WHO: Zika virus is no longer a world threat
The World Health Organization declared on Friday that Zika virus, shown to cause microcephaly in infants and spread by mosquitos, was no longer an international emergency. The virus causes a mild fever and flu-like symptoms in healthy adults but has been linked to malformed heads in newborns, and research has suggested possible links to other birth defects.
The organization noted, though, that while no longer a “public health emergency of international concern”, the virus remains “a significant enduring public health challenge requiring intense action”. The WHO shifted to a “longer-term technical mechanism” to confront the crisis, it said.
Almost 30 countries have reported birth defects linked to the virus, and thousands of people have tested positive in Brazil and the US territory of Puerto Rico. Florida has reported 139 locally acquired cases of the virus, according to the CDC’s most recent count.
Trade and Peru
The White House and leaders in Congress quietly abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free trade deal that would have set up new rules of commerce for 12 countries, including the US, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Peru. The trade deal became a symbol of globalization and lost manufacturing jobs during the presidential campaign, and Donald Trump had promised to take it off the table.
The deal would have phased out thousands of tariffs and made it easier for US vendors to sell products abroad, and vice versa. It also had provisions for internet and copyright provisions, guards against wildlife trafficking and child labor, and rules designed to curb China’s influence in Pacific trade. Its opponents included unions, which argued it gave too much power to foreign manufacturers.
Barack Obama will meet with leaders of Japan, China, Australia and other countries in Peru this weekend for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He will face questions about trade and, inevitably, Trump.
Airbnb
The housing startup blocked a Harvard professor, Ben Edelman, from its service after he found evidence of racial discrimination by its users. Edelman said he had found that black guests were more often rejected than white guests who used the site; he reached his findings in part by creating multiple fake accounts as black and white users. Airbnb said it suspended his service for violating policy about multiple fake accounts.
The $30bn company also announced a big expansion to create entire itineraries for tourists, though it already faces opposition in cities such as New York and San Francisco, where critics say the company is making exploitative housing practices worse.
China and the Arctic: global warming still real
The north pole was reported at about 20C (36F) warmer than normal, with record low sea ice, alarming climate scientists. “The extreme behavior of the Arctic in 2016 seems to be in no hurry to quit,” Jennifer Francis, a Rutgers University scientist, told the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, China’s deputy foreign minister, Liu Zhenmin, felt compelled to remind the US president-elect that global warming is real and that Republican presidents including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan have supported environmental measures. In 2012 Trump wrote: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”
Dakota protests
The energy company trying to build a pipeline through North Dakota has asked a federal judge to intervene in the project, which the US government ordered delayed and against which Native Americans have protested for months.
“It is time for the Courts to end this political interference and remove whatever legal cloud that may exist over the right-of-way beneath federal land at Lake Oahe,” CEO Kelcy Warren said in a statement.
In response, the Standing Rock Sioux tribal chair, Dave Archambault II, said: “Dakota Access is so desperate to get this project in the ground that it is now suing the federal government on the novel theory that it doesn’t need an easement to cross federal lands.” More than 400 people have been arrested in demonstrations so far.
Gains in Iraq, losses in Syria
The Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga, backed by US special forces and airstrikes, have made tentative gains in the gruelling battle for Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and one of Isis’s most important strongholds. Reuters reported that advances into Mosul had slowed out of concern for civilians trapped in the city, and that 54,000 people have been displaced by the four-week campaign.
Iraqi forces also retook Nimrud, the site of an ancient Assyrian city where the king Ashurnasirpal built his palace. Isis militants tried to bulldoze sections of the site last year, and released video purportedly showing fighters destroying artifacts.
In Syria, civil war between the regime of Bashar al-Assad, rebels and Isis continued to devastate the country. A children’s hospital in Aleppo was bombed by chlorine gas, leaving only four functioning hospitals in the city for some 250,000 civilians in the area. The bombing was believed to have been carried out by Syrian government forces, which have launched a new assault with airstrikes and support from Russian allies.
