Author: Dmedia

Washington — Pakistan's space agency on Thursday launched its second satellite in a month from a launch site in China's northwest Sichuan province. According to Pakistan’s Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), PakSAT-MM1 is a high-power multimission satellite designed to provide a range of communication services. "Based on advanced communication technologies, PakSAT-MM1 will play a pivotal role in the socio-economic uplift of the country," SUPARCO said on its website, adding that the satellite is "the hallmark of technological cooperation between" China and Pakistan. SUPARCO added, "It will prove to be a stepping stone in the transformation of the country into digital Pakistan." Chinese state news agency Xinhua said Thursday that the country successfully launched Pakistan's multimission communications satellite. "At 20:12 on May 30, my country [China] successfully launched Pakistan's multi-mission…

GRINDAVIK, Iceland — Lava continued to spurt from a volcano in southwestern Iceland on Thursday but the activity had calmed significantly from when it erupted a day earlier. The eruption Wednesday was the fifth and most powerful since the volcanic system near Grindavik reawakened in December after 800 years, gushing record levels of lava as its fissure grew to 3.5 kilometers in length. Volcanologist Dave McGarvie calculated that the amount of lava initially flowing from the crater could have buried the soccer pitch at Wembley Stadium in London under 15 meters of lava every minute. "These jets of magma are reaching like 50 meters, into the atmosphere," said McGarvie, an honorary researcher at Lancaster University. "That just immediately strikes me as a powerful eruption. And that was my first impression ...…

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May 31 is World No Tobacco Day, a day when many health advocacy groups raise awareness about the dangers of tobacco. These groups have reason to celebrate: In most countries, tobacco use is declining. But not in Indonesia, where smoking rates are rising, according to the World Health Organization. Dave Grunebaum has the story. ...

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Geneva — Despite the failure of negotiators to reach a pandemic accord ahead of this week’s World Health Assembly, a senior U.S. official remains optimistic that an agreement to lessen the threats of global killer disease outbreaks is in sight. “We think the elements of a good deal are already on the table and that is why we feel optimistic because those are pretty good deals. It is just a matter now of fine-tuning it to make sure everybody says we are ready to sign on the dotted line,” Xavier Becerra, U.S. secretary of health and human services, told journalists at a briefing in Geneva Wednesday. While disappointing, Becerra indicated that it was not surprising that an accord was not reached after two-and-a-half years of negotiations. “Negotiations go on forever,” he…

TOKYO — The operator of Japan's destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant demonstrated Tuesday how a remote-controlled robot would retrieve tiny bits of melted fuel debris from one of three damaged reactors later this year for the first time since the 2011 meltdown. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings plans to deploy a "telesco-style" extendable pipe robot into Fukushima Daiichi No. 2 reactor to test the removal of debris from its primary containment vessel by October. That work is more than two years behind schedule. The removal of melted fuel was supposed to begin in late 2021 but has been plagued with delays, underscoring the difficulty of recovering from the magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami in 2011. During the demonstration at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' shipyard in Kobe, western Japan, where the…

Yaounde — Cameroon is observing World Menstrual Hygiene Day (May 28) with caravans visiting schools and public spaces to educate people about social taboos that women should not be seen in public during their menstrual periods. Organizations are also donating menstrual kits to girls displaced by terrorism and political tensions in the central African state. Scores of youths, a majority of them girls, are told that menstruation is a natural part of the reproductive cycle. Officials in Cameroon’s social affairs and health ministries say the monthly flows are not a curse and girls and women should never be isolated from markets, schools, churches and other public places because of their menstrual cycle. The government of the central African state says it invited boys to menstrual health day activities because boys often…

Geneva — The World Health Organization chief on Monday urged countries to nail down a landmark global agreement on handling of future pandemics after they missed a hard deadline. Scarred by COVID-19 — which killed millions, shredded economies and crippled health systems — nations have spent two years trying to forge binding commitments on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. Negotiators failed to clinch a deal ahead of this week's World Health Assembly — the annual gathering of WHO's 194 member states — the deadline for concluding the talks. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus opened the assembly Monday, saying he was confident that an agreement would be secured. "Of course, we all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly and…

OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — Generations of American families have grown up not knowing exactly what happened to their loved ones who died while serving their country in World War II and other conflicts. But a federal lab tucked away above the bowling alley at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha and a sister lab in Hawaii are steadily answering those lingering questions, aiming to offer 200 families per year the chance to honor their relatives with a proper burial. “They may not even have been alive when that service member was alive, but that story gets carried down through the generations," said Carrie Brown, a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab manager at Offutt. "They may have seen on the mantle a picture of that person when they were little…

London — Life expectancy in Europe has returned to the level it reached before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, while the U.S. is still trying to regain lost ground. Overall, new numbers show life expectancy has increased in most parts of the world, with eastern sub-Saharan Africa showing the biggest gains over the past three decades. Latest European Union figures released this month show the average life expectancy across the bloc in 2023 was 81.5 years — almost a year's gain over 2022, as the coronavirus pandemic was coming to an end. Jennifer Beam Dowd is a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford. “Within Europe, we're seeing really high life expectancy in countries like Spain and Italy, Sweden, Norway, but some countries are falling behind their peers…

Life expectancy in Europe has returned to the level it reached before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, while the U.S. is still trying to regain lost ground. Overall, new numbers show life expectancy has increased in most parts of the world, with eastern sub-Saharan Africa showing the biggest gains over the past three decades. Henry Ridgwell reports. ...

LILANDA, Zambia — Extreme weather events have hit parts of Africa relentlessly in the last three years, with tropical storms, floods and drought causing crises of hunger and displacement. They leave another deadly threat behind them: some of the continent's worst outbreaks of cholera. In southern and East Africa, more than 6,000 people have died and nearly 350,000 cases have been reported since a series of cholera outbreaks began in late 2021.  Malawi and Zambia have had their worst outbreaks on record. Zimbabwe has had multiple waves. Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia also have been badly affected.  All have experienced floods or drought — in some cases, both — and health authorities, scientists and aid agencies say the unprecedented surge of the water-borne bacterial infection in Africa is the newest example…

Geneva — The World Health Organization and STOP, a global tobacco industry watchdog, warn the tobacco industry is using a variety of manipulative tactics to hook a new generation of young people into becoming users of their addictive, toxic tobacco and nicotine products for life. “The terrible truth is that eight million people every year die from tobacco use. The single greatest cause for these deaths is a vast industry that works relentlessly to sell products that are essentially poison,” Jorge Alday, director of STOP at Vital Strategies, said at the recent launch of a new tobacco interference report, “Hooking the next generation.” Speaking in advance of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, Alday asserted that the tobacco industry’s products kill at least half of the people who use them,…

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TRENTO, Italy — In a lush greenhouse high in the Alps, butterflies of various species and colors flutter freely while butterfly pupae are suspended in a structure as they grow into adult insects. This is the Butterfly Forest in the tropical mountain greenhouse in Trento, Italy, a project by the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), an Italian science museum. It's modeled on Udzungwa Mountains, a mountain range and rainforest area in south-central Tanzania that's one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The Butterfly Forest features plant species endemic to the region, as well as birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates from different parts of the world, all inside 600 square meters of forest with cliffs, inclinations and a waterfall. The Butterfly Forest was created this spring to create public awareness on some of…

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NAIROBI, Kenya — The impact of the calamitous rains that struck East Africa from March to May was intensified by a mix of climate change and rapid growth of urban areas, an international team of climate scientists said in a study published Friday. The findings come from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists that analyzes whether and to what extent human-induced climate change has altered the likelihood and magnitude of extreme weather events. The downpours caused floods that killed hundreds of people, displaced thousands of others, killed thousands of livestock and destroyed thousands of acres of crops. To assess how human-caused climate may have affected the floods, the researchers analyzed weather data and climate model simulations to compare how these types of events have changed between today's climate and the…

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, California — High in the evergreen canopy of General Sherman, the world's largest tree, researchers searched for evidence of an emerging threat to giant sequoias: bark beetles. The climbers descended the towering 2,200-year-old tree with good news on Tuesday. "The General Sherman tree is doing fine right now," said Anthony Ambrose, executive director of the Ancient Forest Society, who led the expedition. "It seems to be a very healthy tree that's able to fend off any beetle attack." It was the first time climbers had scaled the iconic 85-meter sequoia tree, which draws tourists from around the world to Sequoia National Park. Giant sequoias, the Earth's largest living things, have survived for thousands of years in California's western Sierra Nevada range, the only place where the species is…

WASHINGTON — Get ready for what nearly all the experts think will be one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, thanks to unprecedented ocean heat and a brewing La Nina.  There's an 85% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season starting in June will be above average in storm activity, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday in its annual outlook. The weather agency predicted between 17 and 25 named storms will brew up this summer and fall, with eight to 13 achieving hurricane status (at least 75 mph sustained winds) and four to seven of them becoming major hurricanes, with at least 111 mph winds.  An average Atlantic hurricane season produces 14 named storms — seven of them hurricanes and three major hurricanes.  "This season is looking to…

New York — A Michigan dairy worker has been diagnosed with bird flu — the second human case associated with an outbreak in U.S. dairy cows.  The patient had mild eye symptoms and has recovered, U.S. and Michigan health officials said in announcing the case Wednesday. The worker had been in contact with cows presumed to be infected, and the risk to the public remains low, officials said.  A nasal swab from the person tested negative for the virus, but an eye swab tested positive, "indicating an eye infection," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.  The first case happened in late March, when a farmworker in Texas was diagnosed in what officials called the first known instance globally of a person catching this version of…

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Experts say that in Ukraine, there has been a heavy increase in cases of anxiety, depression, adjustment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems since Russia’s invasion in 2022, and it will likely have a long-term impact. For VOA, Lesia Bakalets has more. ...

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