AFP

Hundreds of thousands of people in China were in lockdown on Friday as the country battled its worst Covid-19 outbreak in months, while Japan — a week into the Olympics — extended its state of emergency due to surging infections.

The average number of new daily cases globally jumped by 10 percent over the last week, according to an AFP tally, largely due to the highly contagious Delta variant, after slowing between late April and mid-June.

While the Asia-Pacific region has been hard-hit — with Vietnam and Japan recording a 61 percent jump in daily cases — Western countries are also facing surges, with the US and Canada seeing 57 percent more infections.

The World Health Organization has warned that the Delta variant, first detected in India, could unleash more Covid-19 outbreaks in a high-risk zone stretching from Morocco to Pakistan where vaccination rates are low

In China, a cluster of infections in Nanjing city linked to airport workers who cleaned a plane from Russia earlier this month had reached Beijing and five provinces by Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been locked down in Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital, while 41,000 came under stay-at-home orders in Beijing’s Changping district.

– Manila misery –

The Philippines, which has closed its airport to most international travel for months, will send more than 13 million people in the national capital region back into lockdown next week because of a Delta-linked increase, the government said Friday.

And Japan extended a virus state of emergency in Tokyo and expanded the measure to four more regions after new cases topped 10,000 for the first time on Thursday.

Japan’s case figures remain small compared to many places, with 3,300 new infections reported in Tokyo on Friday, but experts say the medical system is already at risk of being overwhelmed with only around a quarter of the population fully vaccinated.

The record cases come as Tokyo hosts the Olympics, where organisers on Friday reported 27 new cases related to the event — the highest daily figure yet.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Japan and the International Olympic Committee had done “their best to minimise risk, because nobody should expect zero risk”.

Meanwhile, Australia said on Friday it would not reopen borders and end lockdowns until vaccination rates reach 80 percent.

– Nastier variants –

In Germany, the government tightened restrictions on unvaccinated people entering the country, “regardless of whether they come by plane, car or train”, Health Minister Jens Spahn said Friday.

Governments of other wealthy countries have amplified efforts to get more of their populations to accept jabs.

Bolstering their case, new research shows that relaxing anti-virus measures before an entire population is vaccinated greatly enhances the risk of more resistant variants evolving. 

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Europeans have received at least one vaccine dose, the authors said their study showed the need to maintain non-vaccination measures until everyone is fully jabbed. 

The report by Austria’s Institute of Science and Technology showed that the highest risk of resistant strains emerging came when a large proportion of the population was vaccinated, but not large enough to ensure herd immunity.

Still, tightening measures risks snuffing out the eurozone’s nascent economic recovery.

The zone’s economy expanded by two percent in the second quarter, with some of the biggest rebounds in Italy and Spain, the countries worst hit by the first wave of the pandemic. Portugal posted a stellar 4.9 percent growth.

– Kenya curfew –

More than four billion doses of vaccines have now been administered across the globe, according to AFP data.

High-income countries gave out an average of 97 shots per 100 inhabitants compared with just 1.6 in low-income nations.

Kenya, where only 1.7 million shots have been given to the population of 52 million, on Friday extended a nighttime curfew and banned public gatherings after a surge in Delta cases.

Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe said hospitals were becoming overwhelmed.

“If you fall sick today, you will not get a hospital bed,” Kagwe said. “I am not scaring you, I am telling you the reality.”

To help fill the vaccine gap, rich countries are stepping up donations to the less wealthy.

The US on Friday sent three million Moderna doses to Uzbekistan, following a delivery of 1.5 million Moderna jabs to neighbouring Tajikistan earlier this week.

Even while many of the world’s poorest are yet to receive a first dose, Israel on Friday began rolling out a third booster dose for over-60s.

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Turkish firefighters made progress Friday containing deadly wildfires that forced the evacuation of entire villages and Mediterranean coast hotels already reeling from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

Blazes that erupted Wednesday to the east of tourist hotspot Antalya on Turkey’s scenic southern shores have officially killed four people and injured nearly 200.

But they have also threatened to scare off tourists who had only just started to return to Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped would be a boon for the developing country’s fragile economy.

The soaring flames turned summer skies blood orange over luxury hotels and villages dotting rolling hills that have been parched by another dry summer.

They had spread by Thursday evening to the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s western coast and spanned a region stretching 300 kilometres (185 miles) and covering most of the country’s top resorts.

Local resident Gulen Dede Tekin came to a five-star hotel in the coastal city of Marmaris on Thursday morning and at first thought nothing of the fires raging beyond the hills.

“In the evening, we realised how serious things were when they cut off the electricity and the ventilation at the hotel,” Tekin told AFP.

“This morning, we woke up to a rain of ash.”

– Arrests –

The government said 57 of the 71 fires had been contained or entirely put out by Friday.

“The situation is improving in all active fires,” Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli told reporters during a visit to the affected region.

But he also confirmed that Turkey no longer had a firefighting plane in its inventory and was only in the process of acquiring one under orders from Erdogan.

Russia has sent three giant aircraft and Turkey’s historic rival Greece — at odds with its neighbour on a wide range of disputes — said it was “ready to help”.

Turkey’s regional allies Ukraine and Azerbaijan also announced they were sending planes and other help.

The blow the fires threaten to deal to Turkey’s tourism-dependent economy and the admission that the country had no firefighting planes has put Erdogan’s government under pressure.

His office has officially blamed arson and unspecified “attacks”.

Erdogan told reporters after Friday prayer that his opponents were trying to score political points by questioning the government’s preparedness for the crisis.

“While our country is burning, they are playing politics,” he said.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of five people on suspicion of starting one of the blazes.

“Who started these fires,” he asked in televised comments during a visit to Manavgat. “We, as well as our citizens, have our suspicions.”

But the blame on arsonists — which government media has linked to banned Kurdish militants waging an insurgency against the Turkish state — has created a febrile atmosphere in some of the most badly damaged regions.

Turkish television showed an angry mob of a few dozen men being restrained by the police on Thursday night as they tried to attack two locals they held responsible for blazes in the town of Manavgat.

The private DHA news agency said two children — one eight and the other 10 years old — had also admitted under questioning in the presence of their teacher that they accidentally started one of the fires by burning their books.

Scientists working to bring back the functionally extinct northern white rhino announced they had successfully created three additional embryos of the subspecies, bringing the total to 12. 

One of world’s two remaining live specimens — female Fatu who lives with her mother Najin on Kenya’s 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy — provided the eggs for the project, while the sperm used was from two different deceased males. 

Scientific consortium Biorescue described in a press release late Thursday how the eggs were collected from Fatu in early July before being airlifted to a lab in Italy for fertilisation, development and preservation.

Neither Fatu nor Najin is capable of carrying a calf to term, so surrogate mothers for the embryos will be selected from a population of southern white rhinos.

Ol Pejeta director Richard Vigne told AFP on Friday that he believed in the project’s chances of success, while emphasising the high stakes.

“No one is going to pretend that this is going to be easy,” he said.

“We are doing things which are cutting-edge from a scientific perspective and we a dealing with genetics, with the two last northen white rhinos left on the planet,” said Vigne. 

“There are many, many things that could go wrong,” he said. “I think everybody understand the challenges that remain.”

Since 2019 Biorescue has collected 80 eggs from Najin and Fatu, but the 12 viable embryos all hail from the younger rhino.

The project is a multi-national effort with scientists from the German Leibniz Institute backing the Kenya Wildlife Service and Ol Pejeta, and the Italian Avantea laboratory providing fertilisation support.

Kenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala welcomed the news.

“It is very encouraging to note that the project has continued to make good progress in its ambitious attempts to save an iconic species from extinction,” he said in the press release.

Rhinoceroses have very few natural predators but their numbers have been decimated by poaching since the 1970s.

Modern rhinos have roamed the planet for 26 million years and it is estimated that more than a million still lived in the wild in the middle of the 19th century.

Scientists in Sardinia are hoping a thousand-year-old olive tree nearly destroyed by recent fires can be saved, mobilising volunteers to stand guard around the remains of the ancient tree.

“The Patriarch”, as it is known in the west of the Italian island region, was a massive wild olive tree with a trunk about 10 metres (33 feet) around and 16.5 metres (54 feet) high.

But it was nearly completely devoured by flames that ripped through the area last weekend when over 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) burned in the worst fires seen on the island in decades. 

The blaze destroyed homes and killed livestock as it ravaged thousands of Sardinia’s olive trees, along with juniper groves, cork trees, oaks and pines. 

After an examination of the tree earlier this week, experts said they hoped there might be signs of life in the root system and the side of the trunk that was spared the worst burns. 

The community of Cuglieri has organised volunteers to stand guard to prevent people from walking on its fragile root systems on the advice of experts, including botanist Gianluigi Bacchetta of Cagliari University.

“Keeping this tree alive means keeping everyone’s hope alive,” he said of the specimen, which registered on Italy’s list of monumental trees.

Bacchetta said after an examination of the area Wednesday that water added to the soil around the tree had helped lower its temperature.

Another scientist who surveyed the damage, University of Sassari botany professor Ignazio Camarda, wrote on Facebook that all that was left of the mighty tree were “miserable remains that lie on the ground and a few blackened stumps, as well as a section of the base”.

But he also noted “a glimmer of life from which a new sapling could emerge”. 

Firefighters were still on the ground in western Sardinia Friday, extinguishing new outbreaks and clearing areas, even as scorching temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and winds mean that the risk of fire remains high. 

China has opened the doors on what it bills as the world’s largest planetarium, a slick new Shanghai facility showcasing the nation’s recent extra-terrestrial exploits while notably downplaying those of space pioneers like the United States.

Beijing has spent much of this year bombarding the public with news of the country’s rising space prowess, part of a larger propaganda blitz highlighting Chinese achievements under the ruling Communists to mark the party’s 100th anniversary.

In recent months, China has landed a spacecraft on Mars, set loose a rover to explore it, and sent the first astronauts to a Chinese space station.

Scale-model replicas of spaceships from these and other missions figure prominently at the new Shanghai Planetarium, along with paeons to China’s rapid scientific advancement, and clips of President Xi Jinping addressing the nation’s taikonauts.

“This year we had several astronauts go to space, which is a source of pride for China,” said a woman surnamed Zhou, who brought her young daughter.

“I wanted my child to have some knowledge about space from a young age.”

By contrast, the pioneering space-travel efforts of the then-Soviet Union and China’s geopolitical rival the United States get only passing mention, if at all.

The 1969 US landing on the moon is referenced only briefly in a small, dryly-worded display, and a section entitled “Space Heroes” lists only two Russian cosmonauts along with Yang Liwei, the first person sent into space by the Chinese space programme.

The planetarium features working telescopes and a range of interactive exhibits on the origins of the universe and history of astronomy, including Chinese-speaking versions of Copernicus and other luminaries explaining their theoretical breakthroughs.

The building was designed by New York’s Ennead Architects and resembles a union of swirling galaxies.

It covers 38,000 square metres, (420,000-square feet) of floor space — roughly equal to five football fields — and cost 600 million yuan ($93 million), according to Chinese media.

A reactor at a nuclear plant in southern China has been shut down because it is damaged, the operator said Friday, but it insisted there were no major safety issues.

Chinese authorities last month blamed minor fuel rod damage for a build-up of radioactive gases at the Taishan plant in Guangdong province, describing it as a “common phenomenon” with no need for concern.

French nuclear firm Framatome, which helps operate the plant, last month reported a “performance issue” which caused the US government to look into the possibility of a leak.

“After lengthy conversations between French and Chinese technical personnel, Taishan Nuclear Power Plant… decided to shut down Unit 1 for maintenance,” China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) said Friday in an online statement. 

The company added that “a small amount of fuel damage” had occurred.

CGN said both reactors at the plant have “maintained safe and stable operations throughout” and that the faulty unit is “completely under control”.

Engineers will now “find the cause of fuel damage and replace the damaged fuel”, the statement added.

There are more than 60,000 fuel rods in the reactor and the proportion of damaged rods is “less than 0.01 percent”, China’s environment ministry and nuclear regulator previously said.

They called the damage “inevitable” due to factors including fuel manufacturing and transportation.

French energy giant EDF — the majority owner of Framatome — also previously blamed the build-up of radioactive gases on deteriorating coating on some uranium fuel rods.

EDF said it was first informed about the fuel rod problem in October, but only learned about the gas build-up in mid-June.

Official environmental monitoring data shows a slight increase in radiation near Taishan compared with other nuclear plants in China, but experts say this remains within the normal range of environmental radiation levels in Guangdong.

– ‘Permanently monitored’ –

The shutdown follows the French firm stating last week that it would have shut down a nuclear reactor in France if it suffered problems similar to those reported at the Taishan plant.

“Based on analyses, EDF operating procedures for its French plant would have led it to shut down the reactor to fully understand the problem and halt its development,” the company said in a statement.

However, they noted that the situation was “not urgent”. 

The radioactivity levels in the water of the reactor’s primary circuit “remain below regulator levels in place for Taishan, which are in line with international standards”, they said.

But based on earlier data provided by Chinese officials, the deterioration of the structural integrity of some fuel rods “appears to be continuing, and is being permanently monitored”, the firm added.

The problem is the latest blow to the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) design, which is being used to build power plants in France, Britain and Finland that have racked up delays and billions of euros in cost overruns.

Abrupt disruptions to Earth’s climate thousands of years ago that caused extreme sea-level rise and mass ice cap melting can serve as an early warning system for today’s planetary tipping points, according to new research. 

Climate tipping points — which are irrevocable over centuries or longer — are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur.

They include looming catastrophes such as the melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which contain enough frozen water to lift oceans more than a dozen metres (40 feet). 

But they are notoriously hard to anticipate, given the relatively small or incremental changes in variables such as atmospheric carbon concentrations that trigger them.

In a review of past climate events published in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international team of scientists examined two major instabilities in the Earth system, caused by changes in ice, oceans, and rainfall patterns.

They looked at the conditions that led to the Bolling-Allerod warming event nearly 15,000 years ago, which saw surface air temperatures soar up to 14 degrees Celsius over Greenland. 

The team also studied the end of the so-called African humid period around 6,000-5,000 years ago, which led to regional changes in ecosystems and pre-historic human societies. 

They found that various past climate systems, such as ocean dynamics and rainfall patterns, tended to slow as they reached a tipping point, after which they failed to recover from perturbations. 

“Earth’s recent past shows us how abrupt changes in the Earth system triggered cascading impacts on ecosystems and human societies, as they struggled to adapt,” said Tim Lenton, review co-author and director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. 

“We face the risk of cascading tipping points again now — but this time it is of our own making, and the impacts will be global,” said Lenton. 

“Faced with that risk, we could do with some early warning systems.” 

– Compound changes –

While current atmospheric CO2 levels of around 412 parts per million have some precedent — at least 800,000 years ago — the rate of CO2 accumulation does not. 

Scientists are divided on when or if most tipping points will be triggered, but many believe effects such as ice-sheet melt is already “locked-in” due to carbon pollution. 

Authors of the review, which was published online Thursday, said it showed evidence that the impacts of past abrupt changes to the Earth system combined to create planet-wide disruption. 

Changes to ice levels and ocean currents, for example, at the start of the Bolling-Allerod warming lead to cascading impacts such as low ocean oxygen levels, vegetation cover, and atmospheric CO2 and methane levels.

“It sounds counterintuitive, but to foresee the future we may need to look into the past,” said lead author Victor Brovkin from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. 

“The chance to detect abrupt changes and tipping points — where small changes lead to big impacts — increases with the length of observations,” he said. 

“This is why analysis of abrupt changes and their cascades recorded in geological archives is of enormous importance.”

Scientists working to bring back the functionally extinct northern white rhino announced they had successfully created three additional embryos of the subspecies, bringing the total to 12. 

One of world’s two remaining live specimens — female Fatu who lives with her mother Najin on Kenya’s 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy — provided the eggs for the project, while the sperm used was from two different deceased males. 

Scientific consortium Biorescue described in a press release late Thursday how the eggs were collected from Fatu in early July before being airlifted to a lab in Italy for fertilisation, development and preservation.

Neither Fatu nor Najin is capable of carrying a calf to term, so surrogate mothers for the embryos will be selected from a population of southern white rhinos.

Ol Pejeta director Richard Vigne told AFP on Friday that he believed in the project’s chances of success, while emphasising the high stakes.

“No one is going to pretend that this is going to be easy,” he said.

“We are doing things which are cutting-edge from a scientific perspective and we a dealing with genetics, with the two last northen white rhinos left on the planet,” said Vigne. 

“There are many, many things that could go wrong,” he said. “I think everybody understand the challenges that remain.”

Since 2019 Biorescue has collected 80 eggs from Najin and Fatu, but the 12 viable embryos all hail from the younger rhino.

The project is a multi-national effort with scientists from the German Leibniz Institute backing the Kenya Wildlife Service and Ol Pejeta, and the Italian Avantea laboratory providing fertilisation support.

Kenyan Tourism Minister Najib Balala welcomed the news.

“It is very encouraging to note that the project has continued to make good progress in its ambitious attempts to save an iconic species from extinction,” he said in the press release.

Rhinoceroses have very few natural predators but their numbers have been decimated by poaching since the 1970s.

Modern rhinos have roamed the planet for 26 million years and it is estimated that more than a million still lived in the wild in the middle of the 19th century.

Turkish firefighters made progress Friday containing deadly wildfires that forced the evacuation of entire villages and Mediterranean coast hotels already reeling from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

Blazes that erupted Wednesday to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya on Turkey’s scenic southern coast have officially killed four people and injured nearly 200.

But they have also threatened to scare off tourists who had only just started to return to Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped would be a boon for the developing country’s fragile economy.

The soaring flames turned summer skies dark orange over five-star hotels and villages dotting rolling hills that have been parched by another dry summer.

They had spread by Thursday evening to the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s western coast and spanned a region stretching 300 kilometres (185 miles) and covering most of the country’s top resorts.

Local resident Gulen Dede Tekin came with his family to a five-star hotel in the Mediterranean coast city of Manavgat on Thursday morning and at first thought nothing of the fires raging beyond the hills.

“In the evening, we realised how serious things were when they cut off the electricity and the ventilation at the hotel,” Tekin told AFP.

“This morning, we woke up to a rain of ash.”

– Arrests –

The government said 57 of the 71 fires had been contained or entirely put out by Friday morning.

“The situation is improving in all active fires,” Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli told reporters during a visit to the affected region.

But he also confirmed that Turkey no longer had a firefighting plane in its inventory and was only in the process acquiring one under orders from Erdogan.

Russia has sent three giant aircraft and Turkey’s historic rival Greece — at odds with its neighbour on a wide range of regional disputes — said it was “read to help”.

The blow the fires threaten to deal to Turkey’s tourism-dependent economy and the admission that the country had no firefighting planes has put Erdogan’s government under pressure.

His office has officially blamed the fires on arson and unspecified “attacks”.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of five people on suspicions of starting one of the blazes in the southern city of Osmaniye.

“Who started these fires,” he asked in televised comments. “We, as well as our citizens, have our suspicions.”

The private DHA news agency said two children — one eight and the other 10 years old — admitted under questioning in the presence of their teacher that they accidentally started one of the fires by burning their books.

Turkish firefighters made progress Friday containing deadly wildfires that forced the evacuation of entire villages and Mediterranean coast hotels already reeling from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

Blazes that erupted Wednesday to the east of the tourist hotspot Antalya on Turkey’s scenic southern coast have officially killed four people and injured nearly 200.

But they have also threatened to scare off tourists who had only just started to return to Turkey in what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had hoped would be a boon for the developing country’s fragile economy.

The soaring flames turned summer skies dark orange over five-star hotels and villages dotting rolling hills that have been parched by another dry summer.

They had spread by Thursday evening to the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s western coast and spanned a region stretching 300 kilometres (185 miles) and covering most of the country’s top resorts.

Local resident Gulen Dede Tekin came with his family to a five-star hotel in the Mediterranean coast city of Manavgat on Thursday morning and at first thought nothing of the fires raging beyond the hills.

“In the evening, we realised how serious things were when they cut off the electricity and the ventilation at the hotel,” Tekin told AFP.

“This morning, we woke up to a rain of ash.”

– Arrests –

The government said 57 of the 71 fires had been contained or entirely put out by Friday morning.

“The situation is improving in all active fires,” Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli told reporters during a visit to the affected region.

But he also confirmed that Turkey no longer had a firefighting plane in its inventory and was only in the process acquiring one under orders from Erdogan.

Russia has sent three giant aircraft and Turkey’s historic rival Greece — at odds with its neighbour on a wide range of regional disputes — said it was “read to help”.

The blow the fires threaten to deal to Turkey’s tourism-dependent economy and the admission that the country had no firefighting planes has put Erdogan’s government under pressure.

His office has officially blamed the fires on arson and unspecified “attacks”.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced the arrest of five people on suspicions of starting one of the blazes in the southern city of Osmaniye.

“Who started these fires,” he asked in televised comments. “We, as well as our citizens, have our suspicions.”

The private DHA news agency said two children — one eight and the other 10 years old — admitted under questioning in the presence of their teacher that they accidentally started one of the fires by burning their books.