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The U.S. is experiencing a rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths. The highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus among unvaccinated people is largely responsible for the outbreak.Four states with low vaccination rates were responsible for 40% of last week’s new cases, but cases have risen in all 50 states, officials say.Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday that last week the U.S. had a daily average of 26,000 new cases. She said the outbreak has become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Later Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden repeated Walensky’s assessment, saying, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”Vaccine Mandates Prompt Sharp Legal Debate In recent months, lawmakers in Republican-led states have introduced more than 100 bills that would ban school and employer vaccination mandates A group of international government advisers say they are concerned about England’s plans to lift virtually all its pandemic restrictions Monday. The advisers believe that would leave Britain susceptible to new coronavirus variants, possibly transforming the country into a superspreader location.Elsewhere, there is worry that Tokyo’s Olympics could become a superspreader event after an unidentified person inside the Olympic Village tested positive for the coronavirus. The person is reportedly not an athlete, but someone from abroad helping to organize the games.“The case is one of 15 new positive results among games participants and workers reported on Saturday, the highest daily count since the committee started compiling figures on July 1,” Kyodo news service reported.“There have been a total of 45 COVID-19 infections announced by organizers since July 1,” according to Kyodo.Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said Saturday that there have been more than 4 million global COVID-19 deaths. More than 189 million cases have been confirmed, according to Johns Hopkins.  
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Oliver Daemen, 18, received exciting news Thursday from the Blue Origin flight team: He will be flying into space on July 20.Daemen, who will attend Utrecht University in the Netherlands this fall, will be the youngest person to reach space when he departs on Blue Origin’s New Shepard flight. A press release from his family said that Daemen has “been dreaming about this all [his] life.”Blue Origin announced Thursday that an originally scheduled passenger would be unable to take the flight to the edge of space because of scheduling conflicts. The anonymous winner of the company’s public auction spent $28 million for the seat next to Bezos. Until then, Daemen was scheduled to travel on Blue Origin’s second flight after unsuccessfully bidding on the auction.Daemen’s father, Joes Daemen, is the CEO of an investment firm in the Netherlands, and Blue Origin declined to disclose what he paid for the flight. The person who purchased the $28 million ticket remains anonymous.Donations to nonprofitsThe company stated that $19 million of the auction’s proceeds would be donated to 19 space-specific nonprofit organizations, each receiving $1 million. The chosen associations include AstraFemina, a group of women in science and technology dedicated to providing young girls with role models, and the Brook Owens Fellowship, a mentorship program for undergraduate female students interested in space exploration.FILE – In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio.Also making history is Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, 82, who will become the oldest person to fly into space. Bezos announced on Instagram that Funk would be an “honored guest” for the first Blue Origin flight.Funk participated in the privately funded Mercury 13 program in 1961 that trained women to go to space. The 13 women received the same preparation as NASA astronauts but were ultimately refused employment because of their gender. Funk was the youngest to graduate from the course and reportedly was told that she “completed the work faster than any of the guys.”The three passengers will be joined by Bezos’ brother, Mark, on Blue Origin’s inaugural flight.
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The Hubble Space Telescope should be back in action soon, following a tricky, remote repair job by NASA.  The orbiting observatory went dark in mid-June, with all astronomical viewing halted.  NASA initially suspected a 1980s-era computer as the source of the problem. But after the backup payload computer also failed, flight controllers at Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center focused on the science instruments’ bigger and more encompassing command and data unit, installed by spacewalking astronauts in 2009.  This image of the Eagle Nebula, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows towers of gas and dust, known as the Pillars of Creation because within them, hundreds of new stars are being created.Engineers successfully switched to the backup equipment Thursday, and the crucial payload computer kicked in. NASA said Friday that science observations should resume quickly, if everything goes well.  A similar switch took place in 2008 after part of the older system failed.”Congrats to the team!” NASA’s science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted.Launched in 1990, Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations of the universe. NASA launched five repair missions to the telescope during the space shuttle program. The final tuneup was in 2009.NASA plans to launch Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, by year’s end.
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The World Meteorological Organization is calling for action to halt climate change as extreme weather becomes the norm rather than the exception. Heavy rainfall this week has triggered devastating floods across western Europe, killing and injuring scores of people, destroying homes and livelihoods.  At the same time, parts of Scandinavia — northern Europe’s coldest region — are enduring scorching temperatures.The Finnish Meteorological Institute says Finland had its warmest June on record, which has extended into July.   Southern Finland it notes has had 27 consecutive days with temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius.  By Finland’s normally frigid temperatures, that qualifies as a heatwave.US Facing Triple Weather ThreatsUS experiencing varying, but intense weather conditionsThe western U.S. and Canada also have been gripped by heat, with many records broken in states of Nevada and Utah. Last August, Death Valley, California reached a temperature of 54.4 degrees Celsius, the world’s highest temperature record.  But meteorologists believe Death Valley may have equaled that record a week ago on July 9.The spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization, Clare Nullis, says the heatwave in the western U.S. has led to megadrought conditions and numerous wildfires.”The heatwave that we saw in parts of the U.S. and Canada at the end of June…This heatwave would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change,” said Nullis. “Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the heatwave at least 150 times more likely.”   Nullis says climate change already is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.  She adds many single events have been shown to have been made worse by global warming.”We need to step up climate action,” said Nullis. “We need to step up the level of ambition.  We are not doing really enough to stay within the targets of the Paris agreement and keep temperatures below two degrees Celsius, even 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”   The spokeswoman’s call echoes that of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who is urging all countries to do more to avoid a climate catastrophe linked to rising carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures.
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has warned in a statement that the global COVID vaccination rate “must increase rapidly and protection measures upheld, if we are to win the race against more transmissible, and potentially more deadly, variants.” “At least three quarters of people in most countries want to be vaccinated worldwide, in the face of emerging new variants, according to new survey data,” IFRC said. “However, despite lofty rhetoric about global solidarity, there is a deadly gap in the global plan to equitably distribute COVID-19 vaccines. Only around a quarter of the world’s population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. This number drops dramatically in low-income countries, where only 1% of people have received one dose.  And some countries are yet to start mass vaccination campaigns.”  Haiti Gets First Half Million Doses of COVID-19 Vaccine National Security Council official tells VOA decision to speed up vaccine delivery was made after US delegation trip to Port-au-Prince on Sunday A group of human rights advocates is calling for humanitarian aid for Myanmar’s “crippling COVID-19 crisis.”Myanmar
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar said in a statement that the country is experiencing “a massive third wave of COVID-19″ and is “in urgent need of help.”  It called on the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and “other actors” to deliver assistance “directly to the people now.”Yanghee Lee, of the advisory council, in a statement, accused the country’s junta of “weaponising COVID-19 for its own political gain by suffocating the democracy movement and seeking to gain the legitimacy and control it craves – and has so far been denied – by deliberately fueling a humanitarian disaster and then co-opting the international response.”  Millions of children did not receive their basic vaccinations last year as the world sought to bring the COVID-19 outbreak under control, leaving the youngsters vulnerable to preventable diseases like polio and measles.The World Health Organization said in a recent statement that “23 million children missed out on basic vaccines through routine immunization services in 2020 – 3.7 million more than in 2019.”While Southeast Asia Battles COVID-19 Outbreak, Doubts Linger Over Sinovac VaccineMost of the vaccines offered in Indonesia — nearly 90% — have been made by Beijing-based Sinovac BiotechUp to 17 million children, the WHO said, “likely did not receive a single vaccine during the year, widening already immense inequities in vaccine access.”WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Multiple disease outbreaks would be catastrophic for communities and health systems already battling COVID-19, making it more urgent than ever to invest in childhood vaccination and ensure every child is reached.”“This is a wake-up call,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.  “We cannot allow a legacy of COVID-19 to be the resurgence of measles, polio and other killers.” The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 189 million global COVID cases. Worldwide more than 4 million people have died from COVID-19.  More than 3.5 billion vaccines have been administered, according to Johns Hopkins.
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Vietnam’s government is on a global vaccine shopping spree in hopes it can stem a surge of COVID-19 infections without resorting to more lockdowns like those that have already set back the economy and angered an increasingly frustrated public. Like many of its East Asia neighbors, Vietnam is experiencing some of its highest infection rates since the pandemic began early last year, registering more than 2,000 new cases in a day for the first time earlier this week. It recorded 2,383 new cases on July 12, the fifth consecutive day of record highs. However, public patience is wearing thin with the sort of restrictions that helped to keep three earlier waves of infections in check. After almost 50 days of lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, even those who once supported the government unconditionally began to question the way Vietnam has been fighting the pandemic. FILE – A woman sells food next to a banner reading “prevent the spread of COVID-19, take away only, please keep your distance 2 meters” amid the coronavirus outbreak in Hanoi, Vietnam, May 31, 2021.Some are also questioning whether an all-out battle against the virus is necessary, given that Vietnam is reporting far lower mortality rates from COVID-19 than many countries with more advanced health care systems. The nation’s official figures show only 130 deaths from more than 30,000 cases — a mortality rate of 0.4% compared to 1.8% in the United States. Previous lockdowns have taken a toll on the economy. Vietnam’s General Statistics Office this month reported that 12.8 million people aged 15 or older were negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic during the April-June period of this year. Of those, 557,000 people lost their jobs, 4.1 million people had to temporarily suspend their business, 4.3 million people had their working hours cut or had to take time off or rotate work, and 8.5 million workers had their income reduced. That has the nation’s leaders in Hanoi placing their hopes in a stepped-up campaign to vaccinate more than 70% of the population by the end of March 2022. According to Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long, the campaign will kick off this month with approximately 8.7 million vaccine doses to be administered in 18,000 vaccination centers. That will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring an estimated 150 million vaccine doses over the next nine months. So far, Vietnam has injected not quite 4 million doses since it received its first batch of vaccines in April through COVAX, the U.N.-backed body working to get vaccines to less developed countries. The Ministry of Health says 9 million doses have been received altogether since February, including the products of U.S., Russian, Chinese and British pharmaceutical companies. The effort got a boost on July 10, when Vietnam received 2 million doses of the U.S.-made Moderna vaccine through the COVAX facility. The shipment is part of the 80 million doses vaccine that U.S. President Joe Biden has committed to share globally. FILE – Health workers wait to be vaccinated against COVID-19 at Hai Duong Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Hai Duong province, Vietnam, March 8, 2021.The foreign ministry announced this week it is also in talks with Russia and India to purchase 40 million Sputnik V and 15 million Covaxin doses, respectively. Altogether, it says, it has secured commitments to provide more than 120 million doses. Vietnam’s leaders are also intent on developing the country’s own vaccine. Nanogen’s Nanocovax vaccine, backed by Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính, is about to finish trials and is expected to be available beginning in August. An important consideration is the government’s desire to avoid the “vaccine diplomacy” of China, which has been accused of using its largess with vaccines to pressure Southeast Asia countries for favorable policies on other security issues. Another worry is that some citizens will turn down certain vaccines in hopes of being injected with one that is considered to be more effective against the virus. A wave of social media posts has emerged criticizing people who want to choose vaccines on their own. 
 
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U.S. President Joe Biden, his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Russian President Vladimir Putin are among Pacific Rim leaders gathering virtually to discuss strategies to help economies rebound from a resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will chair the special leaders’ meeting Friday of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

But the pandemic and vaccine diplomacy have proved to be divisive issues among members of a forum that says its primary goal is to support sustainable economic growth and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region.

Biden spoke by phone with Ardern on Friday ahead of the leaders’ retreat and discussed U.S. interest in maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region, a White House statement said.

“They also discussed our cooperation on and engagement with Pacific Island nations,” the statement said.

The Biden administration has put a premium on tending to relations with allies in the Pacific early in his administration.

One of his first high-profile acts of diplomacy as president was hosting a virtual summit with fellow leaders of the Quad – Australia, India and Japan – a group central to his efforts to counter China’s growing military and economic power. And he hosted Suga and South Korea President Moon Jae-in for the first in-person foreign leader meetings of his presidency. South Korea is an APEC member and India is the only country in the Quad that is not.

Biden plans to use the virtual APEC retreat to talk to leaders about his administration’s efforts to serve “as an arsenal of vaccines to the world” in the battle against COVID-19 pandemic and how members of the alliance can collaborate to bolster the global economy, according to a senior Biden administration who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. has donated 4.5 million vaccine doses to Indonesia, 2 million to Vietnam, 1 million to Malaysia, and 3.2 million doses will soon be delivered to the Philippines. The White House says donations to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Papua New Guinea, will also soon be delivered. Laos and Cambodia are the only countries among those eight vaccine recipients that are not APEC members.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the “important meeting” came at a critical time as the world was facing a resurgence in COVID-19 infection numbers and international cooperation against the pandemic had entered a new stage.

“We hope all parties can uphold the vision of an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future, carry forward the Asia-Pacific partnership, send a positive message of fighting the coronavirus with solidarity and deepen economic recovery and cooperation,” Zhao said.

Suga will speak about his determination to hold a safe and secure Olympics when the games start in Tokyo on July 23, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said.

Suga will also emphasis Japan’s determination to secure fair access to vaccines for all countries and regions to support the global effort toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic, and Tokyo’s vision to expand a free and fair economic bloc, Kato said.

Ardern said APEC’s first leaders’ meeting outside the usual annual summits “reflects our desire to navigate together out of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis.”

“APEC economies have suffered their biggest contraction since the Second World War over the past year, with 81 million jobs lost. Responding collectively is vital to accelerate the economic recovery for the region,” said Ardern, whose South Pacific island nation has been among the most successful in the world in containing the virus.

The pace of a global vaccine rollout and conditions attached to international vaccine deals are vexed issues among APEC members.

The United States has been accused by some of hoarding vaccines. Biden came up well short on his goal of delivering 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the rest of the world by the end of June as a host of logistical and regulatory hurdles slowed the pace of U.S. vaccine diplomacy.

Although the Biden administration has announced that about 50 countries and entities will receive a share of the excess COVID-19 vaccine doses, the U.S. had shipped fewer than 24 million doses to 10 recipient countries by July 1, according to an Associated Press tally.

Taiwan, an APEC member that China claims as a renegade territory, has accused Beijing of tying the delivery of coronavirus vaccines to political demands. The government of the self-ruled island says China has intervened to block vaccine deliveries to Taiwan from fellow APEC members Japan and the United States.

China has accused Australia of interfering in the rollout of Chinese vaccines in former Australian colony Papua New Guinea. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea are also APEC members.

Sino-Australian relations plummeted last year when Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of and responses to the pandemic.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who will also join the meeting, said in a statement now was a “critical time for Australia to engage with regional partners to promote free trade facilitation, in particular for vaccines and essential goods; build momentum for strengthening the multilateral trading system; and secure a sustainable and inclusive recovery.”

China said that by May it was providing COVID-19 vaccines to nearly 40 African countries, describing its actions as purely altruistic.

The vaccines were donated or sold at “favorable prices,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry official said.

The online leaders’ meeting that is chaired from the New Zealand capital Wellington and straddles 11 time zones comes before the scheduled annual summit in November.

New Zealand’s pandemic response has been among the most effective in the world and the isolated nation of 5 million people has recorded just 26 COVID-19 deaths. But its vaccination campaign has been far slower than in most developed countries.

Ardern said leading a regional response to the pandemic was one of New Zealand’s highest priorities when it took over as APEC’s chair from Malaysia in an annual rotation among the 21 members.

“I will be inviting discussion on immediate measures to achieve more coordinated regional action to assist recovery, as well as steps that will support inclusive and sustainable growth over the long term,” she said. “APEC leaders will work together to get through the pandemic and promote a sustainable and inclusive recovery, because nobody is safe until everyone is safe.” 
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In a medical first, researchers harnessed the brain waves of a paralyzed man unable to speak — and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen.

It will take years of additional research but the study, reported Wednesday, marks an important step toward one day restoring more natural communication for people who can’t talk because of injury or illness.

“Most of us take for granted how easily we communicate through speech,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the work. “It’s exciting to think we’re at the very beginning of a new chapter, a new field” to ease the devastation of patients who lost that ability.

Today, people who can’t speak or write because of paralysis have very limited ways of communicating. For example, the man in the experiment, who was not identified to protect his privacy, uses a pointer attached to a baseball cap that lets him move his head to touch words or letters on a screen. Other devices can pick up patients’ eye movements. But it’s a frustratingly slow and limited substitution for speech.

Tapping brain signals to work around a disability is a hot field. In recent years, experiments with mind-controlled prosthetics have allowed paralyzed people to shake hands or take a drink using a robotic arm — they imagine moving and those brain signals are relayed through a computer to the artificial limb.

Chang’s team built on that work to develop a “speech neuroprosthetic” — decoding brain waves that normally control the vocal tract, the tiny muscle movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and larynx that form each consonant and vowel.

Volunteering to test the device was a man in his late 30s who 15 years ago suffered a brain-stem stroke that caused widespread paralysis and robbed him of speech. The researchers implanted electrodes on the surface of the man’s brain, over the area that controls speech.

A computer analyzed the patterns when he attempted to say common words such as “water” or “good,” eventually becoming able to differentiate between 50 words that could generate more than 1,000 sentences.

Prompted with such questions as “How are you today?” or “Are you thirsty” the device eventually enabled the man to answer “I am very good” or “No I am not thirsty” — not voicing the words but translating them into text, the team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It takes about three to four seconds for the word to appear on the screen after the man tries to say it, said lead author David Moses, an engineer in Chang’s lab. That’s not nearly as fast as speaking but quicker than tapping out a response.

‘Pioneering demonstration’

In an accompanying editorial, Harvard neurologists Leigh Hochberg and Sydney Cash called the work a “pioneering demonstration.”

They suggested improvements but said if the technology pans out it eventually could help people with injuries, strokes or illnesses like Lou Gehrig’s disease whose “brains prepare messages for delivery but those messages are trapped.”

Chang’s lab has spent years mapping the brain activity that leads to speech. First, researchers temporarily placed electrodes in the brains of volunteers undergoing surgery for epilepsy, so they could match brain activity to spoken words.

Only then was it time to try the experiment with someone unable to speak. How did they know the device interpreted his words correctly? They started by having him try to say specific sentences such as, “Please bring my glasses,” rather than answering open-ended questions until the machine translated accurately most of the time.

Next steps include ways to improve the device’s speed, accuracy and vocabulary size — and maybe one day allow a computer-generated voice rather than text on a screen — while testing a small number of additional volunteers. 
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