tests perform with the variant, which was first detected in late November. 

Fauci said Americans “should not get the impression that those tests are not valuable.” 

“I think the confusion is that rapid antigen tests have never been as sensitive as the PCR test,” Fauci said. “They’re very good when they are given sequentially. So, if you do them like maybe two or three times over a few-day period, at the end of the day, they are as good as the PCR. But as a single test, they are not as sensitive.” 

A PCR test usually needs to be processed in a laboratory. The test looks for the virus’s genetic material and then reproduces it millions of times until it’s detectable with a computer.  

Fauci said if Americans take the necessary precautions, the U.S. might see some semblance of more normal life returning soon. 

“One of the things that we hope for is that this thing will peak after a period of a few weeks and turn around,” Fauci said. He expressed hope that by February or March, omicron could fall to a low enough level “that it doesn’t disrupt our society, our economy, our way of life.” 

Fauci spoke on ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s “State of the Union.”  
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World-renowned Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose groundbreaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, died on Sunday at the age of 77, the country’s president said.

The legendary paleoanthropologist remained energetic into his 70s despite bouts of skin cancer, kidney and liver disease. 

“I have this afternoon… received with deep sorrow the sad news of the passing away of Dr. Richard Erskine Frere Leakey,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement late Sunday.

Born on December 19, 1944, Leakey was destined for paleoanthropology — the study of the human fossil record — as the middle son of Louis and Mary Leakey, perhaps the world’s most famous discoverers of ancestral hominids.

Initially, Leakey tried his hand at safari guiding, but things changed when at 23 he won a research grant from the National Geographic Society to dig on the shores of northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, despite having no formal archaeological training. 

In the 1970s he led expeditions that recalibrated scientific understanding of human evolution with the discovery of the skulls of Homo habilis (1.9 million years old) in 1972 and Homo erectus (1.6 million years old) in 1975.

A TIME magazine cover followed of Leakey posing with a Homo habilis mock-up under the headline “How Man Became Man.” Then in 1981, his fame grew further when he fronted “The Making of Mankind,” a seven-part BBC television series. 

Yet the most famous fossil find was yet to come: the uncovering of an extraordinary, near-complete Homo erectus skeleton during one of his digs in 1984, which was nicknamed Turkana Boy.

As the slaughter of African elephants reached a crescendo in the late 1980s, driven by insatiable demand for ivory, Leakey emerged as one of the world’s leading voices against the then-legal global ivory trade.

President Daniel arap Moi in 1989 appointed Leakey to lead the national wildlife agency — soon to be named the Kenya Wildlife Service, or KWS.

That year he pioneered a spectacular publicity stunt by burning a pyre of ivory, setting fire to 12 tons of tusks to make the point that they have no value once removed from elephants.

He also held his nerve, without apology, when implementing a shoot-to-kill order against armed poachers. 

In 1993, his small Cessna plane crashed in the Rift Valley where he had made his name. He survived but lost both legs.

“There were regular threats to me at the time and I lived with armed guards. But I made the decision not to be a dramatist and say: ‘They tried to kill me.’ I chose to get on with life,” he told the Financial Times.

Leakey was forced out of KWS a year later and began a third career as a prominent opposition politician, joining the chorus of voices against Moi’s corrupt regime.

His political career met with less success, however, and in 1998 he was back in the fold, appointed by Moi to head Kenya’s civil service, putting him in charge of fighting official corruption.

The task proved impossible, however, and he resigned after just two years.

In 2015, as another elephant poaching crisis gripped Africa, President Kenyatta asked Leakey to again take the helm at KWS, this time as chairman of the board, a position he would hold for three years.

Deputy President William Ruto said Leakey “fought bravely for a better country” and inspired Kenyans with his zeal for public service.

Soft-spoken and seemingly devoid of personal vanity, Leakey stubbornly refused to give in to health woes.

“Richard was a very good friend and a true loyal Kenyan. May he Rest In Peace,” Paula Kahumbu, the head of Wildlife Direct, a conservation group founded by Leakey, posted on Twitter.
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France has lowered the age of its mask mandate to 6-year-old children, officials announced Saturday. The news comes just days before schools reopen Monday, following the winter holiday break.

While the mandate requires children to wear masks in indoor public places, the mandate will also include outside locations in cities like Paris and Lyon where an outside mandate is already in place.

The wildly contagious omicron variant, French authorities said Saturday, has resulted in four consecutive days of over 200,000 new infections.

The chief executive of Britain’s National Health Service Confederation told the BBC Saturday that the surge in COVID cases fueled by omicron may force hospitals to ban visitors.

“It’s a last resort. But, when you’re facing the kind of pressures the health service is going to be under for the next few weeks, this is the kind of thing managers have to do,” Matthew Taylor said.

Europe has surpassed 100 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began nearly two years ago, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Worldwide, nearly 290 million cases have been recorded.

Nearly 5 million of Europe’s cases were reported in the last seven days, with 17 of the 52 countries or territories that make up Europe setting single-day new case records thanks to the omicron variant, Agence France-Presse reported Saturday.

More than 1 million of those cases were reported in France, which has joined the U.S., India, Brazil, Britain and Russia to become the sixth country to confirm more than 10 million cases since the pandemic began, Reuters reported.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded 289.3 million global COVID cases and 5.4 million deaths.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press. 

 
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India’s health ministry reported 22,775 new cases of the coronavirus Saturday, saying the new cases bring the country’s omicron variant count to 1,431. Public health officials, however, have warned that the country’s COVID-19 tallies are likely undercounted.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Saturday that paramedics in the Australian state of New South Wales had a “record breaking” level of calls overnight, resulting in its busiest night in 126 years, as the omicron variant of coronavirus sweeps across the globe.

New South Wales Ambulance Inspector Kay Armstrong told the newspaper the telephone calls included, “the usual business of New Year’s Eve – alcohol-related cases, accidents, obviously mischief – and then we had COVID on top of that.” The Herald reported paramedics also received “time-wasting calls from people wanting COVID-19 test results.”

The chief executive of Britain’s NHS Confederation said the omicron variant will “test the limits of finite NHS [National Health Service] capacity even more than a typical winter.” Matthew Taylor also predicted that hospitals will be forced to make “difficult choices” because of the variant.

CNN reports that more than 30 colleges and universities have changed the starting date of their spring semesters as the omicron variant crosses the United States.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center on Saturday reported 288.2 million global COVID-19 cases. The center said 9.1 billion vaccinations have been administered.
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