This photo provided by the Elephant Nature Park shows three of the roughly 100 elephants who are stuck in rising flood waters at the park in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (Darrick Thompson/Elephant Nature Park Via AP)
BANGKOK (AP) — Flooding in northern Thailand forced many residents of the city of Chiang Mai and its outskirts to seek safety on higher ground on Friday, with members of the animal world under similar threat.
Evacuations were underway at the Elephant Nature Park, which houses around 3,000 rescued animals, including 125 elephants, 800 dogs, 2,500 cats, 200 rabbits and 200 cows.
Flood waters caused by heavy rainfall swept through the park on Thursday.
Heavy seasonal monsoon rains and the effects of Typhoon Yagi combined to cause serious flooding in many parts of Thailand, with the northern region particularly badly hit.
This photo provided by the Elephant Nature Park shows three of the roughly 100 elephants who are stuck in rising flood waters at the park in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. PHOTO: AP
Video posted online by the park vividly illustrated that care and compassion are not solely human traits.
The video shows several of the park’s resident elephants fleeing through rising, muddy water to ground less inundated.
Three of them dash through the deluge with some ease but, according to the park, a fourth one is blind and was falling behind. It showed greater difficulty passing through wrecked fencing.
Its fellows appear to call out to it, to guide it to their sides.
Efforts to evacuate more animals were hampered by the high water, while more rain is forecast.
PARIS (AFP) – Big thunderstorms continuously emit gamma rays that are undetectable from the ground, two studies said, upending what was previously thought – and potentially pointing towards a clue in the mystery of how lightning is sparked.
Despite the fact that 40,000 thunderstorms generate more than eight million lightning strikes above our heads every day, they “remain poorly understood”, physicist Joseph Dwyer said in an analysis of the new research in the journal Nature.
Normally when people think of gamma rays – bursts of an incredibly high-energy form of light – they are coming from out of this world, such as solar flares, exploding stars or black holes.
However in the 1990s, NASA satellites tasked with hunting down high-energy particles from such cosmic sources detected gamma rays coming from Earth.
Other than inside nuclear reactors, nothing on our planet had been thought capable of generating gamma rays.
Since then, two different types of gamma rays have been observed inside thunderstorms – both invisible to the naked eye.
Gamma-ray glows can last for a few minutes over a region roughly 20 kilometres (km) wide, while more powerful “flashes” last less than a millisecond.
“As it turns out, essentially all big thunderstorms generate gamma rays all day long in many different forms,” researcher at Duke University and a co-author of one of the studies Steven Cummer said in a statement.
To find out more about what is happening inside thunderstorms, the international team of researchers used an NASA ER-2 airplane.
The scientific aircraft, based the American U-2 spy plane, can fly more than twice as high as a commercial airliner, soaring far above storm clouds.
Over a month in 2023, the plane left a Florida air force based to fly at an altitude of 20km over active storms, capturing evidence that gamma radiation is much more common than had been thought.
The storms almost continuously generated gamma-ray glows for hours across thousands of square kilometres, all of which were closely linked to the most intense areas of the storm.
The storms resemble “a huge gamma-glowing ‘boiling pot’ in both pattern and behaviour”, said the author of the first Nature study, authored by Martino Marisaldi of Norway’s University of Bergen. The second study revealed that glows could intensify into what it called “flickering” gamma-ray flashes.
These could be the elusive “missing link” between glows and flashes, it added.
These observations “blur the line between these two types of emission, suggesting that gamma-ray glows often morph into intense pulses”, Dwyer explained.
Lightning often follows these intense gamma ray emissions, which suggests they might play some role in sparking lightning strikes, according to the second study.
“How lightning is initiated inside thunderstorms is one of the greatest mysteries in the atmospheric sciences,” Dwyer said.
“It is amazing that, more than two decades into the 21st century, Earth’s atmosphere has enough surprises in store to motivate an entirely new line of research.”
Meng Rongda gives a lesson at Zhongzhai teaching site in Xishan Township of Congjiang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province. PHOTO: XINHUA
GUIYANG (XINHUA) – Meng Rongda, 59, is the only teacher of a “mini-school”, more precisely a teaching site in Xishan Township of Congjiang County, China.
At present, there are 23 pre-school students and 17 pupils in the first and second grades.
Besides Chinese and math, Meng is also responsible for physical education (PE) and music courses to ensure rural children can also attain a sound basic education.
Meng has been working as a teacher, cook and caretaker at the mini-school since 2015 in the landlocked mountainous areas.
To him, education can change the fate of children and therefore, he devotes himself to lighting up the way ahead for these rural children.
Meng Rongda gives a lesson at Zhongzhai teaching site in Xishan Township of Congjiang County, southwest China’s Guizhou Province. PHOTO: XINHUAMeng and his wife supervise children during lunch time. PHOTO: XINHUAMeng with students during a Yao ethnic drum dance lesson. PHOTO: XINHUA
Shi Xuejun gestures during a class at Nanjing School for the Deaf
in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province. PHOTO: XINHUA
NANJING (XINHUA) – Born in 1970, Shi Xuejun has been teaching hearing-impaired students for about 30 years, during which she developed a set of effective teaching methods on her own.
The courses Shi gives are tailored to best serve the development needs of each child.
She develops physics experiment classes where students can explore simple mechanisms such as fruit batteries, ward call systems and camera structures.
Students are also organised to visit museums as a way to improve their social skills and enrich their school lives.
Shi Xuejun gestures during a class at Nanjing School for the Deaf in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu Province. PHOTO: XINHUAXuejun with her students in a physics experiment class. PHOTO: XINHUA
A wastepicker walks past a pile of garbage at a landfill in Depok on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia. PHOTO: AP
AP – The amount and proportion of the powerful heat-trapping gas methane that humans spew into the atmosphere is rising, helping to turbocharge climate change, a new study found.
The study found that in 2020, the last year complete data is available, the world put 670 million tonnes (608 million metric tonnes) of methane in the air, up nearly 12 per cent from 2000. An even more significant finding in the study in Environmental Research Letters was the source of those emissions: those from humans jumped almost 18 per cent in two decades, while natural emissions, mostly from wetlands, inched up just two per cent in the same time.
Methane levels in the air are now 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times, the study said. Methane levels in the air had plateaued for a while in the early 2000s, but now are soaring. Humans cause methane emissions by burning fossil fuels, engaging in large-scale agriculture and filling up landfills.
“Methane is a climate menace that the world is ignoring,” said study lead author Rob Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, which is a group of scientists who monitor greenhouse gas emissions yearly. Methane has risen far more and much faster than carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is still the biggest threat, said Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist. Humans, mostly through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, put 60 times more CO2 in the air than methane and it lasts thousands of years.
Because methane leave the atmosphere in about a decade, it’s a powerful “lever” that humans can use to fight climate change, Jackson said. That’s because cutting it could yield relatively quick benefits.
A wastepicker walks past a pile of garbage at a landfill in Depok on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia. PHOTO: APCows stand together in a meadow in Wehrheim, near Frankfurt, Germany. PHOTO: APPHOTO: ENVATO
In 2000, 60 per cent of the methane spewed into the air came from direct human activity. Now it’s 65 per cent, the study found.
“It’s a very worrying paper, but actually not a big surprise unfortunately,” said climate scientist and chief executive officer of Climate Analytics Bill Hare, who wasn’t part of the research.
He said for the world to keep warming to an agreed-upon limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) since pre-industrial times, the world needs to cut CO2 emissions nearly in half and methane by more than one-third. But Jackson said the current trend with methane emissions has the world on target for warming of 3°C, twice the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Jackson’s study mostly focused on where the methane is coming from, both by location and source.
Geographically, everywhere but Europe is increasing in human-caused methane emissions, with large jumps in Asia, especially China and India, Jackson said.
In the last 20 years, methane emissions from coal mining, oil and gas have jumped 33 per cent, while landfill and waste increased 20 per cent and agriculture emissions rose 14 per cent, according to the study. The biggest single human-connected source of emissions are cows, Jackson said.
Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth faulted the study for not sufficiently emphasising methane emissions from the boom in shale gas drilling, known as fracking. He said that boom began in 2005 and coincided with a sharp rise in methane emissions, including a spike of about 13 million tonnes (11.7 million metric tonnes) in the United States alone since then.
Jackson said the rise in natural methane from tropical wetlands was triggered by warmer temperatures that caused microbes to spew more gas. He called it disturbing because “we don’t have any way of reducing” those emissions.
In 2021, countries promised to do something about methane, but it’s not working yet, Jackson said. – Seth Borenstein
ABOVE & BELOW: A man walks on a railway track littered with plastic and other waste materials in Mumbai, India; and a volunteer picks up trash on a river covered with trash in Pecatu, Bali, Indonesia. PHOTO: AP
AP – The world creates 57 million tonnes of plastic pollution every year and spreads it from the deepest oceans to the highest mountaintop to the inside of people’s bodies, according to a new study that also said more than two-thirds of it comes from the Global South.
It’s enough pollution each year – about 52 million metric tonnes – to fill New York City’s Central Park, United States (US), with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building, according to researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom (UK). They examined waste produced on the local level at more than 50,000 cities and towns across the world for a study in the journal Nature.
The study examined plastic that goes into the open environment, not plastic that goes into landfills or is properly burned. For 15 per cent of the world’s population, government fails to collect and dispose of waste, the study’s authors said – a big reason Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa produce the most plastic waste. That includes 255 million people in India, the study said.
Lagos, Nigeria, emitted the most plastic pollution of any city, according to study author Costas Velis, a Leeds environmental engineering professor. The other biggest plastic polluting cities are New Delhi; Luanda, Angola; Karachi, Pakistan and Al Qahirah, Egypt.
India leads the world in generating plastic pollution, producing 10.2 million tonnes a year (9.3 million metric tonnes), far more than double the next big-polluting nations, Nigeria and Indonesia. China, often villainised for pollution, ranks fourth but is making tremendous strides in reducing waste, Velis said. Other top plastic polluters are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia and Brazil. Those eight nations are responsible for more than half of the globe’s plastic pollution, according to the study’s data.
The US ranks 90th in plastic pollution with more than 52,500 tonnes (47,600 metric tonnes) and the UK ranks 135th with nearly 5,100 tonnes (4,600 metric tonnes), according to the study.
ABOVE & BELOW: A man walks on a railway track littered with plastic and other waste materials in Mumbai, India; and a volunteer picks up trash on a river covered with trash in Pecatu, Bali, Indonesia. PHOTO: APPHOTO: APNina Gomes recovers a discarded plastic bag from ocean waters, near Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. PHOTO: AP
In 2022, most of the world’s nations agreed to make the first legally binding treaty on plastics pollution, including in the oceans. Final treaty negotiations take place in South Korea in November.
The study used artificial intelligence to concentrate on plastics that were improperly burned – about 57 per cent of the pollution – or just dumped. In both cases incredibly tiny microplastics, or nanoplastics, are what turn the problem from a visual annoyance at beaches and a marine life problem to a human health threat, Velis said.
Several studies this year have looked at how prevalent microplastics are in our drinking water and in people’s tissue, such as hearts, brains and testicles, with doctors and scientists still not quite sure what it means in terms of human health threats.
“The big time bomb of microplastics are these microplastics released in the Global South mainly,” Velis said. “We already have a huge dispersal problem. They are in the most remote places… the peaks of Everest, in the Mariana Trench in the ocean, in what we breathe and what we eat and what we drink.”
He called it “everybody’s problem” and one that will haunt future generations.
“We shouldn’t put the blame, any blame, on the Global South,” Velis said. “And we shouldn’t praise ourselves about what we do in the Global North in any way.”
It’s just a lack of resources and ability of government to provide the necessary services to citizens, Velis said.
Outside experts worried that the study’s focus on pollution, rather than overall production, lets the plastics industry off the hook. Making plastics emits large amounts of greenhouse gas that contribute to climate change.
“These guys have defined plastic pollution in a much narrower way, as really just macroplastics that are emitted into the environment after the consumer, and it risks us losing our focus on the upstream and saying, hey now all we need to do is manage the waste better,” said senior director of science and policy Neil Tangri at GAIA, a global network of advocacy organisations working on zero waste and environmental justice initiatives.
“It’s necessary but it’s not the whole story.”
Theresa Karlsson, science and technical advisor to International Pollutants Elimination Network, another coalition of advocacy groups on environment, health and waste issues, called the volume of pollution identified by the study “alarming” and said it shows the amount of plastics being produced today is “unmanageable”.
But she said the study misses the significance of the global trade in plastic waste that has rich countries sending it to poor ones. The study said plastic waste trade is decreasing, with China banning waste imports. But Karlsson said overall waste trade is actually increasing and likely plastics with it.
She cited European Union waste exports going from 110,000 tonnes (100,000 metric tonnes) in 2004 to 1.4 million tonnes (1.3 million metric tonnes) in 2021. Velis said the amount of plastic waste traded is small. Kara Lavender Law, an oceanography professor at the Sea Education Association who wasn’t involved in the study, agreed, based on US plastic waste trends. She said this was otherwise one of the more comprehensive studies on plastic waste.
Officials in the plastics industry praised the study.
“This study underscores that uncollected and unmanaged plastic waste is the largest contributor to plastic pollution and that prioritising adequate waste management is critical to ending plastic pollution,” International Council on Chemical Associations council secretary Chris Jahn said in a statement. In treaty negotiations, the industry opposes a cap on plastic production.
The United Nations projects that plastics production is likely to rise from about 440 million tonnes (400 million metric tonnes) a year to more than 1,200 million tonnes (1,100 million metric tonnes, saying “our planet is choking in plastic”.
A pregnant dengue fever patient, Josselyn Caqui, sits under a mosquito net at the Sergio Bernales National Hospital in the outskirts of Lima, Peru. PHOTO: AFP
AFP – A global network of doctors and laboratories is working to pinpoint emerging viral threats, including many driven by climate change, in a bid to head off the world’s next pandemic.
The coalition of self-described “virus hunters” has uncovered everything from an unusual tick-borne disease in Thailand to a surprise outbreak in Colombia of an infection spread by midges.
“The roster of things that we have to worry about, as we saw with COVID-19, is not static,” said infectious disease expert Gavin Cloherty, who heads the Abbott Pandemic Defense Coalition.
“We have to be very vigilant about how the bad guys that we know about are changing… But also if there’s new kids on the block,” he told AFP.
The coalition brings together doctors and scientists at universities and health institutions across the world, with funding from healthcare and medical devices giant Abbott.
By uncovering new threats, the coalition gives Abbott a potential headstart in designing the kinds of testing kits that were central to the COVID-19 response.
And its involvement gives the coalition deep pockets and the ability to detect and sequence but also respond to new viruses.
A pregnant dengue fever patient, Josselyn Caqui, sits under a mosquito net at the Sergio Bernales National Hospital in the outskirts of Lima, Peru. PHOTO: AFPABOVE & BELOW: An adult tick with a nymph (young tick); and a mosquito. PHOTO: AFPPHOTO: AFP
“When we find something, we’re able to very quickly make diagnostic tests at industry level,” Cloherty said.
“The idea is to ringfence an outbreak, so that we would be able to hopefully prevent a pandemic.” The coalition has sequenced approximately 13,000 samples since it began operating in 2021. In Colombia, it found an outbreak of Oropouche, a virus spread by midges and mosquitoes that had rarely been seen there before.
Phylogenetic work to trace the strain’s family tree revealed it came from Peru or Ecuador, rather than Brazil, another hotspot.
“You can see where things are moving from. It’s important from a public health perspective,” said Cloherty.
More recently, the coalition worked with doctors in Thailand to reveal that a tick-bourne virus was behind a mysterious cluster of patient cases.
“At the time, we didn’t know what virus caused this syndrome,” said associate professor Pakpoom Phoompoung of infectious disease at Siriraj Hospital.
Testing and sequencing of samples that dated back as far as 2014 found many were positive for severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTSV).
“Less than 10 patients had (previously) been diagnosed with SFTSV in Thailand… we don’t have PCR diagnosis, we don’t have serology for this viral infection diagnosis,” Pakpoom told AFP.
“Diagnosing it is difficult, labour intensive and also is costly.”
And there is a growing need to track these threats as climate change expands the range of infectious disease globally.
The link between climate change and infectious disease is well-established and multi-faceted.
Warmer conditions allow vectors like mosquitoes to live in new locations, more rain creates more breeding pools, and extreme weather forces people into the open where they are more vulnerable to bites.
Human impact on the planet is also driving the spread and evolution of infectious disease in other ways: biodiversity loss forces viruses to evolve into new hosts, and can push animals into closer contact with humans.
Phylogenetic analysis of the SFTSV strain in Thailand gives a snapshot of the complex interplay.
It showed the virus had evolved from one tick with a smaller geographic range into the hardier Asian longhorned tick.
The analysis suggested its evolution was driven largely by pesticide use that reduced the numbers of the original tick host. Once the virus evolved, it could spread further in part because Asian longhorned ticks can live on birds, which are travelling further and faster because of changing climate conditions.
“It’s almost like they’re an airline,” said Cloherty.
MANILA (AFP) – Philippine authorities have detained more than 250 people, most of them foreign nationals, in a raid on a suspected online scam farm in Manila, law enforcement officials said yesterday.
Police and other authorities raided the office building late Thursday to find staff with hundreds of phones, computers, and pre-registered international and local SIM cards, the Presidential Anti-Organised Crime Commission said. “These are red flags of love scamming that victimises foreign nationals,” the commission said in a statement, referring to schemes in which scammers pretend to have romantic feelings for their victims in order to earn their trust and eventually steal their money.
International concern has been growing over similar scam farms in Asia, often staffed by victims of trafficking who were tricked or coerced into promoting bogus crypto investments and other cons.
In July, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos outlawed all forms of offshore gaming operators, including internet gaming licence holders, after the gambling industry was found to be linked to financial scams, kidnapping, prostitution, human trafficking, torture and murder.
AFP – Infections of drug-resistant superbugs are projected to kill nearly 40 million people over the next 25 years, a global analysis predicted, with the researchers urging action to avoid this grim scenario.
Superbugs – strains of bacteria or pathogens that have become resistant to antibiotics, making them much harder to treat – have been recognised as a rising threat to global health.
The analysis has been billed as the first research to track the global impact of superbugs over time and to estimate what could happen next.
More than a million people died from the superbugs – also called antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – per year across the world between 1990 and 2021, according to the GRAM study in The Lancet journal.
Deaths among children under five from superbugs actually fell by more than 50 per cent over the last three decades, the study said, due to improving measures to prevent and control infections for infants.
However, when children now catch superbugs, the infections are much harder to treat. And deaths of over-70s have surged by more than 80 per cent over the same period, as an ageing population became more vulnerable to infection.
Deaths from infections of MRSA, a type of staph bacteria that has become resistant to many antibiotics, doubled to 130,000 in 2021 from three decades earlier, the study said.
The researchers used modelling to estimate that, based on current trends, the number of direct deaths from AMR would rise by 67 per cent to reach nearly two million a year by 2050.
It would also play a role in a further 8.2 million annual deaths, a jump of nearly 75 per cent, according to the modelling.
Under this scenario, AMR will have directly killed 39 million people over the next quarter century and contributed to a total of 169 million deaths, it added.
But less dire scenarios are also possible. If the world works to improve care for severe infections and access to antimicrobial drugs, it could save the lives of 92 million people by 2050, the modelling suggested. The researchers looked at 22 pathogens, 84 combinations of drugs and pathogens, and 11 infectious syndromes such as meningitis.
The study involved data from 520 million individual records across 204 countries and territories.
“These findings highlight that AMR has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing,” said study co-author Mohsen Naghavi of the United States-based Institute of Health Metrics.
Head of Infectious disease policy Jeremy Knox at the United Kingdom-based health charity the Wellcome Trust warned that the effects of rising AMR rates would be felt across the world.
“An increasing AMR burden at the scale described in the GRAM report would represent a steady undermining of modern medicine as we know it, as the antibiotics we rely upon to keep common medical interventions safe and routine could lose their effectiveness,” Knox told AFP.
Brunei LNG senior officials with SPHI Marine officers taking a group photo in front of the company's first escort terminal tug, the m/v SOFEA. PHOTO: AJEEMH
Brunei LNG senior officials with SPHI Marine officers taking a group photo in front of the company’s first escort terminal tug, the m/v SOFEA. PHOTO: AJEEMHPlaque signing by Yang Berhormat Pengiran Dato Seri Setia Shamhary bin Pengiran Dato Paduka Haji Mustapha as the guest of honour to commemorate the event. PHOTO: AJEEMH
The 1st October 2024 was another truly historic and momentous occasion in the midstream integrated gas industry with the official commencement of Brunei Darussalam’s first fleet of locally owned, financed and flagged escort terminal tugs servicing the A Class LNG Tankers at Brunei’s Lumut LNG Terminal.
Minister of Transport and Infocommunications, Yang Berhormat Pengiran Dato Seri Setia Shamhary bin Pengiran Dato Paduka Haji Mustapha officiated the ceremony as the guest of honour.
In his officiating speech, the minister congratulated the directors, shareholders and management of SPHI Marine Sdn Bhd on the delivery and commencement of its locally owned, flagged and operated escort terminal tugs.
As one of the major contributors to Brunei Darussalam’s export revenues, Brunei LNG has maintained a reputation as one of the safest and most reliable LNG suppliers in the world. Coupled with strong commitment to their valued customers for further sustainability, Brunei LNG continues to improve the delivery performance of its LNG through the operations of their four A Class vessels since 2011.
The minister stated that the Government of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien Sa’adul Khairi Waddien, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam is therefore proud that a locally owned, Brunei company, for the very first time since the commencement of LNG export operations in 1972, has been given the responsibility to continue supporting LNG tanker loading and delivery schedules continuously throughout the year and ensure that this entire process is performed safely and efficiently without incident, for these large LNG tankers.
The ceremony commenced with the recital of Al-Fatihah and Doa Selamat by the imam. This was followed by a welcoming speech by the managing director of SPHI Marine Hj Ibrahim Khalili Bin PD Hj Abd. Rahman.
SPHI Marine is a locally owned and managed offshore support vessel company (OSV) providing OSV services to Brunei LNG and Brunei Shell Petroleum Company Sdn Bhd.
The three escort terminal tugs are the latest, state of the art 32-metre tugs, designed by world class naval architects with a bollard pull capacity of 80 tons. The first two escort terminal tugs, m/v SOFEA and m/v MAY ROSA were delivered to Brunei LNG on 1st July 2023. The third Terminal Tug, m/v MARYAM was delivered in April 2024.
Haji Ibrahim in his speech stated the milestone not only provides opportunities to SPHI Marine and the local Bruneians working both on the vessels and also onshore in the offices, but also ensures that local business development in this critical industry has continued progressing forward and given an opportunity to gain new knowledge, and ultimately, pride, to all stakeholders especially His Majesty’s Government, knowing that Brunei companies are able to rise to the occasion to the challenges set when given an opportunity.
The officiating ceremony was followed by the cutting of the ceremonial ribbons by Yang Berhormat Pengiran Dato Seri Setia Shamhary; Yang Mulia Mr Gbolahan Adeleye Falade, Managing Director of Brunei LNG; as well as SPHI Marine Technical Director Hj Jameel Ahmed Hj Basheer Ahmed.
Guest of honour with government senior officials, Brunei LNG MD and SPHI Marine directors. PHOTO: RAFI ROSLIGuest of honour on board SPHI Marine’s latest addition to the company fleet, the m/v Maryam. PHOTO: AJEEMH
This was followed by a tour of one of the two escort terminal tugs by the guest of honour.
Amongst the attendees were senior government officials from His Majesty’s Government, the deputy CEO of Baiduri Bank, senior Brunei LNG stakeholders as well as directors and shareholders of SPHI Marine.
