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CNN
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It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack – an 8mm by 6mm silver capsule, no bigger than a coin, believed to be lost somewhere along a stretch of vast desert highway in Australia’s biggest state.

Mining company Rio Tinto issued an apology on Monday saying it was supporting state government efforts to find the capsule, which contains Caesium-137, a highly radioactive substance used in mining equipment.

Rio Tinto said it has checked all roads in and out of the Gudai-Darri mine site in remote northern Western Australia, where the device was located before a contractor collected it for the journey south to the state capital, Perth.

Authorities believe the capsule, which emits both gamma and beta rays, fell off the back of a truck trundling along a 1,400 kilometer (870 miles) section of the Great Northern Highway – a distance longer than the Californian coastline.

Due to the tiny size of the capsule and the huge distances involved, authorities warn the chances of finding it are slim.

And there are fears that it may have already been carried further from the search zone, creating a radioactive health risk for anyone who comes across it for potentially the next 300 years.

State authorities raised the alarm on Friday, alerting residents to the presence of a radioactive spill across a southern swathe of the state, including in the north-eastern suburbs of Perth, the state’s capital, home to around 2 million people.

According to authorities, the capsule was placed inside a package on January 10 and collected from Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri mine site by a contractor on January 12.

The vehicle spent four days on the road and arrived in Perth on January 16 but was only unloaded for inspection on January 25 – when it was discovered missing.

“Upon opening the package, it was found that the gauge was broken apart with one of the four mounting bolts missing and the source itself and all screws on the gauge also missing,” said the Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES).

They believe that strong vibrations caused by bumpy roads damaged the package – dislodging a mounting bolt that held it in place.

Experts have warned Caesium-137 can create serious health problems for humans who come into contact with it: skin burns from close exposure, radiation sickness and potentially deadly cancer risks, especially for those exposed unknowingly for long periods of time.

Radiation Services WA, a company that provides radiation protection advice, says standing within one meter of the capsule for an hour would deliver around 1.6 millisieverts (mSv), as much as around 17 standard chest X-rays.

Picking up the capsule would cause “serious damage” to your fingers and surrounding tissue, the company said in a statement.

Ivan Kempson, an associate professor in Biophysics from the University of Southern Australia, said the worst case scenario would be a curious child picking up the capsule and putting it in their pocket.

“This is rare but could happen and has happened before,” Kempson said. “There have been some past examples of people finding similar things and suffering radiation poisoning but they were much stronger than the current capsule that is missing.”

“We are all exposed to a constant level of radiation from things around us and the foods we eat but the primary concern now is the potential impact on health of the person who would find the capsule.”

The incident has come as a shock to experts who said that handling of radioactive materials like Caesium-137 is highly regulated with strict protocols for their transport, storage and disposal.

Rio Tinto said it regularly transports and stores dangerous good as part of its business and hires expert contractors to handle radioactive materials. The tiny capsule was part of a density gauge used at the Gudai-Darri mine site to measure the density of iron ore feed in the crushing circuit, it said in a statement.

Radiation Services WA says radioactive substances are transported throughout Western Australia on a daily basis without any issues. “In this case, there seems to be a failure of the control measures typically implemented,” it said, adding that it had nothing to do with the capsule’s loss.

Pradip Deb, a lecturer and radiation safety officer at RMIT University in Melbourne, said the loss of the capsule was “very unusual” as Australian safety rules require them to be transported in highly protective cases.

The name of the logistics company used to transport the device has not been released, Rio Tinto said.

Authorities are attempting to find the device with specialized radiation detection equipment fitted to search vehicles driving slowly up and down the highway in both directions at 50 kilometers an hour (31 miles per hour).

“It will take approximately five days to travel the original route,” the DFES said in a statement Monday.

Dale Bailey, a professor of medical imaging science from the University of Sydney, said the slow speed was needed to give the equipment time to detect the radiation.

“Radiation detectors on moving vehicles can be used to detect radiation above the natural levels, but the relatively low amount of radiation in the source means that they would have to ‘sweep’ the area relatively slowly,” he said.

Authorities have warned members of the public not to come within five meters of the device, while acknowledging that it would be difficult to see from a distance.

“What we’re not doing is trying to find a tiny little device by eyesight. We’re using radiation detectors to locate the gamma rays,” DFES officials said.

But there are fears that it may no longer be within the search zone – authorities say the capsule may have become lodged in another vehicle’s tire, carrying it a greater distance away, or even dispersed by wild animals, including birds.

“Imagine if it was a bird of prey for example that picks up the capsule and carries it away from the (original) search area – there are so many uncertainties and it will pose more problems,” said Dave Sweeney, nuclear policy analyst and environmental advocate at the Australian Conservation Foundation.

“This source obviously needs to be recovered and secured but there are so many variables and we simply don’t know what could happen.”

Caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years, which means that after three decades, the capsule’s radioactivity will halve, and after 60 years, it’ll halve again.

At that rate, the capsule could be radioactive for the next 300 years, said Deb from RMIT University.

“Caesium-137 is normally a sealed source – meaning, if it is not broken, it will not contaminate the soil or environment … If the capsule is never found, it will not contaminate or transfer radioactivity into the surrounding soil,” Deb added.

Kempson, from the University of Southern Australia, said that if remains lost in an isolated area, “it will be very unlikely to have much impact.”

Rio Tinto, one of the world’s biggest mining giants, operates 17 iron ore mines in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. The company’s mining activities have caused controversy in the past, including the destruction in 2020 of two ancient rock shelters at Juukan Gorge, prompting an apology and the resignation of then-CEO Jean-Sébastien Jacques.

CNN
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The video was instantly viral: Cell phone footage from anti-government protests in Iran’s Kurdish city of Sanandaj showed a bare-chested man wielding a knife, encircled by about a dozen regime forces armed with guns.

Security officers appeared to take turns cautiously swinging their batons at the protester, some even firing their guns at him, as they sprang back and forth with every lunge he made.

Eventually the protester fell to his knees, after being shot multiple times at close range, he says.

It was the world’s first glimpse of Ashkan Morovati, a Kurdish Iranian boxer who has since become a hero to supporters of Iran’s protest movement.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Morovati explained the backstory to the video, taken in late October. In the moments leading up to the confrontation seen on camera, he said, he had approached security forces and asked them to take a calmer approach toward protesters calling for the end of the country’s iron-fisted clerical regime.

“I went there to tell them to stand by the people and make compromises with people,” Morovati told CNN. “You are suppressing people mercilessly and this is beneath humanity.”

As he addressed them, however, the security forces attacked without warning, using pepper spray, batons, and ultimately firing at him, according to Morovati. He says he only took out his knife in self-defense, though to no avail.

“They shot me with a shotgun from a very close range and then shot me twice with military grade bullets in both legs.”

Iranian authorities did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Morovati was arrested and later charged with “waging war against God” or “moharebeh”, a charge that carries the death penalty, and which has been repeatedly used by the Iranian regime to prosecute political protesters in the country.

The ordeal could have cost him his life. Instead, it led to his daring escape from Iran.

Iran’s nationwide uprising convulsed the country when it began in mid-September, posing the biggest domestic threat to the ruling clerical class in more than a decade. Mass protests penetrated the regime’s conservative support base and produced countless acts of defiance – and sometimes violence – against the formidable Basij, a voluntary paramilitary group that is the fulcrum of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus. The protesters were young and angry, and a barrier of fear appeared to have broken.

But four months on, a growing wave of repression against demonstrators – including dozens of execution sentences handed out to protesters – has damped Iran’s protests, though not the popular anger behind it. Recent death sentences are the culmination of an increasingly violent crackdown including the gunning down of protesters, mass arrests, physical assault and sexual violence.

Morovati himself says he died many times before finally escaping from Iran. He alleges that regime forces brutalized him even after his arrest, continuing to beat him and even shooting him again, until they were certain he would not survive.

“When they were transporting me to hospital, they shot me from a very close range with a shotgun, as if it was a coup de grace,” Morovati explains. He believes that the officers only took him to the hospital because they were certain he would die.

But he lived.

At Kowsar Hospital in Sanandaj, he was taken to the ICU and treated by several doctors, including Dr. Iman Navabi, a surgeon.

Morovati told CNN that doctors at the hospital said he had a severed artery in his leg, a lung punctured by shotgun pellets, and about 200 more pellets in his body, with some causing serious wounds.

Though his condition was dire, he miraculously pulled through.

“Are you 100%? Open your eyes,” Navabi said in a video posted on his Instagram showing Morovati after surgery. Navabi stood above Morovati, whose large stature lying on a stretcher had his feet dangling off the front end. His parents, visibly worried, sat next to him in hospital gowns.

“Ashkan Morovati is fine, the operation was successful, his condition is stable, he is out of danger, he is in the ICU tonight and there is nothing to worry about,” Navabi wrote in his video caption.

Many Iranian doctors and health workers have been arrested as punishment for providing medical treatment for protesters, and after treating Morovati, Navabi himself was arrested in early December, according to Norway-registered Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. He was later released, according to Canadian member of Parliament Terry Beech.

The Kurdish boxer, who previously had been seen training with weights, throwing punches and sprinting on videos posted to his social media accounts, spent nearly a month lying in a hospital bed recuperating.

Then, he says regime forces burst into the hospital and dragged him out in the early hours of November 23.

“Around 10 plainclothes agents came along with around 20 armed soldiers who had fully taken over the hospital, and took me from the isolated ICU room,” Morovati said, describing the scene. “They had a court order to shoot anyone who came close to interfere and they took me to prison in that condition.”

He was taken to prison where he says he experienced unbearable agony because of his open wounds.

In prison, Morovati no longer received continual oxygen from an oxygen tank or had his wound dressings changed frequently as he had in the hospital; prison staff ignored his cries of pain, he says.

“I had to find salt and put them on my wounds to disinfect my wound just a little bit,” Morovati says of his nearly 10 days in prison. “They didn’t pay any attention to my condition.”

He relied on fellow prisoners to share their painkillers.

After 10 days, at the persistent urging of his family and pressure from physicians from Kowsar Hospital on the judiciary, prison staff acquiesced in providing medical treatment for Morovati by transferring him to an army hospital.

“I was there in that condition with both my hands and feet chained to the bed,” Morovati says, describing his six-day tenure at the facility. He says army doctors thought he was dying and suggested he be transferred to a hospital better equipped to treat him.

Again, at the behest of family and physician pressure, Morovati was somehow granted reprieve.

“They gave me 20 days to get myself to a well-equipped hospital,” he says.

It was during this time that the judiciary charged him with moharebe – without a hearing and without questioning. And this was precisely the time that Morovati took advantage of to make his great escape.

Instead of going to a hospital, Morovati fled the country, traveling overland. “I got out of the country through mountains and deserts while heavily bleeding and in a very, very bad condition,” Morovati says.

With the help of friends, he says he is now in a safe place, in an undisclosed location outside of Iran’s borders.

“Many people in Iran are dying to get out of the country and tell the world the truth,” Morovati explains. “Our only crime is that we demand freedom and democracy and want our women to be equal to our men. We shouted ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ – this is our crime.”

When asked if Iranians are scared in light of the current crackdown on protesters, Morovati disagreed, referencing a popular slogan used by protesters: “Any one person who is killed, there are a thousand people in support of them.”

“I don’t believe that people are scared,” Morovati says. “People are still standing bravely and will [continue to] stand courageously.”

Morovati still hasn’t received medical attention since his escape and says his leg that sustained the gunshot wound is numb, but he copes with it. He says it’s extremely painful for him to come to terms with the fact that he won’t be able to pursue boxing as a career after his injuries, but his hopes lie in a different destiny now.

Asked about his safety and any physical pain he feels, Morovati hastily responds saying he doesn’t feel safe, and he is in pain. He quickly adds that “the most important thing for me right now is Iran’s liberation.”

“I will give my life for my people, for my Iran, not one time, but a hundred thousand times,” he added.

CNN
 — 

The United States spends more on health care than any other high-income country but still has the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group.

The report, released Tuesday, also says that compared with peer nations, the US has the highest rates of deaths from avoidable or treatable causes and the highest maternal and infant death rates.

“Americans are living shorter, less healthy lives because our health system is not working as well as it could be,” the report’s lead author, Munira Gunja, senior researcher for The Commonwealth Fund’s International Program in Health Policy and Practice Innovation, said in a news release. “To catch up with other high-income countries, the administration and Congress would have to expand access to health care, act aggressively to control costs, and invest in health equity and social services we know can lead to a healthier population.”

People in the US see doctors less often than those in most other countries, which is probably related to the US having a below-average number of practicing physicians, according to the report, and the US is the only country among those studied that doesn’t have universal health coverage. In 2021 alone, 8.6% of the US population was uninsured.

“Not only is the U.S. the only country we studied that does not have universal health coverage, but its health system can seem designed to discourage people from using services,” researchers at the Commonwealth Fund, headquartered in New York, wrote in the report. “Affordability remains the top reason why some Americans do not sign up for health coverage, while high out-of-pocket costs lead nearly half of working-age adults to skip or delay getting needed care.”

The researchers analyzed health statistics from international sources, including the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, which tracks and reports on data from health systems across 38 high-income countries. The data was extracted in December.

The researchers examined how the United States measured against Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. They also compared the US with the OECD average for 38 high-income countries.

The data showed that in 2021 alone, the US spent nearly twice as much as the average OECD country on health care – and health spending in the US was three to four times higher than in South Korea, New Zealand and Japan.

Globally, health care spending has been increasing since the 1980s, according to the report, driven mostly by advancements in medical technologies, the rising costs of medical care and a higher demand for services.

The US has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic health conditions, the data showed, and the highest obesity rate among the countries studied.

Life expectancy at birth in the US in 2020 was 77 years – three years less than the OECD average – and early data suggests that US life expectancy dropped even further in 2021. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, more people died from coronavirus infections in the US than in any other high-income country, according to the report.

Deaths caused by assaults also appeared to be highest in the US compared with all peer countries. The researchers found that deaths from physical assault, which includes gun violence, occurred at a rate of 7.4 deaths per 100,000 people in the US in 2020, significantly higher than the OECD average of 2.7 and at least seven times higher than most other high-income countries in the report.

Where the US appeared to do well was in cancer prevention and treating cancers early. Along with Sweden, it had the highest number of breast cancer screenings among women ages 50 to 69, and the US exceeded the OECD average when it came to screening rates for colorectal cancer.

A separate paper published in mid-January said that the US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted.

Overall, the new Commonwealth Fund report “continues to demonstrate the importance of international comparisons,” Reginald D. Williams II, who leads The Commonwealth Fund’s International Program, said in the news release. “It offers an opportunity for the U.S. to learn from other countries and build a better health care system that delivers affordable, high-quality health care for everyone.”

Much of the data in the new report shows trends that have been seen before.

“It validates the fact that we continue to spend more than anybody else and get the worst health outcomes. So we’re not getting the best value for our health care dollar,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the new report.

“The big takeaway for me is that Covid did not become the great equalizer [among nations]. It did not help our case at all,” Benjamin said. “If anything, it exposed the existing holes in our health care system.”

To help fix the holes in the US health care system, Benjamin referenced three steps the nation can take.

“We’re still the only nation that does not have universal health care or access for all of our citizens,” Benjamin said.

Second, “we don’t do as much primary care prevention as the other nations, and we still have a public health system, which is fractured,” he said. “The third thing is, we under-invest compared to other industrialized nations in societal things. They spend their money on providing upfront support for their citizens. We spend our money on sick care.”