People cool off in fountains in Rome amid high temperatures
People hit fountains to stay cool in Rome, Italy. A heatwave is sweeping across the country this week while wildfires are still raging in its southern regions.
A man refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A man refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
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People visit the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
People visit the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists fill bottles from a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists fill bottles from a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
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A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A woman takes a selfie near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A woman takes a selfie near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists cool off near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists cool off near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
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A boy refreshes himself with the tap water in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A boy refreshes himself with the tap water in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A dog drinks water under a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A dog drinks water under a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A couple stand near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A couple stand near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A boy refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A boy refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Asia Album: Rescue team provides flood relief in Indias northern state
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distributed relief as the houses of people in Prayagraj district in Indias northern state of Uttar Pradesh remained submerged after river Ganga swelled due to monsoon rains.
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distribute relief among flood affected people in Prayagraj district, India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh
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Houses are seen in the flood as the Ganga river swells after monsoon rains in Prayagraj district, India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Aug. 9, 2021.
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distribute relief among flood affected people in Prayagraj district, India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Aug. 11, 2021.
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distribute relief among flood affected people in Prayagraj district, India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Aug. 11, 2021.
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distribute relief supplies among flood-affected people in Prayagraj district in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Aug. 10, 2021.
Members of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) distribute relief supplies among flood-affected people in Prayagraj district in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Aug. 10, 2021
Southeast Asia reported lower number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths on Thursday, collated data showed.
There were 95,460 new cases on Thursday, lower than Wednesday’s 97,857, while 2,659 patients died, down from Wednesday’s 2,723.
The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 8.4 million in the region and deaths rose to 181,005.
Vietnam reported 9,667 new cases and 326 deaths on Thursday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 246,568 patients and 4,813 deaths.
Vietnamese police arrested the owner of a printing business in a northern province for allegedly selling fake negative Covid-19 test results via RT-PCR method. He reportedly admitted to selling more than 150 fake documents after the government restricted domestic travel since late April and required all travellers to present a negative test result to the authorities of each province.
Cambodia reported 455 new cases and 20 deaths, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 83,839 and 1,634 deaths. All hospitals in Cambodia have started giving a third jab of the Covid-19 vaccine for frontline medics as a booster shot to increase immunity against the virus. Those who received the first and second jabs as Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccine will get a third jab of AstraZeneca. Those who received AstraZeneca as the first and second jabs will get Sinovac as a booster shot. The government is also planning to give the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which it received as a donation from the US, to people in remote areas because it requires only one dose per person.
With stress on officers spiking, New York joins wave of police agencies using therapy dogs
NEW YORK – New York Police Department First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Tucker knows that what an officer sees on the job can have an impact for many years.
He still remembers the deadly gang-related arson when he was a beat cop in Brooklyn in the 1970s, and the unsolved murder of a man he found lying on the pavement, the bullet wound behind his ear not yet visible.
In 2019, when the nation’s largest police department grappled with a record wave of officer suicides, Tucker brought those memories with him as he and other department brass brainstormed how to alleviate job-related stress.
Enter Jenny and Piper – newly-minted yellow Labrador retriever detectives with the NYPD’s Employee Assistance Unit. Their cuteness and caring demeanor will help connect with officers who face growing tension on the streets and may be quietly suffering from work or personal issues.
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in police custody and the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, anti-police fury is “tremendous” and “exponentially more palpable than it has been in the past, said Tucker, who presided over Jenny and Piper’s swearing-in ceremony at police headquarters earlier this month.
Assaults on officers are increasing, and communities across the country are facing calls to “defund the police.” Beat cops routinely face catcalls – and a wall of cellphone cameras set to “record” – when carrying out daily duties.
Lt. Janna Salisbury, who heads New York’s Employee Assistance Unit, said the dogs and their handlers “will respond to critical incidents involving on and off-duty members of the department . . . breaking down traditional mental health barriers, reducing stigmas that often prevent officers from seeking care.”
Services provided by the EAU are confidential, and the unit will refer troubled cops to counselors outside of the department anonymously if they wish.
Law enforcement agencies around the country increasingly are turning to emotional support dogs – a departure from K-9 programs where animals search for drugs, weapons and explosives, control crowds or track down missing people.
In the month after Jan. 6, four police therapy dogs from two Northern Virginia departments – Fairfax County and Arlington County – spent time with U.S. Capitol Police officers and National Guard soldiers, said Allison Cutright, who runs the Fredericksburg, Va.-based FRK9 that trained those dogs. She estimated that dozens of departments have launched K-9 programs in recent years.
“Law enforcement officers go to work every day and do a job most people wouldn’t do for a million bucks,” said Patrick Yoes, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police, describing how officers on patrol have been villanized over the past 18 months. “To have people turn on us the way that they did . . . I think it took a toll on every officer.”
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With stress on officers spiking, New York joins wave of police agencies using therapy dogs
A program called Puppies Behind Bars is responsible for bringing Jenny and Piper to New York’s employee assistance unit. To learn how to handle dogs, four EAU officers recently spent two weeks embedded at the Bedford Hills Correctional Center, a maximum security women’s prison in Westchester County where inmates raise puppies to become therapy and service animals.
The women are housed in their own unit; their K-9 trainees sleep beside them in cells.
Tiffany Richway, 29, is serving an 11-year sentence on a high-level drug conviction in a remote upstate county, near the Canadian border. Richway said the K-9 program has given her purpose as she works through her sentence.
“It makes prison so much easier,” she said. “It gives you something to wake up for.”
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Richway said she and her colleagues in the program only recently began training therapy dogs for use in police departments. They were already training dogs for other jobs, including to comfort veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
At the prison, the NYPD officers were paired with inmates who trained them to become Jenny and Piper’s handlers and backup handlers. The pairing of convict coaches and cops was odd at first, according to some of the inmates and officers. But they quickly saw the importance of their common purpose.
Sgt. Anthony Manza, who is Piper’s backup handler, said the dogs “have an uncanny ability to spot a person in need and offer unconditional compassion.” Some therapy dogs are used to ease the stress of domestic violence and sexual assault victims, often with a tactic called “tell me a story,” in which the therapy dog sits on the lap of an ailing person as they are asked to convey a traumatic event.
“It is our intention to bring techniques like this to cops in crisis, to smash through the wall that stigma behind mental health has built, to get officers to open up in situations where they might not normally open up, including thoughts of suicide,” Manza said.
In Fairfax County, three police dogs make several rounds of random check-ins with officers each week, while also responding to critical incidents and any situation that may be difficult for officers, said Lt. Christopher Sharp, who commands the Incident Support Services unit.
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The dogs tend to disarm officers who could benefit from help but might not otherwise feel comfortable talking freely with a colleague, Sharp said. They are also used in the community – appearing at National Night Out and other public events.
Patrick Yoes, the national FOP president, said police therapy dogs are “sorely needed,” especially if used in a way that keeps officers from feeling like they will face reprisal for seeking help or counseling. The dogs, he said, are skilled at getting big “manly” cops to “sit on the floor and play with them.”
With stress on officers spiking, New York joins wave of police agencies using therapy dogs
Blue H.E.L.P., an organization devoted to promoting mental health for law enforcement, says at least 89 officers have died by suicide so far this year. That is compared to 239 law enforcement suicides in 2019 – the year 10 New York officers took their own lives – 174 in 2020 and 182 in 2018.
Four officers who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have since taken their own lives.
Many officers who survived the attacks at the Capitol continue to suffer from mental as well physical injuries.
Attacks on officers across the country are on the rise, according to statistics complied by the FOP, with 185 officers shot, including 35 killed, through July. The organization said ambush-style attacks are up 126 percent from last year, with 67 cops shot in 52 incidents. Earlier this month, two Chicago police officers were shot, one fatally, during a traffic stop.
Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant and longtime dog owner who worked in suburban Chicago, used to supervise her agency’s K-9 unit.
Now a spokeswoman for the National Police Association and a police trainer, Smith often brought Marley, her German shepherd rescue, to courses she teaches with her husband around the country.
Marley, who died recently, had a knack for cozying up to officers in her training sessions who had been in a shooting or who had experienced another kind of trauma, Smith said.
While she was on the job, her pets were always a source of comfort. In her recent eight-month stint of treatment for breast cancer, her pair of terrier mixes were a loving presence that helped her get through.
“That’s one of the reasons I so strongly believe in these programs – is because I have seen with my own personal experiences what dogs mean to people, [and] what dogs have meant to our family,” Smith said.
Military bases near Chesapeake Bay contaminated with forever chemicals, new report warns
Nine military bases near the Chesapeake Bay are contaminated with “forever chemicals” from firefighting foams used by the Defense Department, an environmental advocacy group warned this week.
The new report from the Environmental Working Group, citing tens of thousands of pages of records obtained from the Defense Department, said that the biggest risk is that the chemicals might have flowed out of the groundwater at military sites in Maryland and Virginia and into the Chesapeake, contaminating the region’s wildlife – including its famed shellfish – affecting the food chain and possibly sickening people.
Known as PFAS, the group of man-made chemicals has been around since the 1940s and is found in hundreds of everyday products, including pizza boxes, nonstick cookware, stain-repellent fabric and cleaning products. They do not break down in the environment and can slowly accumulate in the human body, which research has shown could be linked to an increased risk of cancer and birth defects, among other ailments.
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The chemicals are also present in “aqueous film-forming foam” that the Defense Department first developed in the 1960s to quickly put out jet-fuel fires, during training exercises and in actual blazes.
When asked to comment on the report, a spokesman for the Defense Department offered links to two websites with news releases about the department’s efforts to clean up the chemicals, its outreach and restoration efforts, and how the “national issue” needed “national solutions.”
Beyond that, the spokesman said in an email, “we have nothing further to provide.”
The nine affected sites include Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md., the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., which had the highest concentration of chemicals in its groundwater, at 2.2 million parts per trillion. (The Environmental Protection Agency has said that such chemicals should be at or below 70 parts per trillion in clean drinking water).
Also on the list was Blossom Point, the Martin State air facility, Patuxent River Naval Air Station and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Chesapeake Bay Detachment in Maryland, along with Fort Eustis in Newport News, Va., and Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.
An additional seven military sites may also be affected, the report said, though the Defense Department has not yet done testing to confirm the presence of “forever chemicals” in those places. Those are the Navy recreation center in Solomons, Md.; the Weide Army Heliport in Edgewood, Md.; Naval Training Center Bainbridge in Port Deposit, Md.; Fort Monroe in Virginia; the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach; the Williamsburg Fleet and Industrial Supply Center; and the Craney Island naval fuel depot in Portsmouth, Va.
Scott Faber, senior vice president at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, best known for its guides to sunscreens and produce, said it is unclear whether the crabs, oysters and fish being harvested from affected areas contain high levels of contamination, but he said a “limited sampling” has left his group feeling that there are “reasons to be worried.”
The third-largest estuary in the world, the Chesapeake Bay encompasses about 64,000 square miles, and its watershed spans parts of six states. The chemicals have long posed a challenge to the bay’s health. In a 2020 study, PFAS chemicals were found in crab and oysters from St. Inigoes Creek in Maryland and in striped bass in the Potomac River.
Faber said that people who catch or consume shellfish near the nine spots listed in the report should take precautions.
“Limit your consumption of oysters and crabs from areas near those places,” Faber said. “Don’t eat a lot of them that are harvested offshore from these places.”
And while the Food and Drug Administration has not set consumption thresholds for “forever chemicals” in seafood – nor has Maryland or Virginia – the European Food Safety Authority has set a limit of 4.4 nanograms per kilogram of weight. That’s the equivalent of a 160-pound person eating a portion of an oyster.
Other states, including Alabama, Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin, have begun issuing fish advisories for seafood known to have elevated levels of the chemicals.
The Defense Department formed a task force in July 2019 to figure out what to do about “forever chemicals.” By late March of this year, the department had compiled a list of 698 military installations across the country that had probably used or released the firefighting foam, now known to be hazardous. Of those places, 129 have finished a preliminary assessment, with 63 sites being given a clean bill of health and 66 requiring a more detailed investigation.
At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in late May, Richard Kidd – the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy resilience – said that the department had a “mature” cleanup program but that efforts have been complicated by the $29 billion price tag and how little is still known about the chemicals, including how to remediate them.
Solutions, he said, include pumping out groundwater, filtering it, then pushing it back into the ground.
“Based on what we know today, and known technologies, frankly, it will be years before we fully define the scope of the problem. . . . And after that, probably decades before cleanup is complete,” Kidd said.
Published : August 13, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Lizzie Johnson, Dana Hedgpeth
Chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says – but not zero
Its not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.
Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close with Earth in September of 2135.
But not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.
“Even though there is no possibility whatsoever of in impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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Although researchers believe it will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what’s known as a “gravitational keyhole” that could potentially put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet’s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.
Farnocchia said that although recent findings show the odds of impact have slightly increased – from 1-in-2,700 to 1-in-1,750 over the next century – it “does not represent significant change,” or a reason to worry.
Farnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to data collected by NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.
“Overall the situation has improved,” Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. “I am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.”
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In the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu’s movements through 2300, improving scientists’ ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.
Using NASA’S Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu’s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1750 (or 0.057%.)
Looking at it from glass half full perspective, it means there is a 99.94% probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.
Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037%) – which is still lower that the overall probability of impact through 2300.
The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based “astrometric observations,” mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.
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Since its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid’s measurements.
Although the chances of it colliding with Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another called 1950 DA, NASA said in a news release.
Researchers stated that the most pressing threat for Earth from space objects are hazardous asteroids that are undetected. However, they said they have detected about 60% of those similar to Bennu in size.
In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to fly in close proximity to Bennu to gather information about its size, shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory to evaluate its potential danger.
After a 27-month-long journey, OSIRIS-REx arrived in the asteroid’s orbit in 2018 and spent two years closely studying the object, before coming back to earth on May 10 of this year.
“The OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,” said study lead Davide Farnocchia. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before.”
The spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rocks and dust from the asteroid’s surface, which it will drop to Earth two years from now, on Sept. 24, 2023, landing at the Utah Test and Training Range, in the Great Salt Lake Desert.
“The orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu’s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids – an incredible result,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona.
“The spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu’s orbit since we will measure the asteroid’s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth,” he said, according to the news release.
A week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu, on Dec. 31, 2018, the mission’s team came to the surprise realization that the asteroid was releasing small pieces of rock into space.
Upon arrival at the asteroid, team members also were astonished to find that Bennu is littered with boulders, according to a NASA statement in May.
OSIRIS-REx is not the only spacecraft from Earth exploring an asteroid. Hayabusa2, launched by Japan’s space agency in 2014, began orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018 and in 2020 successfully completed its mission to collect samples and return them to Earth – according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Traveling at approximately 600 miles per hour, if Bennu were to crash into Earth it would unleash the energy of more than a billion tons of TNT, according to NASA’s calculations.
The resulting damage depends on a number of factors and specific circumstances, including location and angle of entry into our atmosphere, but it could create a crater three to six miles in diameter, said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater.
If an object Bennu’s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it “would pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,” he told reporters.
Tokyo virus situation is out of control, panel expert says
A member of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government coronavirus advisory panel of experts said it was now impossible to control the spread of Covid-19 in the capital.
“Infections are raging at disaster level — it’s an emergency,” Norio Omagari said at a Thursday panel meeting with Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. “It’s impossible to control the situation.”
His comments came as the city and national governments consider whether to extend a state of emergency in Tokyo, which is experiencing its worst-ever wave of virus cases as it has joined the list of countries battling surges attributed to the delta variant. The emergency is currently set to be lifted at the end of August.
The imposition of successive states of emergency has become less effective over time, with many bars and restaurants ignoring instructions to close early and stop serving alcohol. Several experts have blamed the government for issuing mixed messages about the seriousness of the situation, including by staging the Olympics, saying this may have prompted people to drop their guard.
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Koike called for measures that would reduce the frequency of people’s outings by 50%, compared with the period immediately prior to the current emergency, echoing the advice of a government panel reported by public broadcaster NHK earlier in the day. She urged people to avoid going on vacation and stay away from their home towns.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, whose public support hit new lows this week amid criticism of his handling of the pandemic, has rejected the idea of European-style lockdowns to contain the virus, ahead of a general election that must be held in the next three months. He has told reporters he’s relying on the vaccine rollout, and has also set limits on which patients can be hospitalized, in a bid to conserve resources.
Japan has fully vaccinated about 36% of its population, compared with 60% in the U.K. and 51% in the U.S., according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker.
Tokyo found 4,989 new cases of Covid-19 Thursday, near a record of 5,042 hit a week ago. The number of patients in hospitals and those in serious condition is continuing to hit records, putting the capital’s health care system under strain. Tokyo had 218 people suffering serious symptoms, its highest yet, while it has 392 beds available for those in serious condition.
Japan’s central government is considering extending the state of emergency into September, and expanding it to more regions, the Sankei newspaper reported earlier Thursday.
Published : August 13, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Isabel Reynolds
Calls for curfew, more curbs in Sydney as delta outbreak worsens
Australia is facing its worst Covid-19 crisis yet, and experts say a lockdown of its biggest city needs to be ramped up to prevent further deterioration to the nations vaunted record in stamping out the pathogen.
Though Sydney has been in lockdown for nearly two months now, the curbs are generally looser than those that helped Melbourne beat back the virus last year; daily cases have surged from 12 on June 26, when the stay-at-home order was first announced, to records of around 350 this week.
The situation is putting Australia in the worst of both worlds: half the population of 26 million people are cooped up again, but the delta variant is still spreading to new cities and regions hundreds of miles away, just like it is in reopened economies like the U.S. and U.K. National capital Canberra on Thursday became the latest to order a lockdown after one case were found.
New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian is now under increasing pressure from other regional leaders and some health experts to tighten social-distancing restrictions to stem the outbreak, as her playbook of keeping the economy relatively open while trying to contain delta’s spread appears to be unequal to the variant’s highly contagious nature. While residents of Sydney and other locked-down areas have been told not to leave home unless unavoidable, there’s a lengthy list of exemptions such as for outside exercise or essential work that some people are using liberally.
“Covid Zero is clearly not holding up under delta — it’s so much more contagious,” said Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales. Unless Berejiklian changes tactics, “it will keep spreading and the case numbers will keep rising, and it will pose a greater threat to the rest of Australia.”
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MacIntyre said the only way to get Sydney’s outbreak under control was to enforce city-wide night-time curfews, curtail the number of retailers allowed to open, and circle the city in a “ring of steel” to ensure residents can’t leave — as occurred in Melbourne last year during one of the world’s most stringent and longest lockdowns.
It’s a dilemma also facing other countries with a zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19, including China and Singapore. With delta being so much more transmissible than the original virus, these governments need to ramp up the strictness of their containment measures to slow down spread, even as populations fatigue from the 18 months of stop-start lockdowns.
The slow nationwide vaccine rollout is the biggest obstacle in the way of Australia’s path to normalization and international reopening after shutting its borders in early 2020. Only 36.2% of people have received a first dose, one of the lowest levels among developed economies, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker.
There’s also concern the decision to tier the outbreak response in different parts of Sydney is causing social unrest. Some areas of its south and western districts hardest hit by the outbreak — which also have relatively large multicultural populations and wider socio-economic problems — have been dealt stricter travel restrictions than those in the more affluent eastern and northern suburbs.
Mistrust of authorities has been fueled by military patrols in those areas aimed at supporting the police in enforcing lockdown rules.
Berejiklian has been criticized by health experts who say she didn’t enforce Sydney’s lockdown early enough after delta was initially seeded in the community in mid-June by a limousine driver who came into contact with infected international flight crew. Still, the state premier insists the lockdown measures are the toughest implemented in Australia, and the outbreak’s spread is due to delta’s virulence and non-compliance by a minority of residents.
The dangers of relying on people to self-police given high levels of lockdown fatigue was evident in a high-profile case of an infected Sydney man who traveled almost 500 miles to look at real estate. He did not use his phone to “check in” at venues he visited as required, and the tourist hub of Byron Bay and other towns he visited were this week locked down as a result.
“Many smaller cities are now in lockdown, with all the economic and emotional issues that come with that,” said Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases specialist at the Australian National University Medical School. “That could have been avoided if those people simply hadn’t left Sydney, the center of the outbreak. It only takes a small minority of people to be non-compliant to cause a lot of damage.”
Other state leaders, who have implemented their own hard borders against Sydney residents, are losing patience with Berejiklian, saying the deteriorating situation in New South Wales is threatening their own Covid Zero strategies that have so far kept coronavirus deaths in Australia to below 1,000.
Earlier this week, Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews urged Berejiklian to build a “ring of steel” enforced by police around Sydney, even as he battles another outbreak in Melbourne that’s placed the nation’s second-largest city in lockdown for a sixth time.
Western Australia state Premier Mark McGowan — perhaps the nation’s strictest adherent to the zero tolerance approach — told reporters on Wednesday that New South Wales authorities “don’t have the backbone to do what is required.”
Meanwhile Berejiklian, who hasn’t ruled out tightening some of Sydney’s rules, is now backing away from indicating that she could ease restrictions by the end of the month should case numbers fall and her state’s adult vaccination number reaches 6 million. It’s at about 4.7 million now.
While Prime Minister Scott Morrison is promising every adult will have access to a vaccine by the end of the year, he said on Thursday that there are no other options in the meantime but to enforce strict stay-at-home orders where necessary.
“Suppress and vaccinate — that is the phase we are in,” Morrison told parliament in Canberra, just hours before the city entered its first lockdown for more than a year. “Whether in Europe, the Netherlands or Singapore or Japan or other countries: where they have sought to open up, the delta variant has had a very different view.”
Published : August 13, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jason Scott
In new documentary, WHO scientist says Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis
The World Health Organization expert who led a controversial joint probe into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic says in a documentary airing Thursday night on Danish television that Chinese colleagues influenced the presentation of their findings.
Speaking to Danish documentarians, Peter Ben Embarek said Chinese researchers on the team had pushed back against linking the origins of the pandemic to a research laboratory in Wuhan in a report about the investigation.
“In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek said during the interview. “We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”
In its report released earlier this year, the WHO-China team said it was “very unlikely” that the virus, officially named SARS-CoV-2, could have accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another facility in the Chinese city where infections were first found. The joint team of researchers said it would not recommend further investigation into the issue.
A discussion of whether to include the lab-leak theory at all lasted until 48 hours before the conclusion of the mission, Ben Embarek told the Danish reporters. In the end, Ben Embarek’s Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
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Asked in the documentary whether the report’s “extremely unlikely” wording about the lab-leak theory was a Chinese requirement, Ben Embarek said “it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.” But he added that this meant it was not impossible, just not likely.
Ben Embarek said one similar scenario, in which a lab employee inadvertently could have brought the virus to Wuhan after collecting samples in the field, could be considered both a lab-leak theory and a hypothesis of direct infection from a bat, which was described as “likely” in the report.
“A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave – such a scenario belongs both as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human. We’ve seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis,” Ben Embarek said.
In further comments during the interview that were not included in the documentary but were incorporated in an account by the Danish channel TV2 on its website, Ben Embarek suggested that there could have been “human error” but that the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to admit that.
“It probably means there’s a human error behind such an event, and they’re not very happy to admit that,” Ben Embarek was quoted as saying. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect,” he added. “Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?”
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Asked for comment, Ben Embarek initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote, declining to comment further and referring The Washington Post to the WHO. He did not immediately respond to follow-up questions.
WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic also said that the comment was mistranslated and that the interview took place “months ago.”
“There are no new elements nor [a] change of the position [that] all hypothesis are on the table and WHO works with member states on the next step,” Jasarevic said, referring to comments by senior officials with the global health organization about the probe.
The documentary, titled “The Virus Mystery,” is scheduled to air on TV2 on Thursday evening.
Ben Embarek had cooperated with the documentary filmmakers, even going so far as to film his trip to China for them on his phone to provide an inside look at a closed-off trip.
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Ben Embarek led a team of international scientists on a mission to China in January to work with local officials to investigate the origins of a pandemic that has so far led to more than 200 million confirmed cases and at least 4.3 million deaths worldwide.
From the start, the trip was mired in controversy. Beijing delayed approval for the WHO trip, pushing back the researchers’ arrival, while some of the international experts on the team were criticized for prior links to Chinese research.
Even once it arrived, the WHO team, subject to strict quarantine procedures, had only two weeks in the field to conduct research.
After the team’s report was released in late March, it grew only more disputed. The team looked at four different scenarios for how the virus first spread to humans, labeling the idea of zoonotic spread from animals to humans as “most likely.”
Other, less likely scenarios included that the virus could have been imported to China on frozen food – a theory pushed repeatedly by Chinese officials but seen as unlikely by many international experts.
The “lab-leak” theory, the subject of intense speculation in the United States, was dubbed the least likely scenario, and the WHO team said it should no longer be investigated. Even skeptics of the theory found the dismissal a surprise.
At a news conference marking the release of the report, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the scenario still needed closer study.
“Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy,” Tedros said.
Ben Embarek and other researchers on the team have hinted at immense pressure during the trip from all sides, with as many as 60 Chinese colleagues working with not only scientists but also public health figures.
“The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” he told Science Magazine during an interview published in February.
Later this month, the U.S. intelligence community is expected to complete a 90-day review of the evidence about the origins of the coronavirus.
Tedros has also said that the WHO will continue its own research into the origins, although Chinese officials said last month that it would be “impossible” to accept a continuing China-focused probe.
Published : August 13, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Adam Taylor, Emily Rauhala, Martin Sesloe Sorensen
U.S. sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan to bolster security as some embassy staff are withdrawn
The Biden administration will send thousands of troops to Afghanistan to help airlift American personnel and local allies out of Kabul, U.S. officials said Thursday, as rapid-fire advances by the Taliban intensified the existential threat facing the Afghan state.
Approximately 3,000 combat troops will deploy to the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, to facilitate the withdrawal of additional civilian staff from the U.S. embassy and accelerate the departure of Afghans who have aided the U.S. government in the war effort, the Defense and State Departments said.
The orders to return American forces to Afghanistan comes just weeks before the military is scheduled to conclude its withdrawal under a timeline established by President Joe Biden, and coincides with Taliban’s seizure of Ghazni, the fifth provincial capital to fall to militant forces in less than a week.
On Thursday, Herat and Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second- and third-largest cities, were on the verge of falling to Taliban troops.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby declined to call the deployment a combat mission, but said infantry soldiers and Marines will deploy with machine guns, mortars and other heavy weapons, and authorization to defend themselves if attacked.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said “core” diplomatic staff would continue their diplomatic and consular work at the heavily fortified U.S. embassy in Kabul , but declined to say how many U.S. government personnel are among the roughly 4,000 embassy staff there.
“The embassy remains open,” Price said. “This is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not a wholesale withdrawal.”
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But the decision marks a tacit admission that the United States is uncertain how long it can ensure the safety of its staff in a country where conditions are changing on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.
The 3,000 troops being dispatched to Kabul will include two infantry battalions from the Marine Corps and one from the Army, all already deployed in the region, Kirby said. In the next week, an additional 3,500 U.S. soldiers will be sent to Kuwait and put on standby in case even more combat troops are needed in Kabul, and about a thousand other personnel will deploy to Qatar to assist Afghan allies evacuated from their home country with American help.
The additional muscle will augment a force of approximately 650 American troops who have been in Kabul since the U.S. military all but completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan last month. Those forces have been split between the airport and the U.S. embassy to provide defense against rocket attacks.
In April, Biden announced that he would fully withdraw military forces in keeping with a February 2020 deal the Trump administration struck with the Taliban. News of the American departure after two decades appeared to have energized the Taliban and undermined the confidence of Afghan forces as they face their adversary without air and logistical support from foreign troops.
The government of President Ashraf Ghani now controls less than a third of the country.
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The fall of Ghazni, 80 miles southwest of the Afghan capital, added fuel to Afghans’ concerns about surrender deals between the Taliban and local leaders that have appeared to have contributed to the group’s dramatic battlefield sweep. In many instances, the militant fights have commandeered areas without a major fight.
On Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans forces surrendered as part of a deal near the northern city of Kunduz. On Thursday, Ghazni’s governor was arrested after fleeing the provincial capital as it fell.
A senior Interior Ministry official said the Taliban runs a recruitment team that reaches out to Afghan officials, pushing them to join the militants.
“One of the main reasons we lost so much ground is the cooperation of officials with the Taliban,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose such information to the news media.
“We suspect a long list of governors who might have Taliban ties.”
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Analysts said the Biden administration’s decision to reduce its embassy presence occurs amid an understanding of the impact a full-scale embassy withdrawal would have on the ground in Afghanistan.
“Without a diplomatic footprint, the Afghan government would suffer a major psychological blow, narratives of U.S. abandonment would strengthen, and the Taliban would score yet another victory,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia scholar at the Wilson Center.
“The international community should absolutely prioritize the security of its diplomats,” he said. “But let’s be clear: Its departure from Afghanistan would send a sobering signal that the world is resigned to leaving Afghans to their fate.”
Although Price suggested that at least some of the departing diplomats would leave on commercial flights, saying that the Kabul airport remained open, the embassy has advised nonofficial U.S. citizens in Afghanistan to leave “immediately” and noted that flights are limited.
Kirby described the newly deployed troops’ mission as “narrowly focused,” and said it was far better to be prudent and deploy the troops now than to “wait until it’s too late.”
“We believe that this is the right thing to do, and the right time to do it,” Kirby said.
In a possible sign of the sensitivities involved, however, Kirby declined to call the new mission a noncombatant evacuation operation, a term the military generally uses to describe the departure of civilians and nonessential military personnel from a dangerous situation. The term “NEO” is politically charged, and the Biden administration has sought to avoid using it, two U.S. officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“The purpose here is to help with the reduction of civilian personnel out of the embassy,” Kirby said. “That is not the same as a noncombatant evacuation operation, where you’re moving a massive amount of people who aren’t necessarily U.S. government employees. It’s a different operation altogether, and we’re just not there.”
Others scoffed at that notion.
“This is, in no uncertain terms, a NEO, which is an operation designed to evacuate U.S. civilian personnel whose lives are threatened by war, civil unrest or natural disaster,” said Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration. “There’s no cut-out for embassy personnel unless you are trying to make a political point which was, simply, not to use the word, ‘evacuation.’ “
A Defense Department publication for evacuation operations states that “diplomatic or other considerations may make the use of the term NEO inadvisable and require the use of other terms for the operation instead.”
For the past several months, the Defense Department has been negotiating with Turkey over its offer to provide security for the airport after the U.S. withdrawal. Those negotiations are not yet completed, Kirby said this week, although he expressed certainty that they would be successful.
Turkey has repeatedly said it intends to provide airport security despite Taliban advances, as long as it has the proper financial, diplomatic and logistical support from the United States. During a visit Thursday to Pakistan, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said that Turkey fully intends to man the airport, and that Turkish troops would not be in danger, despite Taliban statements warning of attacks against them.
But the delay in finalizing an agreement has concerned all of those foreign missions remaining in Kabul, as well as the Americans.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to elevate Turkey’s status in NATO, and circumvent numerous disagreements with Washington over Syria, its defense purchases from Moscow, and domestic crackdowns over civil rights. In an interview Wednesday with CNN Turk, Erdogan said the situation in Afghanistan was “really, really troubling,” and offered to meet with “the person who is [the Taliban] leader.”
“Why? Because if we do not get control of things like this at a high level,” he said, “it won’t be possible to secure peace this time in Afghanistan.”
Published : August 13, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Missy Ryan, Dan Lamothe, Ezzatullah Mehrdad, Susannah George
A man refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021. 
People visit the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists fill bottles from a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A woman takes a selfie near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
Tourists cool off near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A boy refreshes himself with the tap water in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A tourist cools off by a fountain near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A dog drinks water under a water tap near the Pantheon in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A couple stand near a fountain in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
A boy refreshes himself with the water of the Barcaccia Fountain in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, Aug. 12, 2021.
With stress on officers spiking, New York joins wave of police agencies using therapy dogs
With stress on officers spiking, New York joins wave of police agencies using therapy dogs
SootinClaimon.Com 