A Russian film crew blasts into space on a moviemaking history mission, an American actor known for playing a space explorer gets the chance to see the real deal, and more. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more on the Week in Space.
…
The announcement of the first-ever malaria vaccine not only inspires hope in the battle against one of the planet’s most pernicious diseases but also underscores the need to attack this scourge on multiple fronts, says the head of the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, which this week rolled out an ambitious five-year plan aimed at taming what he described as “the oldest pandemic.”
Malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. Most of the victims are young children, and most malaria cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
While malaria is not endemic to the United States, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden considers anti-malaria efforts a priority, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, who was appointed as PMI’s global malaria coordinator in February. PMI is a U.S. government program dedicated to fighting the disease.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he told VOA. “There are too many people — over 400,000 — who die every year from malaria. Most of them are children. In fact, a child dies every two minutes from this disease. And over 200 million cases still occur every year. This is the oldest pandemic. It is a pandemic that has killed perhaps more children than any other, certainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
“So that’s the first reason: It’s just the right thing to do. It’s the moral thing to do. We have the tools, the medicines, the tests. Now we have a vaccine that can help us save lives. The second reason is that it is in the interest of the United States for other countries to succeed.”
A new vaccine, announced this week by the World Health Organization, “is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year.”
This four-dose vaccine, developed for children under 2 and tested in three African countries, was found to prevent 30% of severe cases.
Those figures may sound disappointing, but this vaccine is only one tool among several, explained Ashley Birkett, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative at PATH, a global organization that promotes health equity and that took part in the 30-year development of the vaccine.
“Thirty percent sounds like a modest number, but when you look at the magnitude of the problem and the fact that we have over 260,000 children dying from malaria a year and a vaccine that can build on the other tools and bring another way of offering protection, it has the potential to have quite a significant impact,” Birkett said.
That, Panjabi said, is why the President’s Malaria Initiative this week unveiled an ambitious billion-dollar-a-year plan aimed at saving another 4 million lives and preventing 1 billion infections over the next five years.
“Medical breakthroughs are not enough,” Panjabi said. One tactic in the plan, he said, is to hire, train and equip local residents as community health workers who can bring tests and medicines to people’s homes. Another is to continue work on vaccine efficacy and development.
So why did it take scientists 30 years to develop this one vaccine? VOA asked Panjabi.
“One of the reasons it’s been more challenging is because parasites are frankly, well, evil geniuses,” he said. “The malaria parasite has about 5,300 genes. The COVID-19 virus has only 10 genes.
“And malaria has a very complex life cycle; it goes between mosquitoes and humans. And so it’s challenging to train the immune system when you have a pathogen that has multiple stages within the bloodstream. And so that’s one of the real reasons that it’s challenging to develop a vaccine for a parasite. And why it’s a remarkable achievement that this has been accomplished. It’s been decades in the making.”
…
U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Chicago on Thursday, making another push for companies to require their workers to get vaccinated, following the vaccine mandate for businesses he announced last month. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
…
Russia appears to be getting more aggressive and more successful as the nation’s hackers launch a growing number of cyberattacks against the United States and other nations, according to a new report by Microsoft.
Microsoft’s 2021 Digital Defense Report warns that what it labels as “Russian nation-state actors” are responsible for 58% of all nation-state cyberattacks, and that they are now successful almost one out of every three times.
“Russia-based activity groups have solidified their position as acute threats to the global digital ecosystem,” the report said, cautioning that Russian cyber actors have been adaptable, getting better at using open-source tools “that make them increasingly difficult to detect.”
Microsoft also said Russia’s most frequent target was the United States, followed by Ukraine and Britain, and that the focus seems to be shifting toward intelligence gathering, with more than half of Russian attacks now targeting agencies involved with foreign policy, national security or defense, up from just 3% a year earlier.
According to Microsoft, after Russia, the greatest number of cyberattacks came from North Korea, Iran and China.
North Korea’s top target was cryptocurrency companies, while Iran quadrupled its attacks on Israel as tensions between the two countries grew steadily.
China also was active, focusing much of its cyber efforts on intelligence gathering.
Microsoft said a large part of Beijing’s efforts, through a threat actor called Chromium, focused on gathering social, economic and political intelligence from India, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan and Thailand.
Another prominent Chinese threat actor, known as Nickel, focused its efforts on foreign ministries in Central and South America.
The report also said that South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam were increasingly active in cyberspace, though the volume of attacks carried out from those countries paled in comparison with Russia, North Korea, Iran and China.
Top U.S. officials have shared their concerns about the growing danger from cyberattacks, especially from nation-state adversaries, in recent weeks. And many have voiced support for legislation that would require private companies to notify the U.S. government if their systems were breached.
“I think we’re at a point, seeing the arc of cybercrimes and the cyberthreats, that really there’s an urgency to it,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a virtual cybersecurity conference earlier this week. “We’re optimistic the legislation will pass.”
Speaking at the same summit Thursday, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said that while many of the threats are not new, they remain worrisome, given “how vulnerable some of our critical infrastructure sectors are.”
…
The U.N. secretary-general and the head of the World Health Organization launched an ambitious strategy Thursday to have 40% of the world’s population vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of this year, and 70% by mid-2022.
“With vaccine production now at nearly 1.5 billion doses per month, we can reach 40% of people in all countries by year’s end — if we can mobilize some $8 billion to ensure that distribution is equitable,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres told a news conference.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 6.5 billion doses have already been administered worldwide. Another 5 billion are needed to meet the 70% benchmark, which Tedros said current vaccine manufacturing rates can handle.
“This is not a supply problem, it is an allocation problem,” he said, adding it is critical that the elderly, health care workers and other at-risk groups are prioritized.
An earlier goal to vaccinate 10% of every country’s population by the end of September fell short, with 56 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, unable to meet the target. WHO said 200 million doses are needed to get those countries to meet the 10% target.
“That’s a week’s worth of the global supply,” said Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization vaccines and biologicals. “If that can’t be achieved, there really needs to be a fine point put on that.”
To get to the 40% benchmark, Tedros urged countries which have already achieved high coverage to swap their place in the vaccine distribution line with countries that have had less access.
“We can only achieve our targets if countries and companies put contracts for COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT) first for deliveries and donated doses,” Tedros said. “We have the tools to bring the pandemic under control if we use them properly and share them fairly.”
WHO officials said that achieving the 40% vaccination target would essentially end the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic, but if the targets can’t be reached, the risk continues of new variants emerging that may be vaccine resistant.
“It is ambitious, but it is very doable,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to Tedros. He said the doses are paid for, but that the issue is getting them prioritized for distribution through the COVAX facility and AVAT, so they reach the countries that are lagging.
The strategy also urges vaccine-producing countries to share technology and licensing to help other nations scale up production of doses. It also calls on vaccine manufacturers to prioritize fulfilling contracts with COVAX and AVAT, so doses go to the neediest countries. There is a role for international financial institutions, as well, in assisting countries in accessing the funding needed for domestic delivery of doses.
WHO said a three-step approach to vaccination should be taken, targeting the elderly, health care workers and high-risk groups first, followed by all adults and lastly, adolescents.
There have been more than 236.67 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 4.8 million deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which tracks global data on the infection.
…
German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday the nation has vaccinated millions more people than previously thought, thanks to some unreported vaccination numbers discovered by the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control.
The institute says nearly 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated, and about 84% have received at least one shot. Previous official reports were about 5% lower — meaning there are about 3.5 million more people vaccinated than had been reported.
Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Spahn said the discrepancy was discovered in surveys conducted by the RKI that revealed additional vaccinations. He believes some big companies’ employee vaccination programs and mobile vaccination teams in nursing centers and elsewhere may account for those initially unreported.
The new RKI figures are based on surveys and do not include people under the age of 18, which is why the agency has yet to give a new overall number of vaccinated people in Germany.
Spahn said these new numbers are good news in terms of any new COVID-19 restrictions that might be contemplated in the coming months, barring any unforeseen new variants or surges of cases.
“From today’s perspective, we will not need any further restrictions in autumn and winter to get through this time well without overburdening the health system,” he said.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
…
More than 260,000 African children under the age of five die from malaria each year, including more than 10,000 in Kenya, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO’s backing of a malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, for children in sub-Saharan Africa has raised hopes of preventing those deaths. The vaccine proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization gave the green light for the use of the vaccine for children between five and 24 months of age in Africa and other regions prone to a high level of malaria transmission.
This follows trials of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The four-dose shot was administered to 800,000 African children.
Thirty-year-old Salome Awuor allowed her son, now three years old, to take part in the malaria vaccine trials in Kisumu County, western Kenya.
The mother of four said previously she would visit her nearest clinic four times a month to get malaria treatment for him. At the time, he was 12 months old.
“My son was given three jabs, and malaria went down. I never went back to the clinic seeking malaria treatment. I feel so good my children no longer get sick most of the time. That’s why whenever I hear about vaccines, I run to get them because it helps a lot,” she said.
WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus described the malaria vaccine breakthrough as historic and one that could save the lives of tens of thousands of young people each year.
According to the WHO, malaria affects more than 229 million people each year and kills more than 400,000.
In Africa, more than a quarter of a million children die from the mosquito-borne disease.
Earlier trials in 2015 showed the vaccine could prevent 40 percent of malaria cases and about 30 percent of severe cases.
Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He said Kenya’s participation in the study proves the vaccine will work on the country’s population.
“If it’s safe you know it was done in your population and you know it’s good for you. You are not relying on data from another population but from your own population. So that you can confidently advise the government this is safe for us, it works and its approved and it was done by us and we contributed to this development,” he said.
The first three vaccine doses are given a month apart when children are babies, and a final booster is given when the child is one-and-a-half years old.
Ogutu has voiced confidence that Kenyan parents will vaccinate their children from malaria.
“People have been asking where it is now that we have been given the go ahead, we can now go for the rollout. I think it’s time to get to our people and tell them now it’s available and now it’s a matter of procuring the vaccine and ensuring it’s available and start getting it to those who need it,” said Ogutu.
So far, there is no word on when the vaccine will become available to the general public.
…
This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah for his body of work detailing the refugee experience and how colonialism shaped African culture.
At a news conference at the Swedish Academy’s headquarters in Stockholm, Permanent Secretary Mats Helm said Gurnah received the award for “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Gurnah, born in 1948 and raised on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, arrived in England as a refugee himself in the late 1960’s. He has published ten novels and a number of short stories.
In its statement, the academy said, “In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books.” The statement said that quality is as evident in his latest novel, 2020’s “Afterlives,” which he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.
The academy went on to say Gurnah’s writing is “striking” for its dedication to truth and “his aversion to simplification. His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.”
Gurnah will receive a $1.1 million cash prize, but for writers, the prize also adds prestige and publicity by exposing their work to much wider audience.
The Nobel Prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were awarded earlier this week, with the Peace Prize to be awarded Friday, and economics on Monday.
The awards will all be formally presented in December. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the academy announced this year’s ceremony will be a mixture of digital and physical events. Laureates will receive their Nobel Prize medals and diplomas in their home countries.
Some information in this report comes from Reuters.
…
Google plans to invest $1 billion in Africa over the next five years to ensure access to fast and cheaper internet and will back startups to support the continent’s digital transformation, it said on Wednesday.
The unit of U.S. tech company Alphabet Inc made the announcement at a virtual event where it launched an Africa Investment Fund, through which it will invest $50 million in startups, providing them with access to its employees, network and technologies.
Nitin Gajria, managing director for Google in Africa told Reuters in a virtual interview that the company would among others, target startups focusing on fintech, e-commerce and local language content.
“We are looking at areas that may have some strategic overlap with Google and where Google could potentially add value in partnering with some of these startups,” Gajria said.
In collaboration with not-for-profit organization Kiva, Google will also provide $10 million in low interest loans to help small businesses and entrepreneurs in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa so they can get through the economic hardship created by COVID-19.
Small businesses in Africa often struggle to get capital because they lack the necessary collateral required by banks in case they default. When credit is available, interest rates are usually too high.
Google said a program pioneered last year in Kenya in partnership with Safaricom that allows customers to pay for 4G-enabled phones in instalments would be expanded across the continent with mobile operators such as MTN, Orange and Vodacom.
Gajria said an undersea cable being built by Google to link Africa and Europe should come into service in the second half of next year and is expected to increase internet speeds by five times and lower data costs by up to 21% in countries like South Africa and Nigeria.
…
Americans are being warned to beware of potentially deadly fake prescription pills that are laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl and the highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine. The counterfeit tablets are linked to a wave of drug overdoses killing unsuspecting users.
In its first warning in six years, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said international and domestic criminal networks were mass-producing fake pills and falsely marketing them as legitimate prescription medication.
“Counterfeit pills that contain these dangerous and extremely addictive drugs are more lethal and more accessible than ever before,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram at a news conference in Washington.
The notification was issued last week after the DEA announced it had seized more than 1.8 million fake pills during a two-month undercover operation and had arrested more than 810 people. In a statement, the agency said it had confiscated more than 9.5 million potentially lethal pills in the last year.
“Illicit fentanyl was responsible for nearly three-quarters of the more than 93,000 fatal drug overdoses in the United States in 2020,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Health officials report fentanyl was responsible for nearly 70,000 of the overdose deaths.
Powerful pills
U.S. law enforcement investigators say the majority of counterfeit medication found in America is being made in labs in Mexico using chemicals imported from China. The DEA believes Chinese traffickers have switched from primarily manufacturing finished fentanyl to exporting precursors of the synthetic opioid to Mexican cartels, which then manufacture illicit fentanyl. U.S. officials are now seeking greater cooperation from Mexican law enforcement agencies to disrupt trafficking in the country.
DEA laboratory testing revealed that two out of five fentanyl-laced fake pills seized contained a potentially deadly dose of just 2 milligrams. Fentanyl can be 100 times more powerful than morphine. Drug researchers say a deadly dose of fentanyl is small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil.
“The fake pills seized were capable of killing more than 700,000 people,” Milgram noted, adding that law enforcement agencies have sought to shut down criminal distribution networks selling tablets that look exactly like name-brand prescription medications. “We are alerting the public to this danger so that people have the information they need to protect themselves and their children.”
The DEA alert said medications prescribed by doctors and dispensed by licensed pharmacists were safe, but pills acquired by other avenues were potentially deadly.
Decades of death
Since 1999, more than 500,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses, both prescription and nonprescription. Deaths rose in nearly all states, with the highest increases in California, Kentucky, Vermont, South Carolina and West Virginia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The more than 9.5 million fake tablets seized this year represented 430% more than the number seized in 2019. The DEA also confiscated ingredients used to make tens of millions of pills, including more than 4,000 kilograms of methamphetamine.
“The pervasiveness of these illicit drugs, and the fatal overdoses that too often result, is a problem that cuts across America from small towns to big cities and everything in between,” said Monaco.
The most common counterfeit pills are being made to look identical to prescription medications such as Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin or stimulants like amphetamines. Investigators say the fake medications are widely available and sold on social media platforms as well as on the streets.
“The illicit drug supply introduces even greater uncertainty about what people are taking, and that contributes to overdoses.” Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told VOA. “If someone combines fentanyl with heroin or methamphetamine or another illicit product, it can be deadly.”
…
The United States is taking new steps to make sure the country’s air and surface transportation sectors will not be crippled by ransomware or cyberattacks.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the measures Tuesday at a virtual cybersecurity conference, warning that recent incidents such as the SolarWinds hack and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed that “what is at stake is not simply the way we communicate or the way we work, but the way we live.”
The new security directives target what the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration describe as “higher risk” rail companies, “critical” airport operators, and air passenger and air cargo companies.
Cybersecurity coordinators
Mayorkas said that going forward, the rail companies will have to name a cybersecurity coordinator who will report any incidents and create contingency plans in the case of a cyberattack.
The aviation companies will also be required to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator and report incidents to the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Similar cybersecurity directives are already in place for 2,300 critical maritime companies that, starting this month, will have to submit plans to identify and address cyber vulnerabilities.
The U.S. Coast Guard is also working with the International Maritime Organization to require that passenger and cargo vessels arriving in U.S. ports have plans to deal with cyber emergencies.
“Whether by air, land or sea, our transportation systems are of utmost strategic importance to our national and economic security,” Mayorkas said.
Spike in ransoms paid
Top U.S. officials, including Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray, have warned that cyberattacks and ransomware attacks, in particular, have become a persistent threat.
“Last year, victims paid an estimated $350 million in ransoms, a 311% increase over the prior year, with the average payment exceeding $300,000,” Mayorkas told U.S. lawmakers at a hearing last month.
“We’re now investigating over 100 different types of ransomware, each with scores of victims,” Wray added.
U.S. officials have blamed Russia for many of the attacks, saying that despite Moscow’s assurances, they have seen few indications the Kremlin is doing anything to address the problem.
Russian officials deny any role in the recent, high-profile ransomware attacks.
Speaking at a separate cybersecurity forum Tuesday, the head of U.S. Cyber Command warned the problem with ransomware is likely to persist.
“Our adversaries are targeting everyone,” General Paul Nakasone told the Mandiant Cyber Defense Summit. “What was once viewed as criminal behavior has become a national security issue.”
To help facilitate the fight against cyberattacks and ransomware attacks, U.S. lawmakers are considering several bills that would require private companies to report intrusions and attacks on the government.
“We’re optimistic the legislation will pass,” Mayorkas said Wednesday at the annual Billington CyberSecurity Summit.
“I think we’re at a point, seeing the arc of cybercrimes and the cyberthreats, that really there’s an urgency to it,” he said.
Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming e-sports platform Twitch said Wednesday that it had been hit by a data breach. It gave no details.
An anonymous hacker claimed to have leaked Twitch data, including information related to the company’s source code, clients and unreleased games, according to Video Games Chronicle, which first reported the news of the hack.
Twitch confirmed the breach and said its “teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this.”
The company declined to comment further and said ((https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/1445770441176469512)) it would “update the community as soon as additional information is available.” Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The hacker’s motive was to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space,” according to the Video Games Chronicle report.
About 125GB of data was leaked, including information on Twitch’s highest-paid video game streamers since 2019, such as a $9.6 million payout to the voice actors of popular game “Dungeons & Dragons” and $8.4 million to Canadian streamer xQcOW, the report said.
“Twitch leak is real. Includes significant amount of personal data,” cyber security expert Kevin Beaumont tweeted.
Twitch, which has more than 30 million daily visitors on average, has become increasingly popular with musicians and video gamers. They interact with users while live streaming content.
The platform, which was boycotted earlier this year by users for not doing enough to block harassment, previously made a move to ban users for offenses such as hate-group membership and credible threats of mass violence.
…
The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions on the continent with moderate-to-high malaria transmission receive a malaria vaccine.
The vaccine, known as Mosquirix, proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019.
The WHO said malaria is a top killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, causing the deaths of more than 260,000 children under age 5 every year.
The vaccine, which requires four doses, counters P. falciparum, “the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa,” WHO said in a press release.
“For centuries, malaria has stalked sub-Saharan Africa, causing immense personal suffering,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. “We have long hoped for an effective malaria vaccine and now for the first time ever, we have such a vaccine recommended for widespread use. Today’s recommendation offers a glimmer of hope for the continent which shoulders the heaviest burden of the disease and we expect many more African children to be protected from malaria and grow into healthy adults.”
Substantial benefit
According to WHO, pilot program data showed that more than two-thirds of children who were not sleeping under bed nets were benefiting from the vaccine, and that there was a 30% reduction in “deadly severe malaria, even when introduced in areas where insecticide-treated nets are widely used and there is good access to diagnosis and treatment.”
The pilot program also found that the vaccine had a “favorable safety profile” and was “cost effective.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, it could still be years until the vaccine is widely available.
The vaccine has been under development for 30 years by GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical company; PATH, a global nonprofit focused on health issues; and some African research organizations, WHO said.
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation provided late-stage development funding for the vaccine, WHO said.
…
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Wednesday awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to two scientists for their work – independently – in developing a new way of building molecules, a process with applications throughout industry.
Speaking in Stockholm, academy Secretary General Goran Hansson said chemists Benjamin List of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and David MacMillan of Princeton University will split this year’s prize.
In presenting the award, the academy explained the two chemists developed new, organic catalysts to help build molecules.
Catalysts are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product, and are essential to constructing molecules for research and industry.
The academy said previously, it was believed there were just two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes. But over the last 20 years, List and MacMillan, working independently of each other, have developed a third type of catalyst, known as asymmetric organocatalysis.
In the words of the academy, “Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can attach. These often contain common elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorus. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.”
Using these reactions, researchers can build molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease.
The Nobel Prizes for medicine and physics were awarded earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics to be awarded over the next week.
Some information for this report comes from AP.
…
Facebook is in the hot seat again. A recent Wall Street Journal report cites internal knowledge of its harmful effects and the company’s reticence to act. A whistleblower, a former Facebook employee, came out in public this week to testify against the social media company, only adding to the scrutiny. Tina Trinh reports.
Produced by: Tina Trinh
COVID-19 has killed more Americans than the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919. One artist is determined that the more than 700,000 lives lost will not be forgotten. VOA’s Amy Hybels has the story.
Camera: Amy Hybels
Key U.S. lawmakers pilloried social media giant Facebook on Tuesday after Frances Haugen, an inside whistleblower who once worked at the company, alleged that Facebook’s products are harming young people, undermining democracy and helping to divide the country politically.
Haugen, who worked as a Facebook project manager for less than two years, held Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg responsible for prioritizing concerns about company profits over controlling online content on its various platforms, including Instagram.
Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection a day after Facebook had encountered hourslong technical issues that left millions of users wondering why they could not access the site and its other platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
“I don’t know why it went down,” Haugen said, “but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies” with the posting of glamorous pictures of models, pop singers and Hollywood starlets.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers, in a rare show of political unanimity in Washington, quickly castigated Facebook and panned Zuckerberg for a recent sailing trip while controversy engulfed his company. They promised to enact tighter controls on social media.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut contended, “The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation. Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror.”
He said, “Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth.”
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee declared that Facebook “is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids’ safety on their platforms, at least not when that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenues.”
“It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users,” she said.
Other lawmakers accused Facebook of helping to foment the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed into the building to try to prevent lawmakers from declaring that Democrat Joe Biden had won last November’s election.
Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said, “When they allowed 99% of violent content to remain unchecked on their platform, including the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection, what did they do? Now we know Mark Zuckerberg was going sailing.”
While the hearing was ongoing, Facebook pushed back against Haugen and the onslaught of criticism. It said in a statement that Haugen had no other Facebook employees who reported to her, had never attended a decision-making meeting with top Facebook officials, and had acknowledged in her testimony at least six times she was being asked questions about aspects of the company she had not worked on.
“We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about,” Facebook said.
“Despite all this,” Facebook said, “we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”
Haugen acknowledged that she was the one who provided the documents used in a Wall Street Journal investigation of Facebook.
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
The U.S. Justice Department has launched a fresh inquiry into the FBI’s botched handling of its sex abuse investigation into disgraced former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, after previously declining to prosecute the agents involved, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said on Tuesday.
“The recently confirmed assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division is currently reviewing this matter, including new information that has come to light,” Monaco told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, adding that she is “constrained” on what more she can say.
“I do want the committee and frankly, I want the survivors to understand how exceptionally seriously we take this issue,” she added.
In an emotional hearing last month famous gymnasts including Simone Biles and McKayla Maroney appeared before the same Senate panel, where they blasted the FBI for failing to properly investigate abuse they suffered under Nassar’s care.
The hearing was prompted by a scathing investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which uncovered widespread and dire errors which allowed Nassar to continue to abuse at least 70 more victims before he was finally arrested.
Two former FBI agents were singled out in the report – the former Indianapolis field office Special Agent in Charge W. Jay Abbott and a former supervisory special agent who has since been identified as Michael Langeman.
The inspector general referred both former agents for prosecution, but the Justice Department declined to bring charges against them in September 2020.
…
The crew of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was welcomed aboard the International Space Station Tuesday, though a communications glitch during their final approach delayed their eventual boarding.
The Soyuz spacecraft was launched Tuesday from the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The ship was carrying a history-making crew, as it included film director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild, who will be filming a feature film during their stay at the station.
After the spacecraft orbited the earth twice and made a final approach to the ISS, mission control reported the Soyuz craft experienced some communication issues. Those issues resulted in the crew abandoning automated docking procedures. Veteran Cosmonaut Shkaplerov, the other crew member on the Soyuz craft, manually guided the spacecraft into place without a problem.
The manual docking set back the scheduled opening of the hatch between the spacecraft and the station by an hour.
Once they were welcomed on board the ISS, Shipenko and Peresild will spend the next 12 days filming segments of a new feature film called “Challenge” — the first to actually be shot in outer space.
NASA says filming will begin almost immediately. Pereslid will play a doctor who is launched to the orbital outpost to save an ailing cosmonaut. Shkaplerov and two fellow cosmonauts already on board the ISS, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, will all have speaking roles in the film.
Shipenko and Pereslid will return to Earth on October 17 with Novitskiy.
The historic mission beats out a similar plan announced last year by Hollywood superstar actor Tom Cruise, the U.S. space agency NASA and Elon Musk’s privately-owned SpaceX company, which ferries crews and cargo to the ISS.
Russian space officials are hoping the film will restore some luster to the program, which has fallen from its glory days of the 1950s and `60s, when it launched the first man-made satellite as well as the first man and woman, into orbit, but has been plagued by delays, accidents and corruption scandals in recent years.
Tuesday’s launch comes nearly a month after four Americans became the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth, spending three days in space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press.
…
Facebook took another pounding in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday and a senator called on federal regulators to investigate accusations by a whistleblower that the company pushed for higher profits while being cavalier about user safety.
In an opening statement to a Senate Commerce subcommittee, chair Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said that Facebook knew that its products were addictive, like cigarettes. “Tech now faces that big tobacco jawdropping moment of truth,” he said.
He called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the committee, and for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the social media company.
“Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror,” Blumenthal said, adding that Zuckerberg instead was going sailing.
In an era when bipartisanship is rare on Capitol Hill, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed on the need for big changes at Facebook.
The top Republican on the subcommittee, Marsha Blackburn, said that Facebook turned a blind eye to children below age 13 on its sites. “It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users.”
Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said in an email ahead of the hearing that the company sees protecting its community as more important than maximizing profits and said it was not accurate that leaked internal research demonstrated that Instagram was “toxic” for teenage girls.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, said the company keeps its algorithms and operations a secret.
“The core of the issue is that no one can understand Facebook’s destructive choices better than Facebook, because only Facebook gets to look under the hood,” she said in written testimony prepared for the hearing.
“A critical starting point for effective regulation is transparency,” she said in testimony to be delivered to the subcommittee. “On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more.”
Haugen revealed she was the one who provided documents used in a Wall Street Journal investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s harm to teenage girls.
The Journal’s stories showed the company contributed to increased polarization online when it made changes to its content algorithm; failed to take steps to reduce vaccine hesitancy; and was aware that Instagram harmed the mental health of teenage girls.
Haugen said Facebook had also done too little to prevent its site from being used by people planning violence.
Facebook was used by people planning mass killings in Myanmar and the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump who were determined to toss out the 2020 election results.
…
Researchers in Australia have shown a bacteria can sterilize and eradicate a disease-carrying mosquito that is responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever and Zika.
Three million male Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever mosquitoes, were released in the trial at three sites in Northern Queensland state. They were reared at James Cook University in Cairns and sterilized with a naturally-occurring bacteria called Wolbachia.
Researchers say the bacteria appears to have changed part of the male insects’ reproductive biology, so that female mosquitoes that mate with them lay eggs that do not hatch.
The flying insects were released over a 20-week period in 2018. Mosquito numbers subsequently fell by more than 80%. When scientists returned the following year, they found one of the trial areas had almost no mosquitoes.
Nigel Beebe is an associate professor at the University of Queensland and research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. He hopes the sterilization method will eventually be used in developing countries.
“We wanted to show in a developed country that the technology was robust, we could mass rear mosquitoes. It is not very expensive to mass rear mosquitoes and it is really the separation of the males from the females,” he said.
The Australian team plans to use a similar technique to suppress the virus-spreading Asian Tiger mosquito that has become established in the Torres Strait in northern Australia.
“At the moment we have to use relatively sophisticated technology to do that. But we are now trying to build something that is much more robust and can be used in tropical countries and will be relatively cheap to actually be able separate the males from the females. The mass rearing of the mosquitoes is actually pretty cheap to do. So, I think, absolutely we will have application in developing countries,” saId Beebe.
Researchers elsewhere are looking at ways to use sterile male mosquitos to curb the spread of malaria, but associate professor Beebe has said it was a “complicated” challenge.
More than 40% of people worldwide suffer from mosquito-borne diseases. The Australian team hopes its “environmentally-friendly mosquito control” method will help tackle current and future outbreaks of dengue and other debilitating diseases.
A new study reveals the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 90% effective at keeping someone from being hospitalized from the virus up to six months after receiving the second dose.
Researchers from Pfizer and U.S.-based health care consortium Kaiser Permanente observed the records of about 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser’s Southern California health insurer and provider program between December 2020 and August of this year.
The study, published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, also revealed the vaccine was 93% effective against the highly contagious Delta variant for at least six months after the second shot.
But the researchers also found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection dropped from 88% one month after completing the regimen to 47% after six months.
The new study was published on the same day the European Union’s drug regulator approved the use of booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 18 years and older, but left it to individual countries to decide whether or not to recommend the shots for widespread use.
The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Monday that a booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine “may be considered at least 6 months after the second dose for people aged 18 years and older.”
The agency said people with a severely weakened immune system should be given a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least 28 days after they have received their second shot.
The guidance comes as some EU member states have already begun administering booster shots, while others are still debating how broadly to use boosters in their populations.
Meanwhile, the New York Times newspaper said Monday that Johnson & Johnson will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a booster shot of its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine.
The U.S. drugmaker announced last month that clinical trials show a second shot of its vaccine increased its effectiveness against the virus to 94% about two months after the first dose, which provided about 70% effectiveness.
Johnson & Johnson said the company is submitting the results of its studies to the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Medicines Agency and other health authorities for potential use of the vaccine as a booster eight months or later after the primary single-dose vaccination.
Johnson & Johnson’s request comes less than two weeks after the FDA authorized a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech two-dose COVID-19 vaccine for Americans 65 years old and above and adults at high risk of severe illness. The FDA is currently considering whether to approve a third shot of the two-dose Moderna vaccine.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.
…
Workers continue to clean up a massive oil spill off the coast of California as divers try to learn why an underwater pipeline started leaking late last week. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles.
…
The U.N. Children’s Fund says children are likely to suffer most from the monthslong COVID-related restrictions, school closures, and separation from family and friends.
The latest estimates show more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 suffer from mental health disorders globally, while nearly 46,000 adolescents commit suicide every year.
UNICEF spokesman James Elder told VOA most of these conditions are not being addressed because of the stigma attached to mental illness and the lack of government investment. Only about two percent of government health budgets are allocated to mental health spending globally, he said.
“Twenty percent … of young people are saying that they are feeling depressed and have very little interest in things,” he said. “That again is a clear indication of the impact COVID’s been having. … There is a whole range of mental disorders — anxiety and depression and bipolar — that young people are suffering from.”
UNICEF reports more than 1.6 billion children have suffered some loss of education because of pandemic lockdowns. Elder said children’s mental health often deteriorates when there is a disruption to their daily routines, such as not attending school, not engaging in recreational activities, and not socializing with friends. These problems, he said, affect children all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike.
“Of course, if you are from a country where you do not have connectivity, you do not have a laptop or one of your parents is on $200 a month, then, of course, those stresses, that anxiety, that risk of slipping into a mental health disorder is much greater,” he said. “And in some of the world’s poorest countries, governments are spending less than a dollar per person treating mental health conditions.”
The cost of ignoring mental disorders is enormous, UNICEF warned. It cited a new analysis by the London School of Economics, which indicates nearly $390 billion in human capital is lost every year due to mental disorders among young people.