(Bloomberg) — Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., South Africa’s state power company, disputed the findings of a Greenpeace report that it operates many of the world’s worst emission sites for toxic nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide.
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The Major Air Polluters in Africa report, released Thursday by Greenpeace in collaboration with the Centre For Research on Energy and Clean Air, asserted that coal-fired plants operated by the utility account for five of the world’s 10 biggest single-source nitrogen-dioxide emission sites. The company also runs two of the 10 worst sulfur-dioxide sites, Greenpeace and CREA said.
“The Greenpeace report appears to rely on satellite interpretation of the high levels of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the troposphere,” Eskom said in a response to queries. It “links the nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide measured many hundreds of meters above the ground to direct health impacts at ground level,” the utility added.
South Africa, which relies on coal for the generation of more than 80% of its electricity, has some of the world’s worst air pollution, with emission standards that, while considerably more lenient than in other major polluters China and India, are rarely enforced.
The company said that at ground level, its plants mostly comply with South African nitrogen-dioxide emission levels and where they don’t, it’s due to nearby vehicle traffic and other industrial sources.
The two newest of its 14 operating coal-fired plants, Medupi and Kusile, as well as Camden are fitted with so-called low NOx burners to reduce emissions of nitrogen dioxide and others may retrofitted with the equipment, it said. Flue-gas desulfurization units, which slash sulfur-dioxide emissions, are fitted at Medupi and Kusile, it said.
Still, that equipment is currently being bypassed at Kusile after an accident.
Police in Northern California briefly chased a Volkswagen that sped away during a traffic incident Wednesday — and were surprised to find a 9-year-old boy behind the wheel, authorities said.
No one was hurt in the incident in Oroville, a city of around 20,000 in a valley near the Sierra Nevada mountains around 60 miles north of Sacramento, the California Highway Patrol said.
The incident began around 9:20 a.m. when the sedan was found “stopped oddly in the middle of the intersection,” the CHP said in a statement.
“When instructed to move, the vehicle unexpectedly sped off, leading to a short and erratic chase that ended in a dirt parking lot just east of Plumas Avenue Elementary School,” the highway patrol said.
After the vehicle stopped, it reversed and ran into the patrol car, the agency said, but there was only minor damage.
But once stopped, the driver was found to be a 9-year-old child who took the car in an attempt to drive themself to school, the agency said.
“We are relieved to report that no one was injured in this incident. The child was safely sent to school after the necessary authorities were alerted and the situation was documented,” the patrol said.
Police stopped a car that was being driven by a 9-year-old in Oroville, Calif., on March 27, 2024.CHP – Oroville via Facebook
CHP Officer Terry Dunn, who pulled over the child, told NBC affiliate KNVN of Chico that his reaction was one of shock.
“Several other officers showed up as well, and it was kind of like one of those, no one really believed it kind of things,” Dunn said.
Dunn said that after the vehicle was stopped he “did notice a little head bopping inside” the car.
“As I was approaching I could see a kid, which turned out to be a 9-year-old child, sticking his head out and saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m trying to get to school,'” Dunn told the station.
Dunn said it was dangerous, and reminded parents to keep car keys secure and to talk to their children to prevent anything like Wednesday’s incident from happening again.
In 2020, when New York City was the epicenter of the Covid pandemic and grappling with thousands of cases, Helen Arteaga Landaverde became seriously ill with the disease and was admitted to New York City Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, a public hospital that is part of the country’s largest municipal health system.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die in the same place where my father died,’” said Arteaga Landaverde, whose father’s leukemia diagnosis and rapid death years before had compelled her to shift her career trajectory from chemistry to public health.
She was one of the fortunate ones who survived Covid, and a year later, the medical staff who cared for her found themselves working under her leadership: In 2021, Arteaga Landaverde became Elmhurst’s first female — and first Hispanic — chief executive officer. The public hospital she now leads was founded in 1837 in the borough of Queens, a county of over 2 million people that’s one of the most ethnically diverse in the country.
In the last few years, the history-making CEO has been focused on ensuring that Elmhurst gets the same kind of high-tech equipment that is available at private hospitals, with the goal of making it a top facility in the country. “Two hundred thousand dollars,” she said, pointing to a machine. “It’s a small machine, but it helps our patients so much.”
“I wanted to do something that would change the world — that our people know that one of them is running the largest hospital in Queens,” Arteaga Landaverde said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo, “that one of them also understands it’s not easy to come to this country, that it’s not easy to learn a new language.”
Arteaga Landaverde is a longtime resident of Corona, Queens, having arrived with her family from Ecuador when she was young. Like many immigrant families, they came in search of a better life, and she said she saw how health care played a vital role in the community.
“I wanted to study chemistry to find the cure of AIDS because I would see my neighbors, people I loved in my church were getting sick, they were dying, and there was a stigma that it was something bad,” she said.
Helen Arteaga Landaverde.NYC Health + Hospitals
Arteaga Landaverde earned a scholarship to New York University, where she majored in chemistry, but her father’s leukemia diagnosis and subsequent death inspired her to channel that grief and change direction, earning a master’s in public health at Columbia University. Later, working with several community leaders, she opened the Plaza del Sol Family Health Center in Queens in 2014 in her father’s memory.
Plaza Del Sol has provided care to more than 30,000 patients regardless of their ability to pay; “a place that everyone could go to,” she said.
Having already served on the hospital’s board of directors, Arteaga Landaverde went through 21 interviews for the CEO spot and was selected from among 300 applicants.
“When I arrived, people were scared, they wanted hope, they wanted solutions,” she said, adding that her priority is to show warmth and humanity to the hospital’s patients. During the interview, she ran into her mother, who had come in for an appointment, in the hospital’s corridor, both sharing a laugh about the chance encounter.
Arteaga Landaverde’s supporters say it was about time that someone from the community who understands its needs was picked to head the hospital.
“One hundred and ninety years had to go by for a woman, a Latina, to finally be picked to be this center’s director,” said Vladimir Gasca, director of behavioral health and psychiatry at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst.
Currently working on a doctorate at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, Arteaga Landaverde has received numerous awards and recognitions, including a fellowship with the National Hispana Leadership Institute.
As the nation marks Women’s History Month, she was asked her advice to girls and women who may think it’s difficult to reach a goal, like she may have thought herself.
“Keep in mind it’s hard, but dream as big as you possibly can,” Arteaga Landaverde said, spreading her arms wide open.
An earlier story was first published in Noticias Telemundo.
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A group of relatives searching for some of Mexico’s roughly 100,000 missing persons said it had discovered around two dozen bags containing human remains in a clandestine cemetery.
The bones and other charred remains were found on Sunday at a ranch in El Salto in the western state of Jalisco, according to the Guerreros Buscadores collective.
After arriving at the site accompanied by National Guard personnel, the group discovered a smoking pit oven and noticed a foul stench, according to one of its members, Indira Navarro.
“While exploring, we began to locate bones, skin and burnt human flesh,” she told AFP, adding: “We’re talking about a clandestine cemetery.”
Members of the National Guard guard the area where a group of searching mothers from the collective “Guerreros Buscadores” located two clandestine crematory ovens and 27 bags with human remains during the search for their relatives in El Salto, Jalisco State, Mexico on March 24, 2024.
ULISES RUIZ/AFP via Getty Images
There was no immediate comment from the state prosecutor’s office, which was expected to inspect the site.
Collectives searching for missing persons say that drug trafficking cartels and other organized crime gangs use brick and other ovens to incinerate their victims and leave no trace.
Most of Mexico’s missing persons have vanished since the country launched a major offensive against the cartels in 2006.
Jalisco, where the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel operates, is one of the regions with the most people to have disappeared and the scene of turf wars between rival drug gangs. Just last week, prosecutors there said they found five dead bodies piled in a bulletproof SUV.
Last June in Jalisco, authorities found 45 bags containing human remains in a gorge. Four months before that, 31 bodies were exhumed by authorities from two clandestine graves in Jalisco.
In addition, nearly 450,000 people have been murdered across the country since 2006.
The country’s forensic system is overwhelmed, and tens of thousands of unidentified bodies lie unclaimed in morgues or mass graves.
Nearly 100 people in the United States and Australia have so far been arrested over child sex abuse allegations after the fatal shooting of two FBI agents led to the unraveling of a suspected international pedophile ring, officials announced Tuesday.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said that 19 men had been arrested for allegedly sharing child-abuse material online, while at least 13 children were rescued from further harm as a result of a joint operation with the FBI, dubbed “Operation Bakis.”
The development brought the total number of people arrested as part of the joint probe up to 98, with at least 79 arrests so far carried out by the FBI, according to the AFP.
The joint investigation began after two FBI agents investigating the alleged pedophile ring were fatally shot in 2021 while executing a search warrant in Sunrise, Florida, for a man suspected of being in possession of child abuse material, the AFP noted in a news release.
Special Agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger were fatally shot, while the gunman, David Lee Huber, 55, was also killed, NBC News previously reported.
The AFP said the coordinated probe was formally launched in 2022 after the FBI provided the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation with intelligence about Australian individuals suspected of being part of a “peer-to-peer network allegedly sharing child abuse material on the dark web.”
Operation Bakis was a joint investigation with Australian state and territory police that had its origins in the murder of two FBI agents in Florida in 2021.Australian Federal Police
The Australian suspects are between the ages of 32 to 81 years old, the AFP said. So far, two have been sentenced, it said.
Most of the Australian suspects were employed in occupations that required a high degree of knowledge on internet networks, the AFP said.
“Members used software to anonymously share files, chat on message boards and access websites within the network,” it said.
Some were also accused of having produced their own child abuse material to share with members of the network, the AFP said.
“Viewing, distributing or producing child abuse material is a horrific crime, and the lengths that these alleged offenders went to in order to avoid detection makes them especially dangerous — the longer they avoid detection the longer they can perpetuate the cycle of abuse,” AFP Commander Helen Schneider said in a statement.
“The success of Operation Bakis demonstrates the importance of partnerships for law enforcement, at a national level here in Australia, but also at an international level,” she said.
“We are proud of our longstanding relationship with the Australian Federal Police resulting in 19 Australian men facing criminal prosecution as a result of our collaborative investigation,” FBI Legal Attaché Nitiana Mann said in a separate statement.
“The complexity and anonymity of these platforms means that no agency or country can fight these threats alone,” Mann said. “As we continue to build bridges through collaboration and teamwork, we can ensure the good guys win and the bad guys lose.”
Mann said that 43 people had been convicted of child abuse offenses in the U.S. as part of the investigation, according to the Associated Press.
The FBI had also alerted other countries to suspects within their jurisdictions, Mann said according to the AP, but did not name those countries.
Police have finally identified a woman who was found dead in a California home nearly a decade ago — as well as the body of another person who was discovered inside a box under her kitchen table.
The bizarre case began in February 2014, when the Monterey Police Department responded to the death of a woman, who was identified by her driver’s license as 58-year-old Francesca Linda Jacobs. Police said in a news release that Jacobs died from starvation and they did not suspect foul play, but while at her home they found the “decomposed remains of another person inside a box under the kitchen table.”
Foul play could not be ruled out, police said, and a search of the apartment found that Francesca Jacobs had left a handwritten will naming the woman in the box as her mother, who she identified as Florence Jacobs. The investigation soon became known as the “Mom-In-The-Box” case.
Soon, though, police began to find discrepancies in the case: Francesca Jacobs appeared much older than the age on her driver’s license, and the license seemed to show a much older woman. Records about her life only began in the 1990s, and almost no records could be found for Florence Jacobs.
In late 2022, the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force began working with the sheriff’s office to try to identify all unknown humans remains cases in the county, including the “Mom-In-The-Box” case. Samples from both women were used to create DNA profiles that were tested by a private forensics lab in Texas.
The process led to what police called “surprising facts” in the case. The woman who had named herself Francesca Jacobs was actually Linda Rae Jacobs, born in 1942, not 1955. The DNA analysis confirmed that the woman in the box was her mother, Ida Florence Jacobs. Using these new developments, detectives were able to contact relatives of the women.
Honored that Othram could again assist the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office, this time in identifying a daughter and mother found in 2014. An investigation into their deaths continues.#dnasolves https://t.co/xbLbYjzHv1
One relative included a previous husband who “helped confirm the true identities and the unusually strong life-long bond between daughter and mother.”
The investigation confirmed that there was no foul play suspected in the death of Ida Florence Jacobs. However, the biggest question in the case remains unanswered.
“The reasons Linda Rae Jacobs assumed a new name or why she would keep her mother’s body in a box under the kitchen table will likely never be known,” police said.
Kerry Breen
Kerry Breen is a news editor and reporter for CBS News. Her reporting focuses on current events, breaking news and substance use.
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In early 2022, nearly 200,000 Malawians were displaced after two tropical storms struck the southeastern part of Africa barely a month apart. Fifty-three people died.
Amid an already-heavy rainy season, the storms Ana and Gombe caused devastation across southern Malawi to homes, crops, and infrastructure.
“That March, we started to see cholera, which is usually endemic in Malawi, becoming an outbreak,” said Gerrit Maritz, a deputy representative for health programs in Malawi for the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Cholera typically affects the country during the rainy season, from December to March, during which time it remains contained around Lake Malawi in the south and results in about 100 deaths each year.
The 2022 outbreak showed a different pattern — cholera spread throughout the dry season and by August had moved into Malawi’s northern and central regions. By early February of this year, cases had peaked at 700 per day with a fatality rate of 3.3 %, three times higher than the typical rate. When cases finally began to decline in March, cholera had claimed over 1,600 lives in a 12-month period — the biggest outbreak in the country’s history.
As climate change intensifies, storms like Ana and Gombe are becoming more frequent, more powerful, and wetter. The World Health Organization says that while poverty and conflict remain enduring drivers for cholera around the world, climate change is aggravating the acute global upsurge of the disease that began in 2021. According to the WHO, 30 countries reported outbreaks in 2022, 50% more than previous years’ average; many of those outbreaks were compounded by tropical cyclones and their ensuing displacement of people.
“It’s difficult to say that (Tropical Storm Ana and Cyclone Gombe) caused the cholera outbreak,” UNICEF public health emergency specialist Raoul Kamadjeu said. “What we can say is they were risk multipliers.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Grist exploring the intersection of climate change and infectious diseases.
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Cholera is a diarrheal illness that spreads in places without access to clean water and sanitation, when people swallow food or water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae bacteria.
“Malawi’s water-sanitation indicators were already extremely bad,” said Kamadje, “but the storms made a bad situation worse.”
Flash floods spread sewage into lakes and boreholes, washed away pipelines and sanitation infrastructure, and ruined roads integral to the delivery of supplies. By one government estimate, Ana alone destroyed 54,000 latrines and about 340 wells. People displaced from their homes turned to whatever water sources were available, often ones that were highly contaminated, and transmitted the disease as they moved to new areas.
While Malawi’s outbreak was spreading across its borders to Zambia and Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan reported cholera symptoms amid a massive monsoon season that left a third of the country fully underwater. And in Nigeria, cases spiked after over a million people were displaced by extreme flooding during the 2022 rainy season.
The global cholera surge drove a vaccine shortage right when countries needed it most. Malawi in the past used the cholera vaccine for prevention, but “now if you don’t have an outbreak, you don’t get the vaccine,” said Patrick Otim Ramadan, WHO incident manager for regional cholera response in Africa.
In response to the shortage, the international coordinating group for cholera vaccines changed its vaccination protocol in October from two doses to one, reducing protection from two years to about five months.
Climate change doesn’t only affect cholera through worsening floods and storms. Hotter temperatures and longer and drier droughts can also have an impact.
“With a severe shortage of water, the remaining sources become easily contaminated, because everyone is using them for everything,” Ramadan said. “We have seen that in the greater Horn of Africa.”
Amid a prolonged and extreme drought, which has been directly attributed to climate change, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya all saw cholera proliferate over the past year. In drought areas that have experienced crop failure, malnourishment has also reduced immunity to diseases.
Johns Hopkins University infectious disease epidemiologist Andrew Azman, who specializes in cholera research, cautions against making sweeping statements about climate change turbocharging cholera globally.
“We know cholera is seasonal in much of the world, but the associations between precipitation, drought, floods, and cholera are not really clear,” Azman said. “In some places, more precipitation increases cholera risk. In some places, it’s less precipitation.”
He added that destructive storms in the past have not led to massive cholera outbreaks at the scale of the recent epidemic in Malawi, so it’s important to also consider other factors.
“While the storms may have created good conditions for transmission, the outbreak happened after a few years of relative calm in terms of exposures,” Azman said. “Immunologically, you had a much more naive population.”
The strain circulating had also been newly introduced from Asia, and scientists are currently studying whether it was more transmissible.
Research suggesting that the Vibrio bacteria itself thrives and spreads more effectively in an aquatic environment under increasing temperatures has largely been discredited, said Azman.
“But one of the big mechanisms by which extreme events will impact cholera risk is the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure,” he said. “That is an important point, because we can block those impacts if we invest in (those things).”
Kamadju agrees. “Cholera is just a mark of inequity and poverty,” he said. “It’s a problem of investment, development, and infrastructure.”
Malawi’s outbreak came at a time of economic crisis, with its currency devalued in May 2022. Limited health resources were also stretched thin by COVID-19 and a polio outbreak, the first in 30 years.
This March, a year after the cholera outbreak began and as cases were beginning to go down, Malawi and its neighbors braced for a new storm. Cyclone Freddy turned out to be the longest-lasting cyclone ever on record, causing untold damage and killing more than 600 people across Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malawi, with some counts even higher. But while cholera cases started to spike in Mozambique as predicted, in Malawi they continued their downward trend.
Ramadan says that’s in large part because the ongoing cholera response already occurring in Malawi’s southern region — high vaccination rates, advanced distribution of water tablets and supplies, and messaging around cholera — reduced transmission in spite of the direct impacts to infrastructure.
Maritz of UNICEF worries that a shift in Malawi’s methodology for reporting cholera cases may be giving a false impression of just how successful those mitigation efforts are. On June 1, as cases continued to decline significantly, Malawi shifted to an endemic protocol for measuring cholera, which requires a rapid diagnostic test and a lab sample to confirm an infection. In contrast, during an outbreak, anyone who presents at a clinic with symptoms gets marked as a case.
Kamadjeu said this strategy made sense given the low number of current cases. But Maritz says that capacity challenges and delays in testing with the new protocol have led to underreporting of cases.
“We are still seeing people arriving at clinics with cholera symptoms that are not being reported in the national dashboards,” said Mira Khadka, an emergency health specialist leading cholera response for UNICEF in Malawi’s Blantyre district. It’s hard to mask a big cholera outbreak if people start dying, but the reporting lag is still cause for concern.
“Agencies that were responding to the cholera outbreak are now withdrawing,” said Khadka. “This can create the potential for another big outbreak to start.”
A team of government officials and health experts is assessing reporting methods in the southern districts where cases persist.
“What climate change means for us as a humanitarian agency is that we cannot do business as usual anymore,” Maritz said. “We are already preparing that most likely come January, February, there will be another cyclone with a huge flooding event.”
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
