The delta variant of the coronavirus is sending Australia, New Zealand and Bangladesh into some form of lockdown, along with parts of Portugal. Even Israel, where more than half of the population is vaccinated, is reimposing a mask mandate in enclosed public places.The variant, first discovered in India, has been identified in at least 85 countries and “is the most transmissible of the variants identified so far … and is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday.Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, on Saturday began a two-week lockdown because of the growing number of cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.The delta variant is to blame for the first lockdown in Sydney since December. Stay-at-home orders will also apply to other areas in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state.New Zealand, because of the Australian outbreaks, is suspending quarantine-free travel between the two neighbors for three days. On Monday, Bangladesh enters a national lockdown for a week, with people allowed to leave their homes only for medical reasons.Medical workers carry a patient suspected of having coronavirus on a stretcher at a hospital in Kommunarka, outside Moscow, Russia, June 26, 2021.Russian surgeThe delta variant is also behind a surge in cases in Russia. St. Petersburg, which next Friday will host the quarterfinal of the Euro 2020 football matches, on Saturday announced that there had been 107 COVID-19 deaths, a daily record for the city since the pandemic began.And the variant is prompting alarm across Africa, where cases rose 25% in a week.Reuters quoted virologist Tulio de Oliveira, director of research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, as saying, “We are in the exponential phase of the pandemic with the numbers just growing very, very, extremely fast.”Members of the Economic Freedom Fighters stage a protest march in Pretoria, South Africa, June 25, 2021, demanding that vaccines from China and Russia be included in the country’s vaccine rollout program.Meanwhile, health officials said the delta variant of the coronavirus has its own variant, called delta plus. It has emerged in almost a dozen countries, including India, the United States and the U.K. Authorities fear delta plus may be more contagious than the delta variant. Scientists are just beginning to study the new strain.The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported Saturday that the global count of COVID-19 cases had reached more than 180 million. The U.S. continued to have the most infections with 33.6 million, followed closely by India with 30.1 million and Brazil with 18.3 million.Hopkins said 2.8 billion vaccine doses had been administered.Phil Mercer and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
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California will extend its ban on evictions and cover back rent and utility payments for people who fell behind during the pandemic under a $7.2 billion plan announced Friday that Gov. Gavin Newsom called the “largest and most comprehensive renter protection deal in the United States.”California placed a moratorium on evictions after Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide shutdown in March 2020 and ordered most businesses to close and people to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus.That protection is scheduled to expire Wednesday. The new agreement between Newsom and legislative leaders will extend the eviction moratorium by three months and pledges to pay off all unpaid rent and utility bills for qualifying renters from April 2020 through Sept. 30 of this year.No one knows exactly how many people will qualify and how much it will cost. But the state has $5.2 billion to spend on back rents, enough to provide $10,400 each to a half-million tenants, all of it coming from the federal government.”I think that everyone is breathing a sigh of relief,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.Newsom’s administration believes the pot of money is more than enough to pay off rental debts for everyone eligible. Another $2 billion in state money will cover people’s unpaid utility bills.The proposal, which will be voted on in the Legislature next week, also gives tenants more time to apply for assistance after a landlord tries to evict them while also masking their credit and rental history so those debts won’t show up and prevent them from getting future housing.Crisis before COVIDCalifornia has some of the most expensive rents in the country, driven by a statewide affordable housing shortage. In Los Angeles, the median rent in May was about $2,600, and in San Francisco it was $2,700.About 25% of California’s renters pay at least half of their income on housing costs, a figure that includes rent and utilities, according to the California Department of Finance.”Our housing situation in California was a crisis before COVID, and the pandemic has only made it worse — this extension is key to making sure that more people don’t lose the safety net helping them keep their home,” said state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego.To qualify, people may only earn 80% or less of their area’s median income and must have been affected by the pandemic — a nondescript requirement everyone can meet.The federal government is giving every state money to cover back rent during the pandemic. Some states, like Washington, have also extended their eviction bans through the end of September. Others, like New Hampshire, are also offering rental assistance of up to 15 months.Californians who aren’t eligible to have their unpaid rent covered can still qualify for the eviction ban, but only if they pay at least 25% of what they owe through Sept. 30. If they do that, landlords can still sue them to try to recoup that money, but they can’t evict them for it.This will be the third time California has extended its eviction ban. While some landlords say they are happy to have the state cover all of some tenants’ rental debt, they are angry the state has continued to halt evictions.The ban has caused “irreparable harm” to landlords who “have been under severe financial distress for the past 16+ months,” said Christine LaMarca, president of the California Rental Housing Association.”We are very concerned as to when this moratorium will actually end,” she said.California began offering rental assistance earlier this year, using a previous allocation of federal money. As of Thursday, 54,520 tenants have requested $616.4 million in assistance, said Russ Heimerich, spokesperson for the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency.But the state has paid only $61.6 million of those requests so far.Those figures don’t include applications made to some of the state’s larger cities — including Los Angeles — that operate their own programs. Still, the state’s slow response has frustrated landlord groups.”Both the federal and state eviction moratoriums would not be necessary if state and local governments were disbursing rental assistance funds to tenants and housing providers in an expedited manner,” said Tom Bannon, CEO of the California Apartment Association.Newsom acknowledged the state’s slow response, adding the federal government has also been sluggish in getting the money to state governments. Newsom said the application process is laborious, but he said state officials are trying to make it easier.”We expect with this announcement … we’re going to see more people applying and more money requested,” he said. “Our job is to efficiently — and make sure appropriately, because we don’t want fraud in this space — to get those dollars out as quickly as possible.”
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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday that the delta variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations and in nations where COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted.At a briefing from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, Tedros said the delta variant was the most transmissible of the COVID-19 variants identified so far and had been detected in at least 85 countries.He said that while the global number of COVID-19 cases had been declining for eight straight weeks, the rate of decline had slowed. In Africa, the number of cases and deaths increased by almost 40%.Residents leave a vaccination center in Capbreton, southwestern France, June 24, 2021. The delta variant, first identified in India, is estimated to represent 9 to 10% overall in France.As some countries ease public health and social measures, virus transmission has increased around the world, Tedros said.”More cases mean more hospitalizations, further stretching health workers and health systems, which increases the risk of death,” he said.Variants of any widespread virus are to be expected, Tedros said, because it is how viruses evolve. They can be prevented by stopping transmission, he said, which makes it even more urgent for people in areas with low vaccination rates to consistently follow public health measures and take advantage of effective vaccine programs.That is why he has been stressing for the past year the importance of “vaccine equity,” along with protecting health workers and the most vulnerable, he said. The lack of vaccine in the world’s poorest nations is creating what he calls “a two-track pandemic.””Those who have vaccines are getting better significantly, and they’re opening up their society,” Tedros said. “Those who don’t have vaccines are facing serious COVID situations with serious surges in cases and deaths due to COVID. That’s the reality now.”The Associated Press, Reuters news service and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.   
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A solid majority of Americans believe most abortions should be legal in the first three months of a woman’s pregnancy, but most say the procedure should usually be illegal in the second and third trimesters, according to a new poll.The poll comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving a currently blocked Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, two weeks into the second trimester. If the high court upholds the law, it would be the first time since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision confirming a woman’s right to abortion that a state would be allowed to ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.
The new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 61% of Americans say abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances in the first trimester of a pregnancy. However, 65% said abortion should usually be illegal in the second trimester, and 80% said that about the third trimester.
Still, the poll finds many Americans believe that the procedure should be allowable under at least some circumstances even during the second or third trimesters. For abortions during the second trimester, 34% say they should usually or always be legal, and another 30% say they should be illegal in most but not all cases. In the third trimester, 19% think most or all abortions should be legal, and another 26% say they should be illegal only in most cases.
Michael New, an abortion opponent who teaches social research at Catholic University of America, predicted the findings regarding second- and third-trimester abortions will be useful to the anti-abortion movement.
“This helps counter the narrative that the abortion policy outcome established by the Roe v. Wade decision enjoys substantial public support,” he said.
David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, said the findings suggest that abortion rights advocates are “way out of the public mainstream” to the extent that they support abortion access even late in pregnancy. 
But Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, who supports abortion rights, cited research showing that Americans viewed second-trimester abortions more empathetically when told about some of the reasons why women seek them.
These include time-consuming difficulties making arrangements with an abortion clinic and learning during the second trimester that the fetus would die or have severe disabilities due to abnormalities, Grossman said.
“More work needs to be done to elevate the voices of people who have had abortions and who want to share their stories to help people understand the many reasons why this medical care is so necessary,” he said via email.
Majorities of Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — think a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if her life is seriously endangered, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest or if the child would be born with a life-threatening illness.
Americans are closely divided over whether a pregnant woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she wants one for any reason, 49% yes to 50% no.
Jenny Ma, senior staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said women seeking second-trimester abortions included disproportionately high numbers of young people, Black women and women living in poverty. Some had not learned they were pregnant until much later than the norm; others had trouble raising the needed funds to afford an abortion, Ma said.
She noted that Republican-governed states have enacted numerous restrictions in recent years that often complicated the process for getting even a first-trimester abortion.
“Removing the many existing barriers to earlier abortion care would reduce need for second- and third-trimester abortions,” Ma said.
Abortions after the first trimester are not rare, but they are exceptions to the norm. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its most recent report on abortion in the U.S., estimated that 92% of the abortions in 2018 were performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.
The poll also shows how opinions on abortion diverge sharply along party lines. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats think abortion should be legal in all or most cases; about two-thirds of Republicans think it should be illegal in all or most cases.  
But most Americans fall between extreme opinions on the issue. Just 23% say abortion in general should be legal in all cases, while 33% say it should be legal in most cases. Thirty percent say abortion should be illegal in most cases; just 13% say it should be illegal in all cases.
Respondents from three major religious groups — white mainline Protestants, nonwhite Protestants and Catholics — are closely divided as to whether abortion should usually be legal or illegal in most cases. It was different for white evangelicals — about three-quarters of them say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Dave Steiner, a hotel manager from suburban Chicago, was among those responding to the AP-NORC poll who said abortion should be legal in the first trimester but generally illegal thereafter.
“I was raised a very strict Catholic — abortion was just no, no, no,” said Steiner, 67. “As I became more liberal and a Democrat, I felt the woman should have the right to choose — but that should be in the first trimester.”
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“Abortions are going to happen anyway,” he added. “If you’re making it illegal, you’re just chasing it underground.”
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Parts of the western United States are seeing record high temperatures in the midst of drought — signaling, experts say, long-term changes in the weather.  With dozens of fires now burning in Western states, President Joe Biden will convene a meeting of Western governors, emergency officials and others to talk about the problem in coming days.
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“Africa is facing a fast-surging third wave of COVID-19 pandemic, with cases spreading more rapidly and projected to soon overtake the peak of the second wave the continent witnessed at the start of 2021,” according to the World Health Organization’s regional office in Africa. WHO said in a statement the pandemic is resurging in 12 African countries. Meanwhile, the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, has been detected in 14 African countries.“The third wave is picking up speed, spreading faster, hitting harder. With rapidly rising case numbers and increasing reports of serious illness, the latest surge threatens to be Africa’s worst yet,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa said.The third wave comes as Africa is experiencing a vaccine shortage. WHO says just slightly more than 1% of Africans have been fully vaccinated. While approximately 2.7 billion COVID-19 vaccine shots have been administered globally, WHO says just under 1.5% of those shots have been administered on the African continent.  FILE – Kenyan tour guide, Daniel Ole Kissipan, receives the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine in Nairobi, Kenya, April 27, 2021.The Associated Press reports that its analysis of recent COVID-19 deaths reveals that nearly all the deaths occurred in people who were unvaccinated. The news agency said the results of its assessment are “a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been.” In addition, AP said the deaths per day “could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.”Workers and residents in several neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia, have been told to stay home as officials attempt to bring a COVID-19 outbreak under control. Authorities say they believe they outbreak started with a limousine driver who transported an international flight crew to a quarantine hotel in Sydney.  The directors of the WHO, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization say they met earlier this month to determine how they can collectively “tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressing global challenges at the intersection of public health, intellectual property and trade.” The three organizations said in a statement that their initiatives will include: a series of “capacity-building workshops to enhance the flow of updated information on current developments in the pandemic and responses to achieve equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies.” the creation of a “joint platform for tripartite technical assistance to countries relating to their needs for COVID-19 medical technologies, providing a one-stop shop that will make available the full range of expertise on access, IP and trade matters provided by our organizations, and other partners, in a coordinated and systematic manner.” The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that global count of COVID-19 infections has reached more than 180 million. The three countries with the most cases are the U.S. with 33.6 million cases, India with more than 30 million infections and Brazil with 18.2 million. The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report. 
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Workers and residents in Sydney were ordered to stay home for a week on Friday, as authorities locked down several central areas of Australia’s largest city to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.Sixty-five COVID-19 cases have been reported so far in the flare-up linked to a limousine driver infected about two weeks ago when he transported an international flight crew from Sydney airport to a quarantine hotel.But authorities have since identified scores of potential infection sites visited by thousands of people across central Sydney, including the city’s main business district.Authorities have been alarmed by instances of people passing on the virus during fleeting encounters in shops and then quickly infecting close family contacts.Premier Gladys Berejiklian of New South Wales state, which includes Sydney, called it the “scariest period” since the pandemic broke out more than a year ago.On Friday, she ordered anyone who lived or worked in four central Sydney neighborhoods to stay home for at least a week, only venturing out to purchase essential goods, obtain medical care, exercise or if they are unable to work from home.The restrictions included central business district workers over fears that commuters were potentially spreading the virus into other parts of the city, Berejiklian said.”We’ve done better than expected in terms of contact tracing and getting on top of all those links,” she said.”But what this does is make sure that we haven’t missed any chains of community transmission.”An earlier ban on Sydneysiders leaving the city was also extended until next Friday, as traces of the virus were detected in sewage in the far-flung outback town of Bourke, about nine hours drive northwest of Sydney.It was a dramatic development for a city that had returned to relative normality after months of recording very few local cases.Australia Medical Association President Omar Khorshid chided New South Wales authorities for not taking tougher action, including locking down the entire Sydney metropolitan region, home to some 5 million people.”The Delta virus is different; it is being transmitted far more easily,” Khorshid told media in Canberra. “Sydney has not faced this before.”Korshid warned that although the economic impact of a lockdown was hard, a wider outbreak could be “catastrophic” for the whole country.It is the latest in a string of snap “circuit-breaker” lockdowns across major cities around Australia, with most cases linked to returning travelers held in hotel quarantine.Australia has been among the world’s most successful countries in containing COVID-19, with more than 30,000 cases and 910 deaths in a population of about 25 million.
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Fossils from tiny baby dinosaurs discovered in northernmost Alaska offer strong evidence that the prehistoric creatures lived year-round in the Arctic and were likely warm-blooded, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.The fossils are from at least seven types of dinosaurs just hatched or still in their eggs about 70 million years ago. Researchers have never found evidence of dinosaur nests so far north, said lead author Pat Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North.The find helps upend past assumptions of dinosaurs as giant cold-blooded reptiles.”If they reproduced, then they over-wintered there. If they overwintered there, they had to deal with conditions that we don’t usually associate with dinosaurs, like freezing conditions and snow,” Druckenmiller said.To survive dark Arctic winters, those dinosaurs could not have basked in the sun to warm their bodies, as lizards do, he said.”At least these groups had endothermy,” he said, using the term for the ability of animals to warm their bodies through internal functions. “They had a degree of warm-bloodedness.”The discovery site is a steep bluff on the Colville River on Alaska’s North Slope, at latitude 70 and about 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. In the Cretaceous period, when North America was positioned differently, it was even farther north, at latitude 80 or 85, Druckenmiller said.The region was much warmer then than Alaska’s North Slope is now but hardly tropical. From remnants of ancient plants, scientists calculate the average annual temperature at about 6 degrees Celsius – similar to Juneau, Alaska – meaning below-freezing winters with snow, Druckenmiller said.While Alaska’s North Slope endures two months of total winter darkness now, during the Cretaceous period it was in total darkness for up to four months a year, he said.Finding the tiny bones and teeth, some the size of a pinhead, was laborious, Druckenmiller said. They were identified through microscopic examination after being sifted out multiple times from sediments collected in expeditions stretching back decades, he said.”I liken it to gold panning. It’s a very slow process,” he said.The discovery site, called the Prince Creek Formation, has proved crucial to modern understanding of the ancient creatures.The first dinosaur discovery was made there in the 1960s by a petroleum geologist. Subsequent expeditions found previously unknown dinosaur species. Over time, evidence of year-round Arctic occupation has mounted.At the same formation, other scientists found a jawbone from a baby dromaeosaurid, detailed in a study published last year in the journal PLOS ONE. That meat-eating dinosaur would have been the size of a small puppy and incapable of long-distance migration, said co-author Tony Fiorillo, a Southern Methodist University paleontologist.The new study about nesting dinosaurs strengthens the growing realization that dinosaurs lived full-time in the Arctic and thus could not be cold-blooded, Fiorillo said.”This new study broadens the conversation about year-round dinosaurs in the Arctic. It didn’t invent the conversation,” he said. 
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The European Space Agency (ESA) reports that the first recruitment drive for astronauts since 2008 netted 22,000 applications, including an increase in female applicants and the first applications from people with disabilities.The agency put out a call for applicants in February, encouraging more women and people with disabilities to apply to boost diversity among crews. The agency launched the “parastronaut” program to examine what is needed to get disabled astronauts onto the International Space Station.The ESA said the preliminary number of applications this year far exceeded the 8,413 applications received in 2008. More than 200 people applied for the newly established vacancy for astronauts with a physical disability, and about 5,400 women — about 24% of all applicants — applied. The share of women was 15.5% in 2008, the ESA said.The space agency said applications would next be screened through a six-stage process, with finalists expected to be announced in October 2022.The Associated Press contributed to this report.  
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The Northern Hemisphere sees its longest day of the year; astronauts make power moves outside the International Space Station. Plus: do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?  Details in The Week in Space from VOA’s Arash Arabasadi.Produced by: Arash Arabasadi 
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday there is a likely association between two COVID-19 vaccines and a rare heart condition in boys and young men. The federal health agency said more than 1,200 people who had received either the PfizerBioNTech or Moderna vaccines developed myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. The condition was more prominent in men than women, and was detected more after the second dose than the first.   The CDC said the side effects, which include fatigue and chest pain, have been mild and that the vast majority of those diagnosed with myocarditis have fully recovered.  The agency concluded that despite the “likely association” between the two vaccines and myocarditis, the benefits of receiving the vaccine far outweigh the risks.   FILE – Health care workers prepare doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine before administering them to staffers of Japan’s supermarket group Aeon at the company’s shopping mall in Chiba, Japan, June 21, 2021.Both the Pfizer and Moderna two-shot vaccines were developed using messenger RNA, which is a single-stranded RNA molecule that is complementary to one of the DNA strands of a gene, according to the FILE – Health workers treat a COVID-19 patient at the emergency unit of a field hospital set up to treat COVID patients in Ribeirao Pires, greater Sao Paulo area, Brazil, April 13, 2021.A White House official said “scientific teams and legal and regulatory authorities” from both nations collaborated to secure the arrangement. Brazil has posted 507,109 COVID-19 deaths, second only behind the United States, which has 602,837, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.    
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An Indonesian court jailed hardline Islamic cleric Rizieq Shihab on Thursday for four years for spreading false information in a video saying he was healthy despite having tested positive for COVID-19.The verdict comes after an eight-month jail term handed last month to Rizieq, the spiritual leader of the outlawed Islamic Defender’s Front (FPI), for breaching coronavirus curbs over several mass events, including his daughter’s wedding, which was attended by thousands.Prosecutors had called for a six-year sentence in the latest case after Rizieq was charged over the video, posted on the YouTube channel of the hospital where he was being treated for the coronavirus.In a streamed broadcast, Judge Khadwanto said Rizieq was guilty of “announcing false information and purposefully causing confusion for the public.”Indonesia passed the 2 million mark in coronavirus cases on Monday, as authorities announced a tightening of restrictions to contain the spread in the world’s fourth most populous country. Deaths from COVID-19 now total 55,594.Hundreds of Rizieq’s supporters had gathered outside the East Jakarta court amid heavy guard by police and video footage showed some scuffles.Shortly after being sentenced, Rizieq told the court he rejected its ruling and would contest it.Rizieq’s supporters and legal team have said the cases are politically motivated efforts to silence the cleric, who has a large and vocal following in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country.He returned last year from self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia, where he had fled while facing charges of pornography and insulting the state ideology, both later dropped.The FPI had become politically influential in recent years and was among several Islamic groups that staged rallies in 2016 to bring down Jakarta’s then governor, a Christian, on charges of blasphemy.The mass protests stirred deep anxiety within the government of President Joko Widodo about a perceived Islamist threat.  
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