Category: Entertainment

Thousands of young campaigners marched through the streets of Glasgow on Friday, chanting their demand that world leaders at the U.N. climate conference safeguard their future against catastrophic climate change.

Inside the COP26 conference venue in the Scottish city, civil society leaders took over discussions at the end of a week of government speeches and pledges that included promises to phase out coal, slash emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane and reduce deforestation.

“We must not declare victory here,” said former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work informing the world about climate change. “We know that we have made progress, but we are far from the goals that we need to reach.”

Campaigners and pressure groups have been underwhelmed by the commitments made so far, many of which are voluntary, exclude the biggest polluters, or set deadlines decades away.

Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg joined the marchers on the streets, who held placards and banners with messages that reflected frustration with what she described as “blah-blah-blah” coming from years of global climate negotiations.

“You don’t care, but I do!” read one sign, carried by a girl sitting on her father’s shoulders.

Sixteen-year-old protester Hannah McInnes called climate change “the most universally devastating problem in the world,” adding: “It’s our lives and our futures that are on the line.”

Promises

The talks aim to secure enough national promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions – mainly from fossil fuels – to keep the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Scientists say this is the point at which the already intense storms, heatwaves, droughts and floods that the Earth is experiencing could become catastrophic and irreversible.

To that end, the United Nations wants countries to halve their emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, on their way to net-zero emissions by 2050. That would mean the world would release no more climate-warming gases than the amount it is simultaneously recapturing from the atmosphere.

The summit on Thursday saw 23 additional countries pledge to try to phase out coal – albeit over the next three decades, and without the world’s biggest consumer, China.

A pledge to reduce deforestation brought a hasty about-turn from Indonesia, home to vast and endangered tropical forests.

But a plan to curb emissions of methane by 30% did appear to strike a blow against greenhouse gases that should produce rapid results.

And city mayors have been working out what they can do to advance climate action more quickly and nimbly than governments.

The Glasgow talks also have showcased a jumble of financial pledges, buoying hopes that national commitments to bring down emissions can actually be implemented.

But time was running short. “It is not possible for a large number of unresolved issues to continue into week 2,” COP26 President Alok Sharma said in a note to negotiators published by the United Nations.

Efforts to set a global pricing framework for carbon, as a way to make polluters pay fairly for their emissions and ideally finance efforts to offset them, are likely to continue to the very end of the two-week conference.

The new normal

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said on Friday it was possible to reach a deal at the summit settling the final details of the rulebook for how to interpret the 2015 Paris Agreement.

He said the United States was in favor of “the most frequent possible” assessments of whether countries were meeting their goals to reduce emissions.

In Washington, President Joe Biden’s mammoth “Build Back Better” package, including $555 billion of measures aimed at hitting the 2030 target and adapting to climate change, looks set to pass eventually. It hit snags on Friday, however, as the House of Representatives was due to vote on it.

Gore, a veteran of such battles, offered conference-goers a scientific video and photo presentation filled with images of climate-fueled natural disasters, from flooding to wildfires.

“We cannot allow this to become the new normal,” Gore said.

One schoolchild’s placard put it just as well.

“The Earth’s climate is changing!” it read, under a hand-painted picture of a globe on fire. “Why aren’t we?”

Source: Voice of America

OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO — The Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou returns to Burkina Faso this weekend after being canceled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One Burkinabe director, who has made a film documenting a nursery for the infants of sex workers, talks about the importance of telling African stories through cinema.

Moumouni Sanou is a documentary film director from Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second largest city.

In 2019, he made a film, which is being screened at The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, or FESPACO.

Night Nursery follows the story of an older woman who runs a nighttime home for sex workers’ children in Bobo Dioulasso.

Sanou said he wants Night Nursery to humanize sex workers.

Sanou said the idea was to show a different side to sex workers, which is very rarely seen. In Burkina Faso and in the rest of Africa this profession is frowned upon, he said. “But it is also the oldest profession in the world. When we see these girls, people say they are bad people because they are sex workers,” he adds.

FESPACO has been running since 1969 and this year will feature films from around 30 African countries in its official selection. Cinema professionals and cinephiles travel from all over Africa and beyond to attend.

“FESPACO is one of the biggest African film festivals, and for me to be selected and represent Burkina Faso in the documentary film section will mean this film will be seen by the whole world, not just by Africans,” Sanou said.

Ardiouma Soma, the director of FESPACO, says that this year, the event will also host the African International Film & TV Market — known as MICA — for the first time.

Soma said, because this year the MICA will be held at FESPACO they have invited distributors, whose names he prefers not to mention, to Ouagadougou. He said the market will allow them to find new projects that are in post-production and also films that are already finished but not scheduled for FESPACO, so that they can buy them for their own platforms.

Last year, FESPACO, which usually happens every two years, was cancelled due to COVID-19. Burkina Faso is also in the middle of a conflict with terrorist groups linked to Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Burkina Faso’s culture minister, Élise Foniyama Ilboudo Thiombiano, said it is important the festival goes on.

She said it’s a challenge for Burkinabè to continue to be able to keep the festival going every two years. But it is through cinema we can see the vision of Africans and the people who live on this continent, she adds. She points out that her predecessors all made sure FESPACO remained a focal point for Africa and she intends to do the same.

As for Sanou, he is hoping Night Nursery could receive an award, and the recognition it needs to win a wide audience.

Source: Voice of America

COVID-19 cases among U.S. service members have been on a steady decline over the last month, as more service members have become vaccinated ahead of the Defense Department’s fast-approaching vaccination compliance deadlines.

The number of cases reached 4,902 the week of Sept. 8 but dropped to 863 cases last week, the military’s lowest number of cases since early June, according to DOD data obtained by VOA.

“The decline, it’s exactly how we wanted it to go,” Defense Department spokesperson Major Charlie Dietz told VOA on Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo Aug. 25 requiring service members to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face penalties, leaving deadlines for vaccination compliance to the service branches.

DOD’s vaccination mandate came during a summer surge of the coronavirus across the country that was particularly hard-hitting for unvaccinated people. Nearly as many service members died in August as in all of 2020. More service members died in September than in August, and none of those who died in September were fully vaccinated, Dietz said.

According to data on active-duty troops obtained Wednesday by VOA, 91% of the Army, 99% of the Navy, 96% of the Air Force and Space Force, and 91% of the Marine Corps are fully or partially vaccinated.

But active-duty troops are vaccinated at a much higher rate than their Reserve and Guard counterparts, some of whom have deadlines as late as June 30, 2022.

With less than three weeks until the first of the military’s COVID-19 vaccination compliance dates, about one in five U.S. service members — hundreds of thousands of troops — have yet to get a single COVID-19 vaccine dose.

The Air Force’s COVID-19 vaccination compliance deadline is Nov. 2 for active-duty troops and Dec. 2 for Guard and Reserve airmen.

“With the Air Force deadline up first, it will be interesting to see how they handle things. They are our canary in the coal mine,” a military official told VOA.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department will roll out its plan for civilian workforce vaccine compliance on Friday, according to a military official. The rollout is expected to include how the department will track civilian vaccination rates and what will happen to those civilians who fail to comply.

President Joe Biden set Nov. 22 as the deadline for federal civilian employees to be fully vaccinated, the second-earliest compliance date for DOD, following the date for Air Force active-duty troops.

However, the Pentagon has not yet tracked or received self-reporting COVID-19 vaccination data for more than half of its roughly 765,000 civilian employees.

Catholic objections

As the Pentagon’s compliance deadlines near, the archbishop for military services says Catholic troops should be able to refuse the vaccine based on conscientious objection.

“No one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience,” Timothy P. Broglio, archbishop for the military services, said Tuesday in a statement.

The archbishop had previously supported President Joe Biden’s mandatory vaccination order for U.S. service members, and he still encouraged troops to get vaccinated in his most recent statement. But he added this week that the Catholic Church’s permission to get the COVID-19 vaccine should not overrule a member’s conscious objections to vaccines tested or derived from lab replicas of abortion-derived cells, which is how the COVID-19 vaccines were developed.

Katherine Kuzminski, of the Center for a New American Security, told VOA on Wednesday the statement “is threading a really fine needle,” adding that vaccines for chickenpox, rubella, hepatitis A and poliovirus were all tested with “abortion-derived cell lines” like the tests conducted for the Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.

“The question will be, has this person ever raised a conscious objection to a previous vaccine?” she said.

According to Dietz, the Pentagon currently requires at least nine vaccines for individuals entering military service, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, measles, poliovirus, tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis, and varicella. Up to 17 vaccines are required for service members depending on their role and geographic region.

Objections have been granted to service members in the past for some of their required vaccines, such as the vaccine for anthrax, according to a military official.

Source: Voice of America

• A Canadian partnership with international ties to advance the field of psychedelic medicine globally with standardized extracts

• A leader in naturally-derived psilocybin for extraction, production of advanced formulations and clinical research

TORONTO, Sept. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Psyence Group Inc. (CSE: PSYG) (“Psyence” or the “Company”) and Pure Extracts Technologies Corp. (CSE: PULL) (OTC: PRXTF) (XFRA: A2QJAJ) (“Pure Extracts”) announce the signing of a Joint Venture agreement (the “JV”) “Pure Psyence” for the development of nature-derived psilocybin extracts and advanced psilocybin formulations for the long-term treatment of psychological trauma and its mental health consequences.

Pure Psyence will leverage Psyence’s supply of high-quality standardized psilocybin mushrooms with Pure Extract’s expertise in extraction technologies to produce high-quality, high-purity medicinal mushroom extracts and formulations on a commercial pharmaceutical scale.

Psyence has built and operates one of the first federally licensed commercial psilocybin cultivation and production facilities in the world, focused on the production of certified, high-quality psilocybin/psilocin-yielding mushrooms. The facility, which is in the Kingdom of Lesotho, has been designed and constructed to The British Standards Institute (BSI) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards. All harvests are shipped with an export permit from the Lesotho Ministry of Health and a Certificate of Analysis indicating the Psilocybin and Psilocin potency of each batch of psychoactive mushrooms.

Pure Extracts is a plant-based extraction company with extensive expertise in cannabis, hemp, functional mushrooms and psychoactive mushrooms. A Dealer’s Licence was submitted to Health Canada under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) to process psilocybin mushrooms at its state-of-the-art extraction facility. Located in Pemberton, BC, the Pure Extract facility was built for EU-GMP certification.

Dr. Justin Grant, Chief Scientific Officer of Psyence, commented, “Psilocybin mushrooms hold a rich pharmacopeia of unique elements that Pure Psyence is researching to create breakthrough synergies in mental health solutions.”

The JV’s combined expertise in formulation development of psychoactive compounds will enable Pure Psyence to produce stable and effective psilocybin medicinal products. Pure Psyence’s physicians and scientists will work to make psilocybin more accessible to leading Canadian research institutions as well as provide psilocybin to its own research team at Pure Psyence for human clinical trials.

Pure Extracts CEO, Ben Nikolaevsky, remarked, “Pure Psyence sits at the intersection of evidence-based science and nature. The researchers, scientists and physicians at Pure Psyence will now be uniquely positioned to bring psilocybin whole mushroom in measurable pharmaceutical dosages to market; a first.”

About Psyence Group www.psyence.com

Psyence, a public life science biotechnology company listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE: PSYG), sets the global standard for natural psychedelics. Psyence leads the way in natural psilocybin and other psychedelics for the healing of psychological trauma and its mental health consequences in the context of palliative care. Our name “Psyence” combines the words psychedelic and science to affirm our commitment to producing psychedelic medicines developed through evidence-based research.

Informed by nature and guided by science, we built and operate one of the world’s first federally licensed commercial psilocybin mushroom cultivation and production facilities. Our team brings international experience in both business and science and includes experts in mycology, neurology, and drug development. We work to develop advanced psilocybin products and other psychedelic breakthroughs for research institutes, clinics, therapeutic immersions, and destination experiences for clinical research. We are also developing a nutraceutical mental wellness collection that supports improved focus, calm, and sleep.

Our four key divisions (Psyence Production, Psyence Therapeutics, Psyence Function, and Psyence Experience) anchor an international footprint with operations in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Jamaica, South Africa, and Australia.

Psyence Contact Information:

Lisa-Marie Iannitelli

Investor Relations

Email: ir@psyence.com

Media Inquiries: media@psyence.com

General Information: info@psyence.com

About Pure Extracts https://pureextractscorp.com/

Pure Extracts features an all-new, state-of-the-art processing facility located just 20 minutes north of world-famous Whistler, British Columbia. The bespoke facility has been constructed to European Union GMP standards aiming towards export sales of products and formulations, including those currently restricted in Canada, into European jurisdictions where they are legally available. Health Canada, under the Cannabis Act, granted Pure Extracts its Standard Processing License on September 25, 2020 and its Sales Amendment on July 19, 2021. The company’s stock began trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) on November 5, 2020.

Source: Globe Newswire