Two-and-a-half years after its first failed attempt, the world’s largest aerospace manufacturer scores in a roundtrip mission to the International Space Station. Plus, the European Space Agency expects continued diplomacy aboard the ISS. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Month: May 2022
US Economy Shrank by 1.5% in Q1 but Consumers Kept Spending
The U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year even though consumers and businesses kept spending at a solid pace, the government reported Thursday in a slight downgrade of its previous estimate for the January-March quarter.
Last quarter’s drop in the U.S. gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic output — does not likely signal the start of a recession. The contraction was caused, in part, by a wider trade gap: The nation spent more on imports than other countries did on U.S. exports. The trade gap slashed first-quarter GDP by 3.2 percentage points.
And a slower restocking of goods in stores and warehouses, which had built up their inventories in the previous quarter for the 2021 holiday shopping season, knocked nearly 1.1 percentage points off the January-March GDP.
Analysts say the economy has likely resumed growing in the current April-June quarter.
The Commerce Department estimated that the economy contracted at a 1.5% annual pace from January through March, a slight downward revision from its first estimate of 1.4%, which it issued last month. It was the first drop in GDP since the second quarter of 2020 — in the depths of the COVID-19 recession — and followed a robust 6.9% expansion in the final three months of 2021.
The nation remains stuck in the painful grip of high inflation, which has caused particularly severe hardships for lower-income households, many of them people of color. Though many U.S. workers have been receiving sizable pay raises, their wages in most cases haven’t kept pace with inflation. In April, consumer prices jumped 8.3% from a year earlier, just below the fastest such rise in four decades, set one month earlier.
High inflation is also posing a political threat to President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress as midterm elections draw near. A poll this month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research found that Biden’s approval rating has reached the lowest point of his presidency — just 39% of adults approve of his performance — with inflation a frequently cited contributing factor.
Still, by most measures, the economy as a whole remains healthy, though likely weakening. Consumer spending — the heart of the economy — is still solid: It grew at a 3.1% annual pace from January through March. Business investment in equipment, software and other items that are intended to improve productivity rose at a healthy 6.8% annual rate last quarter.
And a strong job market is giving people the money and confidence to spend. Employers have added more than 400,000 jobs for 12 straight months, and the unemployment rate is near a half-century low. Businesses are advertising so many jobs that there are now roughly two openings, on average, for every unemployed American.
The economy is widely believed to have resumed its growth in the current quarter: In a survey released this month, 34 economists told the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that they expect GDP to grow at a 2.3% annual pace from April through June and 2.5% for all of 2022. Still, their forecast marked a sharp drop from the 4.2% growth estimate for the current quarter in the Philadelphia Fed’s previous survey in February.
Considerable uncertainties, though, are clouding the outlook for the U.S. and global economies. Russia’s war against Ukraine has disrupted trade in energy, grains and other commodities and driven fuel and food prices dramatically higher. China’s draconian COVID-19 crackdown has also slowed growth in the world’s second-biggest economy and worsened global supply chain bottlenecks. The Federal Reserve has begun aggressively raising interest rates to fight the fastest inflation the United States has suffered since the early 1980s.
The Fed is banking on its ability to engineer a so-called soft landing: Raising borrowing rates enough to slow growth and cool inflation without causing a recession. Many economists, though, are skeptical that the central bank can pull it off. More than half the economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics foresee at least a 25% probability that the U.S. economy will sink into recession within a year.
“While we still expect the Fed to steer the economy toward a soft landing, downside risks to the economy and the probability of a recession are increasing,” economists Lydia Boussour and Kathy Bostjancic of Oxford Economics cautioned Thursday in a research note.
“A more aggressive pace of Fed rate hikes, a tightening in financial conditions, the ongoing war in Ukraine and China’s zero-Covid strategy increase the risk of a hard landing in 2023,” they added.
In the meantime, higher borrowing rates appear to be slowing at least one crucial sector of the economy — the housing market. Last month, sales of both existing homes and new homes showed signs of faltering, worsened by sharply higher home prices and a shrunken supply of properties for sale.
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Five Ways Climate Change Is Making Poor People Poorer
Heat waves like the ones roasting South Asia this year don’t just sap people’s strength. They drain people’s finances in ways that are not always obvious.
It’s one of the ways climate change is weighing on the economy and making poor people poorer.
“These effects are global, they are pronounced, and they are persistent,” said Teevrat Garg, an economist at the University of California-San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
South Asia is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-driven heat waves. But temperature extremes are becoming more common worldwide as the planet warms.
- Too hot to work
March and April were the hottest or near-hottest months on record across South Asia.
Climate change made this heat wave about 100 times more likely, according to the U.K. Met Office.
The heat has been brutal for farmers, construction workers and anyone who has to work outside. That’s about half the workforce in South Asia.
“Wage laborers like us work despite the heat,” Indian construction worker Kushilal Mandal told Agence France-Presse in April. “We won’t be able to eat if we don’t work.”
At these temperatures, heatstroke and even death are real risks.
Many work sites shut down early. But that means lost wages.
The U.N. International Labor Organization says that in 2030, hours lost to heat worldwide will be the equivalent of losing at least 80 million full-time jobs.
- Lower earnings for outdoor work
It doesn’t take a full work stoppage to hurt workers’ wages. People just can’t do as much when it’s hot.
In a study Garg co-authored, workers in Indonesia in a hot, sunny environment were 8% less productive than those in a shady environment that was about 3 degrees cooler. Doubling wages did not increase productivity.
“It’s not about workers feeling icky or lazy or just like, ‘I don’t want to work because it’s hot,’ ” Garg said. “It’s that heat is representing binding constraints on workers’ ability to do their job.”
- Factory slowdowns
Heat affects workers even if they are not exerting themselves. High temperatures slow down factory workers, too.
“We think of manufacturing as a thing that occurs inside. But inside doesn’t mean protected from heat. It doesn’t mean air conditioning,” said World Bank economist Patrick Behrer.
Studies as far back as 1915 show factory workers paid by the piece earn less at higher temperatures. Even call center workers get less done in hot conditions.
“It’s harder for you to pay attention. It’s harder for you to focus. You get tired more easily,” Behrer said. “All of those things feed through to reductions in productivity.”
- Workplace injuries
More than wages can be at risk.
“Because you’re paying less attention to what you’re doing or you’re more tired, you’re much more likely to injure yourself,” Behrer said.
On very hot days, workers are about 10% more likely to be injured on the job than on a cool day, Behrer and colleagues found in a study.
That could mean lost wages for the day, or it could be more serious. “If you get hurt on the job, that can be a permanent change in your life,” Behrer said.
- Poverty traps
Poorer areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures than wealthier areas, researchers have found. Workers tend to be in industries that are more exposed to heat. And poor people often can’t afford air conditioning. These inequalities are expected to worsen with global warming.
High temperatures also lower crop yields, which lower household incomes in largely agrarian economies such as those of South Asia.
The effects can be passed on to children in these rural households. Garg and colleagues found that students score lower on math and reading tests the year after a hot year, perhaps because their families had less money to spend on education, or even on food or health.
Adaptation
Societies can adapt to hotter temperatures. Factories, for example, can buy air conditioning.
But that’s money they won’t spend on better equipment or hiring more workers, Garg noted.
“Adaptation is not free. It’s expensive. It’s costly,” he said. “And in general we find that the poorer you are, the more expensive it is.”
Social safety net programs can help. Garg and colleagues, for example, conducted a study focused on a safety net program in India that supplemented income in rural areas. Since heat waves did not affect farm households’ budgets as much, the effect of heat on students’ test scores was smaller.
With heat waves becoming more common, demand for safety-net programs is growing.
“Countries are already paying for climate change,” Garg said, “because the demand on social protection is rapidly increasing as we get more and more hot days.”
“When we think about climate investments, [typically] we’re thinking about seawalls and green energy. And all of that’s quite important. But … safety net [programs] are going to play a huge role for low- and middle-income populations,” he said.
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Sanctions Frustrating Russian Ransomware Actors
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be having an unanticipated impact in cyberspace — a decrease in the number of ransomware attacks.
“We have seen a recent decline since the Ukrainian invasion,” Rob Joyce, the U.S. National Security Agency’s director of cybersecurity, told a virtual forum Wednesday.
Joyce said one reason for the decrease in ransomware attacks since the February 24 invasion is likely improved awareness and defensive measures by U.S. businesses.
He also said some of it is tied to measures the United States and its Western allies have taken against Moscow in response to the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve definitively seen the criminal actors in Russia complain that the functions of sanctions and the distance of their ability to use credit cards and other payment methods to get Western infrastructure to run these [ransomware] attacks have become much more difficult,” Joyce told The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Initiatives Group.
“We’ve seen that have an impact on their [Russia’s] operations,” he added. “It’s driving the trend down a little bit.”
Just days after Russian forces entered Ukraine, U.S. cybersecurity officials renewed their “Shields Up” awareness campaign, encouraging companies to take additional security precautions to protect against potential cyberattacks by Russia itself or by criminal hackers working on Moscow’s behalf.
And those officials caution Russia still has the capability to inflict more damage in cyberspace.
“Russia is continuing to explore options for potential cyberattacks,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Matthew Hartman told a meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week.
“We are seeing glimpses into targeting and into access development,” Hartman said, noting Russia has for now held back from launching any major cyberattacks against the West. “We do not know at what point a calculus may change.”
FBI cyber officials have likewise voiced concern that it could be a matter of time before the Kremlin authorizes cyberattacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, including against the energy, finance and telecommunication sectors.
U.S. and NATO officials on Wednesday also cautioned that it would be a mistake to think that just because there have been few signs of “catastrophic effects” that Russia has not tried to leverage its cyber capabilities to its advantage.
“It has been happening and it’s still happening,” said Stefanie Metka, head of the Cyber Threat Analysis Branch at NATO. “There’s a lot of cyber activity that’s happening all the time and probably we won’t know the full extent of it until we turn the computers back on.”
Said the NSA’s Joyce: “If you look at Ukraine, they have been heavily targeted. What we’ve seen are a number of wiper viruses, seven or eight different or unique wiper viruses that have been thrown into the ecosystem of Ukraine and its near abroad.” Wiper viruses are viruses that erase a computer’s memory.
These included a cyberattack against a satellite communications company, which hampered the ability of Ukraine’s military to communicate and had spillover effects across Europe.
But with help from the U.S. and other allies, Ukraine was able to mitigate the impact, Joyce said.
“The Ukrainians have been under threat and under pressure for a number of years, and so they have continued to adapt and improve and develop their tradecraft to the point where they mount a good defense and, equally as important, they mount a great incident response,” he said.
Some cybersecurity experts say that ability to respond might be one of the biggest take-aways, so far, from the invasion.
“Resiliency matters,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and the former chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, at Wednesday’s virtual forum. “The Ukrainians have gotten really, really good at rebuilding networks, quickly mitigating damage.”
Another key lesson, he said, is the limitations of cyber.
“If you’ve got kinetic options, if you can create a crater somewhere, take out a substation, take out a communication system, that’s what you’re going to prefer to use,” Alperovitch said. “That’s what’s easiest [to do] to get lasting damage.”
Ivory Coast Chocolatier Strives to Sweeten Cocoa Processors’ Earnings
In Ivory Coast, an artisanal chocolatier blends good flavor and good intentions in his work. Axel-Emmanuel Gbaou trains women to get good taste and good profits from the cocoa beans they process, as Yassin Ciyow observes in this report narrated by Carol Guensburg.
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Six Ways Climate Change Is Making Poor People Poorer
Heat waves like the ones roasting South Asia this year don’t just sap people’s strength. They drain people’s finances in ways that are not always obvious.
It’s one of the ways climate change is weighing on the economy and making poor people poorer.
“These effects are global, they are pronounced, and they are persistent,” said Teevrat Garg, an economist at the University of California-San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
South Asia is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-driven heat waves. But temperature extremes are becoming more common worldwide as the planet warms.
- Too hot to work
March and April were the hottest or near-hottest months on record across South Asia.
Climate change made this heat wave about 100 times more likely, according to the U.K. Met Office.
The heat has been brutal for farmers, construction workers and anyone who has to work outside. That’s about half the workforce in South Asia.
“Wage laborers like us work despite the heat,” Indian construction worker Kushilal Mandal told Agence France-Presse in April. “We won’t be able to eat if we don’t work.”
At these temperatures, heatstroke and even death are real risks.
Many work sites shut down early. But that means lost wages.
The U.N. International Labor Organization says that in 2030, hours lost to heat worldwide will be the equivalent of losing at least 80 million full-time jobs.
- Lower earnings for outdoor work
It doesn’t take a full work stoppage to hurt workers’ wages. People just can’t do as much when it’s hot.
In a study Garg co-authored, workers in Indonesia in a hot, sunny environment were 8% less productive than those in a shady environment that was about 3 degrees cooler. Doubling wages did not increase productivity.
“It’s not about workers feeling icky or lazy or just like, ‘I don’t want to work because it’s hot,’ ” Garg said. “It’s that heat is representing binding constraints on workers’ ability to do their job.”
- Factory slowdowns
Heat affects workers even if they are not exerting themselves. High temperatures slow down factory workers, too.
“We think of manufacturing as a thing that occurs inside. But inside doesn’t mean protected from heat. It doesn’t mean air conditioning,” said World Bank economist Patrick Behrer.
Studies as far back as 1915 show factory workers paid by the piece earn less at higher temperatures. Even call center workers get less done in hot conditions.
“It’s harder for you to pay attention. It’s harder for you to focus. You get tired more easily,” Behrer said. “All of those things feed through to reductions in productivity.”
- Workplace injuries
More than wages can be at risk.
“Because you’re paying less attention to what you’re doing or you’re more tired, you’re much more likely to injure yourself,” Behrer said.
On very hot days, workers are about 10% more likely to be injured on the job than on a cool day, Behrer and colleagues found in a study.
That could mean lost wages for the day, or it could be more serious. “If you get hurt on the job, that can be a permanent change in your life,” Behrer said.
- Poverty traps
Poorer areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures than wealthier areas, researchers have found. Workers tend to be in industries that are more exposed to heat. And poor people often can’t afford air conditioning. These inequalities are expected to worsen with global warming.
High temperatures also lower crop yields, which lower household incomes in largely agrarian economies such as those of South Asia.
The effects can be passed on to children in these rural households. Garg and colleagues found that students score lower on math and reading tests the year after a hot year, perhaps because their families had less money to spend on education, or even on food or health.
Adaptation
Societies can adapt to hotter temperatures. Factories, for example, can buy air conditioning.
But that’s money they won’t spend on better equipment or hiring more workers, Garg noted.
“Adaptation is not free. It’s expensive. It’s costly,” he said. “And in general we find that the poorer you are, the more expensive it is.”
Social safety net programs can help. Garg and colleagues, for example, conducted a study focused on a safety net program in India that supplemented income in rural areas. Since heat waves did not affect farm households’ budgets as much, the effect of heat on students’ test scores was smaller.
With heat waves becoming more common, demand for safety-net programs is growing.
“Countries are already paying for climate change,” Garg said, “because the demand on social protection is rapidly increasing as we get more and more hot days.”
“When we think about climate investments, [typically] we’re thinking about seawalls and green energy. And all of that’s quite important. But … safety net [programs] are going to play a huge role for low- and middle-income populations,” he said.
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Pfizer to Offer Low-Cost Medicines, Vaccines to Poor Nations
Pfizer said Wednesday that it will provide nearly two dozen products, including its top-selling COVID-19 vaccine and treatment, at not-for-profit prices in some of the world’s poorest countries.
The drugmaker announced the program at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, and said it was aimed at improving health equity in 45 lower-income countries. Most of the countries are in Africa, but the list also includes Haiti, Syria, Cambodia and North Korea.
The products, which are widely available in the U.S. and the European Union, include 23 medicines and vaccines that treat infectious diseases, some cancers and rare and inflammatory conditions. Company spokeswoman Pam Eisele said only a small number of the medicines and vaccines are currently available in the 45 countries.
New York-based Pfizer will charge only manufacturing costs and “minimal” distribution expenses, Eisele said. It will comply with any sanctions and all other applicable laws.
The drugmaker also plans to provide help with public education, training for health care providers and drug supply management.
“What we discovered through the pandemic was that supply was not enough to resolve the issues that these countries are having,” Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said Wednesday during a talk at Davos.
He noted that billions of doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, have been offered for free to low-income countries, mainly through the U.S. government, but those doses can’t be used right now.
Earlier this month, the head of the World Health Organization called on Pfizer to make its COVID-19 treatment more widely available in poorer countries.
Comirnaty brought in nearly $37 billion in sales last year, and analysts expect the company’s COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid to add almost $24 billion this year, according to the data firm FactSet.
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Climate-Driven Heat Waves Can Increase Inequality
March and April were the hottest or near-hottest months on record across South Asia. Heat waves don’t just sap people’s strength; they can drain people’s finances. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Climate-Driven Heat Waves Increasing Inequality
March and April were the hottest or near-hottest months on record across South Asia. And climate change made this heat wave 100 times more likely, the U.K. Met Office says. Heat waves like these don’t just sap people’s strength; they drain people’s finances in not always obvious ways —just another example of how climate change is weighing on the economy and making poor people poorer. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Pandemic Creates New Billionaires as Global Inequality Rises
The world’s billionaires have increased their wealth by trillions of dollars since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, while the world’s poorest people are struggling with soaring prices and rising debt, according to an analysis by charitable organization, Oxfam.
As the global business elite gather in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum, Oxfam says it has reason to celebrate: An analysis by the charity shows the wealth of the world’s 2,668 billionaires has risen by $3.78 trillion since 2020.
The report’s authors calculate that 573 people became new billionaires during the pandemic, at the rate of one every 30 hours. Conversely, Oxfam says 263 million more people will crash into extreme poverty in 2022, at a rate of a million people every 33 hours.
“It’s an extraordinary moment in history,” Max Lawson, head of inequality policy at Oxfam International, told VOA. “We’ve seen this explosion in billionaire wealth during the pandemic, and now off the back of food and energy price increases. And then you’re seeing this historic rise in poverty worldwide, which we also haven’t seen for decades.”
He added that the super-rich have become more wealthy thanks largely to taxpayers’ money.
“Because of the trillions of dollars that rich countries poured into the economy in response to COVID-19. So, that was the first thing, and that drove up asset prices. And now we’re seeing this really sharp increase in addition in the fortunes of food and energy billionaires, as you see the profits in those sectors soar because of prices rising,” he told VOA.
According to Oxfam, the world’s 10 richest men now own more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity, or 3.1 billion people. The report says the richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa.
As the rich have gotten richer, the past two years have put decades of progress against poverty at risk, Lawson said.
“A crisis of inequality. A crisis of climate-induced hunger all over the world. And then on top of that, the food price increases, and the problems of COVID-19. You put that together and you have more than a perfect storm,” he said.
Meanwhile, the World Food Program warns that 49 million people are at immediate risk of famine in 43 countries.
“Our needs right now are an extra $68 billion that we need. We are only asking for one to two days’ worth of [the billionaires’] net worth increases. Is that too much to ask to stabilize the world against famine, destabilization and mass migrations?” David Beasley, executive director of the WFP, told The Associated Press in Davos.
The WFP says Ukraine supplies enough grain to feed 400 million people, but its ports are blockaded by Russia.
“If we don’t get those ports open, you will be talking about a food pricing problem over the next 10 to 12 months,” Beasley warned. “But next year, it’s going to be a food availability problem, and that is going to be hell on earth.”
Oxfam says governments have the power to tackle the growing inequality through fairer taxes.
“This is a product primarily of government interventions. Huge amounts of money poured into the economy. This is our money. It’s driven up the fortunes of these companies. Let’s claw it back. Let’s have a series of taxes — one-off solidarity taxes, windfall taxes, wealth taxes — and bring the world back to balance,” Lawson said.
Some European countries, including Portugal and Italy, have imposed windfall taxes on energy firms. Others, including Britain, argue that such taxes would deter investment at a critical time as Western nations try to wean themselves off Russian energy imports.
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Pandemic Creates New Billionaires as Global Inequality Rises
The world’s billionaires have increased their wealth by trillions of dollars since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic – while the poorest countries are struggling with soaring commodity prices and rising debts. These are the findings of a newly released analysis by the charity Oxfam, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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Egyptian Wheat Farmers Cope with Compounding Disruptions
This year’s wheat harvest season in Egypt—the world’s biggest importer of the staple crop—comes at a time when the U.N. says the Ukraine war has sent international food prices soaring to “a new all-time high, hitting the poorest the hardest,” with the country’s annual inflation rate surging to a three-year high of 14.9 percent. Amid rising global wheat prices and food security concerns, Cairo photojournalist Hamada Elrasam shows the pressures facing Egyptian farmers.
Captions by Elle Kurancid.
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Tedros Re-Elected as Head of World Health Organization
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) members re-elected Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as director general by a strong majority for another five years, the president of the World Health Assembly said on Tuesday.
The vote by secret ballot, announced by Ahmed Robleh Abdilleh from Djibouti at a major annual meeting, was seen as a formality since Tedros was the only candidate running.
Ministers and delegates took turns to shake hands and hug Tedros, a former health minister from Ethiopia, who has steered the U.N. agency through a turbulent period dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The president had to use a gavel several times to interrupt the applause.
German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach tweeted on Tuesday: “Just re-elected as Director General of #WHO: @DrTedros. 155/160 votes, spectacular result. Congratulations, fully deserved.”
Germany recently overtook the United States as the U.N. health agency’s top donor.
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Malawi Rolls Out Cholera Vaccine to Contain Outbreak
Malawi has rolled out a vaccination campaign to help stop an outbreak of cholera. Authorities report more than 350 cases and 17 deaths from cholera across eight districts of southern Malawi.
Malawi’s Ministry of Health declared the cholera outbreak in early March after the first case was confirmed in the Machinga district in southern Malawi.
The disease has so far spread to eight districts including Nsanje, Chikwawa and Blantyre.
In its latest report on Monday, the ministry said the country had recorded 367 cholera cases in all with 17 deaths and 19 hospital admissions.
Dr. Gertrude Chapotera represented the World Health Organization at the launch of the vaccination campaign Monday in Blantyre.
She said the campaign is running with support from various global partners, including the Gavi Vaccine Alliance and the Global Task for Cholera Control.
“We are supporting the Ministry of Health with up to 3.9 million doses that will be administered in two rounds,” she said. “So this actually is the beginning of the first round with the campaign starting from today the 23rd of May running up Friday this week the 27th of May.”
Cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingesting food or water contaminated with bacteria. The disease affects both children and adults and, if untreated, can kill within hours.
Dr. Gift Kawalazila is director of Health and Social Services in Blantyre. He says the district has so far seen nearly 100 cases of cholera, with five deaths but only three hospital admissions as of Monday.
“This means that cholera is a disease that can easily be reversed and we have treatment options with us,” said Kawalazila. “So, the general message to the general population is that they should quickly present themselves to our health workers in our different health facilities whenever they notice the signs and symptoms of cholera which is profuse diarrhea and vomiting in some cases.”
Health authorities say many people are turning up for vaccination, with some districts running short of the doses.
Alinafe Longwe is among those who received the cholera vaccine in Blantyre. Longwe says she did not get the COVID-19 vaccine, citing fears of blood clotting and other health issues.
“But with this one, I haven’t heard any issues, so I am okay with it and I have received it and I am fine,” said Longwe.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health says it has intensified public education preventing cholera infections. These include the use of clean water for domestic purposes and observing personal hygiene.
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Meta Returns with Africa Day Campaign
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is hosting its second annual Africa Day campaign to promote Africans who are making a global impact.
The content producer for the film project, South African filmmaker Tarryn Crossman, said Meta identified eight innovators, creators and businesspeople on the continent whose stories the company wanted told for the “Made by Africa, Loved by the World” campaign.
Crossman’s company, Tia Productions, teamed up with Mashoba Media to find four fellow filmmakers in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their job was to make two- to three-minute documentaries about the subjects.
“So, for example we did Trevor Stuurman here in South Africa,” Crossman said. “He’s a visual artist and his line was, I just loved so much, he says: ‘Africa’s no longer the ghost writer.’ We’re telling our stories and owning our own narratives. That’s kind of the thread amongst all these characters. They all have that in common.”
Nairobi-based filmmaker Joan Kabangu made a movie about Black Rhino VR, a Kenyan virtual reality content producing company which has worked with international brands.
“They are the pioneers around creating VR content, 360 content, augmented mixed reality kind of content in Kenya, in the wider Africa. And it’s a company which is run by a young person and everybody who is working there is fairly young. And they are really getting into how tech is being used to elevate the way we are creating content in 2022, going forward,” Kabangu said.
Of Meta’s Africa Day campaign she said, “I feel it’s celebrating the good in Africa.”
In Ghana, Kofi Awuah’s movie making has been delayed by floods in the capital, Accra. But he is determined to finish. His innovator is designer Selina Beb, whose work can be seen on Instagram and is sold online, often to buyers in the U.S. and Britain.
“She’s very unique,” Awuah said. “Based on material she uses and even the processes she uses are kind of things that tell a Ghanian or African story. For instance, she uses a certain kind of stone that you can find only in the northern parts of Ghana.”
Awuah said being a part of the campaign is the chance of a lifetime.
“My manager called me to tell me that we gotten a contract from Meta and I almost, like I had a heart attack,” she said. “When that call came, I felt this is the moment for me to express myself to the millions or billions of people who are using Facebook, who are using social media.”
Meta will also be hosting free virtual training sessions throughout the week. These include training on monetization, cross-border business and branded content.
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Facebook, Instagram to Reveal More on How Ads Target Users
Facebook parent Meta said it will start publicly providing more details about how advertisers target people with political ads just months ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
The announcement follows years of criticism that the social media platforms withhold too much information about how campaigns, special interest groups and politicians use the platform to target small pockets of people with polarizing, divisive or misleading messages.
Meta, which also owns Instagram, said it will start releasing details in July about the demographics and interests of audiences who are targeted with ads that run on its two primary social networks. The company will also share how much advertisers spent in an effort to target people in certain states.
“By making advertiser targeting criteria available for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, elections and politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies,” Jeff King wrote in a statement posted to Meta’s website.
The new details could shed more light on how politicians spread misleading or controversial political messages among certain groups of people. Advocacy groups and Democrats, for example, have argued for years that misleading political ads are overwhelming the Facebook feeds of Spanish-speaking populations.
The information will be showcased in the Facebook ad library, a public database that already shows how much companies, politicians or campaigns spend on each ad they run across Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Currently, anyone can see how much a page has spent running an ad and a breakdown of the ages, gender and states or countries an ad is shown in.
The information will be available across 242 countries when a social issue, political or election ad is run, Meta said in a statement.
Meta collected $86 billion in revenue during 2020, the last major U.S. election year, thanks in part to its granular ad targeting system. Facebook’s ad system is so customizable that advertisers could target a single user out of billions on the platform, if they wanted.
Meta said in its announcement Monday that it will provide researchers with new details that show the interest categories advertisers selected when they tried to target people on the platform.
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US Stocks Gain Ground Following 7 Straight Weeks of Losses
Stocks rallied in afternoon trading on Wall Street Monday, following seven weeks of declines that nearly ended the bull market that began in March 2020.
The S&P 500 rose 1.8% as of 3:12 p.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 588 points, or 1.9%, to 31,850, and the Nasdaq rose 1.3%.
Banks made strong gains along with rising bond yields, which they rely on to charge more lucrative interest on loans. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 2.86% from 2.77% late Friday. Bank of America rose 6.3%.
Technology stocks also did some heavy lifting. Apple rose 3.4% and Microsoft rose 2.7%. The sector has been choppy over the last few weeks and has prompted many of the market’s recent big swings.
VMware surged 20.8% following a report that chipmaker Broadcom is offering to buy the cloud-computing company. JPMorgan Chase jumped 6.9% after giving investors an encouraging update on its financial forecasts.
Retailers and some other companies that rely on direct consumer spending lagged the rest of the market. Amazon fell 0.7%. A series of disappointing earnings reports from key retailers last week raised concerns that consumers are tempering spending on a wide range of goods as they get squeezed by rising inflation.
Lingering concerns about inflation have been weighing on the market and have kept major indexes in a slump. The benchmark S&P 500 is so far experiencing its longest weekly losing streak since the dot-com bubble was deflating in 2001. It came close to falling 20% from its peak earlier this year, which would put the index at the heart of most workers’ 401(k) accounts into a bear market.
Inflation’s impact on consumers and businesses has been the key worry for markets, along with the Federal Reserve’s attempt to temper that impact by aggressively raising interest rates. Inflation brought on by a big supply and demand disconnect has worsened because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on energy prices.
Supply chains were further hurt by China’s recent series of lockdowns for several major cities facing rising COVID-19 cases.
Investors are worried that the central bank could go too far in raising rates or move too quickly, which could stunt economic growth and potentially bring on a recession. On Wednesday, investors will get a more detailed glimpse into the Fed’s decision-making process with the release of minutes from the latest policy-setting meeting.
Wall Street will also get a few economic updates this week from the Commerce Department. On Thursday, it will release a report on first-quarter gross domestic product, and on Friday, it will release data on personal income and spending for April.
WHO Says No Evidence Monkeypox Virus Has Mutated
The World Health Organization does not have evidence that the monkeypox virus has mutated, a senior executive at the U.N. agency said on Monday, noting the infectious disease that is endemic in west and central Africa has tended not to change.
Rosamund Lewis, head of the smallpox secretariat which is part of the WHO Emergencies Program told a briefing that mutations are typically lower with this virus, although genome sequencing of cases will help inform understanding of the current outbreak.
The more than 100 suspected and confirmed cases in the recent outbreak in Europe and North America have not been severe, the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonoses lead and technical lead on COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove, said.
“This is a containable situation,” she said.
The outbreaks are atypical, according to the WHO, as they are occurring in countries where the virus does not regularly circulate. Scientists are seeking to understand the origin of the cases and whether anything about the virus has changed.
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Who is Buying Russia’s Oil?
So far, Russia’s oil exports have not slowed down a bit from the war in Ukraine and international sanctions. In fact, Russia exported more oil in April than it did before the war. And high oil prices mean Moscow is raking in money. That’s one reason Europe is considering a Russian oil ban: Current sanctions are not hurting Moscow enough. Europe gets more of its oil from Russia than anywhere else. It would have to make up for those banned barrels somewhere else, and that won’t be easy. And it’s likely to push oil prices everywhere up even further.
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COVID Pandemic, Ukraine War Color WHO International Meeting
The Ukraine war, with disease and destruction following in its wake, loomed large Sunday as the WHO convened countries to address a still raging pandemic and a vast array of other global health challenges.
“Where war goes, hunger and disease follow shortly behind,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on the opening day of the U.N. agency’s main annual assembly.
The assembly, due to run through Saturday, marks the first time the WHO is convening its 194 member states for their first largely in-person gathering since COVID-19 surfaced in late 2019.
Tedros warned that important work at the assembly to address a long line of global health emergencies and challenges, including the COVID-19 crisis, could not succeed “in a divided world.”
“We face a formidable convergence of disease, drought, famine and war, fueled by climate change, inequity and geopolitical rivalry,” he warned.
The former Ethiopian health minister said he was viewing the ravages in Ukraine through a personal lens: “I am a child of war.”
In Ukraine and elsewhere, he said, it is clear peace “is a prerequisite for health. We must choose health for peace, and peace, peace, peace.”
But it was war that dominated the high-level speeches on the first day of the assembly.
“The consequences of this war are devastating, to health, to populations, to health facilities and to health personnel,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a video address.
He called on all member states to support a resolution to be presented by Ukraine and discussed by the assembly Tuesday, which harshly condemns Russia’s invasion, especially its more than 200 attacks on health care providers, including hospitals and ambulances, in Ukraine.
The resolution will also voice alarm at the “health emergency in Ukraine,” and highlight the dire impacts beyond its borders, including how disrupted grain exports are deepening a global food security crisis.
But while Russia has been shunned and pushed out of other international bodies over its invasion, no such sanctions are foreseen at the World Health Assembly.
“There’s not a call to kick them out,” a Western diplomat told AFP, acknowledging the sanctions permitted under WHO rules are “very weak.”
The Ukraine conflict is far from the only health emergency up for discussion this week, with decisions expected on a range of important issues, including on reforms toward strengthening pandemic preparedness.
“This meeting is a historic opportunity to strengthen universal architecture for security and health,” Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader Corona told the assembly.
Among the decisions expected at the assembly is Tedros’s reappointment to a second five-year term.
His first term was turbulent, as he helped steer the global response to the pandemic and grappled with other crises, including a sexual abuse scandal involving WHO staff in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But while he has faced his share of criticism, he has received broad backing and is running unopposed, guaranteeing him a second term.
There will be no shortage of challenges ahead, with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging and demands for dramatic reforms of the entire global health system to help avert similar threats in the future.
And new health menaces already loom, including hepatitis of mysterious origin that has made children in many countries ill, and swelling numbers of monkeypox cases far from Central and West Africa —where the disease is normally concentrated.
One of the major reforms up for discussion involves the WHO budget, with countries expected to greenlight a plan to boost secure and flexible funding to ensure the organization can respond quickly to global health threats.
The WHO’s two-year budget for 2020-21 ticked in at $5.8 billion, but only 16% of that came from regular membership fees.
The idea is to gradually raise the membership fee portion to 50% over nearly a decade, while WHO will be expected to implement reforms, which includes more transparency on its financing and hiring.
The remainder came from voluntary contributions that are heavily earmarked by countries for specific projects.
“There is no greater return on investment than health,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres told the assembly in a video address.
The COVID pandemic laid bare major deficiencies in the global health system, and countries last year agreed numerous changes were needed to better prepare the world to face future pandemic threats.
Amendments are being considered to the International Health Regulations — a set of legally binding international laws governing how countries respond to acute public health risks.
And negotiations are underway toward a new “legal instrument” — possibly a treaty— aimed at streamlining the global approach to pandemic preparedness and response.But experts warn the reform process is moving too slowly.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who co-chaired an expert panel on pandemic preparedness, warned reporters last week little had changed.
“At its current pace, an effective system is still years away, when a pandemic threat could occur at any time,” Clark said.
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