A new French study has dismissed a cave in Mojiang County, southwest Chinas Yunnan Province as an origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The study, published online on the journal Environmental Research in late September, also rebuts lab-leak speculations that link the virus to several miners working in the county in 2012.
A retrospective analysis of their clinical reports showed that the miners had displayed symptoms very different from those shown by COVID-19 patients, Sputnik news agency reported.
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“One must also wonder why a virus which killed more than 5 million and infected more than 200 million in 18 months did not cause any illness in 7 years from 2012 to 2019,” the study read.
“Dismissing the Mojiang mine theory leaves the laboratory leak narrative without any scientific support thus making it simply an opinion-based narrative,” it added.
Over the past decades, mega-projects built across China and world-leading developments have propelled the countrys drive to strengthen its transportation network and key infrastructure for the economy.
The world’s second-largest economy has its backbone on an “enormous, interconnected and comprehensive transportation system,” according to Minister of Transport Li Xiaopeng.
China now leads the world in technology for railways at high altitudes and in extremely low temperatures and is a global player in high-speed and heavy-haul railways, said the white paper titled “Sustainable Development of Transport in China.” The State Council Information Office released the report last December.
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It listed examples such as the Harbin-Dalian High-speed Railway, the world’s first high-speed rail line operating at low temperatures in winter. It also listed the Datong-Qinhuangdao Heavy-haul Railway, which ranks top globally in terms of annual transport volume, and the Beijing-Guangzhou High-speed Railway, the longest high-speed rail line in the world.
Aerial photo taken on Dec. 9, 2020 shows a view of Honghe Bridge of Hezhou-Gaolan Port Highway on the Pearl River estuary in south China
Boasting eight of the ten highest bridges and seven of the ten longest cable-stayed bridges worldwide, China also tops the world in the total length and number of highway bridges and tunnels in service and under construction, the document said.
The number of highway bridges in China reached around 912,800 by the end of 2020, and the total length surpassed 66.28 million linear meters.
China announced the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge in October 2018, which is the world’s longest cross-sea bridge. The 55-km-long bridge connects China’s southern mainland province of Guangdong with the country’s two special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao.
According to the white paper, China had 238 certified civil airports throughout the country.
Hailed as the “new gateway” to China, Beijing’s new Daxing International Airport has seen its total passenger throughput exceed 10 million a year after it began functioning. The airport was built in less than five years and officially opened to flights on Sept. 25, 2019.
In addition to its capacity of building large airports, core technologies in improving massive estuaries and lengthy waterways have given China around 127,000 km of navigable inland waterways, sending it to the front ranks of the world, noted the white paper.
The large-scale transportation network has supported a leap in the composite national strength, Li said, noting that China is now “running at full steam” on the journey towards a country with a strong transportation system.
Giving priority to transport in its future plans, China will shift its focus from speed and scale to quality and efficiency, from independent initiatives to integrated multimodal development, and from traditional drivers to innovative forces, said the white paper.
Underlining the goal of building up significant strength in transport by 2035, “our country will build a modern comprehensive transport system that is safe, convenient, efficient, green and economical, equipped with world-class facilities, technology, management, and services,” the white paper said.
Aerial photo taken on Aug. 31, 2021 shows a high-speed railway under construction and an expressway in Gaoling Township of Du
The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) on Tuesday called on the public to attend to the psychological well-being of adolescents at a theme campaign held in Beijing.
Titled “Stronger Mind, Strong You,” the campaign was launched in the wake of World Mental Health Day which fell on Oct. 10, aiming to start conversations among adolescents over mental health issues and reduce related stigmas.
Thirteen percent of adolescents worldwide are estimated to be living with mental disorders, according to the UNICEF publication “The State of the World’s Children 2021.”
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Representatives from the Chinese government and UN organizations, experts, sports celebrities and young people attended the event co-hosted by UNICEF China and China’s national center for mental health.
Participants called on the public to raise awareness over the potential risks of mental health issues for adolescents and to pool wisdom on how to tackle the risks.
“Despite growing awareness of the impact of mental health conditions, stigma is preventing children and young people from seeking treatment and limiting their opportunities to grow, learn and thrive,” said Cynthia McCaffrey, UNICEF representative to China.
She added that parents, other caregivers, teachers and public figures need to create an environment where young people feel that it is safe to talk about their mental health.
The campaign is part of UNICEF’s effort to empower adolescents and young people through peer support to develop skills to help each other and reject stigma.
The drumbeat to commemorate the Jim Crow lynching of George Hughes, a Black farmhand accused of raping a White woman in Grayson County, Texas, began in the winter of 2020. It continued into the spring and on through the summer.
The effort was unyielding: a Facebook page, YouTube videos, an anniversary gathering to mark the 1930 tragedy, a town hall forum, thousands of signatures on a petition. Every week, supporters requested that a vote on a historical marker on the courthouse grounds be placed on the public agenda of the county’s governing body. They spoke without fail at every meeting.
Melissa Thiel poses for a portrait outside the Grayson County courthouse. Thiel, a county native and public historian, led a successful effort to install a historical marker on the courthouse grounds to commemorate the lynching of a Black man and a White-led riot there in 1930.
Photo by Cooper Neill for The Washington Post
And yet for months there was no decision, not a promise of one, not even a word. “People said, ‘You can’t do this, not in Grayson County,’ ” which is overwhelmingly White and Republican, said Melissa Thiel, the preacher’s daughter and local public historian who led the effort.
“I thought, ‘They’re right,’ ” she said. ” ‘I can’t do this, but we can’ . . . They can’t put us off forever.”
On Tuesday, forever ended. After months of silent delay – and nearly a century of community denial – the all-White Commissioners Court voted narrowly to permit the placement of the marker on the courthouse grounds.
“We are a nation founded on the basis of laws, and the destructive actions of a vigilante mob on the grounds of what we consider to be the center of justice should be condemned and not whitewashed away from our history,” said Commissioner Jeff Whitmire, who voted in favor of the marker.
“We as a court and the community as a whole have wasted too much time dealing with what should have been a mundane situation permitting a metal marker describing a historical event,” Whitmire said.
In May 1930, Hughes was arrested for allegedly assaulting the wife of his boss after trying to collect $6 in payment for his farm labor.
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He was brought to the Grayson County courthouse in Sherman for his trial on May 9, 1930 – a year when the resentments of the Great Depression spurred a threefold increase in lynchings across the nation.
Hughes’s harrowing murder, and the events surrounding it, were the small rural North Texas county’s version of the cataclysmic anti-Black lynchings and riots that struck Tulsa and so many other communities across the nation in the violently racist early decades of the 20th century.
A mob of about 5,000 White people surrounded the courthouse and jammed the corridors. Hughes, supposedly protected by Texas Rangers, including the legendary Capt. Francis A. Hamer, was locked inside a walk-in document vault in the second story of the courthouse. The enraged mob lit the building on fire, and Hughes, 41, suffocated.
The rioters then took Hughes’s charred body, chained it to a car and dragged it to the town’s Black business district, where they hung it from a cottonwood tree, mutilated it and lit a fire beneath it. Then they burned the commercial area down and warned Black residents to leave town. Many of them did.
The governor called in hundreds of Texas National Guard troops and declared martial law. The violent events made headlines around the world.
Yet when Thiel, who is White, encountered the events 90 years later while working on her master’s degree in public history, there had been no public recognition of Hughes’s lynching and what became known as the Sherman Riot. A plaque on the courthouse grounds now simply mentions that the old court building burned down. No one talked about – or seemed to know – what actually happened.
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Thiel, whose family has lived in Grayson County for generations, set out to erect a historical marker near the courthouse entrance.
The stonewalling started shortly after Thiel received approval from the county historical commission for the marker. The manager of the marker program, Brian Hander, sent an email to Judge Bill Magers, head of the Commissioners Court, on Nov. 16 telling him the marker had been approved and was ready for the commissioners to consider as part of the state requirement that a marker receive permission from the landowner.
In early December, Thiel said she received a call from Magers telling her that contrary to Hander’s understanding, the marker had not been approved by the historical commission. Shortly afterward, Hander resigned, citing his suspicion that the county was trying to undermine the approval process for the marker, in part by calling a public hearing, a first in Hander’s decade-long tenure.
The then-chairwoman of the county historical association, Teddie Ann Salmon, invited Thiel to a private meeting in February and suggested that the lynching and riot were set in motion by Hughes’s alleged actions.
In March, Thiel decided to take her crusade public, pressing the Commissioners Court to approve the marker.
Six months passed, and the elected officials appeared unmoved. Then in late September, Magers, facing reelection next year, appointed his own committee of citizens – which did not include Thiel or members of her group – to report back to the court on what to do.
On Tuesday, before the committee announced its decision and the Commissioners Court cast its vote, the marker’s supporters spoke once again.
“Today is a historic day for me because you see the topic of the historical marker is on the agenda,” said Yolanda Boyd, a Black resident of Sherman. “I believe, when read, [the marker] will allow us to take away something of a subliminal message within ourselves that this will never happen again, that we are to do the right thing, that we will never hurt anyone.”
The citizens’ committee endorsed the marker, adopting Thiel’s wording for the inscription almost in its entirety, albeit with a few changes Thiel believes undermine its historical accuracy. Three of the five Commissioners Court members then voted in favor. Phyllis James voted no, repeating her pledge to vote in a way that reflects the views of the majority of Grayson County. And so did Bart Lawrence, saying the wording on the plaque “provokes divisiveness,” although he did not say how.
The court will now submit the application to the Texas Historical Commission.
Even though Thiel has found the process a bit galling, she said a yes is still a yes.
“We got our yes vote,” Thiel said. “We weren’t sure how it was all going to go down. . . . It’s a little surreal. . . . This is a huge move forward.”
And yet she worries: Will the wording be factual after it’s negotiated with the state? Will the marker be erected in a “respectable” place on the courthouse grounds where visitors can easily absorb what happened on May 9, 1930, and remember the Black man who was lynched there, the livelihoods destroyed?
The drumbeat may have faded, but it has not stopped.
“This is my baby and I want to make sure it’s done right from the beginning to the end,” Thiel said. “It’s important that that happens.”
Spain celebrated its National Day on October 12 with a military parade and flypast by the Spanish Air Force, which was canceled in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
King Felipe VI of Spain and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Tuesday attended a military parade held here to celebrate the country’s National Day.
The traditional annual parade and flypast by the Spanish Air Force returned after being canceled in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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COVID-19 restrictions, such as smaller stands, were still in place for the event in which 2,656 troops participated — considerably fewer than the 4,200 who took part in the 2019 parade.
Sixty-eight aircraft and helicopters took part in the flypast and 115 vehicles rolled through the streets during the event, whose slogan was “Service and Commitment.”
Soldiers attend a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Gustavo Valiente)
It was designed to highlight the Spanish armed forces’ efforts to contain the pandemic and to respond to natural catastrophes, such as forest fires; to clean up after Storm Filomena, which covered central Spain in almost a meter of snow earlier in the year; or to help save lives and property during the ongoing volcanic eruption on the island of La Palma.
Early in the day, Sanchez tweeted that “this October 12 let us claim what unites us, what makes us better as a society and what makes Spain a welcoming, open and diverse country. Let’s celebrate our commitment, solidarity, cooperation and multilateralism. Let’s celebrate who we are.”
Planes fly at a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Gustavo Valiente)
Soldiers attend a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Meng Dingbo)
Two postal workers were killed in a shooting at a U.S. Postal Service facility in Memphis on Tuesday, according to Postal Inspection Service, the mail agencys law enforcement arm. The shooter also died.
An assistant mail carrier retrieved a firearm from his car in the East Lamar Carrier Annex and returned to the building, shooting his manager and a plant supervisor before shooting himself, according to a U.S. Postal Inspection Service official and a postal union official, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.
The Memphis Police Department said late Tuesday afternoon that there were “no active threats” in the area.
An FBI spokeswoman told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the shooter was a Postal Service employee.
An Inspection Service statement said the agency was working with the Memphis Police Department, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate the shooting. Postal Service spokeswoman Kimberly Frum said in an emailed statement that the mail service was “saddened at the events that took place today in Memphis. Our thoughts are with the family members, friends and co-workers of the individuals involved.”
The agency will provide mental health resources to employees at the annex, a staff-only mail-sorting and distribution facility, in coming days, Frum said.
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Authorities did not identify the victims or the shooter, but Memphis-area resident Roxanne Rogers identified her cousin James Wilson as one of the victims, according to the Commercial Appeal.
“He was a good man. An outstanding man,” Rogers told the newspaper. “The best man you’d ever want to be around.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said Tuesday night that she was “saddened by the loss of life” in the attack.
Postal shootings during the 1980s and ’90s gave rise to the slang “going postal” to describe homicides committed by current or former mail service employees. News media often falsely ascribed long hours and intense work for driving employees to violence.
Postal Service workers, and the agency’s unions, bristle at the term and instead commend the agency for its workplace protections. The Postal Service commissioned a report in 2000, led by former Carter administration Cabinet official Joseph Califano Jr., that found that “‘going postal’ is a myth, a bad rap.”
“Postal workers are no more likely to physically assault, sexually harass, or verbally abuse their co-workers than employees in the national workforce,” the report stated.
Tuesday’s shooting at the annex in the Orange Mound neighborhood comes less than a month after a shooting at a grocery store killed one person and injured 15 in the Memphis suburb of Collierville. The gunman in that attack fatally shot himself, police said.
“A prolonged period of extremely easy financial conditions, while needed to sustain the economic recovery, may result in overly stretched asset valuations and could fuel financial vulnerabilities,” the IMF report said.
While policy support continues to be key to sustaining the ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers need to tackle pockets of elevated vulnerabilities to maintain financial stability, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Tuesday.
“Policymakers are confronted with a challenging trade-off: maintaining near-term support for the global economy while preventing unintended consequences and medium-term financial stability risks,” the IMF said in its latest Global Financial Stability Report.
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“A prolonged period of extremely easy financial conditions, while needed to sustain the economic recovery, may result in overly stretched asset valuations and could fuel financial vulnerabilities,” the report said.
Some warning signs that point to a deterioration in the underlying foundations of financial stability are “increased financial risk-taking and rising fragilities in the nonbank financial institutions sector,” according to the report.
“If left unchecked, these vulnerabilities may evolve into structural legacy problems, putting medium-term growth at risk and testing the resilience of the global financial system,” the report said.
The report also warned that a sudden change in the monetary policy stance of advanced economies may result in a sharp tightening of financial conditions, adversely affecting capital flows and exacerbating pressures in countries facing debt sustainability concerns.
“We already see that over 50 percent of low-income countries have either unsustainable debt or very close to unsustainable debt,” Tobias Adrian, financial counselor and director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, told Xinhua in a video interview.
“So many countries might be pushed into unsustainable territory. And we could see more debt restructuring of low-income countries,” he said.
While leveraging the historic general Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) allocation, emerging and frontier markets should rebuild buffers as appropriate and implement structural reforms to insulate themselves from the damage from capital flow reversals and abrupt increases in funding costs, the report said.
The new allocation of SDRs equivalent to 650 billion U.S. dollars, the largest in the IMF’s history, came into effect in August. About 275 billion dollars of the new allocation would go to emerging and developing countries, of which low-income countries would receive about 21 billion dollars, according to the IMF.
The SDR allocation came at an important time as many countries are in acute need of liquidity support to fight the pandemic with the spread of the more contagious Delta variant.
The SDR, an international reserve asset created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries’ official reserves, can be exchanged among governments for freely usable currencies in times of need.
A trader works at the trading floor in the New York Stock Exchange in New York, the United States, Sept. 20, 2021. (Xinhua)
England will suffer devastating floods like the ones that submerged parts of Germany this summer if the country fails to protect itself against more severe weather brought on by climate change, a government agency said Wednesday.
“It is adapt or die,” the head of the Environment Agency, Emma Howard Boyd, said in a statement accompanying a new climate change report.
The report warned of rising sea levels, increased river flows and significant strains on England’s public water supply amid soaring global temperatures associated with the changing climate. It urged the government, businesses and broader society to in adaptation and mitigation strategies, “rather than living with the costs of inaction.”
“Some 200 people died in this summer’s flooding in Germany. That will happen in this country sooner or later … unless we also make the places where we live, work and travel resilient to the effects of the more violent weather the climate emergency is bringing,” Boyd said.
According to the agency, even with a 2°C temperature rise compared to preindustrial levels, summer rainfall is expected to decrease while winter rainfall is expected to increase over the next several decades. Some 3 million properties in England are at risk of surface water flooding in places where no early warnings are available.
“The Environment Agency alone cannot protect everyone from increasing flood and coastal risks … we must help communities learn to live with risk, minimize damage and return to normal life quickly,” the report said, adding that “the required scale and urgency of national action is daunting.”
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Britain is hosting the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month, where adapting to “protect communities” against climate change is one of the conference’s four key goals.
But with much of the world’s focus on reducing emissions, Boyd said that she is worried adaptation will take a back seat at the summit.
“It is deeply worrying that adaptation is in danger of being grievously undercooked at COP26. Not by the UK Government, but by the world at large,” she said.
“Significant climate impacts are inevitable,” she said. “But we are running out of time to implement effective adaptation measures. Our thinking must change faster than the climate.”
Britain has done too little in the early weeks to stop coronavirus spreading, which is one of the countrys worst public health failures, according to an official report.
Britain’s failure to do more to stop the spread of coronavirus early in the pandemic was one of the country’s worst public health failures, said an official report released Tuesday.
The government approach was to try to manage the situation and in effect achieve herd immunity by infection, according to the “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date” report from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee of the British parliament.
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The result was that too little was done in the early weeks to stop COVID spreading, despite evidence from China and then Italy that it was a virus that was highly infectious, caused severe illness and for which there was no cure.
People line up outside Bridge Park Community Leisure Center to receive the COVID-19 vaccines in Brent, northwest London, Britain, June 19, 2021. (Xinhua/Ray Tang)
“The veil of ignorance through which the UK viewed the initial weeks of the pandemic was partly self-inflicted,” said the report.
Across 150 pages, the report covers a variety of successes and failings. However, the report described the whole approach to the vaccination program, from the research and development through to the rollout of the jabs, as “one of the most effective initiatives in UK history.”
Another 38,520 people in Britain have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 8,231,437, according to official figures released Tuesday.
The country also recorded another 181 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 137,944. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test.
There are currently 7,003 patients in hospital with COVID-19.
More than 85 percent of people aged 12 and over in Britain have had their first dose of vaccine, and over 78 percent have received both, the latest figures showed.
Photo taken on March 31, 2021 shows a view of the National COVID Memorial Wall outside St Thomas
The political package that must be delivered in Glasgow needs to contain at least three key elements: emissions reduction, financing for climate action in developing countries, and climate adaptation, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, next month must be a turning point for climate action.
“COP26 must be a turning point if we are to fulfill the promise of the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, protect populations from the impacts of climate change and ensure that all financial flows are consistent with the goals of net-zero emissions and sustainable development,” he told the sixth ministerial meeting of the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action, in a video message.
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People participate in a march calling for action against climate change in Brussels, Belgium, Sept. 20, 2019. (Photo by Riccardo Pareggiani/Xinhua)
With COP26 fast approaching, he said, he remained genuinely concerned over the lack of progress on these priorities.
The political package that must be delivered in Glasgow needs to contain at least three key elements: emissions reduction, financing for climate action in developing countries, and climate adaptation, he said.
“First, we must swiftly close the emissions gap. That means national pledges must collectively put us on track to reduce emissions by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. And each country must be ready to update its climate commitments until we collectively get on track to reach the 1.5-degree objective,” he said.
Second, developed countries must close the finance gap by providing and exceeding the promised 100 billion U.S. dollars a year to developing countries for climate action, he said. “And this is just a starting point. Beyond that goal, all financial flows, public and private, must align with a net-zero emissions and resilient development pathway.”
Third, Glasgow must deliver a breakthrough on adaptation. Climate disruption is already here, affecting ever more lives and livelihoods every year, especially among the most vulnerable. Building resilience and adapting must be a priority for all, said Guterres.
“I ask each of you in your national capacity and as shareholders of national and multilateral development banks to consider allocating half of all public climate finance in support of developing countries for adaptation. And I ask that you reconsider how you calculate gross domestic product. Nature’s resources still do not figure in countries’ calculations of wealth. We need nature-based solutions for adaptation and mitigation. The current system is weighted toward destruction, not preservation. Governments must reflect nature’s true value in all policies, plans and economic systems,” he said.
As COVID-19 and climate change pose new and unique challenges to low- and middle-income countries, he asked the finance ministers to revise eligibility thresholds for official development assistance to improve access to finance for those countries.
Soldiers attend a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Gustavo Valiente)
Planes fly at a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Gustavo Valiente)
Soldiers attend a parade to celebrate the National Day of Spain in Madrid, Spain, Oct. 12, 2021. (Xinhua/Meng Dingbo)
A trader works at the trading floor in the New York Stock Exchange in New York, the United States, Sept. 20, 2021. (Xinhua)
People line up outside Bridge Park Community Leisure Center to receive the COVID-19 vaccines in Brent, northwest London, Britain, June 19, 2021. (Xinhua/Ray Tang)
People participate in a march calling for action against climate change in Brussels, Belgium, Sept. 20, 2019. (Photo by Riccardo Pareggiani/Xinhua)
