Britain will next week formally apply to join a trans-Pacific trading bloc of 11 countries, with negotiations set to start later this year, the government has said.Since leaving the European Union, Britain has made clear its desire to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which removes most tariffs between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.”One year after our departure for the EU we are forging new partnerships that will bring enormous economic benefits for the people of Britain,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement.Trade minister Liz Truss told Times Radio: “On Monday I am putting in the letter of intent” and that she expected formal negotiations will start in the spring.Reuters reported on Thursday that Britain will not publish an assessment of the economic benefits of CPTPP membership before requesting to join it – contrary to earlier promises.Previous government economic analyses of Brexit have pointed to small boosts to economic output from additional trade deals.The government said joining CPTPP would remove tariffs on food and drink and cars, while helping to boost the technology and services sectors.”Applying to be the first new country to join the CPTPP demonstrates our ambition to do business on the best terms with our friends and partners all over the world and be an enthusiastic champion of global free trade,” Johnson said. 
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When she was growing up, Sophie Corroon struggled to get through a ballet class or soccer tryout without having an anxiety attack.The idea of going to sleepovers or being home alone left her feeling panicked. Corroon’s anxiety grew even more during high school in Salt Lake City in the U.S. state of Utah when the pressures of getting into college left her in tears at school or toiling for hours on assignments.Corroon, now 20, has struggled with her mental health since fourth grade, and she’s not alone. And now, the coronavirus pandemic has multiplied the pressures on kids — many have spent almost a year doing remote learning, isolated from their friends and classmates. The portion of children’s emergency-room visits related to mental health was 44% higher in 2020, compared with the year before.State lawmakers are increasingly seeking more support for kids. This year, legislation proposed in Utah and Arizona would add mental or behavioral health to the list of reasons students can be absent from class, similar to staying out with a physical illness. Similar laws have passed in the states of Oregon, Maine, Colorado and Virginia in the past two years.Offering mental health days can help children and parents communicate and prevent struggling students from falling behind in school or ending up in crisis, said Debbie Plotnick, vice president of the nonprofit advocacy group Mental Health America. Plotnick said mental health days can be even more effective when paired with mental health services in schools.“We know that this year has been extra hard, and we know that it’s hard for young people,” Plotnick said. “That’s why it’s so essential that students feel comfortable to come forward and say … ‘I need to take some actions to support my mental health.’”In Arizona, Democratic Sen. Sean Bowie has introduced a mental health day measure for the second time after legislation stalled in March as the pandemic took hold.Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has taken an interest in youth suicide and mental health, and Bowie said he’s confident it will be signed into law. The bill passed the state Senate unanimously Thursday.Getting a ‘day to catch their breath’Conservative Utah passed a law in 2018 letting kids take time off school for a mental illness. A new proposal from Republican Rep. Mike Winder would allow absences for students to deal with other kinds of mental pressures to further normalize treating a mental health concern like a physical one.“If a student has a panic attack today, because of some drama going on at home, that’s not mental illness necessarily,” Winder said. “But maybe they need that day to catch their breath and maintain their mental health.”Under the Utah bill, which passed out of committee Friday and will move to the House floor, mental health days would be treated like any other excused absence, Winder said. A parent would need to excuse their child, and students would still be expected to make up their schoolwork.In Arizona, specific mental health day policies would be up to each school district, Bowie said.Theresa Nguyen, a licensed clinical social worker, said she’s concerned about the potential long-term mental and academic effects that students may face from the pandemic. In addition to growing reports of anxiety and depression, Nguyen said, many students say they don’t feel like they’re absorbing class material virtually and they’re not getting enough support.“They feel like, ‘Nobody cares that I’m struggling, so I’m basically being communicated to that I need to just deal with it by myself,’” said Nguyen, Mental Health America’s chief program officer. “And for a lot of youth, that means increased self-harm and suicide.”Alarming rate of youth suicidesFor the last few years, Utah leaders have searched for ways to reduce an alarming rate of youth suicides. The pandemic has lent urgency, with many young people isolated from friends and school activities.Winder’s bill is modeled after a similar program in Oregon that his daughter, Jessica Lee, found through her work on a youth-focused committee with the Utah chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. In Oregon, students are given five excused absences every three months, and those can be either physical sick days or mental health days.Lee, who is a senior at Southern Utah University studying clinical psychology, said she was inspired by youth activists who successfully championed the Oregon bill in 2019.Lee and Corroon both work with the committee to help teenagers navigate their mental health. Over the years, Corroon learned to manage her anxiety with medication and therapy and is now a sophomore at the University of Washington, where she plans to study public health.Part of her routine is taking a step back to prioritize her mental health — a chance she says other kids deserve, too.“I definitely needed those days to just stay home or seek out a resource rather than forcing myself to go to school and putting more stress on my mental health,” Corroon said.
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A team of World Health Organization scientists investigating the source of the coronavirus visited a wet market Sunday in Wuhan, China.A cluster of cases was linked to the Huanan Seafood Market when the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019. Since then, the coronavirus has infected more than 102 million people worldwide and killed more than 2.2 million.The scientists have already visited at least one of the hospitals in Wuhan that treated some of the first patients.”Just back from visit at Jinyintan hospital, that specialized in infectious diseases and was designated for treatment of the first cases in Wuhan,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said on Twitter. “Stories quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.”Just back from visit at Jinyintan hospital, that specialised in infectious diseases and was designated for treatment of the first cases in Wuhan. Stories quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.— Marion Koopmans (@MarionKoopmans) January 30, 2021The scientists want to know where the virus originated, in what animal, and how it made its way into humans, something that could take years to figure out.The team is also planning to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology and laboratories at state facilities such as the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, according to the Geneva-based WHO.The Associated Press reports that Israel has agreed to transfer 5,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine to the Palestinians for front-line medical workers. Israel has been criticized for not providing vaccines to the Palestinians before but says it is not responsible for them.In the U.S., the Associated Press has done an analysis of data from 17 states and two cities concerning the racial breakdown about who is receiving the COVID vaccine.“Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below,” AP reported.That fact holds true, AP said, despite African Americans making up “an oversize percentage of the nation’s health care workers, who were put at the front of the line for shots when the campaign began in mid-December.”In North Carolina, Black people are just a scant 11% of the vaccine recipients even though they are 22% of the population and 26% of the health care workforce, AP found.In comparison, AP reported, “White people in North Carolina are 68% of the population and 82% of those vaccinated.”Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Los Angeles County data has also revealed racial disparities in the COVID pandemic. The mostly Latino neighborhood of Pacoima, the Times said “has one of the highest case rates in the nation . . . roughly five times the rate of Covid-19 cases as much richer and whiter Santa Monica.”The U.S. remains the country with the most cases at more than 26 million, followed by India with 10.7 million and Brazil with 9.1 million, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said early Sunday.The Pentagon on Saturday announced it would delay a plan to vaccinate the 40 prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying it needed to “review force protection protocols,” John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a tweet.No Guantanamo detainees have been vaccinated. We’re pausing the plan to move forward, as we review force protection protocols. We remain committed to our obligations to keep our troops safe.— John Kirby (@PentagonPresSec) January 30, 2021The Pentagon has said it intends to vaccinate all the personnel who work at the detention center, or about 1,500 people. At that time, the vaccine would also be offered to the prisoners, none of whom have received a vaccination yet.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of Saturday morning, nearly 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been distributed and nearly 30 million had been administered.The CDC said 24 million people had received one or more doses, and 5.3 million people had received a first dose.The total includes both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
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Scientists with the World Health Organization’s team investigating the source of the coronavirus that has infected more than 102 million people worldwide and killed more than 2.2 million have visited one of the hospitals in Wuhan, China, that treated some of the first patients.Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said on Twitter that the stories she’d heard at Jinyintan hospital were “quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.”Just back from visit at Jinyintan hospital, that specialised in infectious diseases and was designated for treatment of the first cases in Wuhan. Stories quite similar to what I have heard from our ICU doctors.— Marion Koopmans (@MarionKoopmans) A woman wearing a face mask walks past a closed souvenir shop near Berlin’s famed tourist magnet Checkpoint Charlie, Jan. 29, 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic.Travelers from several European and African nations — Brazil, Britain, Eswatini, Ireland, Lesotho, Portugal and South Africa — will not be allowed into Germany. However, German residents traveling from those countries will be granted entry, even if they test positive for the coronavirus virus.Fourteen University of Michigan students were in quarantine after being diagnosed with the British variant of the virus. One of the students was reported to have traveled to Britain over the winter break.Health officials in South Carolina said they had detected two cases of the South African COVID-19 variant, the first cases in the United States.The U.S. remained the country with the most cases at more than 26 million, followed by India with 10.7 million and Brazil with 9.1 million, Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center said Saturday.The Pentagon on Saturday announced it would delay a plan to vaccinate the 40 prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying it needed to “review force protection protocols,” John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a tweet.  No Guantanamo detainees have been vaccinated. We’re pausing the plan to move forward, as we review force protection protocols. We remain committed to our obligations to keep our troops safe.— John Kirby (@PentagonPresSec) January 30, 2021The Pentagon has said it intends to vaccinate all the personnel who work at the detention center, or about 1,500 people. At that time, the vaccine will also be offered to the prisoners, none of whom has received a vaccination yet.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of Saturday morning, nearly 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been distributed in the U.S. and nearly 30 million had been administered.The CDC said 24 million people had received one or more doses, and 5.3 million people had received a first dose.The total included both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.   
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Climate isn’t the only thing changing. What comes next in the nation’s struggle to combat global warming will probably transform how Americans drive, where they get their power and other bits of day-to-day life, both quietly and obviously, experts say. So far, the greening of America has been subtle, driven by market forces, technology and voluntary actions. The Biden administration is about to change that.In a flurry of executive actions in his first eight days in office, the president is trying to steer the U.S. economy from one that uses fossil fuels to one that no longer puts additional heat-trapping gases into the air by 2050.The United States is rejoining the international Paris climate accord and is also joining many other nations in setting an ambitious goal that once seemed unattainable: net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. That means lots of changes designed to fight increasingly costly climate disasters such as wildfires, floods, droughts, storms and heat waves.Think of the journey to a carbon-less economy as a road trip from Washington to California that started about 15 years ago.”We’ve made it through Ohio and up to the Indiana border. But the road has been pretty smooth so far. It gets rougher ahead,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate and energy director at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center in Oakland, California.”The Biden administration is both stepping on the gas and working to upgrade our vehicle,” Hausfather said.What isn’t visible, and what isThe results of some of Biden’s new efforts may still not be noticeable, such as your power eventually coming from ever-cheaper wind and solar energy instead of coal and natural gas that now provide 59% of American power. But when it comes to going from here to there, you’ll notice that.FILE – A Chevrolet Volt hybrid car is hooked up at a ChargePoint charging station at a parking garage in Los Angeles, Oct. 17, 2018.General Motors announced Thursday that as of 2035 it hopes to go all-electric for its light-duty vehicles, no longer selling gasoline-powered cars. Experts expect most new cars sold in 2030 to be electric. The Biden administration promised 550,000 charging stations to help with the transition to electric cars.”You will no longer be going to a gas station, but you will need to charge your vehicle whether at home or on the road,” said Kate Larsen, director of international climate policy research at the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization. “It may be a whole new way of thinking about transportation for the average person.”But it will still be your car, which is why most of the big climate action over the next 10 years won’t be too noticeable, said Princeton University ecologist Stephen Pacala.”The single biggest difference is that because wind and solar is distributed you will see a lot more of it on the landscape,” said Pacala, who leads a study on  decarbonizing America by the National Academy of Sciences that will come out next week.FILE – President Joe Biden signs a series of executive orders on climate change, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Jan. 27, 2021.Less expensive, plus health benefitsOther recent detailed scientific studies show that because of dropping wind, solar and battery prices, Biden’s net-zero carbon goal can be accomplished far cheaper than had been predicted in the past and with health benefits “many, many times” outweighing the costs, said Pacala, who was part of one study at Princeton. Those studies agree on what needs to be done for decarbonization, and what Biden has come out with “is doing the things that everyone now is concluding that we should do,” Pacala said.These are the types of shifts that don’t cost much — about $1 day per person — and won’t require people to abandon their current cars and furnaces but replace them with cleaner electric vehicles and heat pumps when it comes time for a new one, said Margaret Torn, a senior scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who co-authored a study published recently by Berkeley Lab, the University of San Francisco and the consulting firm Evolved Energy Research.Part of the problem, said study co-author Ryan Jones, co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, is that for years, people have wrongly portrayed the battle against climate change as a “personal morality problem” where individuals have to sacrifice by driving and flying less, turning down the heat and eating less meat.”Actually, climate change is an industry economy issue where most of the big solutions are happening under the hood or upstream of people’s homes,” Jones said. “It’s a big change in how we produce energy and consume energy. It’s not a change in people’s day-to-day lives, or it doesn’t need to be.”One Biden interim goal — “a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035″ — may not be doable that quickly, but can be done by 2050, said study co-author Jim Williams of the University of San Francisco.FILE – Todd Miller stands next to solar panels on the roof of his solar installation business in Ankeny, Iowa, April 15, 2019.Electric vehicles, conservation, wind energyBiden’s executive orders featured plans for an all-electric federal fleet of vehicles, conserving 30% of the country’s land and waters, doubling the nation’s offshore wind energy and funding to help communities become more resilient to climate disasters. Republicans and fossil fuel interests objected, calling the actions job-killers.”Using the incredible leverage of federal government purchases in green electricity, zero-emission cars and new infrastructure will rapidly increase demand for home-grown climate-friendly technologies,” said Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor.The next big thing for the administration is to come up with a Paris climate accord goal — called Nationally Determined Contribution — for how much the United States hopes to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It has to be ambitious for the president to reach his ultimate goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but it also has to be doable.His administration promises to reveal the goal, required by the climate agreement but nonbinding, before its Earth Day climate summit, April 22.That new number “is actually the centrally important activity of the next year,” said University of Maryland environment professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal.Getting to net zero carbon emissions at midcentury means about a 43% cut from 2005 levels — the baseline the U.S. government uses — by 2030, said the Rhodium Group’s Larsen. The U.S. can realistically reach a 40% cut by 2030, which is about one-third reduction from what 2020 U.S. carbon emissions would have been without a pandemic, said Williams, the San Francisco professor.All this work on power and vehicles, that’s easy compared with decarbonizing agriculture with high methane emissions from livestock and high-heat industrial processes such as steelmaking, Breakthrough’s Hausfather said.”There’s no silver bullet for agriculture,” Hausfather said. “There’s no solar panels for cows, so to speak, apart from meat alternatives, but even there you have challenges around consumer acceptance.” 
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In the first large-scale, controlled data outside clinical trials, the two-dose Pfizer coronavirus vaccine is showing 92 percent effectiveness, according to Israeli health officials. It’s good news for Pfizer, which says the vaccine also appears to work against the British mutation of COVID-19. The Maccabi Health Fund studied 163,000 Israelis who had received two doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Only 31 of them caught COVID-19 after they were fully vaccinated. In an equivalent sample of unvaccinated Israelis, almost 6,500 developed the disease.The study shows the Pfizer vaccine had 92 percent effectiveness, which was close to the 95 percent Pfizer saw in clinical trials. Israeli infectious-disease experts said the study is good news and that the slight difference between the clinical trials and this current study is within the standard deviation.Israel has become a real-time laboratory for the Pfizer vaccine, which is being widely distributed in the country through the public health funds. Israel bought the vaccine early, paying double the market price, according to media reports, and agreed to share all of its data with Pfizer. All Israelis belong to one of four health funds and all medical records are digitized.So far, almost 3 million Israelis out of a total population of 9.3 million have received the first dose of the vaccine, and almost 1.5 million have received the second dose.FILE – A woman waits outside a container at a coronavirus testing center while Israel is under a lockdown as part of the coronavirus disease restrictions, in Jerusalem Jan. 29, 2021.Rising death rateDespite the good news, the country is seeing a rising death rate and more seriously ill patients. Israel has been under a third lockdown for three weeks, which is due to be lifted next week. All schools and businesses, except for essential businesses like supermarkets and pharmacies, are closed, and Israelis are allowed to travel only a half-mile from their homes.Some in the ultra-Orthodox community have ignored those restrictions, and there have been violent demonstrations when police have come to enforce them.Israel’s health minister, Yuli Edelstein, said lifting the lockdown would be a mistake.He said the lockdown had stopped the increase in new cases, but the British mutation, which is being found in about a third of all new cases, is more infectious and more serious. He said that opening schools and workplaces now would be a big mistake and would result in more deaths.Of the total 4,600 deaths in Israel, more than 1,000 were in the month of January alone. Professor Nachman Ash, who is leading Israel’s coronavirus response, said he was most worried about the number of seriously ill patients.He said that Israel currently has 1,200 seriously ill patients and that some hospitals are on the verge of collapse. He said he expected the numbers of seriously ill patients to begin to drop in the next week.Israel closed its airport this week to air traffic, hoping to stop new cases from being brought into the country. Israeli officials said they hoped to extend both the lockdown and the airport closure for another week.
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