USA

NEW YORK: Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.
And scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that shows hints of accelerating.
Two U.S. science agencies – NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – and a private measuring group released their calculations for last year’s global temperature on Thursday, and all said it wasn’t far behind ultra-hot 2016 and 2020.
Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself, ahead of 2018.
Scientists say a La Nina – natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface – dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.
Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.
“So it’s not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we’ll see another one of those” records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. “It’s the long-term trend, and it’s an indomitable march upward.”
Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA’s temperature team, said “the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.
The other 2021 measurements came from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by Copernicus Climate Change Service i n Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it’s hard to know for sure.
“I think you can see the acceleration, but whether it’s statistically robust is not quite clear,” Schmidt said in an interview. “If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them.”
The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA’s then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.
Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.
The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.
“Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations we rely upon for roughly 25% of our protein intake globally, is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive … sea level rise if we don’t act,” said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.
The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet – more than 5 billion people under age 45 – have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.
North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn’t part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, “I’ve only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn’t have to be this way.”

WASHINGTON: The Food and Drug Administration is planning to broaden eligibility for coronavirus vaccine booster shots, allowing 12- to 15-year-olds to receive third doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine, according to people familiar with the agency’s deliberations.
Regulators are also expected to authorize an extra shot of Pfizer’s vaccine for both adolescents and adults five months after receiving a second dose, instead of the current interval of six months.Younger children, ages 5 to 11, with immune deficiencies would be able to receive booster shots as well.
The decision to expand the use of the shots would come just as schools prepare to open after the holiday break and as governments around the world try to respond to the fast-spreading omicron variant. Israel on Thursday approved a fourth dose of vaccine for people with weakened immune systems, and Britain’s National Health Service said its hospitals would erect field wards to help deal with the surge in coronavirus cases.
Several US states hit their all-time case records for coronavirus cases this week, disrupting the lives of millions of Americans. New York Mayor-elect Eric Adams vowed to keep the city’s vaccine mandate for private-sector employees in place, and the CDC issued a blunt warning to potential travelers: “Avoid cruise travel regardless of vaccination status.”
Health officials are trying to encourage more Americans to get a booster shot — just over one-third of fully vaccinated adults have received one — and warn that the unvaccinated face the greatest risk of severe illness and death from omicron.
“Our CDC guidance has been very clear that people should get their boost when they are eligible,” Dr. Rochelle PWalensky, the CDC director, told reporters this week. “That is both for — because of waning immunity and because we need more protection against Omicron.”
Walensky said Wednesday that even as daily case counts had climbed by roughly 60% in the past week, hospitalizations and deaths were still relatively low, a suggestion that omicron might be less lethal. She and Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, cited international research hinting at the same conclusion.
Studies have shown that while two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have provided strong protection as the delta variant swarmed the country, omicron can evade the defenses of fully vaccinated people, heightening fears about the risks for young people.
More than 70% of people 12 and older in the United States are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Around one-quarter of children between 5 and 11 have received at least one dose. Children under 5 are still not eligible for a vaccine.
The latest surge has caused a concerning rise in hospitalizations among children. But early data suggests that omicron appears to be causing milder illness for children, similar to findings for adults. And hospital officials and physicians have said that nearly all children hospitalized with Covid-19 were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.
Children can better withstand coronavirus infections but in rare instances can still become very sick and even die. At least 1.8 million adolescents between 12 and 15 years old have tested positive for the virus, according to the CDC.
A series of studies published Thursday by the agency underscored how important vaccination can be for children and adolescents. In one study spanning July through early December that examined hundreds of adolescents in Arizona, researchers said two doses of the vaccine reduced the risk of infection by 92%.
Two other CDC studies showed that there were few serious side effects reported among 5- to 11-year-olds who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and that pediatric hospitalizations occurred mostly among children who had not been fully vaccinated.
A recent South African study showed that the effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine against severe illness and hospitalization was about 70% after two doses, against omicron in particular.
Of the three federally authorized coronavirus shots, Pfizer-BioNTech’s is the only vaccine approved for use in people under 18.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee is planning to meet by the middle of next week to weigh in on whether to recommend the changes in the FDA’s booster policy. If the committee agrees with the FDA’s authorizations, Walensky is expected to promptly endorse the revisions.
Dr. Kathryn M. Edwards, a vaccine expert and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said the FDA’s expected decision was justified.
“We’re having a lot of suggestions and a lot of experience with omicron that it’s infecting people that have been boosted. But fortunately, we’re not seeing a lot of severe disease,” she said. “So I think if you look at the immune responses, at least in adults, you’ll see that this booster dose does enhance your neutralization capacity against omicron.”
Other vaccine experts said the administration’s continued attention to offering boosters to younger, healthier people was misguided.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, said research on vaccine effectiveness, including against omicron, had revealed that two doses offer substantial and durable protection against severe disease, including in adolescents — the purpose of vaccination, he said.
A booster dose could increase a person’s protection for several months, he said, but delivering extra shots to young Americans was “focusing on the people who are already protected.”
The Biden administration, he added, should instead direct more attention to reaching the unvaccinated, a point he said was backed up by the overwhelming majority of hospitalized children he had seen in Philadelphia being unvaccinated.

Lance Lowry (Agency photo)

NEW YORK: At a Georgia state House of Representatives hearing on prison conditions in September, a corrections officer called in to testify, interrupting his shift to tell lawmakers how dire conditions had become.
On a “good day,” he told lawmakers, he had maybe six or seven officers to supervise roughly 1,200 people. He said he had recently been assigned to look after 400 prisoners by himself.There weren’t enough nurses to provide medical care.
“All the officers … absolutely despise working there,” said the officer, who didn’t give his name for fear of retaliation.
In Texas, Lance Lowry quit after 20 years as a corrections officer to become a long-haul trucker because he couldn’t bear the job any longer. Watching friends and coworkers die from COVID-19, along with dwindling support from his superiors, wore on him.
“I would have liked to stay till I was 50,” said Lowry, 48. “But the pandemic changed that.”
Staff shortages have long been a challenge for prison agencies, given the low pay and grueling nature of the work. But the coronavirus pandemic – and its impact on the labor market – has pushed many corrections systems into crisis. Officers are retiring and quitting in droves, while officials struggle to recruit new employees. And some prisons whose populations dropped during the pandemic have seen their numbers rise again, exacerbating the problem.
There is no one thing pushing prison employees out in high numbers now. Some are leaving for new opportunities as more places are hiring. University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson pointed to the increased risk of COVID-19 for people working in prisons.
“When jobs become riskier, it becomes harder to attract workers,” she wrote in an email. “By failing to protect prisoners from COVID, the criminal justice system not only created an unfair risk of severe illness and death for the incarcerated, but the increased COVID risk to employees has undoubtedly contributed to staffing shortages.”
Unions representing prison officers in states including Massachusetts and California and at the federal level also claim vaccine mandates will drive out unvaccinated employees and exacerbate understaffing, though it’s unclear how big of an impact those rules will have.
“There are dozens of reasons to leave and very few to stay,” said Brian Dawe, national director of One Voice United, a nonprofit supporting corrections officers. “Understaffing, poor pay, poor benefits, horrendous working conditions. Officers and their families in many jurisdictions have had enough.”
Employers from construction companies to restaurants are having difficulty hiring and keeping people. Nearly 3% of American workers, 4.3 million, quit their jobs in August, according to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the stakes are higher in prisons, where having fewer guards means significantly more dangerous conditions for incarcerated people. And for the officers left behind, worsening shortages have made an already difficult job unbearable, many say.
In Georgia, some prisons report up to 70% vacancy rates. In Nebraska, overtime hours have quadrupled since 2010, as fewer officers are forced to work longer hours. Florida has temporarily closed three prisons out of more than 140 because of understaffing, and vacancy rates have nearly doubled there in the last year. And at federal prisons across the country, guards are picketing in front of their facilities over understaffing, while everyone from prison teachers to dentists is pulled in to cover security shifts. In recent weeks, reporters from The Marshall Project and The Associated Press have spoken with workers, officials, attorneys and people incarcerated in more than a dozen prison systems to understand the consequences of the staffing shortfalls.
The federal Bureau of Prisons says about 93% of its front-line guard positions are filled, with little more than 1,000 vacancies, though workers in many prisons say they’re feeling the pinch as others are conscripted to fill in for missing officers.
Asked last week in a U.S. Senate hearing about federal prison staffing, Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “I agree this is a serious problem at the Bureau of Prisons.”
Garland told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco was working with the bureau to address staffing issues.
Inside prisons, growing shortages mean a rise in lockdowns. Restrictions that might have begun as a way to stop the spread of COVID-19 have continued because there aren’t enough guards to supervise activities. Some incarcerated people say they can’t take classes, participate in group therapy sessions or even work out in the recreation yard or take a shower. That can force those in general population into de facto solitary confinement, and those already in segregation into near-total lockdown.
“If we get rec once a week, that’s a good week,” said Anthony Haynes, who is on Texas’ death row in a unit that is barely half-staffed. “We don’t always get showers.”
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice did not respond to Haynes’ claims but acknowledged that staffing is a challenge in Texas’ prisons.
“Before COVID-19, staffing was frequently impacted by economic surges and competing employment opportunities,” said spokesman Robert Hurst in an email. “The pandemic has exacerbated these issues. We also recognize that the job of the correctional officer is one of the most difficult in all of state government.” He added that Texas has closed six of its more than 100 facilities in the last year due to staffing problems.
Kansas has cut job training and reduced supervision for people after they’re released. Two-thirds of the men in Nebraska’s prisons can’t see visitors on the weekends – when most families are free to travel – because of understaffing.
Dr. Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer for the jail system in New York City, inspects conditions in prisons around the country for court cases. Understaffing will lead to an increase in preventable prison deaths, he said, as the quality of care reaches new lows.
“Things are much worse behind bars now than they have been for a long time,” Venters said. “There are so many staff that have left. That means that basic clinical services, like getting to scheduled appointments, just isn’t happening the way it was even five years ago.”

Congressman Steve Chabot. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON: Pakistan and its intelligence service have played a key role in fostering the Taliban and allowing it to eventually take over Afghanistan, a top Republican lawmaker has alleged, stating that it is disgusting to watch Islamabad celebrate the group’s victory that will bring “untold brutality” to Afghans.
Congressman Steve Chabot, Co-Chair of the India Caucus, said in his address to the virtual gala of Hindu Political Action Committee on Sunday that he applauds the Indian government for welcoming the Afghan religious minorities who have a good reason to fear persecution at the hands of the Taliban and their evil rule.
“In contrast, we all know that Pakistan and particularly its intelligence services played a key role fostering the Taliban and allowing them to eventually take over. It’s just disgusting to watch Pakistani officials celebrate the victory of this group that will bring untold brutality to the Afghan people,” Chabot said.
“Pakistan’s own persecution of religious minorities, however, gets a lot less attention here in America than it deserves. We would do well to educate our fellow citizens about these abuses. Persecution is particularly manifests in the heinous practice of the kidnapping, force conversion to Islam and forced marriage of underage Hindu girls to older Muslim men,” he said.
Such allegations are not mere hearsay, he noted.
Major news organisations and human rights groups have documented the practice with so many heartbreaking stories of girls in their early teens taken from their families, and traffic into forced marriages. These abuses are often just ignored, said the Congressman.
In his address, Chabot said that with roughly 6 million Hindus in America, Hindus are unquestionably an integral part of society throughout the United States.
“Through strong work ethic and high educational attainment, Hindus exemplify the American dream. These virtues also allow Hindus to take on key roles in communities across the country, and also give back to those communities in so many ways,” he said.
That is why the reports of a rise in discrimination against Hindu Americans around the country are so concerning, he rued, adding that there is no place in America for such discrimination.
“We must all seek ways to bring it to an end,” Chabot added.

US President Joe Biden. (Reuters Photo)

WASHINGTON: Democrats face a test of unity in the US House of Representatives on Monday as they begin work on two ambitious spending plans that would devote trillions of dollars to transportation infrastructure and social programs.
While centrist Democrats are eager to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already won approval in the Senate, liberals say they must prioritize a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that would expand spending on child care and education.Both measures are priorities for Democratic President Joe Biden.
The first test will come on Monday evening when the House is due to vote on a package that would advance both spending bills, as well as a separate voting rights proposal.
That would clear the way for a final vote on the budget plan and the voting rights bill on Tuesday, but would not set a timeline for passage of the infrastructure bill.
Nine moderates who are pushing the House to first pass the infrastructure bill have threatened to vote against the package. That could potentially scuttle it in the House, where Democrats hold a 220-212 majority.
“There is a standoff with some of our colleagues who have decided to hold the infrastructure bill hostage for months, or kill it altogether if they don’t get what they want in the next bill,” they wrote in the Washington Post on Monday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has sided with liberals who worry they might lose leverage on the social spending effort if they first pass the infrastructure bill. She wants the House to complete work on both bills by Oct. 1.
“Any delay to passing the budget resolution threatens the timetable for delivering the historic progress and the transformative vision that Democrats share,” Pelosi wrote fellow Democrats on Saturday.
No Republicans are expected to support the budget resolution plan, which sets the broad outline for spending on education, childcare, healthcare and climate measures favoured by Biden and pays for them with tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations.
Crucially, the budget resolution plan would allow Democrats to pass those spending measures on a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the 60 votes required for most legislation in that chamber.
The Senate is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris has the power, however, to cast the tie-breaking vote.

US President Joe Biden. (Reuters Photo)

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden is brushing off criticism of his administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal because he and his aides believe the political fallout at home will be limited, according to White House allies and administration officials.
Biden and his top aides argue they are managing an evacuation mission https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/afghanistan-edge-after-anti-taliban-protest-east-kabul-calm-airlift-goes-2021-08-19 as well as could be expected given the faster-than-anticipated takeover of the country by the Taliban, and are seeking to draw attention back to the choice to get U.S.troops out of the country.
The strategy is based on internal and public polling that shows the Afghanistan withdrawal had been by far the most popular decision Biden has made, even though the issue was not central for most voters.
“The public opinion is pretty damn clear that Americans wanted out of the ongoing war and don’t want to get back in. It’s true today and it’s going to be true in six months,” said one Biden ally. “It isn’t about not caring or being empathetic about what’s going on over there but worrying about what’s happening in America.”
Biden has faced criticism even from some fellow Democrats for his handling of the crisis.
But White House officials believe Americans’ horror over graphic images https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/small-afghan-girl-is-lifted-crowd-capturing-desperation-flee-kabul-2021-08-19 of the chaos in Kabul and pleas from Afghans who fear they will be killed by the Taliban will morph into support for the president’s decision to pull troops from the country by Aug. 31 after a 20-year war.
They expect the Afghanistan story to recede from the headlines, replaced by the resurgence in COVID-19 cases, the economic recovery and other issues, people familiar with the matter said.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
Biden aides honed talking points weeks ago to be used even in the worst-case scenarios of a withdrawal, some of which have come to pass, including emphasizing that leaving Afghanistan was the right decision.
“The idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden told ABC News on Wednesday. “There is no good time to leave Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago would’ve been a problem, 15 years from now. The basic choice is am I going to send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan in perpetuity?”
In recent days, Biden has also assailed the Afghan military for refusing to fight, denounced the now-ousted Afghan government and declared he inherited a bad withdrawal agreement from his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.
The strategy has obvious risks, political experts say. “The concern is that it’s going to undercut his credibility as commander in chief,” said Jim Manley, once a top aide to former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “If the Taliban revert to what they’ve done in the past, and I assume that’s going to be the case, it’s going to be a lot of bad images coming out of that country.”
INADEQUATE RESPONSE
The Afghanistan messaging is increasingly at odds with an emerging consensus within the administration that the White House, Defense and State departments as well as the U.S. intelligence community’s planning for the current situation was inadequate and needs to be fully reviewed once the mission of evacuating key people from Afghanistan is complete and the 5,200 U.S. troops now in Kabul are gone.
“We’re at the Pentagon and even we know it could have been better,” said one official. “A lot better.” Members of the U.S. Congress also plan to investigate what went wrong.
Public opinion, at least for now, is mixed. A majority of both Republican and Democratic voters say https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-approval-drops-lowest-level-this-year-after-taliban-takeover-2021-08-17 the swift capitulation of the Afghan government “is evidence why the U.S. should get out of the conflict.”
Reuters/Ipsos polling this week found that 31% of American adults agreed that the United States should continue its military operations in Afghanistan, up from the 25% who felt the same way in a 2012 poll.
Yet Ipsos polling https://tmsnrt.rs/3k4cwxs conducted on Monday also showed fewer than half of Americans liked the way Biden had steered the U.S. military and diplomatic effort in Afghanistan this year. They currently rate his performance worse than the other three presidents who presided over the United States’ longest war, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump.
Biden’s overall approval sank to 46% of American adults in Reuters/Ipsos polling, the lowest recorded in weekly polls since he took office in January.
Republicans, including Trump, have started weaponizing the withdrawal as an issue to undermine faith in Biden as commander in chief.
Most Democrats are likely to embrace public support of the withdrawal decision, and the issue should die down before the November 2022 congressional elections, said one adviser working on Democratic congressional campaigns.
She added, however: “The Biden administration will likely have to defend every negative headline that comes out of Afghanistan during his tenure, so that is a real unknown.”

HONOLULU: The project director of a new solar telescope in Hawaii that will be the most powerful of its kind hopes scientists will be able to start observations at the facility in three months.
The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope, at the summit of Haleakalā volcano on Maui, was supposed to open last fall. But Thomas Rimmele told Hawaii Public Radio on Wednesday that the Covid-19 travel restrictions set back construction on its critical systems.
He hopes the current schedule won’t be affected by newly surging coronavirus cases and any additional restrictions. Rimmele was expecting to return to Maui as early as this week.
“November 15 is what we’re shooting for. We just had a big review, the final construction review that was conducted by the National Science Foundation,” Rimmele said. “(The scientists) are getting really anxious to get their observations and data done.”
The telescope has received about 100 proposals from researchers for an initial observing window of two-and-a-half months. Picking, which scientists get to go first, depends heavily on atmospheric conditions and what objects are visible on a given day.
He said one quarter or even a fifth of the proposals may be approved for the first cycle.
“We are highly oversubscribed and people will have to submit proposals again for the next cycle,” he said. “That’s just how it works.”
The National Solar Observatory said the Inouye telescope will be able to reveal features three times smaller than anything scientists are able to see on the Sun currently.
The Hawaii Supreme Court in 2016 affirmed a permit for the solar telescope’s construction.
The next year, more than 100 protesters tried to block a construction convoy heading to the telescope site, citing the sacredness of Haleakala’s summit. Maui police had then arrested six people.
Protests against another telescope planned for a different mountain and island — the Thirty Meter Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island — have prevented construction crews from working on that project.