NAJAF, IRAQ (AFP) – Iraqi boxer Bushra al-Hajjar jumped into the ring, gloves raised to eye level, and strike out at her sparring partner.

Her bigger struggle, though, is to deliver a blow against social taboos.

In Iraq’s holy city of Najaf, the sight of a women’s boxing hall is unusual but, like others here, the 35-year-old boxing instructor is fighting deeply-ingrained taboos.

“At home, I have a full training room, with mats and a punching bag,” said the mother of two, who also practises karate.

Hajjar won gold in the 70 kilogramme-class at a boxing tournament in the capital Baghdad in December.

“My family and friends are very supportive, they’re very happy with the level I’ve reached,” she said, a blue headscarf pulled tightly over her hair.

Twice a week, she trains at a private university in Najaf, 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, where she also teaches sports.

In overwhelmingly conservative Iraq, and particularly in Najaf, Hajjar acknowledged her adventure has raised eyebrows.

“We’ve come across many difficulties,” she said. “We’re a conservative society that has difficulty accepting these kinds of things.”

She recalled the protests when training facilities first opened for women, but said “today, there are many halls”.

Boxing student Ola Mustafa, 16, taking a break from her punching bag, said: “We live in a macho society that opposes success for women.”

However, she said she has the support not only of her trainer but also of her parents and brother, signalling that social change is afoot.

“People are gradually beginning to accept it,” she said. “If more girls try it out, society will automatically come to accept it.”

Iraqi boxing federation president Ali Taklif acknowledged that Iraqi women engaging in the sport is a “recent phenomenon”, but said it is gaining ground.

“There is a lot of demand from females wanting to join,” he said, adding that Iraq now has some 20 women’s boxing clubs.

More than 100 women boxers have competed in a December tournament, in all categories, he added.

But “like other sports (in Iraq), the discipline suffers from a lack of infrastructure, training facilities and equipment”.

In the past, Iraq had a proud tradition of women in sports, especially in the 1970s and
1980s.

Whether in basketball, volleyball or cycling, women’s teams regularly took part in regional tournaments.

But sanctions, decades of conflict and a hardening of conservative social values brought this era to a close, with only the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq largely spared.

There has been a timid reversal in recent years, with women taking up a range of sports, also including kickboxing.

For Hajer Ghazi, who at age 13 won a silver medal in December, boxing runs in the family.
Her father, a veteran professional boxer, encouraged his children to follow in his footsteps.

Both her sisters and older brother Ali are also boxers.

“Our father supports us more than the state does,” said Ali in their hometown of Amara in southwestern Iraq.

The father, Hassanein Ghazi, a 55-year-old truck driver who won several medals in his heyday, insisted: “Women have the right to play sports, it’s only normal.”

He recognised certain “sensitivities” remain, linked to traditional tribal values.

As an example, he pointed out that “when their coach wants them to run, he takes them to the outskirts of town”, away from too many onlookers.

Seth Borenstein

AP – A team of scientists are sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.

Thirty-two scientists yesterday are starting a more than two-month mission aboard an American research ship to investigate the crucial area where the massive but melting Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts – more than 65 centimetres over hundreds of years.

Because of its importance, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) are in the midst of a joint USD50 million mission to study Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world by land and sea. Not near any of the continent’s research stations, Thwaites is on Antarctica’s western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about.

“Thwaites is the main reason I would say that we have so large an uncertainty in the projections of future sea level rise and that is because it’s a very remote area, difficult to reach,” oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden Anna Wahlin said on Wednesday in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later.

“It is configured in a way so that it’s potentially unstable. And that is why we are worried about this.”

Thwaites is putting about 50 billion tonnes of ice into the water a year. The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsible for four per cent of global sea rise, and the conditions leading to it to lose more ice are accelerating, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month.

Oregon State University ice scientist Erin Pettit said Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three ways: Melting from below by ocean water; the land part of the glacier “is losing its grip” to the place it attaches to the seabed, so a large chunk can come off into the ocean and later melt; and the glacier’s ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of fractures like a damaged car windshield. This is what Pettit said she fears will be the most troublesome with 10-kilometre long cracks forming in just a year.

No one has stepped foot before on the key ice-water interface at Thwaites before. In 2019, Wahlin was on a team that explored the area from a ship using a robotic ship but never went ashore.

Wahlin’s team will use two robot ships – her own large one called Ran which she used in 2019 and the more agile Boaty McBoatface, the crowdsource named drone that could go further under the area of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean – to get under Thwaites.

The ship-bound scientists will be measuring water temperature, the sea floor and ice thickness. They’ll look at cracks in the ice, how the ice is structured and tag seals on islands off the glacier.

Thwaites “looks different from other ice shelves”, Wahlin said. “It almost looks like a jumble of icebergs that have been pressed together. So it’s increasingly clear that this is not a solid piece of ice like the other ice shelves are, nice smooth solid ice. This was much more jagged and scarred.”

AP – Hospitals across the United States (US) are feeling the wrath of the Omicron variant and getting thrown into disarray that is different from earlier COVID-19 surges.

This time, they are dealing with serious staff shortages because so many healthcare workers are getting sick with the fast-spreading variant. People are showing up at emergency rooms in large numbers in hopes of getting tested for COVID-19, putting more strain on the system.

And a surprising share of patients – two-thirds in some places – are testing positive while in the hospital for other reasons.

At the same time, hospitals said the patients aren’t as sick as those who came in during the last surge. Intensive care units aren’t as full, and ventilators aren’t needed as much as they were before.

The pressures are neverthless prompting hospitals to scale back non-emergency surgeries and close wards, while National Guard troops have been sent in several states to help at medical centres and testing sites.

Nearly two years into the pandemic, frustration and exhaustion are running high among health care workers.

“This is getting very tiring, and I’m being very polite in saying that,” said Dr Robert Glasgow of University of Utah Health, which has hundreds of workers out sick or in isolation.

About 85,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19, just short of the Delta-surge peak of about 94,000 in early September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The all-time high during the pandemic was about 125,000 in January of last year.

But the hospitalisation numbers do not tell the whole story. Some cases in the official count involve COVID-19 infections that weren’t what put the patients in the hospital in the first place.

Chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Health in New York City Dr Fritz François said about 65 per cent of patients admitted to that system with COVID-19 recently were primarily hospitalised for something else and were incidentally found to have the virus.

At two large Seattle hospitals over the past two weeks, three-quarters of the 64 patients testing positive for the coronavirus were admitted with a primary diagnosis other than COVID-19.

Joanne Spetz, associate director of research at the Healthforce Center at the University of California, San Francisco, said the rising number of cases like that is both good and bad.

The lack of symptoms shows vaccines, boosters and natural immunity from prior infections are working, she said. The bad news is that the numbers mean the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, and some percentage of those people will wind up needing hospitalisation.

This week, 36 per cent of California hospitals reported critical staffing shortages. And 40 per cent are expecting such shortages.

Some hospitals are reporting as much as one quarter of their staff out for virus-related reasons, said Kiyomi Burchill, the California Hospital Association’s vice president for policy and leader on pandemic matters.

In response, hospitals are turning to temporary staffing agencies or transferring patients out.

University of Utah Health plans to keep more than 50 beds open because it doesn’t have enough nurses. It is also rescheduling surgeries that aren’t urgent. In Florida, a hospital temporarily closed its maternity ward because of staff shortages.

In Alabama, where most of the population is unvaccinated, UAB Health in Birmingham put out an urgent request for people to go elsewhere for COVID-19 tests or minor symptoms and stay home for all but true emergencies. Treatment rooms were so crowded that some patients had to be evaluated in hallways and closets.

As of Monday, New York state had just over 10,000 people in the hospital with COVID-19, including 5,500 in New York City. That’s the most in either the city or state since the disastrous spring of 2020.

New York City hospital officials, though, reported that things haven’t become dire.

Generally, the patients aren’t as sick as they were back then. Of the patients hospitalised in New York City, around 600 were in ICU beds.

“We’re not even halfway to what we were in April 2020,” said the physician-in-chief for Northwell Health Dr David Battinelli, New York state’s largest hospital system.

Similarly, in Washington state, the number of COVID-19-infected people on ventilators increased over the past two weeks, but the share of patients needing such equipment dropped.

In South Carolina, which is seeing unprecedented numbers of new cases and a sharp rise in hospitalisations, Governor Henry McMaster took note of the seemingly less-serious variant and said: “There’s no need to panic. Be calm. Be happy.”

Amid the Omicron-triggered surge in demand for COVID-19 testing across the US, New York City’s Fire Department is asking people not to call for ambulance just because they are having trouble finding a test.

In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine announced new or expanded testing sites in nine cities to steer test-seekers away from ERs. About 300 National Guard members are being sent to help out at those centres.

In Connecticut, many ER patients are in beds in hallways, and nurses are often working double shifts because of staffing shortages, said Sherri Dayton, a nurse at the Backus Plainfield Emergency Care Center. Many emergency rooms have hours-long waiting times, she said.

“We are drowning. We are exhausted,” Dayton said.

Doctors and nurses are complaining about burnout and a sense their neighbours are no longer treating the pandemic as a crisis, despite day after day of record COVID-19 cases.

“In the past, we didn’t have the vaccine, so it was us all hands together, all the support. But that support has kind of dwindled from the community, and people seem to be moving on without us,” said Rachel Chamberlin, a nurse at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Edward Merrens, chief clinical officer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, said more than 85 per cent of the hospitalised COVID-19 patients were unvaccinated.

Several patients in the hospital’s COVID-19 ICU unit were on ventilators, a breathing tube down their throats. In one room, staff members made preparations for what they feared would be the final family visit for a dying patient.