Around the World briefs
By Associated Press
Dengue fever outbreak in Argentina leads to shortage of a must-have item: mosquito repellent
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina | Shelves have gone empty, as residents hunt in vain and resort to DIY alternatives. And surging resale prices are shocking even to Argentines accustomed to triple-digit inflation. The country’s latest crisis: There isn’t enough mosquito repellent.
As the South American country contends with its worst outbreak of dengue fever in recent memory, bug spray has become this season’s hot-ticket item. So hot that it’s sold out in virtually all Buenos Aires stores and going for exorbitant prices online, in some cases as much as 10 times the retail value.
“We’ve been to at least 30 pharmacies all over the city and there is nothing left,” Ana Infante said as she swatted mosquitoes away from her two small daughters, their arms visibly pocked with red bumps. Infante, 42, joined the frenzied race for repellent when her co-worker at an empanada shop fell seriously ill with dengue last week.
“All we have is this,” she said, raising her swatting hand.
Rampant hoarding and surging prices have stoked desperation. In one widely shared video from a market in the town of El Talar outside the capital Thursday, shoppers are seen descending on an employee opening new boxes of bug spray, snatching up stock before he could place a single bottle on a shelf.
“I feel helpless, because I know I can’t do anything,” said Marta Velarde, a 65-year-old shop owner in Buenos Aires, recalling how a distraught customer recently threatened to punch her in the face when she broke the news she had no repellent left. “You have no explanation and people are very aggressive.”
As public outrage mounted and the repellent shortage evolved from nuisance to national news, the government — busy battling sky-high inflation and near-daily protests — was forced to intervene. On Thursday, authorities lifted import restrictions on foreign-made mosquito repellents to boost supply and announced they would ramp up production at local labs.
“We spoke with producers who told us that they have changed their capacity to produce, they are doing it at their maximum capacity,” Health Minister Mario Russo told the local Telefé channel Thursday in his first TV appearance since the dengue outbreak. When asked how Argentines should protect themselves in the meantime, he offered a warning that was instantly mocked on social media:
“Be careful with shorts,” he said.
The dengue virus has exploded across Latin America over the past muggy weeks of summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
The mosquito-borne illness has long been endemic in countries like Brazil and Colombia, but experts warn the worsening outbreak in Argentina means the Aedes aegypti mosquito has widened its range. Dengue infections in Argentina have soared to over 180,500 this season, according to health authorities, including 129 deaths. That’s six times higher than last season’s count, which was already the worst on record.
Health experts attribute the dengue surge to multiple factors, including the El Niño ocean warming effect and climate change. Recent drenching rains that flooded Buenos Aires have created ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes.
“Transmission never stopped in the previous season, because less cold winters are favorable for adult mosquitoes,” said Susana Lloveras, a specialist at the Francisco Javier Muñiz Infectious Diseases Hospital in Buenos Aires. “The magnitude is really worrisome, because there is a lot of demand on our health system.”
The dengue problem has been exacerbated by the nationwide run on repellant. Political opponents of Libertarian President Javier Milei’s have used the repellent crisis to criticize the government’s push to deregulate the economy and scrap price controls.
Pharmacists across Buenos Aires — fed up with fielding calls about repellent supply — have put signs on their doors telling customers not to bother.
In an online Buenos Aires forum on Reddit that normally is preoccupied with soccer match tickets, many users now focus on where to procure scarce repellant. “I am willing to pay dearly,” read one seeker’s post Thursday from northwest Argentina.
Since February, wholesalers have hiked prices and some Argentines have stockpiled repellent to resell when stories run out. Now most lotions and sprays online fetch between $20 and $40 — five or 10 times the original market price.
“It’s just outrageous,” said 53-year-old Adrián Contrares, a seller of Gaucho-themed knickknacks at his neighborhood park in northern Buenos Aires. “That’s a day’s wage. Who can afford that? Who would spend that?”
Contrares and other Argentines are resorting to homespun methods to keep bugs away. He sets egg cartons alight and tosses citronella incense sticks into tiny crackling fires. Smoke, claimed 60-year-old baker Pablo Vulgo, is nature’s best repellent. An 8-year-old eavesdropper on a bike quickly chimed in, explaining his mom’s technique of mixing coffee grounds with garlic cloves to fend off the flying insects.
Buenos Aires’ municipal health minister, Fernán Quirós, hosted a dengue prevention workshop last week in a crowded shantytown where sanitation is poor and mosquitoes abound. Instagram videos show him instructing residents how to make repellent at home with heaps of herbs and boiled essential oil, both well beyond their purchasing power.
And the final step? “Cover and let it rest for 40 days.”
Cruelty for clicks: Cambodia is investigating YouTubers’ abuse of monkeys at the Angkor UNESCO site
SIEM REAP, Cambodia | A baby monkey struggles and squirms as it tries to escape the man holding it by the neck over a concrete cistern, repeatedly dousing it with water.
In another video clip, a person plays with the genitals of a juvenile male macaque sitting on a limestone block from an ancient temple to get it excited for the camera.
The abuse of monkeys at the Angkor UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwestern Cambodia is not always so graphic, but authorities say it is a growing problem as people look for new ways to draw online viewers to generate cash.
“The monkey should be living in the wild, where they are supposed to be living, but the monkey nowadays is being treated like a domestic pet,” said Long Kosal, spokesperson for APSARA, the Cambodian office that oversees the Angkor archaeological site.
“They’re making the content to earn money by having the viewers on YouTube, so this is a very big issue for us.”
APSARA has few tools itself to stop the YouTubers from filming in general, but has opened an investigation with the Ministry of Agriculture to collect evidence for legal action against the most serious abusers — who are rarely on camera themselves, Long Kosal said.
“If we can build a case, they will be arrested for sure,” he said. “Any animal abuser will be seriously punished by law in Cambodia.”
YouTube, Facebook and other sites remove the videos with graphic content, but scores of other clips of cute monkeys jumping and playing remain, generating thousands of views and subscribers.
Just making those videos involves very close interaction with the monkeys, however, which authorities and animal-rights activists say creates a host of other problems, both for the macaques and people visiting one of Southeast Asia’s most popular tourist sites.
On a recent day outside Angkor’s famous 12th-century Bayon Temple, at least a dozen YouTubers, all young men, crowded around a small group of long-tailed macaques, pushing in close to get shots of a mother with a baby on her back and tracking her everywhere she moved.
The wild monkeys feasted on bananas tossed to them by YouTubers and drank from plastic bottles of water. One young macaque briefly amused itself with half-eaten neon-green popsicle discarded at the side of the path, before dropping it to move on to a banana.
A blue-shirted APSARA warden looked on but those filming were unfazed, illustrating the main problem: Simply taking video of monkeys is OK, even though feeding them is frowned upon. At the same time, it’s making them dependent upon handouts, and the close interaction with humans means they’re increasingly becoming aggressive toward tourists.
“The tourists carry their food, and they would snatch the food,” Long Kosal said, flipping through multiple photos on his phone of recent injuries caused by the macaques. “If the tourists resist, they bite and this is very dangerous.”
The search for food from tourists also draws the monkeys from the surrounding jungle in to the ancient sites, where they pull away pieces of the temples and cause other damage, he added.
Tourist Cadi Hutchings made sure to keep her distance from the monkeys, after being warned by her tour guide of the increasing risk of being bitten.
“What they want is your food, but you also need to appreciate that there needs to be a boundary between human intervention in nature,” the 23-year-old from Wales said. “It’s obviously a great thing that so many tourists come because it’s such a lovely place, but at the same time, you have to be careful that with more and more people … the monkeys don’t get too acclimatized.”
Many other tourists, however, stopped to take their own photos and videos — some holding out bananas to draw them closer — before heading to the nearby temple site.
YouTuber Ium Daro, who started filming Angkor monkeys about three months ago, followed a mother and a baby along a dirt path with his iPhone held on a selfie stick to get in close.
The 41-year-old said he hadn’t seen any monkeys physically abused, and that he didn’t see a problem with what he and the others were doing to make a living.
“The monkeys here are friendly,” he said. “After we take their pictures we give them food, so it is like we pay them for them giving us the chance to take their picture.”
As he spoke, a young macaque scrambled up the leg of an onlooker, trying — unsuccessfully — to grab a plastic bottle of water out of his pocket.
One YouTuber said he had started filming monkeys during the COVID-19 pandemic after the numbers of tourists plummeted, making it impossible to earn a living as a tuk-tuk driver.
Daro said he was looking for a way to supplement his income as a rice vendor, and that he’s too new at it to have realized many returns.
Many, like Phut Phu, work as salaried employees of YouTube page operators.
The 24-year-old said he started filming monkeys 2 1/2 years ago when he was looking for a job in the open air to help him deal with a lung problem.
He’s generally at it daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., earning $200 a month — equivalent to a Cambodian minimum-wage job — and said he hoped authorities wouldn’t try and put an end to it.
“I need these monkeys,” he said, holding a Nikon Coolpix camera with an extreme zoom that his employer provided, the same model most of the YouTubers were using.
With the difficulties involved in identifying and catching those responsible for the physical abuse of the monkeys, coupled with the draw of easy money through YouTube videos, Long Kosal said APSARA’s task is a tough one.
“This is the problem for us,” he said. “We need to find solid reasons which we can use against them not to make content by abusing the monkeys.”
For Nick Marx, director of wildlife rescue and care for the Wildlife Alliance — which implements conservation programs across Southeast Asia and is involved in releasing wildlife back into Angkor — the answer is simple, though perhaps equally as elusive.
“The biggest problem is these (videos) are generated to make money,” he said in an interview from Phnom Penh. “If people that don’t like this kind of thing would stop watching them, that would really help solve the problem of abuse.”
UN climate chief presses for faster action, says humans have two years left ‘to save the world’
OXFORD, England | Humanity has only two years left “to save the world” by making dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift, the head of the United Nations climate agency said.
With governments of the world facing a 2025 deadline for new and stronger plans to curb carbon pollution, nearly half of the world’s populations voting in elections this year, and crucial global finance meetings later this month in Washington, United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell said Wednesday he knows his warning may sound melodramatic. But he said action over the next two years is “essential.”
“We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now,” Stiell said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London. He suggested that climate action is not just for powerful people to address — in a not-so-veiled reference to the electoral calendar this year.
“Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet,” Stiell said. “More and more people want climate action right across societies and political spectrums, in large part because they are feeling the impacts of the climate crisis in their everyday lives and their household budgets.”
Crop-destroying droughts have increased the need for bolder action to curb emissions and help farmers adapt which could boost food security and lessen hunger, he said. “Cutting fossil fuel pollution will mean better health and huge savings for governments and households alike,” Stiell said.
Not everyone is convinced such warnings will be helpful.
“’Two years to save the world’ is meaningless rhetoric — at best, it’s likely to be ignored, at worst, it will be counterproductive,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who is also a professor of international affairs.
Levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the air last year hit all-time highs, according to United States government calculations, while scientists calculate that the world’s carbon dioxide emissions jumped 1.1%. Last year was the hottest year on record by far, global temperature monitoring groups concluded.
If emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from burning of coal, oil and natural gas continue to rise or don’t start a sharp decline, Stiell said it “will further entrench the gross inequalities between the world’s richest and poorest countries and communities” that are being worsened by climate change.
And behind it all is money.
Stiell’s speech comes just ahead of meetings of The World Bank and other big multinational development institutions, where poorer nations, led by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and Kenyan President William Ruto, are pushing for major reforms in the systems that loan money to poor nations, especially those hit by climate-related disasters.
In conjunction with that push, Stiell called for “a quantum leap this year in climate finance.” He called for debt relief for the countries that need it the most, saying they are spending $400 billion on debt financing instead of preparing for and preventing future climate change.
He called for more financial aid, not just loans, and more money from different groups like banks, the International Maritime Organization, and the G20, the world’s 20 most powerful economies. Those countries are responsible for 80% of the world’s heat-trapping emissions, he said.
“G20 leadership must be at the core of the solution, as it was during the great financial crisis,” Stiell said.
“Every day, finance ministers, CEOs, investors, and development bankers direct trillions of dollars. It’s time to shift those dollars from the energy and infrastructure of the past, towards that of a cleaner, more resilient future,” Stiell said. “And to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries benefit.”
Officials said the climate finance problem needs to be fixed by the end of the year with November’s climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, a crucial point.
Stiell is “absolutely right” that timing and finance are the heart of the matter, said longtime climate analyst Alden Meyer of European think tank E3G. The carbon action plans submitted by next year will “determine whether we can get on the trajectory of sharp emissions reductions needed to avoid much worse climate impacts than those we are already suffering today,” he said.
With so many elections and places where democracies on the brink, “climate finance related to carbon policy is on the line,” said Nancy Lindborg, president of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, at the Skoll World Forum, an ideas conference in Oxford, England.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said Stiell was “listening to the science” — namely that global emissions must be halved by the end of the decade to meet the Paris climate accord’s ambition of capping global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
“Governments are nowhere near that, and disastrously many are still supporting new fossil fuel development,” Hare said. “We need to see a massive strengthening of action now — faster ramping up of renewables, electric vehicles and batteries — if we’re to get serious reductions by 2030. The longer we wait, the more it will cost.”
Muslims worldwide celebrate Eid al-Fitr in the shadow of Gaza’s misery
ISTANBUL | Muslims around the world celebrated the Eid al-Fitr holiday Wednesday, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. But events were overshadowed by the worsening crisis in Gaza and Israel’s expected military offensive in Rafah city after six months of war.
“We should not forget our brothers and sisters in Palestine,” one imam, Abdulrahman Musa, said in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. “They have been subjected to unjustified aggression and a lot of violence (as) the world is watching in silence.”
In a holiday message, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent support to Gaza, which he called a “bleeding wound on the conscience of humanity.”
In Istanbul, some of the thousands of worshipers at the Aya Sofya Mosque carried Palestinian flags and chanted slogans in support of residents of Gaza, where the United Nations warns that more than a million people are at threat of imminent famine and little aid is allowed in.
Inside Gaza, there was little joy. Palestinians in the refugee camp of Jabaliya near Gaza City mourned loved ones among the over 33,000 killed in Israel’s offensive in response to Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack in Israel.
Om Nidal Abu Omeira sat alone among bombed-out buildings and wept on the grave of her mother, son-in-law, and grandson. All were killed in Israel’s offensive.
“They (the children) keep saying, ‘I miss my father, where is he?’ I tell them that he’s in heaven,” she told The Associated Press. “They start crying, and then I start crying with them.”
Elsewhere, people were grateful for the plenty they had after a month of fasting and reflection. Before the holiday, markets around the world teemed with shoppers. Residents poured out of cities to return to villages to celebrate with loved ones.
In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, nearly three-quarters of the population were traveling for the annual homecoming known locally as “mudik.”
“This is a right moment to reconnect, like recharging energy that has been drained almost a year away from home,” said civil servant Ridho Alfian.
Jakarta’s Istiqlal Grand Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia, was flooded with devotees. Preachers in their sermons called on people to pray for Muslims in Gaza.
“This is the time for Muslims and non-Muslims to show humanitarian solidarity, because the conflict in Gaza is not a religious war, but a humanitarian problem,” said Jimly Asshiddiqie, who chairs the advisory board of the Indonesian Mosque Council.
In Berlin, worshipers reflected the world, coming from Benin, Ghana, Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey.
“It’s a day where we feel grateful for everything we have here, and think and give to those who are poor, facing war and have to go hungry,” said Azhra Ahmad, a 45-year-old mother of five.
In Pakistan, authorities deployed more than 100,000 police and paramilitary forces to maintain security at mosques and marketplaces.
In Malaysia, ethnic Malay Muslims performed morning prayers at mosques nationwide just weeks after socks printed with the word “Allah” at a convenience store chain sparked a furor. Many found it offensive.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim called for unity and reconciliation, saying no groups should be sidelined based on religion or any other reason.
In Russia, worshipers gathered as their leaders vowed loyalty to fellow citizens amid tensions following last month’s attack by an extremist group on a music hall outside Moscow in which 130 people were killed. The Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.
“As our country’s president, Vladimir Putin, said, terrorism has neither a nationality nor a religion, the chairman of the Council of Muftis in Russia said. “We call to unite against the threat, against those dark forces.”
—From AP reports
