Month: January 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaigners are urging the Australian government to do more to save the moths that were once in such abundance in cities such as Sydney and Canberra that their vast numbers disrupted sporting events.

Source: Voice of America

A community health service in Africa’s largest urban slum is helping poor people get affordable emergency services during the COVID pandemic.

The Kibera community emergency response team in Nairobi is offering a $1 monthly fee for access to emergency services, including an ambulance.

Poor people — like those living in Nairobi’s Kibera slum — find it difficult to access emergency health care.

Even where public services such as clinics and hospitals are provided within slums, the high cost effectively bars most Kibera residents from calling an ambulance.

It’s a challenge Moses Omondi — who was born and brought up in Kibera slum — has undertaken.

He formed a community emergency response team that provides services to slum residents for a fee of $1 a month, including ambulance transport to the hospitals.

“If you have an ambulance, you can easily access a hospital because no hospital should deny you services when you have been taken there by an ambulance, Moses Omondi said. “It means it’s an emergency case that needs emergency attention.”

Annet Okumu is one of about 300 subscribers to the ambulance service. She said she received potentially lifesaving care inside an ambulance after an accident last year.

“The condition I was in wasn’t that good,” Okumu said. “I was really having a very bad headache, I was bleeding. So maybe I could have overbled if I couldn’t have gotten the first aid service.”

Non-profit groups and other benefactors support the service. So far, there is one ambulance for an estimated 250,000 residents in the slum. Officials hope to increase the number to five.

Ambulance services in Kenya ordinarily cost up to $400 depending on the needs of a patient, such as a ventilator and the distance involved.

Officials say arrangements that provide public access to affordable emergency services are especially important during the COVID-19 era. Judith Okech is the head of the Ambulex Kenya service.

“It’s a service people are acknowledging that they very much need, and you’ll realize that people living within such settings, some of them have never called for an ambulance because they know that if you call for an ambulance it’s never going to get there, or you’ll be asked for a lot of money that they are not able to afford,” Judith said.

Residents say the community service emergency response team offers hope they will have better access to the health care they need.

Source: Voice of America

France has lowered the age of its mask mandate to 6-year-old children, officials announced Saturday. The news comes just days before schools reopen Monday, following the winter holiday break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Voice of America

World-renowned Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose groundbreaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, died on Sunday at the age of 77, the country’s president said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Richard was a very good friend and a true loyal Kenyan. May he Rest In Peace,” Paula Kahumbu, the head of Wildlife Direct, a conservation group founded by Leakey, posted on Twitter.

Source: Voice of America

The United States on Saturday cut Ethiopia, Mali and Guinea from access to a duty-free trade program, following through on President Joe Biden’s threat to do so over accusations of human rights violations and recent coups.

“The United States today terminated Ethiopia, Mali and Guinea from the AGOA trade preference program due to actions taken by each of their governments in violation of the AGOA Statute,” the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said in a statement.

Biden said in November that Ethiopia would be cut off from the duty-free trading regime provided under the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) because of alleged human rights violations in the Tigray region, while Mali and Guinea were targeted because of recent coups.

The suspension of benefits threatens Ethiopia’s textile industry, which supplies global fashion brands, and the country’s nascent hopes of becoming a light manufacturing hub. It also piles more pressure on an economy reeling from the conflict, the coronavirus pandemic, and high inflation.

“The Biden-Harris administration is deeply concerned by the unconstitutional change in governments in both Guinea and Mali, and by the gross violations of internationally recognized human rights being perpetrated by the government of Ethiopia and other parties amid the widening conflict in northern Ethiopia,” the trade office statement said.

The AGOA trade legislation provides sub-Saharan African nations with duty-free access to the United States if they meet certain eligibility requirements, such as eliminating barriers to U.S. trade and investment and making progress toward political pluralism.

“Each country has clear benchmarks for a pathway toward reinstatement and the administration will work with their governments to achieve that objective,” it added.

The Washington embassies of the three African countries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ethiopia’s Trade Ministry said in November it was “extremely disappointed” by Washington’s announcement, saying the move would reverse economic gains and unfairly impact and harm women and children.

Source: Voice of America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center on Saturday reported more than 289 million global COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began. The center said 9.1 billion vaccinations have been administered.

Source: Voice of America