December 2022

The world is getting warmer, winters included. The United States, however, has experienced severe winter storms in recent years, and experts are taking a closer look at the link between these extreme cold events and climate change.

While the link between global warming and heat waves is very direct, the behavior of winter storms is governed by complex atmospheric dynamics that are more difficult to study.

Even so, “there are certain aspects of winter storms … where the climate change linkages are fairly strong and robust,” Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told AFP.

For example, the warming of bodies of water — lakes or oceans — influences the amount of snowfall.

In the United States, a mechanism called “lake-effect snow” occurs around the Great Lakes region on the Canadian border. The city of Buffalo, which sits on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, was hit hard by a lethal snowstorm over Christmas weekend.

The collision between cold air from the north with the warmer water of these lakes causes convection, which leads to snowfall.

“The warmer those lake temperatures, the more moisture (is) in the air, and the greater potential for lake-effect snows,” Michael Mann wrote in a 2018 paper.

“Not surprisingly, we see a long-term increase in lake effect snowfalls as temperatures have warmed during the last century.”

Polar vortex

There is, however, no consensus on other mechanisms, such as the effect of climate change on the polar vortex and jet stream air currents.

The polar vortex is an air mass above the North Pole, located high in the stratosphere. Humans dwell in the troposphere, and the stratosphere is located just above it.

It is surrounded by a band of rotating air, which acts as a barrier between the cold air in the north and the warmer air in the south. As the polar vortex weakens, this band of air begins to undulate and take on a more oval shape, bringing more cold air southward.

According to a 2021 study, this type of disturbance is occurring more often and is reflected during the following two weeks, lower in the atmosphere, where the jet stream is located.

This air current, which blows from west to east, again following the border between cold and warm air, then meanders in such a way that it allows cold air from the north to intrude at lower latitudes, particularly over the eastern United States.

“Everybody agrees that when the polar vortex becomes perturbed or disrupted, there is an increase in the probability of severe winter weather,” Judah Cohen, lead author of the study and climatologist for Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), told AFP.

And this “stretched” polar vortex is exactly what was observed just before the storm that hit the United States this December, he pointed out.

The same phenomenon was seen in February 2021, when a bitter cold snap hit Texas, causing massive power outages.

‘Active debate’

But the heart of the debate lies elsewhere: What is causing these increased disturbances in the polar vortex?

According to Cohen, they are linked to changes in the Arctic, accelerated by climate change. On the one hand, the rapid melting of sea ice, and on the other, an increase in snow cover in Siberia.

“This is a topic that I have been studying for over 15 years, and I am more confident today in the link than I have ever been in the past,” he told AFP.

This last point, however, remains “an active debate within the scientific community,” Mann said.

“Climate models are not yet capturing all of the underlying physics that may be relevant to how climate change is impacting the behavior of the jet stream.”

Future studies will still be needed in the coming years to unravel the mystery of these complex chain reactions. 
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The U.S. Justice Department is suing one of the largest U.S. drug distributors for failing to report suspicious orders of prescription opioids, saying the company’s “years of repeated violations” contributed to the deadly U.S. opioid epidemic. 

In a civil lawsuit filed Thursday, the department alleges that AmerisourceBergen and two subsidiaries violated the Controlled Substances Act by failing to report “at least hundreds of thousands” of suspicious orders for prescription painkillers to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The department is seeking potentially billions of dollars in penalties.

“For years, AmerisourceBergen prioritized profits over its legal obligations and over Americans’ well-being,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said during a press call.

Under the Controlled Substances Act, distributors of controlled drugs are required to monitor and report suspicious orders to the drug agency.

The lawsuit alleges that AmerisourceBergen failed to report “numerous orders from pharmacies that AmerisourceBergen knew were likely facilitating diversion of prescription opioids.”

The complaint cites five such pharmacies.

A Florida pharmacy and a West Virginia pharmacy received opioids from AmerisourceBergen that the company allegedly knew “were likely being sold in parking lots for cash,” according to the complaint.

In Colorado, AmerisourceBergen distributed prescription painkillers to a pharmacy it allegedly knew was its largest purchaser of oxycodone 30mg tablets in the state.

AmerisourceBergen identified 11 patients at the pharmacy as potential “drug addicts.” Two of those patients later died of overdoses, according to the lawsuit.

In New Jersey, an online pharmacy that received opioids from AmerisourceBergen has pleaded guilty to illegally selling controlled substances, while the chief pharmacist at another pharmacy has been indicted for drug diversion.

“These incidents were part of the systematic failure by AmerisourceBergen, including dramatically understaffing and underfunding its compliance programs,” Philip Sellinger, U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, said during the press call. “In one year, AmerisourceBergen spent more on taxicabs and office supplies than on the Controlled Substances Act compliance budget.”

In a statement, AmerisourceBergen said the lawsuit represented an attempt to “shift the onus of interpreting and enforcing the law from the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to an industry they are tasked with regulating and policing.”

The five pharmacies were “cherrypicked” by the DOJ out of thousands the company serves, the statement said.

AmerisourceBergen is one of three major U.S. pharmaceutical distributors. The other two are McKesson and Cardinal Health.

In February the companies, along with pharmaceutical manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, agreed to pay $26 billion to settle thousands of civil lawsuits brought by state and local governments. Most of the money will go toward treatment and prevention.

The U.S. drug epidemic has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Opioids are the main driver of U.S. drug overdose deaths. Of an estimated 108,000 drug overdose deaths reported in the country last year, 81,000 involved opioids such as fentanyl, according to the CDC.  

 
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For many outside China, this was the year that the term “surveillance state” became something they understood.

Western media reported in April on what were thought to be government-operated drones whirring through a locked-down Shanghai, China’s most populous city, where authorities reported a record 22,000 new cases of COVID-19 on a single day. In an unverified viral video, one drone trumpeted, “Control your soul’s desire for freedom” as it hovered over a housing compound at night.

Citizens were expected to download a “health code” app for smartphones that dictated their activities. Designed to curtail the spread of the virus, a green QR code meant freedom to move around. A red code barred movement.

In the city of Zhengzhou, authorities in June allegedly issued red codes, usually sent to people deemed by authorities to be at high risk of infection or already infected, to people heading to town to protest a local bank that was freezing their assets.

At the end of November, when unprecedented protests against the “zero-COVID” policy erupted nationwide, Western media reported that authorities began checking the smartphones of people near the demonstrations, looking for VPN software that allowed them access to sites and social platforms like Twitter beyond China’s “Great Firewall.”

By mid-December, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation to restrict the use of the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok. Wildly effective for spreading dancing baby videos and political messaging both real and fake, the lawmakers had security concerns about the data Beijing might be collecting from millions of users as each video played.

According to University of Virginia professor Aynne Kokas, who wrote the book “Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty,” Beijing’s strict zero-COVID response to the pandemic played a big role in showing the rest of the world what surveillance in China is like, including targeting dissidents.

“China’s handling of its zero-COVID policy and the enhancement of surveillance in China in order to achieve that zero-COVID policy has amplified global popular understanding of the scope and scale of China’s surveillance tech,” she told VOA Mandarin in an interview.

Many ways to watch

Street cameras are the primary mode of surveillance, with more than half of the world’s nearly 1 billion surveillance cameras located in China.

In addition to picking people out of crowds, surveillance cameras “aim to transform ‘unstructured information’ into ‘structured information,’ turning a chaotic visual field into something akin to a text file that can be easily, automatically analyzed, and searched,” according to an October report from Human Rights Watch.

Surveillance also includes the collection of biometric data, like voice samples, DNA, iris scans and gait “to form a multimodal portrait,” according to the HRW report. Forced biometric data collection has been tied to repression in Xinjiang and Tibet.

Chinese companies have supplied AI surveillance technology to 63 countries, 36 of which have signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, according to a 2019 report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the government has launched a crackdown against Uyghurs, the big data system known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, closely tracks behaviors Beijing deems suspicious — such as avoiding neighbors or stopping cell phone use — and flags the individuals for interrogation.

Maintaining control, order

But the real effect of this sweeping surveillance system is social control, according to Maya Wang, associate director in the Asia division at HRW.

“IJOP is promoted as an anti-terrorism system, but if you study it carefully, anti-terrorism is not its real purpose,” said Wang. “The system uses variables such as whether someone goes to the gas station or how often their phone is turned off to measure suspicious behavior. Systems like IJOP are ineffective as anti-terrorism mechanisms.”

Beyond Xinjiang, in other parts of China, the government often promotes surveillance technology as a way to maintain social order, according to Bulelani Jili, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University studying Chinese technology.

“The CCP is always framing surveillance technologies as part of its needs and ambitions for political stability,” he told VOA Mandarin in an interview. “Both the promotion and application of surveillance technology has really been about ensuring political stability.”

But when China began experiencing unprecedented protests around the country late last month from people fed up with Beijing’s strict pandemic protocols, authorities employed that technology to locate protestors who believed they’d taken steps to hide themselves from the ubiquitous monitoring.

HRW China researcher Yaqiu Wang said the backlash against the zero-COVID policy and against the security forces that kept people from protesting outside banks in Henan and Anhui show that people are increasingly questioning Beijing’s positive stance on the use of surveillance technology.

TikTok restrictions

The final month of 2022 has seen a flurry of steps taken by Taiwan and the United States to restrict the use of TikTok due to security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned social media app.

In early December, Taiwan announced that government workers would be restricted from using TikTok on government devices. Then on December 18, Taiwan’s government announced it had opened a probe into TikTok on suspicion of illegally operating a subsidiary on the island.

In the U.S., 19 of its 50 states have at least partially blocked access to TikTok on government devices, with most of those restrictions coming in the past few weeks. The U.S. Senate also passed a bill December 14 that would ban federal employees from using TikTok on government devices.

These moves are signs of growing concern over the surveillance threats that TikTok poses outside China, analysts said, and more broadly, how the Chinese government uses technology to monitor people within China’s borders.

“One could see a situation where a staffer in the House or Senate would be using TikTok for entertainment purposes, but then that app could also monitor their other communications,” UVA’s Kokas said in an interview with VOA Mandarin. “When we’re talking about government phones, or government devices, those risks become even more elevated.”

Kokas said TikTok has the capacity to pose a number of national security threats, including spreading misinformation and disinformation. Gathering consumer data from TikTok also gives China a competitive advantage to build better products for the global marketplace.

At a regular press conference in November, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning rebutted the allegations about TikTok, saying that accusations of “spreading false information and using it as an excuse to suppress relevant Chinese companies has become a common practice in the United States.”

Restricting the use of TikTok on government devices is logical to Kokas, but she cautioned that it is not a panacea.

“This isn’t going to solve Chinese consumer data gathering in the U.S. by any means,” she said. But “a TikTok ban for general users doesn’t make a lot of sense. We need a more expansive data security regime in the U.S.”
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The United States earlier this month announced a contract worth up to $29 million to clean up dioxin contamination at the Bien Hoa Air Base in southern Vietnam, near Ho Chi Minh City, a consequence of U.S. use of the herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

The move is the most recent attempt to demonstrate cooperation between the two countries despite a still complicated relationship. 

The nations now work together on trade issues, climate change, and legacies of the war, such as the dioxin spraying or the so-called Christmas bombings, 50 years ago this month, when America dropped 20,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong. 

“This announcement represents the United States’ commitment to our partnership with Vietnam,” Aler Grubbs, the Hanoi-based Vietnam mission director for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said. “This contract will complete critical preparatory work, paving the way for the treatment phase of the project.” 

Some differences still remain between the United States and Vietnam, ranging from human rights to Bien Hoa itself, where the two have not been able to come to an agreement on a cemetery for former soldiers of South Vietnam, with which the U.S. was allied against communist North Vietnam in the war that ended in 1975 with a North Vietnamese victory.

USAID said it finished a similar project in 2018 to clean up Agent Orange and other chemicals that it sprayed around Da Nang in central Vietnam to defoliate the jungle used by communist forces to hide during the war. It said compared to Da Nang, Bien Hoa would require dealing with four times as much soil that has been contaminated with the chemicals, still linked to birth defects. 

Similarly, samples of tilapia fish collected in Bien Hoa in 2010 continued to show levels of Agent Orange considered to be unhealthy, according to a report from the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the United Nations Development Program.

“We look forward to applying our specialized expertise to meet the project’s high safety and health requirements and technical specifications, and contribute to the overall success of the project,” said Vu Van Liem, general director of VINA E&C Investment and Construction JSC, the local corporation that has received the contract to excavate the soil and prepare it for treatment over a period of four years.

Both the U.S. and Vietnamese governments are participating in the entire cleanup across the country, which is estimated will require more than 10 years at a cost of approximately $450 million. Washington said it expects to spend $300 million in the end and has allocated more than $163 million so far.

The two nations have come a long way since the war, though they continue to have issues of disagreement. America has applied pressure on the autocratic government of Vietnam on a routine basis to recognize the freedom of speech and to release political prisoners while Hanoi denies it has any. 

In one of the more recent developments, for example, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said December 2 that Vietnam would be put on a “Special Watch List for engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom,” along with Algeria, the Central African Republic, and Comoros.

“Countries that effectively safeguard [religion] and other human rights are more peaceful, stable, prosperous and more reliable partners of the United States than those that do not,” he said.

“We will continue to carefully monitor the status of freedom of religion or belief in every country around the world and advocate for those facing religious persecution or discrimination.”

Vietnam’s Foreign Affairs Ministry did not accept being put on the watch list.

“Recently Vietnam has been finalizing the legal system and the policies on religion and belief,” the ministry said in response on December 15.

“These efforts and achievements in ensuring freedom of religion and beliefs have been widely recognized by the international community.”

However, while Washington was pressuring Vietnam on one problem, it was also trying to solve another. The Agent Orange remediation in Bien Hoa was about more than cleaning up a mess decades after war. It was also about looking toward the decades to come, showing closer cooperation, such as potentially on addressing environmental problems in the future.

“This marks the largest contract yet by USAID to a local Vietnamese organization,” Grubbs said, “as we make a concerted effort to build Vietnamese expertise in this nascent area of environmental health and safety.”
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Countries are imposing or considering imposing curbs on travelers from China amid a COVID-19 surge there after authorities relaxed “zero-COVID” rules.

They cite a lack of information from China on variants and are concerned about a wave of infections. China has rejected criticism of its COVID data and said it expects future mutations to be potentially more transmissible but less severe.

Below is a list of new regulations for travelers from China.

Countries Imposing Curbs

United States

The U.S. will impose mandatory COVID-19 tests on travelers from China beginning Jan. 5. All air passengers 2 and older will require a negative result from a test no more than two days before departure from China, Hong Kong or Macau. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said Americans should also reconsider travel to China, Hong Kong and Macau.

India

The country has mandated a COVID-19 negative test report for travelers arriving from China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand, the health minister said. Passengers from those countries will be quarantined if they show symptoms or test positive.

Japan

Japan will require a negative COVID-19 test upon arrival for travelers from mainland China. Those who test positive will be required to quarantine for seven days. New border measures for China will go into effect at midnight Friday. The government will also limit requests from airlines to increase flights to China.

Italy

Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs and virus sequencing for all travelers coming from China. Milan’s main airport, Malpensa, had already started testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai. “The measure is essential to ensure surveillance and detection of possible variants of the virus in order to protect the Italian population,” Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said.

Taiwan

Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Centre said all passengers on direct flights from China, as well as by boat at two offshore islands, will have to take PCR tests upon arrival, starting Sunday.

Countries Monitoring Situation

Australia

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia was continuing to monitor the situation in respect of China “as we continue to monitor the impact of COVID here in Australia as well as around the world.”

Philippines

The Southeast Asian country is being “very cautious” and could impose measures such as testing requirements on visitors from China, but not an outright ban, Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said.

Not Considering Curbs

Britain

Britain has no plans to bring back COVID-19 testing for those coming into the country, a government spokesperson said Thursday, when asked about a Daily Telegraph report saying it would consider curbs for arrivals from China.
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