Efforts are taking place around the world to vaccinate as many people as possible to protect against COVID-19.  Officials are tracking the safety and effectiveness of those efforts, but some medical experts say they aren’t getting the information they need on Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. Anush Avetisyan has the story.Camera: David Gogokhia      
Produced by:  Henry Hernandez  
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Bangladesh starts its most severe lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic Thursday with people allowed to leave their homes only in emergencies and soldiers set to patrol the streets to enforce it, as the nation faces a deadly resurgence of COVID-19 infections.The government announced the new measures as the coronavirus surged in recent days, particularly in border areas. Health officials say the national COVID-19 positivity rate is now over 20%. Sunday saw a record number of deaths, with 119, followed by a record number of new cases — 8,364 — set Monday.Along with home confinement, the restrictions include the closure of public transport networks, sending thousands rushing to ferry and bus stations over the last two days to make it home before Thursday.  The Guardian newspaper reports Cabinet secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam told reporters troops would be deployed after the lockdown takes effect. He said, “If anyone ignores their orders, legal action will be [taken against] them.”Bangladesh closed its borders when the pandemic hit last year. But many people travelled to and from India illegally anyway, bringing with them new infections. And while India’s situation has stabilized, in Bangladesh, it has escalated.Health officials are concerned the Eid al-adha Muslim holiday at the end of July will only exacerbate the situation. Bangladesh Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research official Dr. ASM Alamgir said that if the Delta variant of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is not already in Bangladesh, it will be by then.  He said that while new infections are currently concentrated around border areas, during Eid millions of people go from the capital, Dhaka, where infections are also on the rise, to village areas.Officials expect Thursday’s lockdown to last at least a week.  Some information in this report is from The Associated Press.
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Another major Australian city is under a coronavirus lockdown as local officials clash with the federal government over which age group should be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. The city of Alice Springs entered a three-day lockdown effective Tuesday after an infected gold mine worker spent several hours in the city’s airport before flying from the Northern Territory state to his home in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia state, where he tested positive after his arrival.   A transit worker is seen wearing a face mask inside a mostly empty city center train station during a lockdown in Sydney, Australia, June 29, 2021.Alice Springs joins Sydney, Darwin, Brisbane and Perth on the list of cities who have imposed lockdowns to blunt the spread of the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19.  The latest outbreak has been traced to a Sydney airport limousine driver who had been transporting international air crews.  Australia has been largely successful in containing the spread of COVID-19 due to aggressive lockdown efforts, posting just 30,602 total confirmed cases and 910 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.  But it has proved vulnerable to fresh outbreaks due to a slow rollout of its vaccination campaign and confusing requirements involving the two-shot AstraZeneca vaccine, which is the dominant vaccine in its stockpile.  FILE – People wait in line outside a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccination center at Sydney Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia, June 23, 2021.Health officials had limited AstraZeneca to all adults under 60 years old due to concerns of a rare blood clotting condition that has been blamed for the deaths of two people.  But Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Monday that AstraZeneca will be available for adults under 40 years of age who request it.  Queensland state Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young pushed back against the prime minister’s announcement Tuesday, saying it was not worth the risk for healthy young Australians, even though the chances of developing the blood clotting condition are rare.  “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got COVID, probably wouldn’t die,” Young said.Western Australian state Premier Mark McGowan also openly opposed Morrison’s announcement, citing advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunization, the government’s vaccine advisor, to recommend only the two-shot Pfizer vaccine for adults younger than 60 years old.  Pfizer is in far less supply in Australia than the AstraZeneca shot.  Delta variantThe Indonesian Red Cross is warning the delta variant has caused a surge of new infections that is pushing the nation towards “the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe.” A health worker gives a jab of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine to a woman during a vaccination campaign at the Adam Malik Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, June 30, 2021.Indonesia has reported more than 20,000 new COVID-19 infections in recent days, including a record 21,342 new cases on Sunday, including more than 400 new deaths. The Red Cross says hospitals in the capital, Jakarta, are more than 90 percent occupied, while less than 5% of its 270 million citizens have been vaccinated.   Russia reported a single-day record 669 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, breaking the previous record set just the day before of 643 deaths. The fast-moving spread of the delta variant of COVID-19, which was first detected in India and has now been identified in more than 80 countries, has prompted the World Health Organization to urge people to continue wearing masks and taking other precautions, even if they are fully vaccinated. Officials in Los Angeles County, California said Monday they are strongly recommending residents wear a mask indoors because of the delta variant.  The COVID-19 pandemic has sickened nearly 182 million people around the globe since it was first detected in late 2019 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, including nearly 4 million deaths.  A report issued Wednesday by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the U.N. World Tourism Organization said the pandemic caused as much as $2.4 trillion in losses to international tourism and other related sectors in 2020, a decline of 73% from pre-pandemic levels the year before.   The report predicts roughly the same amount of losses for 2021, with global tourism to fall anywhere between 63% and 75%, resulting in losses between $1.7-2.4 trillion dollars.     
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Last week, a 12-story apartment building suddenly collapsed in a Miami, Florida, suburb, killing at least 11 people and leaving some 150 others missing. While the cause of the disaster is unclear, rising sea levels that flood parts of the Miami area with salt water and regularly left standing water in the underground garage of the Champlain Towers suggest that climate change played a role.   Meanwhile, more than 4,000 kilometers away, residents of Seattle, Portland, and the rest of the U.S. Pacific Northwest endured a fourth consecutive day of a record-setting heatwave.While Portland reached a record temperature of over 110 degrees, June 27, 2021 people gathered at Salmon Street Springs water fountain in Portland to cool off. (Mark Graves/The Oregonian via AP)Roadways are buckling as asphalt melts and separates from the ground, making them impassable. Rubberized coatings that protect electrical wiring on mass transit systems are melting, forcing authorities to shut them down until repairs are made.   In the United States, people generally take it for granted that buildings will maintain their structural integrity, roadways don’t turn to molten sludge and mass transit systems keep functioning. For many, recent events may shake those assumptions.   Nobody is ready It is becoming increasingly clear that how Americans expect society to function within different ecosystems is changing — sometimes dramatically. In the Northeastern U.S., what used to be considered “100-yearFILE – Residents of the Crescent at Lakeshore apartment complex are rescued by Homewood Fire and Rescue as severe weather produced torrential rainfall flooding several apartment buildings, May 4, 2021 in Homewood, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)Is the nation adequately prepared for precipitous and increasingly calamitous change? People who make it their business to peer into the future say, unequivocally, America and humanity more broadly are not.  “Nobody is, probably, least of all the U.S. because of prevalent mindsets,” said Richard Hames, executive director of the Centre for the Future, a global organization that “identifies and redesigns life-critical system that are collapsing under the weight of a population now exceeding seven billion people, that are no longer relevant, or that do not yet exist but will be needed for a future we cannot yet comprehend.”   A dystopian vision? The picture Hames paints of humanity’s near-future is not a pretty one.   “Scientists are now saying that things are beyond the worst-case scenario, we’re heading fast to irreversible tipping points, simply because of everything that’s locked in already,” he told VOA.   FILE – Clouds gather but produce no rain as cracks are seen in the dried up municipal dam in drought-stricken Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, Nov. 14, 2019.In terms of the climate crisis, Hames said, “there is nothing in human experience” on which we can draw. The entire Holocene Period — the age of the earth in which human civilization arose and flourished — has been marked by a climate that existed in a stable state of conditions conducive to human thriving.   “Now we’re in a state of exponential change, which, again, nobody really gets, nobody understands. And know that there’s nothing in human experience to [help us] cope with what we’re in for.”   Is my home safe? If humanity is to cope with exponentially increasing effects of climate change, some experts say the first step will have to be truly internalizing the seriousness of the species’ perilous position. That, for example, tragedies like the South Florida building collapse might accelerate.   Bruce Turkel, an author, speaker, and founder of The Strategic Forum in South Florida, was born and raised in Miami. As someone who makes a living helping businesses look into the future of their brands, he says the Champlain Towers collapse is the sort of event that makes people challenge long-held assumptions.   The eastern part of Miami Beach, he notes, is called the “concrete canyon” by locals for the high-rise apartment buildings that line its roads for kilometers of beachfront property.   FILE – Clouds loom over the Miami skyline May 14, 2020, the early signs of what would become Tropical Storm Arthur.“Imagine how many buildings there are; multiply that by the number of apartments; multiply that by the average occupancy of each apartment,” Turkel said. “How many people now are wondering, ‘Oh, my God, is my building safe?’”   Virtually all of those people knew, on some level, that climate change was a problem, he said. But far fewer of them perceived it as an existential threat on a personal level.   “If, in fact, climate change affected this building’s integrity, we didn’t have any perception or understanding that that was an issue,” he said. “What are the unexpected consequences? And how do we deal with those? That’s the big, social, and also socio-economic and geopolitical issue. As people start to say, ‘Oh, my goodness, I never thought of that. Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know that would happen.’ Where does that lead us?”   Change is coming, but from where? While few experts doubt that widespread change as a result of the climate crisis is coming, how it will be received — with chaotic reaction or concerted activities to mitigate its impact — is currently unknowable.   “If you look at the history of human change, it happens for two reasons,” said Turkel. Change, he added, comes either as a reaction to “a cataclysmic event that causes all of us to move either because of lack of food, lack of water, lack of something” or as a response to leadership that arises, typically, from outside established systems.   The latter is preferable to the former, and Hames of the Centre for the Future agrees that if humanity is to be led out of the current crisis, it won’t be by the planet’s current generation of leaders.   “Incumbent leaders don’t have the courage or the impulse to do what needs to be done,” he said. “Their interest is to go back to what was their ‘normality’ — not realizing that a lot of the problems we’re facing were caused by that so-called normality.”   Cause for hope   Hames said that while many people see his writing and public speaking as a reflection of a dystopian vision of the planet’s future, he’s convinced that people, by taking certain concrete actions, can preserve a future for humanity on this planet. “They can live more simply: we don’t need to buy as much stuff as is produced and then throw it away,” he said. “We can have more plant-based nutritional food, rather than eat so much meat. In terms of farms, we can move away from industrial agriculture to more organic, ecologically sensible agriculture, so that we’re not adding to desertification. The little things that we can do will make an awful lot of difference.”   But, he added, the leadership needed to guide those steps are more likely to come from those with the most at stake in that future — today’s youth.   “I’ve got nine kids and 16 grandchildren,” Hames said. “I’m both optimistic and pessimistic. I’m pessimistic that we’re heading so fast towards stepping over planetary boundaries … we’re like lemmings to the cliff. It’s just extraordinary. … My optimism is in human ingenuity and the resolve of youth in particular, who don’t want to inherit the legacy we’re busy creating for them.”   A change of outlook   Hames said that if and when change comes, it will involve an overhauling of the “occidental” worldview driven by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the culture of individualism prevalent in the West, in favor of a more collective understanding of the costs and benefits of modern life.   FILE – Protesters demanding action on climate change gather at Te Ngakau Civic Square in Wellington, New Zealand, March 15, 2019.“I believe the brunt of the leadership we need will come from the grassroots, it will come initially from activism and protest, but then it will move to much more positive ways of changing lives locally, and it starts at the local level,” he said.   Again, he added, he expects the prime movers in this struggle to be today’s youth.   “They want to know that they will have a viable life on this planet, not have to leave what is essentially a terrestrial form of life to go off to the moon or Mars or some crazy idea like that,” he said. “They want the quality of life here that, at the moment, is being taken from them.” 
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U.S. President Joe Biden is holding talks Wednesday with a group of governors from eight Western states about wildfire preparedness as much of the region deals with drought. Biden and other administration officials will be speaking from the White House with the governors joining by video. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week the meeting will “focus on how the federal government can improve wildfire preparedness and response efforts, protect public safety, and deliver assistance to our people in times of urgent need.” Those attending include Democratic governors Gavin Newsom of California, Jared Polis of Colorado, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Kate Brown of Oregon and Jay Inslee of Washington, along with Republican governors Spencer Cox of Utah and Mark Gordon of Wyoming. Not among the group are three other Republican governors from the region: Doug Ducey of Arizona, Brad Little of Idaho and Greg Gianforte of Montana. Gianforte tweeted Friday that he was “disappointed to learn in news stories” that the president “didn’t offer a seat at the table to Montana and other states facing a severe wildfire season.” The National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates the mobilization of resources to battle wildfires in the United States, has warned that many Western states are facing a greater than usual likelihood that significant wildfires will occur in the next few months. The U.S. Drought Monitor reports wide areas of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah are experiencing extreme or exceptional drought. 
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Cities in the Pacific Northwest of North America reported power outages Tuesday, both from failures of utility companies and rolling blackouts due to heavy power demand. Seattle and Portland temperatures were expected to fall Tuesday, below Monday’s record highs, but inland, the city of Spokane, Washington, continued to record high temperatures and experience rolling blackouts in the city. Lytton, British Columbia, set Canada’s all-time high temperature Sunday with 46.6 degrees Celsius, only to see it broken less than 24 hours later, hitting 47.9 C Monday. Officials said Tuesday that several deaths in Portland and Seattle were tied to the extreme heat. In Vancouver, British Columbia, first responders have said that as many as two dozen deaths may be attributed to the high temperatures. On Tuesday, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization called the heat wave hitting the Pacific Northwest corner of the United States “exceptional and dangerous” and says it could last at least another five days.Guests at Sunriver resort near Bend, Oregon line up to get into the pool on June 29, 2021 as temperatures were predicted to hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit.Speaking to reporters from Geneva, a WMO spokeswoman said while records have fallen in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, western Canada has seen extreme heat as well. The official said the temperatures for this time of year and location are shocking. “It’s in the province of British Columbia, it’s to the Rocky Mountains, the Glacier National Park, and yet we’re seeing temperatures which are more typical of the Middle East or North Africa.” In an area used to temperatures 20 to 30 degrees cooler, the WMO said, the extreme heat poses major health threats to residents as well as agriculture and the environment. The WMO said the extreme heat is caused by “an atmospheric blocking pattern,” which has led to a “heat dome” — a large area of high pressure trapped by low pressure on either side. The organization said the temperatures would likely peak early this week on the coast and by the middle of the week in the interior of British Columbia. Afterward, the baking heat is expected to move east toward Alberta. On its Twitter account late Monday, the U.S. National Weather Service in Portland, Oregon, reported cooler air was already in the region along the coastline. In a tweet Sunday, the Oregon Climate Service said that the climate system is no longer in a balanced state, and that such heat events “are becoming more frequent and intense, a trend projected to continue.” This report includes information from The Associated Press.
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Florida’s governor has announced the start of Python Challenge in Everglades National Park. The python removal will start July 9 and last for 10 days. The Everglades ecosystem suffers from the overpopulation of Burmese pythons — a nonnative species for South Florida that kill native wildlife. The challenge is meant to protect the native wildlife and bring the local community together. Liliya Anisimova has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.Camera: Liliya Anisimova  Produced by: Anna Rice, Rob Raffaele 
 
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A unmanned NASA resupply ship, docked at the International Space Station (ISS) since February, departed Tuesday on one last mission to deploy satellites before burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.The Cygnus supply ship, built by the Northrop Grumman aerospace company, is named the S.S. Katherine Johnson, after the African American NASA mathematician whose work was made famous in the movie Hidden Figures. Her calculations contributed to the February 20, 1962 mission in which John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.After departure from the space station, the Katherine Johnson was to remain in Earth orbit to deploy five cube satellites, including one designed to study the Earth’s ionosphere, a layer of electrons in its upper atmosphere, along with an educational satellite from Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi.Thursday evening, the supply ship fires its engines one last time and re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up. The ship is filled with several tons of waste from the orbiting outpost.Another supply ship bound for the ISS is scheduled to be launched later Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.   
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