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2b681bd011acc96d282de1bc433e53ea | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/07/iran-qasem-soleimani-funeral-procession-deaths/2830680001/ | Stampede at Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani's funeral kills at least 56 | Stampede at Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani's funeral kills at least 56
Iranian state TV reported Tuesday that at least 56 people were killed and 213 injured in a stampede at a funeral procession for the nation's slain Gen. Qasem Soleimani in his hometown of Kerman in southeastern Iran.
Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike ordered by President Donald Trump.
A procession in Tehran on Monday drew more than 1 million people in Iran's capital, crowding main thoroughfares and side streets. Emergency services in Kerman blamed high levels of congestion and overcrowding for the deaths.
Click 'play' above to hear USA TODAY's Kim Hjelmgaard put Soleimani's funeral crowds in context.
Latest:What you need to know about the death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani
Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency said authorities later delayed Soleimani’s burial because of concerns about the massive crowd.
It did not say when the burial would take place.
Soleimani's killing has reignited fears Tehran and Washington could be on the brink of a military confrontation. Both sides say they want to avoid war. Iran has pledged revenge for the death of one its most revered commanders, and it has indicated it could take the form of a military strike against U.S. forces. And speaking in a cable news interview Tuesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, "We are not looking to start a war with Iran, but we are prepared to finish one."
Qasem Soleimani killing:Iran OKs bill calling U.S. military terrorists
Soleimani headed the Quds Force, an elite wing of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps. Quds orchestrates Iran's deep ties to non-state armed militants groups in the Middle East, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, with whom Soleimani was holding meetings when he was killed in the U.S. strike near Baghdad's airport Friday.
Among other Iran-related developments:
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615c8455e71456597181c85e2cd9dc65 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/07/iran-says-u-s-military-pentagon-terrorists-qasem-soleimani-killing/2830669001/ | Iran OKs bill calling U.S. military, Pentagon terrorists after Qasem Soleimani killing | Iran OKs bill calling U.S. military, Pentagon terrorists after Qasem Soleimani killing
The Iranian Parliament approved a bill Tuesday designating the entire U.S. military and Pentagon terrorist organizations after the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.
Lawmakers also backed a motion allocating $220 million to the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corp's Quds Force to take revenge for Soleimani's death in a drone strike ordered by President Donald Trump.
The U.S. action has threatened to spill over into outright military confrontation between Tehran and Washington, though both sides insist they don't want war. Trump has sought a "maximum pressure" policy on Iran aimed at curbing its nuclear activities, ballistic missile program and support for militant groups.
Iran's new legislation was unanimously approved by 223 lawmakers, according to Iranian state media. Last year, the nation's Supreme National Security Council had designated U.S. Central Command, the U.S. military's Middle East command unit, a terrorist group. That came in response to the Trump administration's labeling of the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization after Washington exited a landmark 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers and reimposed economic sanctions.
Iran-U.S. tensions reach new heights: Iranian Americans aren't mourning Gen. Qasem Soleimani. They're glad he's dead. But, now what?
Soleimani headed the Quds Force, an elite wing of the Revolutionary Guard that orchestrated Iran's ties to non-state armed groups in the region such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, with whom Soleimani was holding meetings when he was killed in a U.S. strike near Baghdad's main airport Friday.
Separately, Iranian state TV reported that at least 56 people were killed and 213 injured in a stampede that erupted at a funeral procession Tuesday for the slain general in Soleimani's hometown of Kerman, in southeastern Iran. A procession in Tehran on Monday drew more than 1 million people in Iran's capital, crowding main thoroughfares and side streets. Emergency services in Kerman blamed high levels of congestion and overcrowding for the tragedy.
Soleimani's burial was later delayed because of the huge crowds.
Authorities did not say when the funeral and burial would resume.
There was no immediate reaction from the U.S. State Department or White House to Iran's parliamentary resolution. Washington considered Soleimani a terrorist responsible for hundreds of American soldiers' deaths in Iraq, largely because the organization he headed trained Iraqi militant groups to target U.S.-led coalition forces with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Soleimani also oversaw Iran's sophisticated foreign intelligence and security apparatus.
Tragedy in Iran:Stampede at Qasem Soleimani's funeral kills at least 56
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32b4e91f5ea1ef5b0fe3ec048ac7e0b3 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/08/australian-fires-over-1-billion-animals-feared-dead-experts-say/2845084001/ | Over 1 billion animals feared dead in Australian wildfires, experts say | Over 1 billion animals feared dead in Australian wildfires, experts say
The death toll for animals in Australia continues to go up.
The World Wildlife Fund in Australia estimates that as many as 1.25 billion animals may have been killed directly or indirectly from fires that have scorched Australia.
"The fires have been devastating for Australia’s wildlife and wild places, as massive areas of native bushland, forests and parks have been scorched," Stuart Blanch, an environmental scientist with the World Wildlife Fund in Australia, told USA TODAY. Many forests will take many decades to recover, he said.
The fires, which have been blazing since September, have killed 26 people, destroyed 2,000 homes and scorched an area twice the size of the state of Maryland. They have been fueled by drought and the country’s hottest and driest year on record, and exacerbated by climate change.
Australian Aboriginal officials approve killing up to 10,000 feral camels
The new number of animals killed was calculated using methodology that estimates the impacts of land clearing on Australian wildlife and extrapolates upon the science of Chris Dickman from the University of Sydney.
More:Climate change has Australian wildfires 'running out of control,' experts say
Dickman told HuffPost that his original estimate of 480 million animals was not only conservative, it was also exclusive to the state of New South Wales and excluded significant groups of wildlife for which they had no population data.
That figure excluded animals including bats, frogs and invertebrates. With these numbers included, Dickman said, it was “without any doubt at all” that the losses exceed 1 billion. “Over a billion would be a very conservative figure,” he told HuffPost.
Blanch told USA TODAY that the loss includes thousands of precious koalas, along with other iconic species such as kangaroos, wallabies, gliders, potoroos, cockatoos and honeyeaters.
"There are estimates that up to 30% of koalas (as many as 8,400 koalas) may have perished during fires on the mid-north coast of New South Wales," Blanch said. "This is a devastating blow for a species already in decline due to ongoing excessive tree-clearing for agricultural and urban development, and pushes the species closer to becoming an endangered species.
"This has the potential to hasten koalas’ slide towards extinction in the wild in eastern Australia," Blanch warned.
Other species may also have tipped over the brink of extinction, he said.
Blanch added that "fires across Kangaroo Island in South Australia have been particularly devastating for wildlife: The severe loss of understory – the layer of vegetation under a forest – is a worry for the Kangaroo Island dunnart (a small, mouse-like creature) with some fearful the fires have pushed the species over the brink of extinction." A bird, the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo, is also close to extinction and will need an immediate assessment when it’s safe to do so.
Fires have also burned through critical habitat of native Australian mammals such as the long-footed potoroo, the mountain pygmy possum, the yellow-bellied glider and the brush-tailed rock wallaby, and bird species such as the critically endangered regent honeyeater, according to the World Wildlife Fund in Australia.
Until the fires subside, the full extent of damage will remain unknown.
Australia, unfortunately, is no stranger to extinction: Some 34 species and subspecies of native mammals have become extinct in Australia over the past 200 years, the highest rate of loss for any region in the world, Dickman said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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3d2153d37f5fd88d5d54ce1cfd4a20be | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/11/iraq-iran-trump-middle-east-tensions/2853510001/ | Tug of war: In Trump vs. Tehran, Iraqis caught in the middle | Tug of war: In Trump vs. Tehran, Iraqis caught in the middle
The lyrics from a song by a Scottish folk-rock band that was popular several decades ago might seem like an unusual and absurdly specific cultural frame through which to view the tensions that have engulfed the United States and Iran in recent times.
But for Iraqis, as evidenced by their social media posts, protesters and statements and testimony from humanitarian aid groups, religious figures and political analysts, the 1973 Stealers Wheel song, "Stuck in the Middle with You," makes a kind of perfect sense.
Ever since the Trump administration exited the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, reimposing sanctions and pursuing a "maximum pressure" policy on Tehran that has left the country economically and diplomatically isolated – culminating this week with an Iranian missile attack on two bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops after the Pentagon killed a top Iranian commander in a drone strike there – Iraq has been at the center of an intensifying tug of war between Tehran and Washington, according to Osamah Khalil, a historian of U.S. foreign relations and the Middle East at Syracuse University.
"Iraq has become a battleground for American and Iranian influence," he said.
Analysis:Trump backs away from war with Iran but it's not over
Some of this vying for clout is plain to see.
An American defense contractor was killed in a rocket attack on U.S. troops in late December in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Washington blamed an Iranian-backed group for the assault.
The U.S. hit back with airstrikes along the Iraq-Syria border that killed 25 fighters from Kataeb Hezbollah, a non-state armed militia that is part of the Iraq-based Popular Mobilization Forces, supported by Iran.
Shortly afterward, angry crowds of pro-Iranian demonstrators stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, chanting "Death to America." Washington said the siege was orchestrated by Iran's Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who the Pentagon subsequently killed in the drone strike near a Baghdad airport along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Four members of Iraq’s military were wounded Sunday in a rocket attack targeting an air base just north of Baghdad where American trainers were present until recently, Iraqi security officials said.
Poll:Americans say Soleimani's killing made US less safe, Trump 'reckless' on Iran
"#Iran wants the #US out of #Iraq/The US wants Iran out of Iraq/How about we (Iraqis) leave, we might be bothering them," tweeted Hayder Al-Shakeri, summing up the exasperation that some Iraqis feel. According to his online and social media profiles, Al-Shakeri is from Baghdad and works in development, helping to coordinate regional cooperation programs across Arab states. He could not be reached for an interview.
Another twitter user, "@mendlusi," shared a video by an Iraqi journalist that appeared to show an Iraqi man in Baghdad "crying over the pain that Iraqis have suffered at the hands of the government, foreign governments and militias."
Over the last few months, more than 400 Iraqis have been killed and almost 20,000 injured, according to the United Nations, in protests in Baghdad and cities across Iraq.
Among their demands: an end to widespread corruption that has precipitated a dysfunctional economy, rampant unemployment and ineffective governance.
They also want to see a halt to the outsize influence of Iraq's armed Shiite militia groups, such as the Popular Mobilization Forces, that are closely aligned with Iran. Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who has already resigned and is in a caretaker role, was due to meet with Soleimani on the day the Iranian commander was killed in the U.S. drone strike, according to Mahdi's own admissions to his country's parliament.
After Soleimani's killing, Mahdi, a Shiite who has close ties to Iran, led and won a non-binding vote in Iraq's parliament that called for U.S. troops to be expelled from Iraq. On Friday, Mahdi asked U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to start formulating a plan for the U.S. withdrawal of troops. The Trump administration rebuffed the idea and warned Iraq it could lose access to its central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York if it expels American troops from the region, according to the a report.
"America is a force for good in the Middle East," said Morgan Ortagus, spokesperson for the State Department. "Our military presence in Iraq is to continue the fight against (the Islamic State terror group) and as the Secretary has said, we are committed to protecting Americans, Iraqis and our coalition partners," she said.
Still, thousands of Iraqi rallied across the country Friday in anti-government protests where they also chanted criticisms of both the U.S. and Iran.
"Iraq has been suffering from proxy wars for decades; they have torn our country apart," said Bashar Matti Warda, a Chaldean Catholic cleric and the current Archbishop of Erbil, in Kurdish Iraq. Chaldean Catholicism which originates in the Church of the East, is a form of Christianity that is found in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and other places in the region.
Sajad Jiyad, managing director of Al-Bayan Center, a Baghdad-based public policy think tank that focuses on issues related to Iraq and region, said that Iraq "does not want to be in one camp or the other. Iran will always be our neighbor. But we recognize that the U.S. is a superpower."
Jiyad said that prior to the implementation of the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" Iran policy his country was not as caught in the middle between Tehran and Washington and that anti-Americanism has increased.
"Our politics has also taken on a strong anti-American voice," he added, referring to the vote in Iraq's parliament to try to push American forces out of the country.
While the war in Iraq officially ended in 2011, when former President Barack Obama ordered the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops, 17 years after the U.S. invasion that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains in a fragile state.
About 5,000 U.S. and coalition troops have been redeployed to the country to combat the Islamic State terror organization, an extremist Sunni group that capitalized on the chaos unleashed in Iraq by the U.S. invasion and, later, the civil war in neighboring Syria.
Across the broader Middle East region, the U.S. has more than 62,00 troops deployed in various countries ranging from NATO member Turkey to the tiny Gulf state Bahrain.
Iraq and Iran share almost 900 miles of borders and Iraq is heavily dependent on Iran for its energy supply. The many armed militias in Iraq are often closer to Iran than to the Iraqi government – making it potentially perilous to alienate Tehran. A U.S. withdrawal could pave the way for a resurgence of the Islamic State group.
'The world is watching': Trump tweets in support of Iran protests
It would be a "gift to ISIS," Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said, using an acronym for the terror organization.
Washington's current with Iran crisis has put Iraq "in the eye of the storm" at the worst possible moment, said Abbas Kadhim, head of the Atlantic Council’s Iraq initiative and a former Iraqi diplomat.
The current prime minister is on his way out of office, and the current government is operating with "truncated authorities," Kadhim noted at a foreign policy forum in Washington on Thursday. The population is divided, and leaders are struggling to chart a path forward amid a political crisis.
Now they’re dealing with a cycle of confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that has left Iraq torn between two key allies, he said.
Andres Gonzalez Rodriguez, the Iraq country director for Oxfam, the humanitarian group, said in an emailed statement that due to the recent uptick in Iran-U.S.-related frictions in Iraq "we have had to suspend work in three locations where we were delivering cash aid to people in need of help. If we have to continue the suspension for a few weeks more, 100,000 of the most vulnerable people will be affected."
Rodriguez said Oxfam, whose aid reaches over a million people in Iraq, specializes in water and sanitation, emergency food, cash and gender programs and protection work.
Early on Wednesday local time, Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq hosting American and other foreign troops, in what appears to have been a carefully calibrated response to the killing of Soleimani. No one was killed in the strikes.
Iran's strike:A loud warning shot and an offer to de-escalate, sources say
President Donald Trump said Iran "appears to be standing down" and suggested the U.S. and Iran could work toward a new nuclear deal while cooperating against militants. Few foreign affairs experts see that as a likely outcome of the increased frictions.
More:Trump warns Iran but says US 'ready to embrace peace with all who seek it'
Jiyad, of the Al-Bayan Center, said that Iraq understands that the U.S. can be a helpful partner in the region in terms of fighting the Islamic State terror group, "but we don't want to be part of a political game where we are either pro-Iran or pro-U.S. The most important thing for us is to keep good relations with all countries."
Still, for Saeed Jamil al-Hadidiyah, 59, and his family, who live on a farm where they work as sheepherders near where one of the missiles that Iran fired on a base in Kurdish Iraq landed, such political arguments are meaningless.
"We don't understand why Iran is attacking us. What did we do to them," he said Thursday as he showed USA TODAY the damage sustained to his house.
The missile landed about 1,600 feet from the home he shares with 14 other members of his extended family. The youngest is a 6-month-old baby. None were injured in the attack but the home sustained damage to the roof and some windows were shattered .
"We know there's tensions between Iran and the U.S. but why are they shooting at us?"
Contributing: Younes Mohammad in Erbil, Iraq
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e5aa2fd4dfe40881c0da72f9b694baed | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/11/puerto-rico-earthquake-6-0-magnitude-quake-causes-damage-ponce/4441511002/ | Magnitude 5.9 earthquake rocks Puerto Rico and causes landslide in Peñuelas | Magnitude 5.9 earthquake rocks Puerto Rico and causes landslide in Peñuelas
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake shook Puerto Rico on Saturday morning, causing a landslide in the southern municipality of Peñuelas.
The quake at 8:54 a.m. local time struck 8 miles southeast of Guanica at a shallow depth of 3 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It is the most recent in a string of quakes and aftershocks that have left thousands on the island without power and water.
Preliminary reports by the USGS said the quake was a magnitude 6.0 at a depth of 6 miles.
The quake caused outages across the island, including areas of Lares, Adjuntas, Ponce and San German, according to Puerto Rico's Electric Power Authority.
At least 539 buildings were damaged, amounting to losses of $110 million, Gov. Wanda Vázquez said in a press conference Saturday. She said her administration was immediately releasing $2 million to six of the most affected municipalities and putting price freezes on various food products and necessities.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
In Peñuelas, a landslide sent people running, Telemundo Puerto Rico reported. Video of the landslide shows dust kicking up on a hillside as people below run in different directions. Drone video published by Metro Puerto Rico shows barren mountainside in the aftermath of the slide.
In the nearby town of Guánica, around 500 people taking shelter at a sports complex began to shout and cry when they felt the quake, El Nuevo Dia reported. Many grabbed their cell phones to call relatives.
"I want to leave Puerto Rico ... I'm panicking," Ramona Lugo told the outlet.
Puerto Rico quakes:Many are forced to sleep outside
It was the strongest shake since Tuesday's 6.4 magnitude quake, which killed at least one person and knocked out power to virtually the entire island of more than 3 million.
Many on the island have lost their homes, and thousands remain in shelters.Some are sleeping outside or in open plazas for fear that the buildings could collapse.
"People are afraid," Mayita Melendez, mayor of the southern coastal city of Ponce, Puerto Rico's second largest city, told NPR on Friday.
Just 60% of Ponce residents have power and 88% have water, Melendez said.
Ponce has sustained more than $150 million in damages, according to U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.), who visited the island Saturday. More than 700 people are homeless, and the bridge Guánica is beginning to crack, he said on Twitter.
Scientists say the region has been struck by an "earthquake swarm," which is a series of earthquakes rather than the usual pattern of one dominant earthquake followed by aftershocks.
Puerto Rico earthquakes:950 earthquakes have hit the island so far this year. Why? Blame it on an 'earthquake swarm'
There have been nearly 1,000 earthquakes and aftershocks recorded on Puerto Rico since Dec. 31, according to the USGS. Since December, Puerto Rico has experienced more than 139 earthquakes of magnitudes greater than 3.0, including six that were greater than magnitude 5.0, the USGS said.
Over the next seven days, there is only a 3 percent chance of one or more aftershocks larger than magnitude 6.4, the USGS predicted Friday. There is, however, a high likelihood of aftershocks greater than magnitude 3.0, the USGS said.
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c52649f951337464ab416977d2ce1ab7 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/15/australia-fires-google-earth-nasa-tracks-smoke-around-world/4476126002/ | Dark smoke from Australia fires is circling the Earth, NASA says | Dark smoke from Australia fires is circling the Earth, NASA says
The unprecedented masses of smoke created by bushfires in Australia returned to their continent of origin after drifting across the Pacific Ocean and circumnavigating the globe, NASA said.
Google Earth images from the agency show the trail of brown smoke as it made its way around the world. According to NASA, the smoke had traveled halfway around the Earth and across South America by Jan. 8.
Fire-induced thunderstorms provided a pathway for the smoke to enter the stratosphere, traveling thousands of miles from Australia and affecting atmospheric conditions on a global scale.
Wood smoke contains some of the same toxic chemicals as urban air pollution, along with tiny particles of vapor and soot 30 times thinner than a human hair.
The fires have claimed at least 28 lives since September, destroyed more than 2,600 homes and scorched more than 25.5 million acres of land, mostly in the state of New South Wales.
Hospital admissions increased in the smoke-affected cities as some patients suffered asthma for the first time in their lives. The government distributed 3.5 million free particle-excluding masks.
Carrots fall from the sky:Australia drops 4,600 pounds of food, water from helicopters to feed hungry wallabies
Baby kangaroos lost moms in wildfires. Sewing groups make joey pouches for them
Despite regularly broadcast public health warnings, a number of tennis players in the qualifying tournament for the Australian Open in Melbourne have been affected by the smoke. One player dropped to her knees in a coughing fit and had to retire from her match.
In the USA, about 20,000 people die prematurely every year because of chronic wildfire smoke exposure. That’s likely to double by the end of the century, according to scientists funded by NASA.
Research suggests children, the elderly and those with health problems are most at risk.
Contributing: The Associated Press
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
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112f7513ff70d72121698bc4dc846274 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/15/delta-dumps-fuel-expert-defends-pilots/4476137002/ | FAA: Delta pilots didn't seek permission before dumping fuel that rained on school kids | FAA: Delta pilots didn't seek permission before dumping fuel that rained on school kids
The Delta pilots who bombarded elementary school playgrounds with jet fuel before making an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport failed to notify air traffic control of the need to jettison fuel and did not dump it at an optimal altitude, the FAA said Wednesday.
Pilots typically are directed by controllers to an appropriate area to dump fuel, a protocol that did not occur Tuesday, the FAA said in a statement.
"The FAA is continuing to investigate the circumstances behind this incident," the statement said.
Delta made national news Tuesday when pilots of Flight 89 bound for Shanghai dumped the fuel before making an emergency landing moments after takeoff. Delta said the twin-engine Boeing 777 had experienced engine problems.
Scores of people on the ground, including students at multiple elementary schools, were treated for eye and skin irritation, Los Angeles County fire officials said. Decontamination stations were set up, but no injuries required hospitalization, authorities said.
Peter Goelz, a former managing director for the National Transportation Safety Board, said it might be too early to judge the decisions of a pilot trying to ensure the safety of his passengers and crew.
"A 777 flying nonstop to Shanghai is absolutely loaded with fuel," Goelz said. "So loaded that to land right away after takeoff poses a significant danger."
Goelz, who is not involved in the investigation, said guidelines usually call for fuel to be dumped over water and/or at an altitude of 10,000 feet so it can disperse and minimize environmental damage. But the rules change for a very heavy plane that needs to get back on the ground, he said.
Goelz said every pilot knows the story of Swissair Flight 111, a Geneva-bound MD-11 out of New York that plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, 1998. None of the 229 people aboard survived. The crew had called in an emergency but was flying away from an airport so it could dump fuel over water when it crashed.
"Pilots know that when you have a problem that threatens the aircraft and you have to get rid of fuel, you get rid of it fast," he said. "You don't want things like this (contamination) to happen, but the alternative is too dire."
The FAA said it was investigating the fuel dump, noting that procedures call for fuel to be dumped over "designated unpopulated areas, typically at higher altitudes so the fuel atomizes and disperses before it reaches the ground."
Iran attack:New video reportedly shows second Iranian missile hitting doomed Ukrainian passenger plane
Delta said the unexplained engine issue required the plane to "return quickly" to LAX.
"The aircraft landed safely after a release of fuel, which was required as part of normal procedure to reach a safe landing weight," Delta said.
The airline said it was in touch with the airport and fire officials and expressed concern over "minor injuries" to adults and children.
The smell of jet fuel wafted through some neighborhoods.
The Los Angeles Unified School District said crews washed down playgrounds, play equipment, lunch tables and drinking fountains. it said air conditioning was left on at the affected schools overnight to thoroughly ventilate classrooms and other school buildings.
Delta said it dispatched 13 cleaning crews to assist the district in the overnight cleaning job.
School Board Vice President Jackie Goldberg was "shocked and angered" at the fuel dump over the Park Avenue Elementary School playground in Cudahy and promised to closely monitor the investigation.
"I am sorry our school community had to go through this very scary incident today," Goldberg said.
Goelz was willing to give the pilots the benefit of the doubt, at least for now.
"Right off the bat, I would not be criticizing the crew until I have more information," he said. "It was not an easy call."
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52f9ac99ca17470c9d06014cc9e392e2 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/15/russian-prime-minister-dmitry-medvedev-cabinet-resigns/4476322002/ | Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, entire Cabinet resign | Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, entire Cabinet resign
In a surprise move, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev resigned along with the country's entire Cabinet, Russian state news agency Tass reported Wednesday.
Medvedev made the announcement after Russia's President Vladimir Putin unveiled a series of constitutional changes that Medvedev said would alter the country's balance of power. Medvedev is a longtime close Putin ally. He has served as Russia’s prime minister since 2012. Before that, he spent four years as president, 2008-12.
Mikhail Mishustin, the head of Russia's tax agency, was named the new prime minister.
Tass said Putin thanked Medvedev for his service but noted that the prime minister’s Cabinet failed to fulfill all the objectives set for it. The news agency said Putin plans to name Medvedev as a deputy in Russia's Security Council. It was not immediately clear whether Putin asked for Medvedev to go and if his role in the Security Council – which he accepted – is a promotion or a demotion.
Putin, who has been in power in Russia for more than two decades, is a former KGB officer who rose out of the shadows of Russia's intelligence agencies when it was still the Soviet Union. Medvedev's resignation could be a sign that Putin wants to try to extend his 20-year rule after his term of office formally expires in 2024.
Putin also previously served as Russia's prime minister. When he swapped jobs with Medvedev in 2012, the move sparked large-scale protests in Russia.
Late last year, Putin hinted at possible constitutional amendments to redistribute powers among the president, the Cabinet and parliament. He didn’t specify what changes could be made. However, the announcement was viewed as a sign that he intended to curtail the prime minister's powers and continue ruling as president.
Under Russia's existing constitution, Putin would not be entitled to seek another presidential term in four years' time. Russia's constitution only permits presidents to serve two consecutive terms.
Some analysts have speculated that Putin could be maneuvering to become prime minister himself, with widely expanded powers, if he steps down in 2024. The role, as currently understood, is subordinate to the president's office.
"Pretty shoddy treatment of Medvedev after such loyal service as head butler and designated scapegoat," tweeted Mark Galeotii, a Russia expert with the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, a think tank based in London.
President Donald Trump has joked several times about trying to extend his time in the White House beyond the constitutional limit of two, four-year terms.
"He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday," Trump said in a speech to Republican donors in 2008, speaking about China's President Xi Jinping.
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0d70c4c83d290d98083cad60c4997b0f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/16/us-troops-treated-injuries-after-iran-missile-attack/4496310002/ | 11 US troops treated for injuries after Iran missile attack | 11 US troops treated for injuries after Iran missile attack
WASHINGTON – Several U.S service members were injured during Iran's missile assault on Al-Asad airbase in Iraq last week that houses U.S. troops and coalition forces.
U.S. Central Command in the region said in a statement that "several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed."
"At this time, eight individuals have been transported to Landstuhl, and three have been transported to Camp Arifjan," the statement said.
President Donald Trump said in an address to the nation the morning following the attack that, "no Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime.We suffered no casualties, all of our soldiers are safe, and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases."
The airstrike was retaliation for a U.S. drone strike days earlier that killed one of Tehran's most powerful officials, Qasem Soleimani.
Defense One was the first to report on the injuries.
"As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate are transported to a higher level of care. In the days following the attack, out of an abundance of caution, some service members were transported from Al Asad Air Base, Iraq to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, others were sent to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, for follow-on screening," the statement continued.
Top administration officials have stood by the assertion that the threat from Soleimani was imminent but have offered conflicting reasons of what that immediate threat exactly was, and have defended the intelligence that led them to that conclusion.
Iran has indicated there would not be further military retaliation.
“When deemed fit for duty, the service members are expected to return to Iraq following screening. The health and welfare of our personnel is a top priority and we will not discuss any individual’s medical status," the statement says.
The extent of damage to the bases was not immediately clear after the attack, but early-warning defense systems gave U.S. forces advance knowledge that missiles had been launched, according to a U.S. official speaking to USA TODAY on the condition of anonymity.
Contributing: William Cummings, John Bacon Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
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cdf689ef7e0a4a23492e982cbf998b8b | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/20/china-coronavirus-transmission-between-humans-confirmed-200-cases/4523222002/ | Human-to-human transmission confirmed in China's coronavirus outbreak; 200 cases reported | Human-to-human transmission confirmed in China's coronavirus outbreak; 200 cases reported
BEIJING – The head of a Chinese government expert team said Monday that human-to-human transmission has been confirmed in an outbreak of a new coronavirus, a development that raises the possibility that it could spread more quickly and widely.
Team leader Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory expert, said two people in Guangdong province in southern China caught the virus from family members, state media said. Some medical workers have also tested positive for the virus, the English-language China Daily newspaper reported.
Authorities announced a sharp increase in the number of confirmed cases to more than 200, and China’s leader called on the government to take every possible step to combat the outbreak.
“The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan and other places must be taken seriously,” President Xi Jinping said in his first public statement on the crisis. “Party committees, governments and relevant departments at all levels should put people’s lives and health first.”
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In Geneva, the World Health Organization announced it would convene an Emergency Committee meeting on Wednesday to determine whether the outbreak warrants being declared a global health crisis.
Such declarations are typically made for epidemics of severe diseases that threaten to cross borders and require an internationally coordinated response. Previous global emergencies have been declared for crises including the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo, the emergence of Zika virus in the Americas in 2016 and the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014.
The spread of the viral pneumonia comes as the country enters its busiest travel period, when millions board trains and planes for the Lunar New Year holidays. The outbreak may have started late last month when people picked it up at a fresh food market in Wuhan, a city in central China.
Wuhan health authorities said Monday that an additional 136 cases have been confirmed in the city, raising the total to 198. Three people have died.
Authorities announced cases in other Chinese cities for the first time.
Five people in Beijing and 14 in Guangdong have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, CCTV reported Monday evening. A total of seven suspected cases have been found in other parts of the country, including in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in the southwest and in Shanghai.
Zhong said the two people in Guangdong had not been to Wuhan but became ill after family members returned from the city, the China Daily said.
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The outbreak has put other countries on alert. Authorities in Thailand and in Japan identified at least three cases, all involving travel from China.
South Korea reported its first case Monday when a 35-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus one day after arriving at Seoul’s Incheon airport. The woman was isolated at a state-run hospital in Incheon city, west of Seoul, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.
At least a half-dozen countries in Asia and three U.S. airports started screening airline passengers from central China.
People in protective suits checked the temperatures of plane passengers arriving in Macao from Wuhan.
Many of the initial cases of the coronavirus were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, which was closed as authorities investigated.
Since hundreds of people who came into close contact with diagnosed patients have not gotten sick, the municipal health commission maintained that the virus is not easily transmitted between humans.
China’s National Health Commission said experts judged the outbreak to be “preventable and controllable.”
“However, the source of the new type of coronavirus has not been found, we do not fully understand how the virus is transmitted, and changes in the virus still need to be closely monitored,” the commission said in a statement Sunday.
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Coronaviruses cause diseases ranging from the common cold to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. SARS infected people in southern China in late 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing nearly 800. The Chinese government initially tried to conceal the severity of the SARS epidemic.
Xi instructed government departments Monday to promptly release information on the virus and deepen international cooperation.
China has maintained close communication with the World Health Organization and other countries and regions, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a news briefing.
Wuhan has adopted measures to control the flow of people leaving the city, Geng said.
The virus causing the outbreak is different from those previously identified, Chinese scientists said this month. Initial symptoms of the novel coronavirus include fever, cough, tightness of the chest and shortness of breath.
On the Weibo social media platform, which is widely used in China, people posted prevention advice such as wearing masks and washing hands. State broadcaster CCTV recommended staying warm, increasing physical activity, eating lightly and avoiding crowded places. Some people canceled their travel plans and stayed home for Lunar New Year.
Contributing: researcher Yu Bing in Beijing and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea
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a20ac67e686761b615c194a61880525c | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/21/china-coronavirus-outbreak-symptoms-transmission-cdc-sars/4528555002/ | What is coronavirus, and should Americans be worried? What to know about the outbreak in China | What is coronavirus, and should Americans be worried? What to know about the outbreak in China
A new virus gaining traction in China has begun a global spread, and the world is taking notice.
China has reported more than 500 cases of the virus since December, most of them in the city of Wuhan. At least 17 deaths are blamed on the outbreak. The virus is spreading across China, and beyond: One case has been confirmed in Japan, two in Thailand, one in South Korea and one in the U.S.
A Washington state native contracted the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed Tuesday. The man, in his 30s, had recently visited Wuhan and was in good condition at a local hospital, the CDC said.
Coronavirus death toll rises to 17: experts consider public health emergency
Many of the initial cases were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, but Chinese health officials said this week that human-to-human transmission has been confirmed.
The Lunar New Year is Saturday, and officials are concerned that millions of holiday travelers across Asia will fuel spread of the disease.
"From a public health perspective, vigilance is necessary now," said Ogbonnaya Omenka, an assistant professor and public health specialist at Butler University's College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. "Community-led surveillance systems can be very effective in detecting – and nipping in the bud – infectious diseases."
WHO has published a range of interim guidance for all countries on how they can prepare for the virus, including how to monitor for sick people, test samples, treat patients and communicate risks to the public.
The disease is drawing intense attention because of its similarities to severe acute respiratory syndrome, a coronavirus that killed more than 600 people across mainland China and Hong Kong along with more than 100 other people around the world in 2002-2003.
Coronavirus outbreak:First US case of coronavirus reported in Washington state
Here's what to know about coronavirus:
What is coronavirus? What are the symptoms?
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as pneumonia to Middle East respiratory syndrome, known as MERS, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. Common signs of infection include fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and death.
What is the world doing about it?
The World Health Organization has established an emergency committee to advise Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern, or a PHEIC.
Declaring a PHEIC gives the WHO director-general powers to issue recommendations to other countries, such as urging them not to close borders or restrict trade with a country in the throes of an outbreak.
How is coronavirus similar to Ebola, MERS and SARS?
Coronaviruses, Ebola and SARS are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people. Ebola was carried by fruit bats, which spread it to other animals. SARS was transmitted from civet cats to humans and MERS from camels to humans.
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Should Americans be afraid of coronavirus?
The Washington man who contracted the virus flew indirectly from Wuhan to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, CDC said Tuesday. He arrived in Washington on Wednesday, passing through the airport before the CDC and Customs and Border Protection began enhanced health screenings at several airports to detect travelers sickened by coronavirus coming into the United States from Wuhan.
Those screenings began Friday at airports in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Screenings were also expected to begin in Chicago and Atlanta, and all flights from Wuhan were being redirected to these five airports, the CDC said Tuesday.
"With global travel, the spread of any infectious disease is literally a plane ride away," says Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital.
Glatter, however, said perspective is important.
"It’s more likely that you would encounter the flu compared to the coronavirus," Glatter said. "It’s the flu and measles which pose a greater threat to the global community at this time."
Is coronavirus contagious? How is transmitted?
The virus can be spread from animals to people. But it also can be spread by coughing, sneezing and through close contact with an infected person or an object carrying the virus.
Is there a coronavirus vaccine? What does treatment look like?
There is no vaccine yet. Nine studies are examining coronavirus vaccine development.
"Development of vaccine is a complex process, and it's not going to be available tomorrow," said Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
While there is no particular treatment for the coronavirus, recommended measures are similar to those for cold, such as rest and drinking a lot of fluid.
Contributing: Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
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593d90f1a771bacb8b568c79ad603177 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/21/sudan-lions-starving-khartoum-spark-campaign-save/4529839002/ | These Sudanese lions are so starved their bones show. A campaign to save them went viral | These Sudanese lions are so starved their bones show. A campaign to save them went viral
After a series of devastating photos showed five malnourished and sick lions in Sudan, efforts are ramping up globally to save the cats.
The lions are being held in Al-Qureshi Park in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. The park is managed by Khartoum officials but is funded in part by private donors, per AFP.
Some of the lions are skeletal, with bones jutting out of their skin after losing nearly two-thirds of their body weight, while others have visible, untreated wounds. Conditions have worsened in recent weeks, as Sudan remains in the throes of an economic and political crisis.
“Food is not always available, so often we buy it from our own money to feed them,” Essamelddine Hajjar, a manager at the park, told AFP.
Osman Salih, a concerned resident of Khartoum, ignited a call to rescue the animals from their "deteriorating" conditions in a post Saturday. His campaign, using the hashtag #SudanAnimalRescue, has since gained worldwide attention.
In the days since his post, donors brought fresh meat, and the nonprofit Four Paws offered "emergency rescue" aid to these lions and others throughout Sudan, Salih said.
He expressed hesitation over accepting monetary donations, instead suggesting that concerned individuals bring meat directly to the lions. "Too often these situations are exploited, and people are scammed," he wrote.
One female lion has died since Salih's initial plea. But the other lions, per posts shared by Salih, have received medical treatment and food as of Tuesday.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, African lion numbers have plummeted by 40% over the past three generations. They are classified as a "vulnerable" species.
Follow Joshua Bote on Twitter: @joshua_bote
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c6b7330e149a05aa95b4e0e6958f6c6d | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/25/coronavirus-grave-crisis-us-diplomats-ordered-leave-wuhan/4574189002/ | Coronavirus death toll rises to 56 in China as US diplomats prepare to leave Wuhan | Coronavirus death toll rises to 56 in China as US diplomats prepare to leave Wuhan
As the U.S. closed its consulate in Wuhan and prepared to extract all its diplomats, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Saturday of a "grave situation" in the rapid spread of the coronavirus that has claimed 56 lives.
The virus, which broke out in Wuhan last month, has infected at least 1,975 people in at least 29 provinces and cities and killed 56 people in China, according to the National Health Commission.
The figures reported Sunday morning cover the previous 24 hours and mark an increase of 15 deaths and 688 cases.
The government also reported five cases in Hong Kong, two in Macao and three in Taiwan. Small numbers of cases have been found in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the U.S., Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Nepal, France and Australia.
Among the victims is Liang Wudong, a 62-year-old doctor at Hubei Xinhua Hospital who died Saturday after treating patients in Wuhan, according to the state-run Global Television Network.
A hospital in Toronto confirmed Saturday that it is treating a patient with the deadly virus, Canada’s first.
A second case in the U.S. was confirmed Friday in Chicago, along with three cases in France. There have been no deaths outside of China.
The U.S. State Department arranged a charter flight for Tuesday to bring out all its diplomats and other U.S. citizens after temporarily closing the Wuhan consulate, the Associated Press reported. A notice Sunday from the embassy in Beijing said there would be limited capacity to transport U.S. citizens on the flight that will proceed directly to San Francisco.
The reports followed a State Department notice on its website that all essential personnel had been ordered to leave the city of 11 million.
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Xi addressed the issue Saturday at a special Communist party meeting where he called for stepped up moves to tackle the accelerating crisis.
“Confronted with the grave situation of this accelerating spread of pneumonia from infections with the novel coronavirus, we must step up the centralized and united leadership under the party central” leadership, Xi said.
A report issued from the meeting said that Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, "must make containment and control of the epidemic its top most priority, adopting even stricter measures to prevent it expanding within and spreading outward.”
China has already halted all train, plane and other transportation links to the city, which has ordered a ban on all downtown vehicle traffic beginning at midnight Saturday, state media reported.
Only authorized vehicles to carry supplies and for other needs would be permitted after that, the reports said.
The city said it will assign 6,000 taxis to different neighborhoods, under the management of local resident committees, to help people get around if they need to, the state-owned English-language China Daily newspaper said.
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Elsewhere, the latest U.S. victim, a Chicago woman, returned Jan. 13 from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and began experiencing symptoms a few days after arriving home, said Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
The 60-year-old woman called her doctor after symptoms arose. She was treated at St. Alexius in Hoffman Estates and placed in isolation, health officials said. Further testing confirmed the virus.
Arwady said the woman is "clinically doing well and in stable condition." She did not have extended contact with anyone outside of her home, attend a large public gathering or use public transportation, Arwady said.
The woman was not symptomatic while flying, and Arwady told reporters at a Chicago news conference on Friday, "The CDC does not believe that, in the time before symptoms develop, the patients are able to be contagious."
In Paris, the lead doctor treating two hospital patients for the new virus said Saturday that the illness appears less serious than comparable outbreaks of the past and that the chance of a European epidemic appears weak at this stage.
French officials on Friday reported three confirmed cases of the newly identified coronavirus in France, the first ones in Europe. The third patient is at a hospital in Bordeaux.
Dr. Yazdan Yazdanpaneh, a leading French expert who heads Bichat’s infectious diseases unit, said that cases imported from China were “not a surprise” and that France had prepared, including by developing a test that provides rapid results for suspected cases.
While most cases have centered in China, an increasing number of cases have been confirmed in other places, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Australia and Malaysia reported their first cases Saturday and Japan reported its third.
As the crisis increased, local Chinese authorities rushed to build a 1,000-bed hospital in six days to treat the growing number of patients. Authorities announced Saturday that 658 patients were being treated for the virus and 57 were critically ill, Reuters reports.
The state-run Global Television Network reported Saturday that the health commission was sending six groups of 1,230 medical staff to Wuhan, In addition, 450 military doctors, some with experience fighting the SARS and Ebola viruses, were sent to the city Friday.
The Xinhua news agency reported that additional medical supplies were being rushed to the city, including 14,000 protective suits and 110,000 pairs of gloves from the central medical reserves as well as masks and goggles.
The virus has caused major public upheaval, with the government shutting down public transportation for roughly 36 million people in 13 cities in central China and major cities canceling events tied to the Lunar New Year celebration, a busy time for travel.
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said all direct flights and trains form Wuhan would be blocked and that all schools would be closed in the city until Feb. 17.
Beijing's Forbidden City, Shanghai Disneyland and sections of the Great Wall have also closed.
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What is coronavirus?
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to pneumonia. Common signs of infection include fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure and death.
Health officials said the virus, which probably spreads through tiny droplets when a person coughs or sneezes, is low-risk. Officials urged people to take the usual cold and flu season precaution: frequent hand washing, covering your mouth when coughing or sneezing and staying home when you don't feel well.
"These illnesses can pop up anywhere," said Trish Perl, chief of infectious diseases at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. "This is a dynamic situation that can dramatically change from day to day."
Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people. Many of the initial cases were linked to a seafood and meat market in Wuhan. Chinese health officials, which first reported the cases last month, said human-to-human transmission has been confirmed.
Contributing: Ryan Miller, Grace Hauck, Nicholas Wu, John Bacon, Ken Alltucker and Lindsay Schnell, USA TODAY; The Associated Press.
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8fd8d982ca40e7d80dc69781efefbc31 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/30/coronavirus-death-toll-hits-170-countries-scramble-respond/4618844002/ | WHO declares coronavirus global emergency; State Department raises travel warning to highest level | WHO declares coronavirus global emergency; State Department raises travel warning to highest level
As the death toll from the coronavirus climbed to 213, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on Thursday and the U.S. Department of State upped its travel warning on China to the highest level.
The news comes as U.S. health officials reported the first U.S. case of person-to-person spread of the virus.
The U.N. health agency defines an international emergency as an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response. The State Department, in a late-evening advisory, ratcheted up its warning level on China to Level 4 - Do Not Travel.
"Travelers should be prepared for travel restrictions to be put into effect with little or no advance notice," the state department wrote on its website. "Commercial carriers have reduced or suspended routes to and from China."
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, which held its Emergency Committee meeting in Geneva, said there are 98 cases of coronavirus in 18 countries.
Dr. Tedros praised China for its quick response to the crisis, which broke out in December, saying the emergency declaration "is not a vote of no confidence in China."
The goal of the declaration, he said, was to provide support for countries with weaker health systems that have imported the virus from China.
Among the committee's seven-point recommendations, he said, were the speeding up of the development of vaccines and diagnostics and a review of each country's preparedness plans.
There was no need for any measures that would "unnecessarily interfere" with international trade and travel, he said.
In strong closing remarks, Dr. Tedros stressed the need for countries to share data, knowledge and experience with each other.
"This is the time for facts, not fear," he said. "This is the time for science, not rumors. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma."
The first case of person-to-person transmission in the U.S. is the husband of a Chicago woman who developed symptoms after visiting China.
The woman, who is in her 60s, was hospitalized after being diagnosed with the illness following her return from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, on Jan. 13. She and her husband, who did not join her on the trip, are hospitalized.
“We understand this may be concerning, but based on what we know now, our assessment remains that the immediate risk to the American public is low,” said Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Chicago, Allison Arwady, chief medical officer at Chicago Department of Public Health, echoed that view, saying authorities were prepared for such a development.
“We do not have signs of spread in the general public at this time ... there is no local emergency,” Arwady said.
She described the woman as "doing well" and said her husband is in “stable condition.”
Health officials think the new virus spreads mainly from droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes, similar to how the flu spreads.
The new case, confirmed by the CDC at a news conference, is the sixth reported in the United States. The other U.S. cases, which occurred after visits to China, are in Arizona, Southern California and Washington state.
At a press briefing last week, the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier warned: “We are likely going to see some cases among close contacts of travelers and human-to-human transmission.”
The latest figures released by China on Thursday covered the past 24 hours and put the death toll at 213. The figures represented an increase of 43 deaths and 1,981 cases for a total of 9,692. Many of the latest deaths were in Hubei province, where Wuhan is situated.
Based on the latest figures, the coronavirus fatality rate is 2.2%, a slight rise over the previous day's fatality rate. Overall, that compares with a fatality rate of 9.6% for SARS.
The new virus has now infected more people in China than were sickened there during the 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS, another type of coronavirus.
As the illness has spread, numerous countries, airlines and travel groups began scrambling to cut service to China, extract citizens or screen individuals who had been there recently in a desperate effort to contain the contagious illness.
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The WHO emergencies chief, Michael Ryan, upon returning from Beijing, said China was taking “extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary challenge” posed by the outbreak.
He estimated the death rate of the new virus at 2% but said the figure was very preliminary. With fluctuating numbers of cases and deaths, scientists are only able to produce a rough estimate of the fatality rate, and it’s likely many milder cases of the virus are being missed.
In comparison, the SARS virus killed about 10% of people it infected. The new virus is from the coronavirus family, which includes those that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as SARS and MERS.
Dr. Igor Koralnik, a neuro-infectious disease specialist at Northwestern Medicine, told USA TODAY there is no evidence that the virus is spreading in the population, or community.
“I don’t think it’s time for a mass hysteria or panic in the U.S.,” he said.
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As the crisis mounted, Scandinavian Airlines said it was halting all flights to Beijing and Shanghai from Feb. 9 while Iberian airlines announced it was halting three return flights a week between Madrid and Shanghai beginning Friday.
Israel’s El Al and Korean Air also joined the growing list of airlines – British Airways, Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines, Swiss, Air France and KLM – that were suspending or reducing service to China.
An A380 passenger plane left Portugal to China on Thursday to pick up around 350 Europeans who want to leave as the virus spreads. The plane was stopping in Paris to pick up additional medical personnel for what Captain Antonios Efthymiou called a "humanitarian mission."
New Zealand, Australia, India, Singapore and other countries were also trying to get out their citizens, along with Taiwan and the United Kingdom.
France confirmed its sixth case of the infection on Thursday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned travelers to avoid all nonessential trips to China. The U.S. State Department has requested that all non-essential U.S. government personnel defer travel to China.
The U.S., which evacuated 195 Americans from Wuhan on Wednesday, said additional flights were being planned next week to bring out more U.S. citizens.
Those already extracted were being tested and monitored at March Air Reserve Base in Southern California, where they will be monitored twice a day for at least three days for fever and other symptoms.
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"There's a lot about this virus that we don't know. But, something that we also have to keep in mind is that these folks need to come home. ... The risk to the public remains low and we aim to keep it that way," said Dr. Cameron Kaiser, Riverside County's public health officer.
Officials said the passengers who don't exhibit symptoms in those first 72 hours will be able to travel to their home states and on to their families or residences. They will, however, continue to be monitored for a maximum of 14 days.
"When they leave and go to their home states, at least twice a day someone from public health will contact them and say, 'Do you have any of these symptoms?' 'Tell me your temperature?' or 'I'm going to take your temperature,'" Braden said.
In Russia, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree to close the country's border with China, Russia's Sputnik News reported.
Meanwhile, the Italian Ministry of Health said Thursday night that two people with flu-like symptoms aboard a cruise ship docked north of Rome were found not to have the coronavirus. Officials had kept the 6,000 passengers on board the Costa Smeralda for screening until the conditions of the pair could be determined. One of the individuals is a 54-year-old passenger from Macao.
Contributing: Colin Atagi, Palm Springs Desert Sun; Associated Press
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b756a112b51ba28db4d6514cd8a80361 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/01/31/coronavirus-symptoms-britain-russia-who-wuhan-emergency/4620574002/ | Federal quarantine order issued for 195 Americans who returned from China | Federal quarantine order issued for 195 Americans who returned from China
For the first time in a half-century, U.S. health officials have issued a federal quarantine order, compelling all 195 Americans evacuated from China to remain at an air base in California for 14 days.
A flight carrying the Americans arrived Wednesday in Riverside, California, where they had purportedly agreed to remain at March Air Reserve base for monitoring for the deadly coronavirus, which erupted in Wuhan, China, in December.
The quarantine, implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was announced Friday following a report that an unidentified person tried to leave the base despite being ordered to stay confined until cleared by the Riverside County Public Health Department.
The incubation period for coronavirus is two weeks. Officials said on Thursday that the individuals had agreed to stay on the base voluntarily.
Also on Friday, the White House declared coronavirus to be a public health emergency in the United States. But the Trump administration downplayed the threat of the virus to Americans.
"The risk of infection for Americans remains low," said Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services and chairman of the coronvirus tax force set up by Trump. "We are working to keep the risk low."
U.S. citizens from parts of China will undergo entry health screenings and will be monitored during a 14-day self-quarantine, officials said. Azar also announced a suspension of entry into the United States of foreign nationals who pose a risk for the transmission of the virus.
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It was the first time a federal quarantine has been ordered since the 1960s, when one was issued over a concern about potential spread of smallpox, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We are preparing as this is the next pandemic, but hopeful this is not and will not be the case,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday. “We would rather be remembered for overreacting to under-reacting.”
At least 213 people in China have died from it since the virus erupted in the city of Wuhan. The latest cases added to the 98 cases already reported from 18 other countries. Almost 10,000 people have contracted the illness worldwide.
“The current scenario is a cause for concern,” Messonnier said.
In the U.S., only a handful of infections have been confirmed. The seventh case in the U.S. was confirmed Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the San Francisco Bay area. The man infected had recently visited Wuhan and Shanghai before returning Jan. 24 to California, where he became ill, the CDC reported.
The man was never sick enough to be hospitalized and “self-isolated” by staying home.
Britain and Russia on Friday reported their first cases of the deadly coronavirus that has spread from China to at least 20 countries and claimed more than 200 lives.
In Britain, the two cases involved members of the same family who tested positive for the virus.
Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, said in a statement that Britain's National Health Service had "robust infection control measures in place to respond immediately" to the outbreak.
“The N.H.S. is extremely well prepared and used to managing infections,” Whitty said. “We are already working rapidly to identify any contacts the patients had, to prevent further spread.”
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Health authorities declined to provide any detail on the condition of the two Britons and did not indicate whether they had recently traveled to China.
A charter passenger jet brought back 83 British nationals from Wuhan on Friday.
In Russia, two Chinese nationals were diagnosed with the virus and placed in isolation.
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Anna Popova, head of Russia’s public health agency Rospotrebnadzor, said the pair have not been in contact with anyone and there is no risk of the virus spreading further.
The Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization, a U.N. agency, declared a global health emergency on Thursday, focusing primarily on the spread of the virus outside China.
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Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking in Geneva, said China had taken extraordinary steps to try to contain the virus and that the committee was most concerned about its impact in countries with weaker health systems.
Although the number of coronavirus cases is larger than for the SARS epidemic that broke out in 2003 and spread to more than two dozen countries, the mortality rate is far less.
The latest figures show a death rate for coronavirus patients of 2%, 10% for SARS and 70% for the Ebola virus that has repeatedly ravaged sub-Saharan Africa.
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Russia, Singapore tighten borders
As the coronavirus spreads, several countries have been tightening their borders and controlling the flow of visitors.
Russia closed its land border with China on Thursday and suspended most train traffic between the countries.
Singapore announced that it will bar all visitors from China starting on Saturday and will bar all Chinese travelers who have visited China in the past two weeks.
Meanwhile, China was arranging special flights to help Wuhan residents return home from holidays abroad. Some waiting for a flight leaving Bangkok said they wanted to return to take care of their loved ones.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said on Friday it was authorizing the departure of family members and all non-emergency U.S. government employees from Beijing and the consulates in four cities.
The State Department also issued its highest grade “Do Not Travel” advisory warning for visits to China.
US issues 'do not travel' advisory:All your coronavirus travel questions answered
Japan and Germany have also advised against non-essential travel and Britain did as well, except for Hong Kong and Macao.
Contributing: Associated Press
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77bb8a1a662f4db2a5af6dffb56137c7 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/02/coronavirus-first-death-outside-of-china-philippines/4639200002/ | Coronavirus: China apologizes for comparing travel bans to treatment of Jews during Holocaust | Coronavirus: China apologizes for comparing travel bans to treatment of Jews during Holocaust
A 44-year-old Chinese man hospitalized in the Philippines became the first known fatality outside China from the new virus that has killed more than 300 people and prompted a global health emergency, authorities said Sunday.
Also Sunday, China's ambassador to Israel apologized for comparing the decision by several nations to close their borders to Chinese citizens to turning away Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.
“There was no intention whatsoever to compare the dark days of the Holocaust with the current situation and the efforts taken by the Israeli government to protect its citizens," the embassy said in a statement. "We would like to apologize if someone understood our message the wrong way."
In Manila, the Philippine Health Department said a patient died Saturday after developing severe pneumonia due to viral and bacterial infections.
"In his last few days, the patient was stable and showed signs of improvement," Health Secretary Francisco Duque said. "However, the condition of the patient deteriorated within his last 24 hours."
China has reported 361 deaths and more than 17,000 cases of the latest coronavirus, all of which draw their name from the virus's elliptical, spiky shape. More than 180 cases have been reported in more than two dozen other countries, including 11 cases in the U.S.
Duque said the man and his companion, a 38-year-old Chinese woman, arrived in Manila on Jan. 21 via Hong Kong from Wuhan, the central China city that is the center of the outbreak. Four days later both were hospitalized and placed in isolation with a cough, fever and other symptoms.
The woman remained in isolation Sunday.
“I would like to emphasize that this is an imported case with no evidence of local transmission," Duque said. He said his agency was working with the Chinese Embassy to ensure the "dignified management of the remains" while also ensuring containment of the disease.
Coronavirus: Outbreak offers reasons for concern but not for panic
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency Thursday, recommending an urgent effort to develop vaccines and diagnostics as well as a review of every nation's preparedness plans.
WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva that despite the emergency declaration, there is “no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade.”
On Friday, the Trump administration declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a public health emergency in the United States. U.S. citizens who have been in China's Hubei province and are returning to the U.S. will undergo health screenings and be monitored during mandatory quarantines of up to 14 days, officials said.
The U.S. also announced a suspension of entry into the United States of foreign nationals who pose a risk for the transmission of the virus. The U.S. and the Philippines government are among several nations issuing temporary bans on many travelers coming from China, Macao and Hong Kong – drawing the ire of Beijing.
“Just as the WHO recommended against travel restrictions, the U.S. rushed to go in the opposite way," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. "Certainly not a gesture of goodwill.”
Coronavirus explained: What are the coronavirus symptoms? How dangerous is it?
WHO also said that asymptomatic cases is likely not a "major driver" of the outbreak. People are far more likely to spread the virus through coughing and sneezing, WHO said in a statement.
New Zealand announced Sunday it is temporarily banning travelers from China to protect the South Pacific region from the virus. The 14-day ban applies to foreigners leaving China but not to New Zealand residents. New Zealand also raised its travel advice for China to “Do not travel,” the highest level.
Last week, the U.S. flew about 200 Americans out of Wuhan on a chartered plane and indicated that more flights could follow. The European Union sponsored a similar flight last week. This weekend, South Korea and India flew hundreds of their citizens out of Wuhan. Indonesia flew back 241 nationals from Wuhan on Sunday and quarantined them on the remote Natuna Islands for two weeks.
A Turkish military transport plane carrying 42 people arrived in Ankara from Wutan on Saturday night. The 32 Turkish, six Azerbaijani, three Georgian nationals and an Albanian will remain under observation for 14 days, together with 20 personnel who participated in the evacuation, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.
Meanwhile, six officials in the city of Huanggang, neighboring the epicenter of Wuhan in Hubei province, have been fired over “poor performance” in handling the outbreak, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
It cited the mayor as saying the city’s “capabilities to treat the patients remained inadequate and there is a severe shortage in medical supplies such as protective suits and medical masks.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
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8806a82dcd9c89dbe6d1e1f793f989be | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/03/coronavirus-outbreak-china-says-us-spreading-fear/4643737002/ | 'A very bad example': China accuses US of spreading fear about coronavirus after travel advisory | 'A very bad example': China accuses US of spreading fear about coronavirus after travel advisory
WASHINGTON – China's foreign ministry said Monday that the U.S. has not helped contain the outbreak of coronavirus that began in the city of Wuhan but has instead spread fear by imposing travel bans.
"There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel," Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said in a statement.
More than 17,000 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in China and 183 across 26 other countries from an outbreak that has killed 362 people. There are 11 confirmed cases in the U.S.
Last week, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory telling Americans not to go to China because of the virus. And President Donald Trump called the outbreak a public health emergency requiring quarantines for U.S. travelers who recently visited parts of China associated with the outbreak.
Hua said the U.S. has "inappropriately overreacted" by issuing the travel advisory.
On Monday, the man who became the first U.S. patient infected with the virus said he was out of the hospital and getting better, according his statement provided to the Associated Press.
The 35-year-old unidentified man thanked his doctors, nurses and other staff at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He fell sick after returning home from a visit to China and was admitted to the hospital Jan. 20.
In Japan, officials were weighing a fairly drastic measure themselves in dealing with the virus. They're considering whether to quarantine more than 3,000 people on a cruise ship returning to Yokohama after learning a passenger who got off in Hong Kong had tested positive for the virus. A team of quarantine officials and medical staff boarded the ship Monday and did health checks.
The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency on Thursday, but the group's chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said there is "no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade."
U.S. reaction:Coronavirus is spreading. And so is anti-Chinese sentiment and xenophobia
Hua said the U.S. "hasn't provided any substantive assistance to us, but it was the first to evacuate personnel from its consulate in Wuhan, the first to suggest partial withdrawal of its embassy staff, and the first to impose a travel ban on Chinese travelers. What it has done could only create and spread fear, which is a very bad example."
U.S. officials have said the administration has offered to help China deal with the outbreak. On Sunday, national security adviser Robert O'Brien told CBS News that the U.S. offered to send officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health professionals to China.
Wuhan coronavirus:Everything you need to know about coronavirus, the deadly illness alarming the world
The facts:Misinformation on the coronavirus death toll is spreading
"And we have not heard back yet from the Chinese on those offers, but we're prepared to continue to cooperate with them," O'Brien said on "Face the Nation."
"We've got the greatest medical system in the world," he said. "This is a worldwide concern. We want to help our Chinese colleagues if we can."
Despite the public health emergency declaration, "there's no reason for Americans to panic," O'Brien said.
"This is something that is a low-risk, we think, in the U.S," he said. "But President Trump, from the day he took office, made protecting Americans and keeping them safe – whether it's from terrorists or criminal organizations or from viruses like the new novel coronavirus – his top priority. So we're taking steps to keep Americans safe, and the government is functioning in that direction."
How hospital got built:China built a hospital in 10 days to battle coronavirus. These 19 photos show how it got done
Contributing: John Bacon, Jorge Ortiz, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
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784a2243b4723b72d4fd7fb7365aa3a5 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/03/coronavirus-photos-show-wuhan-huoshenshan-hospital-built-10-days/4643377002/ | China built a hospital in 10 days to battle coronavirus. These 19 photos show how it got done | China built a hospital in 10 days to battle coronavirus. These 19 photos show how it got done
Patients arrived Monday at Wuhan's Huoshenshan Hospital, the 1,000-bed treatment center constructed in 10 days as China battles the deadly coronavirus outbreak spreading around the world.
State media reported that the first patients arrived at 10 a.m., but there were no details on their conditions.
A crew of 7,000 people scrambled to build the hospital seemingly overnight, and it will be staffed with 1,400 doctors, nurses and other personnel from the People’s Liberation Army.
The 600,000-square foot hospital has 30 intensive care units and is about half isolation wards, government newspaper Yangtze Daily reported. A second hospital with 1,500 beds is also due to open this week.
As of Monday, 361 people have died and more than 17,200 have been infected in China. Elsewhere, there have been 151 confirmed cases in 23 countries and one death in the Philippines, said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Coronavirus, explained:Everything you need to know about coronavirus, the deadly illness alarming the world
The flu is deadlier:Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread
Contributing: The Associated Press
Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
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9d7d3ffd09d9e68bed87027e54eaf165 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/07/coronavirus-american-citizen-china-death-toll-cases/4699514002/ | American dies in China coronavirus case | American dies in China coronavirus case
The death toll from the coronavirus in mainland China spiked 23 percent Wednesday amid new counting methods adopted by Chinese health officials, who eased their criteria for confirmed cases.
Deaths rose by 252, to a total of 1,367 worldwide. All but two of those deaths have been recorded in China. Meanwhile, the total number of confirmed cases spiked to 60,286 - an increase of over 15,000 from the previous day.
The spikes are at least partly due to new counting standards implemented by China, which reported Wednesday that it is tallying infections differently. The nation previously only counted a coronavirus case as confirmed when a person tested positively for the virus.
As of Tuesday, the government is no longer requiring a positive test, a decision made partly because testing kits are in short supply. New cases are now being confirmed if a person is simply diagnosed by a doctor or other health professional; China says the new standard will help treat people more quickly once they exhibit symptoms of the virus.
The new numbers of deaths push the coronavirus past that of the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003, officials said. They also reported that a 60-year-old U.S. citizen became what appears to be the first American fatality from the global virus outbreak.
But the mortality rate - a statistic that measures the deadliness of the virus on infected persons - of SARS is still significantly higher than coronavirus. The latest figures show that coronavirus has a mortality rate of 2.3 percent, compared to nearly 9.6 percent for SARS.
SARS is widely considered to have killed 774 people and sickened 8,098, mainly in mainland China and Hong Kong. The response this time has been much quicker and countries around the world are enforcing stricter measures to contain the spread of the virus, which broke out in Wuhan, China, in December.
The American victim, who was not identified, died Wednesday after being diagnosed with the coronavirus in Wuhan, according to the U.S. Embassy.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry said a Japanese man in his 60s being treated in Wuhan also died. It said that the patient had been suspected of having the coronavirus but that it had not been confirmed.
Coronavirus, explained:Everything you need to know about the deadly virus
In the U.S., another group of 201 American evacuees from Wuhan arrived at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, to drop off 53 people for a two-week quarantine.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said the U.S. had brought more than 800 Americans from Wuhan in recent days.
The plane that landed in California flew on to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where about 90 people will be quarantined, and then to Omaha, Nebraska, where the remaining 57 passengers will be housed at a nearby Nebraska National Guard training base.
There were no signs of illness among those who flew into Lackland Air Force Base, said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of high consequence pathogens and pathology. There were no immediate reports on the conditions of the other passenger.
In other developments:
China's ruling Communist Party has faced a sharp public backlash after the death of a Chinese doctor who had been reprimanded by police in January for warning fellow doctors about the initial outbreak.
Li Wenliang, 34, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, contracted the virus while treating patients, and his death was confirmed early Friday. Li was one of eight medical professionals in Wuhan who were arrested for trying to warn colleagues about the outbreak. They were forced to sign statements confessing to the spreading of "falsehoods."
Pangolins may have spread coronavirus? What to know about the Wuhan virus
'Patients are on edge':Coronavirus fears trigger run on masks, gloves and other gear
Contributing: Associated Press
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da8526a4b9db6cb618e8cb69fb1ce39c | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/12/wildlife-photographer-year-mice-fight-london-photo-wins-award/4735613002/ | Mice fighting over crumbs in subway station wins wildlife photo award in stunning image | Mice fighting over crumbs in subway station wins wildlife photo award in stunning image
Mice in a subway may be a typical sight on your commute to work, but one wildlife photographer captured the moment two were brawling in an award-winning photograph.
Titled "Station squabble," Sam Rowley's photograph of two mice apparently fighting over leftover crumbs in a London underground station was voted the winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year LUMIX People's Choice Award.
Rowley, a photographer based in Bristol, captured the image of the fight after visiting the the station every night over the course of the week, London's Natural History Museum said in a news release. The interaction lasted for only a second as one of the mice ran away after winning the crumbs, the museum said.
"Sam's image provides a fascinating glimpse into how wildlife functions in a human-dominated environment. The mice's behaviour is sculpted by our daily routine, the transport we use and the food we discard," museum director Sir Michael Dixon said in the statement.
Rowley's photo beat out 25 other finalists of more than 48,000 images submitted for the contest, and 28,000 nature photography fans voted, the museum said.
"I'm so pleased to win this award," Rowley said in the news release. "It's been a lifetime dream to succeed in this competition in this way, with such a relatable photo taken in such an everyday environment in my hometown. I hope it shows people the unexpected drama found in the most familiar of urban environments."
Tender moment between two mighty lions:See the wildlife photo of the year from last year
The museum said Rowley's photo was the first winner of the LUMIX People's Choice Award to feature a human-made environment. Past winners of the overall Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award have featured human-made environments, though.
The photo will be on display in the London museum until May 31.
Here are the four other photos named as "highly commended":
Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
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11653a5a9a016e4b9289f029fec47de5 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/14/us-taliban-reach-afghanistan-truce-agreement-official-says/4761042002/ | Defense Secretary Esper: US has reached a deal with the Taliban to reduce deadly attacks | Defense Secretary Esper: US has reached a deal with the Taliban to reduce deadly attacks
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration has reached an initial deal with the Taliban for a reduction in the deadly attacks that have ravaged Afghanistan for years, Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters on Friday.
“The United States and the Taliban have negotiated a proposal for a seven-day reduction in violence,” said Esper, who is in Germany for an international security conference.
The seven-day clock has not started ticking, but Trump administration officials hope it will lead to a broader Afghanistan peace deal and a significant withdrawal of U.S. troops.
"We've said all along that the best, if not only, solution in Afghanistan is a political agreement," Esper said. "Progress has been made on this front, and we'll have more to report on that soon, I hope."
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan whose mission is split between training Afghan security forces and conducting counterterrorism missions. The American military presence there dates to 2001 when U.S. troops helped topple the hardline Taliban government that had sheltered al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
"It is our view that seven days, for now, is sufficient," Esper said. But he cautioned that the next steps will be based on conditions inside Afghanistan, signaling the truce could go awry if Taliban or its allies violate the terms.
"It will be a continual evaluative process, as we go forward – if we go forward," Esper said.
A senior U.S. official said the seven-day truce will take effect “very soon” and could lead to the withdrawal of an unspecified number of American troops from Afghanistan. The official said the “reduction in violence” agreement will be followed by peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
The official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban had committed to a halt in roadside and suicide bombings, as well as rocket attacks.
A Taliban official familiar with the deal said that the second agreement would be signed on Feb. 29 and that the inter-Afghan dialogue would begin on March 10. The officials said Germany and Norway have offered to host the talks but there has been no decision on the venue.
That Taliban official added that the withdrawal of foreign troops would start gradually and would be phased over 18 months.
Friday’s announcement is no guarantee of peace in the war-torn country. In September, U.S. negotiators hailed a breakthrough in talks only to see hope for peace dissipate after the Taliban claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack that killed an American. President Donald Trump then scrapped a planned meeting with the Taliban at Camp David.
But Trump, visiting troops at Bagram air base north of Kabul, announced in November that he had restarted peace talks.
In 2019, the U.S.-led coalition dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any other year of the war, including 2011, the year of peak U.S. involvement with 100,000 troops on the ground. The air campaign was intended in part to force the Taliban to negotiate.
More than 2,400 U.S. troops have been killed there, and more than 20,000 wounded in the fighting. Last year, the Pentagon estimated the cost to taxpayers for the war there at $737 billion.
A withdrawal of American forces also would likely take several months and require that some forces remain to protect the embassy and other U.S. interests.
U.S. officials have not publicly spelled out their timetable for an initial drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But Trump has said he wants reduce the U.S. presence there to 8,600 troops.
The new developments came as Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Friday in Munich with Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. They spoke on the sidelines of an international security forum in Munich.
A truce had been widely anticipated, and Trump agreed in principle to the deal, according to U.S. officials.
The final details were hammered out in recent days by U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar. Khalilzad was in Munich and attended Pompeo and Esper’s meeting as did Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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f0deea51f2168da281bc1be120286c49 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/16/iran-sanctions-create-some-problems-talks-possible-conditions/4779285002/ | Iran: US sanctions 'create some problems'; talks possible with conditions | Iran: US sanctions 'create some problems'; talks possible with conditions
The U.S. "maximum pressure" policy aimed at isolating Iran will not work, but the regime would be willing to negotiate if the Trump administration returns to the Iranian nuclear deal and drops economic sanctions, President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday.
"Of course, sanctions naturally create some problems, but they will not yield any results for the enemies," Rouhani told state media. "Maximum pressure has failed. We are in a better situation in the region now."
Rouhani said he doesn’t think President Donald Trump wants a war with Iran because it would “ruin” his reelection chances.
In a rare bipartisan effort to curb Trump's powers, eight Senate Republicans aligned with Democrats last week to support legislation that would restrict the president's ability to wage war with Iran. The measure, which goes to the House, reflected lawmakers' concerns that U.S. tensions with Iran could escalate into a full-fledged war.
“I think the Americans aren’t after war since they know what harm it could do them,” Rouhani said.
Iran strategy of 'maximum pressure': The killing of Qassem Soleimani
Talks could take place if the U.S. drops the crippling sanctions and complies with the commitments of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by the Obama administration between Iran and global powers, Rouhani said. Trump repeatedly railed against the deal on the election trail and, as president, pulled the U.S. out.
U.S.-Iranian relations have grown steadily more tense, culminating in a U.S. drone strike that killed Iran's most powerful military leader last month. Iran responded with airstrikes blamed for brain injuries to more than 100 U.S. soldiers.
Trump has, however, repeatedly expressed interest in holding talks with Iran. The State Department did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment on Rouhani's statements.
Rouhani said Iran was forced to scale back its commitments to the nuclear deal after other parties to the agreement had to curb their involvement following the U.S. withdrawal.
Rouhani expressed little interest in the U.S. elections, saying there is no difference for Iran between the Democrats and Republicans. Tehran, he said, cares only about its national interests.
"We will never sit at the negotiating table with a weak position," Rouhani said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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8284477e16cf3bdab7355a8fe0de0a34 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/23/coronavirus-south-korea-president-orders-red-alert/4849614002/ | Not in my backyard: Alabama balks at plan to house coronavirus patients as global death toll tops 2,600 | Not in my backyard: Alabama balks at plan to house coronavirus patients as global death toll tops 2,600
A federal plan to house cruise ship passengers who tested positive for the coronavirus at a facility in Alabama was met with a resounding no thanks by state officials who may have forced authorities to shelve the idea.
Globally, the death toll from the virus topped 2,600 on Sunday night, with more than 79,000 confirmed cases. The U.S. has 35 confirmed cases.
The plan called for the FEMA Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston to be used as a coronavirus quarantine center for some American passengers evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship stuck in Japan. Most of the evacuees involved are housed now at military bases in Texas, Colorado and California.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had said the center was selected because of its "unique facilities." Only patients with minor symptoms – or none at all – would go to Anniston under the plan. Any evacuees who become seriously ill would be taken to "pre-identified" hospitals, HHS said.
The plan drew a quick and negative response from the mayor, the governor and multiple Alabama congressmen.
"The people of Alabama DO NOT want the coronavirus brought here," Rep. Bradley Byrne said on Twitter. "I’m fighting to bring this to a full stop. Leave these people in the place they came to, don’t spread them around the US, and keep them OUT of Alabama. The risk is much too high."
Third Diamond Princess passenger dies: 80-year-old Japanese man
Rep. Mike Rogers said he had spoken with President Donald Trump, who Rogers said agreed that the HHS plan was the "wrong decision."
Gov. Kay Ivey said Sunday that the HHS announcement was "inadvertently, and perhaps prematurely, sent." She said she learned through a series of conference calls that Anniston was being considered only as a backup plan and that no decision had been made to send anyone to Anniston.
Ivey said her state wants to assist fellow Americans but cited "grave concerns" over how Anniston was chosen.
"First and foremost, my priority is to protect the people of Alabama," Ivey said in a statement. "While locating these folks in Alabama is currently a backup plan, this is a serious issue and we need to be fully aware of the facts regarding the potential of housing them in Anniston."
South Korea orders red alert
Worldwide, South Korea went on its highest alert Sunday, reporting its sixth and seventh coronavirus deaths and announcing that cases have surpassed 760. President Moon Jae-in raised the virus alert level to red, the highest in its four-tier system, for the first time in more than a decade. Schools that were supposed to open in a week will be delayed until March 9.
Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said the next seven or 10 days will be crucial in combating the virus. "The COVID-19 is spreading quickly, but it is limited within a specific region and group," Park said.
China: Epidemic 'grim and complex'
In China, President Xi Jinping pledged unrelenting efforts to control the outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 of his countrymen. "The epidemic situation remains grim and complex, and it is now a most crucial moment to curb the spread," Xi told state media. More than 77,000 of the infection cases are in mainland China.
The silver lining: More than 24,000 of those patients have been confirmed as "totally recovered."
Iran's death toll reaches 8
President Hassan Rouhani issued a decree setting up a national committee for managing the epidemic, which has killed eight people in the country – the highest death toll outside China. Another 43 cases have been confirmed.
Cultural centers, schools and universities in 14 provinces were ordered closed, and Turkey closed its border with Iran. Sylvie Briand, director of global infectious hazard preparedness at the World Health Organization, expressed concern over the "very rapid increase in a matter of a few days" in the country.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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109572f42dfa717e5cf7502e8727e61b | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/23/julian-assange-whats-stake-if-u-s-prosecutes-wikileaks-founder/4734934002/ | Julian Assange: He infuriated Washington. Now he's facing life in prison | Julian Assange: He infuriated Washington. Now he's facing life in prison
LONDON – His hosts claim his indoor soccer games destroyed embassy equipment. And that he liked to ride a skateboard in the halls. Nearly a year after British police officers dragged him – heavily bearded, disheveled and resisting – into a waiting van, the cramped quarters where he spent seven years avoiding the long reach of the U.S. Justice Department still retain the odor of cat litter from his trusted feline companion.
A court hearing that began here Feb. 24 could determine whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published classified U.S. government communications as well as emails hacked by Russia from Hilary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, will continue to be confined – and if so, where and how.
The hearing will decide whether Assange is sent to the U.S. to face trial in a case that could have serious implications for First Amendment protections. Yet the core issues at stake – media freedoms in the digital age and the global limits of the U.S. justice system – have been obscured by Assange's personal life, by the refuge he sought in Ecuador's London embassy and by curious claims about his behavior not that well supported.
Assange extradition:Hearing opens with claims of Trump retribution against media
Since May, the Australian national, 48, has been locked up at Belmarsh Prison, a facility that houses some of Britain's most dangerous lawbreakers.
Assange is there because he was found guilty of skipping bail in 2012; he fled to Ecuador's embassy rather than turn himself in to British authorities for possible extradition to Sweden. At the time, investigators in the Scandinavian country wanted to question him over sexual assault allegations connected to two women.
'Evidence has weakened':Julian Assange's rape investigation dropped by Sweden
Assange hid from British police in Ecuador's poky red-brick embassy building, just yards from the famous luxury Harrods department store, because he feared Sweden would, in turn, extradite him to the U.S. The Department of Justice has indicted him on 18 counts, alleging 17 forms of espionage and 1 instance of computer misuse crimes connected to WikiLeaks' dissemination of caches of secret U.S. military documents provided to him by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
Assange denies all the allegations. The Swedish case has since been dropped. In Britain, he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail, a period he has already served. He has been denied bail for his extradition hearing because he is considered a flight risk.
But there's more at stake than one anti-secrecy advocate's freedom.
Shocking detail
John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on a U.S. government-sanctioned torture program in 2007 that was approved by President George W. Bush because of the feared threats posed by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, said that Assange's U.S. case could set a precedent that would erode press freedoms for news organizations that publish classified information.
"If you are able to prosecute someone who has a strong case to be called a publisher, then who's next?" said Kiriakou, who served jail time after pleading guilty to leaking the name of an officer involved in waterboarding.
Assange describes himself as a political refugee.
He maintains that as a journalist he should be immune from prosecution and that his work revealed embarrassing and highly damaging facts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the detainees held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Assange's detractors say he doesn't write stories or interview anyone or provide sufficient explanatory context and that the dissemination of raw, unfiltered documents and data – the publication of stolen classified materials – should not count as journalism.
"WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service," then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now the U.S. secretary of State, said in April 2017, in his first public speech as head of the spy agency. "Assange and his ilk," Pompeo said, seek "personal self-aggrandizement through the destruction of Western values."
In fact, Department of Justice officials in President Barack Obama's administration ultimately decided they could not prosecute Assange for revealing national security secrets, described as one of the largest compromises of classified information in U.S. history, because it risked criminalizing subsequent national security journalism.
"During the Obama administration it was called 'the New York Times problem,' " after the newspaper's distinguished record of publishing information on national security matters the U.S. government has deemed secret, said Stephen Rohde, a historian and constitutional law expert, and a past chair of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. "In other words, how can we indict him for espionage when we're confident he's a journalist, a publisher and enjoys First Amendment rights."
Generally speaking, the First Amendment, as it applies to the press, restrains the government from jailing, fining or imposing liability for what the press publishes.
It does not shield journalists from criminal liability.
On the opening day of Assange's extradition hearing, James Lewis, a British lawyer representing the U.S. government, said Assange was guilty of "straightforward" criminality for hacking and then publishing secret military and intelligence information that put secret U.S. sources at risk of torture or death in places from Iraq to China.
The information Assange published contained about 90,000 Afghanistan War-related "significant activity" reports, 400,000 Iraq War-related reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay "detainee assessment" briefs and 250,000 U.S. State Department cables.
If nothing else, this material illuminated in shocking detail U.S. military and diplomatic procedure and actions in far-flung places, and the light it shined was not flattering.
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange:Journalist or criminal hacker?
To his supporters, Assange is a champion of free speech and the public interest whose exceptional computer skills helped him reveal, among other things, video footage allegedly showing U.S. air crews in Apache helicopters killing a dozen civilians in Iraq.
The dead included two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency.
"Assange published evidence of war crimes by the U.S. government," said Andrew Wilkie, a left-leaning Australian politician who traveled to Britain in February with fellow Australian lawmaker George Christensen in a show of bipartisan support for Assange. Christensen represents Australia's right-of-center Liberal National Party.
"I'm a big fan of the Trump administration but I'm a bigger fan of free speech," said Christensen.
"Assange did the right thing," added Wilkie. "He served the public interest."
Still, the U.S. government alleges that Assange is a criminal who conspired with Manning to steal thousands of pages of national defense information that has risked the lives of U.S. forces, allies and collaborators from translators to political dissidents with whom it partners to fight repressive regimes.
"No responsible actor – journalist or otherwise – would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers," U.S. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said when the indictment was announced in May 2019.
Manning served seven years in prison, including pre-trial custody, before Obama commuted her 35-year prison sentence. She is now back in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning, who was convicted of theft and espionage, says she acted on principle when she handed over the top-secret information to WikiLeaks.
If Assange is sent to the U.S. to stand trial, he could get a life sentence – 175 years – if a federal court finds him guilty on all 18 charges and the maximum penalty is imposed.
A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment on whether there is any evidence that the WikiLeaks disclosures have directly led to injuries or deaths.
To date, no evidence of deaths or injuries precipitated by WikiLeaks' disclosures has emerged and Lewis, the lawyer representing the U.S. government in Assange's extradition hearing, said that while Washington believes that many of its informants who were outed by WikiLeaks later "disappeared" it can't yet prove the assertion.
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Self-imposed isolation?
Ecuador insists it kicked Assange out of its embassy after he became an intolerable nuisance at its building in one of London's most upmarket neighborhoods.
While living there, Assange occupied about a third of the embassy's rooms with his cat. He brought in a sun lamp, treadmill, stacks of books, computer equipment and insisted on his own fridge. He also regularly hosted well-known guests such as the musician Lady Gaga and the actor Pamela Anderson. He addressed admirers and gave news conferences from the embassy's tiny balcony – often, as unsuspecting tourists passed by and expensive cars belonging to Harrods' wealthy patrons idled across the street. Due to space constraints, embassy staff had to share a conference room with Assange. One senior diplomat even shared an office with him.
Most people have suffered through a houseguest from hell.
Over time, Ecuador says, that's exactly what Assange became, even allegedly going to the unhygienic length of smearing his own excrement on a bathroom wall. The allegations were first made public in an interview in April 2019 with Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno, who also accused Assange of not looking after his cat and attacking the embassy's security staff. No evidence was released to back up the allegations.
Assange's supporters and legal team strongly deny the claims, which have not been verified. Ecuadorean officials told USA TODAY that some evidence of Assange's misbehavior in the embassy can be found online, such as a YouTube video that shows him standing on a skateboard. Ecuador says it has not released additional evidence because of possible legal retribution from Assange.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Ecuador started to reexamine its relationship with Assange around the time Moreno took office in 2017. Moreno sought to improve relations with its largest trading partner: the U.S.
In fact, shortly after Assange was expelled from the embassy, President Donald Trump's administration said it was opening a "new chapter of cooperation" with the South American nation that included economic development and natural disasters help.
And, cosmetically at least, Assange's expulsion from the Ecuadorean embassy does appear to mark a sea change in U.S.-Ecuador relations that was foreshadowed on Oct. 16, 2018, when the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote a letter to Moreno offering to "advance crucial matters" and "warmer relations" with Washington if Ecuador "handed over Assange to the proper authorities."
In February, Moreno became the first chief of state from Ecuador to visit an American president in 17 years. Moreno's predecessor, Rafael Correa, who granted Assange asylum and even Ecuadorean citizenship before it was revoked by Moreno, embraced Iran, closed a U.S. military base, expelled the U.S.'s ambassador and generally railed against what he described as belligerent American imperialism and capitalism.
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When USA TODAY visited Ecuador's London embassy in mid-February, some modest refurbishments and redecorations were underway. Officials pointed to the bathroom where they allege Assange spread feces on the wall and also showed off the hotel-style kitchenette where he prepared his meals. But citing legal action in Ecuador and Spain on Assange's behalf, over claims that a security company was contracted by Ecuador's government to spy on Assange while he lived in the embassy, these officials would not reveal further details about what led to Assange's departure. Assange has also tried to sue Ecuador's government for "violating his fundamental rights," by claiming it limited his contact with the outside world while he was holed up there.
Ecuador disputes all the allegations and insists it has done nothing wrong.
British press reported that his cat, who went by various names including "Embassy Cat," "Meowchael Moore," after the American documentary filmmaker, and "James," was given to a shelter when Assange was forced out of the embassy by British police.
The YouTube video footage Ecuador cited as evidence for Assange's poor houseguest manners was uploaded to the video-sharing platform in April 2019. It shows a pale and barefooted Assange attempting to stand on a skateboard in a room in the embassy.
He repeatedly stumbles.
A First Amendment brawl
Assange has been indicted in the U.S. under the Espionage Act of 1917.
According to Rohde, the historian and law expert, before Obama took office the 102-year-old act was used just four times against government officials for providing classified information to the media. The Obama administration used it eight times, including against Manning and Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about U.S. telecoms surveillance programs to the press.
Snowden is currently receiving asylum in Russia.
Trump has prosecuted eight government employees for leaking information to the media, according to U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a press freedom advocacy organization. His administration's use of the act against Assange breaks new legal ground because it is the first time it's been deployed to target a media organization as opposed to a government whistleblower.
Yet while the First Amendment protects the publication of truthful information, it does so only if this information is acquired legally.
The Department of Justice alleges that Assange explicitly solicited – encouraged – Manning to break the law by helping her crack a password that gave her higher-level access to classified computer networks.
Manning disputes the allegation.
As does WikiLeaks.
The Department of Justice's prosecutors are expected to reveal "forensic" digital evidence for this allegation when evidence in Assange's extradition hearing is heard in May. Assange's defense team says it, too, has evidence that refutes the allegation.
According to a report in the Associated Press from April 2019 the genesis of the Trump administration's dialing up of the rhetoric on Assange can be traced to WikiLeaks' release, in 2017, of thousands of pages of documents revealing details about CIA cyber-espionage tools for breaking into targeted computers, cellphones and consumer electronics. However, there is an alternative explanation for Trump's interest in a case that Rohde said that if successfully prosecuted would have a "chilling effect" on First Amendment protections for the press: Trump's disdain for the media.
"Assange is low-hanging fruit to Trump," said Rohde. "They can go through the whole process, and win or lose, the process will keep the ball in the air and reinforce that he's prosecuting leakers and the media."
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, agreed with this assessment.
Trump "probably believes he can profit politically from pursuing Assange," he said.
While the U.S. indictment against Assange does not relate to WikiLeaks' 2016 publication of hacked emails belonging to Clinton's presidential campaign, at a preliminary hearing for Assange's extradition case in late February, Edward Fitzgerald, one of his lawyers, nevertheless said there is evidence that Trump, viathen-Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, offered him a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking the emails. The White House and Rohrabacher deny a pardon was offered.
As the extradition hearing got underway, Fitzgerald told a British judge the U.S. indictments against Assange were part of the Trump administration's determination to put a journalist's "head on a pike" – part of its war on the press.
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If Assange is extradited to the U.S., he will be tried in the same court – the Eastern District of Virginia – as Kiriakou, the CIA analyst, who was also charged under the Espionage Act, but took a lesser plea under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
"It's known as the 'espionage court,'" said Kiriakou, adding that "Assange doesn't stand a chance" in that federal district court because the jury pool tilts toward individuals who are members of the U.S. intelligence community and their families.
The U.S. Justice Department chose not to comment on whether the Eastern District of Virginia would offer an impartial setting for jury selection in any Assange trial. The White House and U.S. State Department chose not to comment on whether the administration was concerned about the impact of Assange's case on the First Amendment.
Lewis, who represents the U.S. government in Assange's extradition hearing, has repeatedly reiterated Washington's position that journalism is not an excuse for breaking the law and that the court proceedings in Britain will prove that he did so.
In a briefing with reporters ahead of Assange's hearing, Kristin Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, described the indictment against Assange as "propaganda."
And Jennifer Robinson, a member of Assange's legal team, said he did "what all journalists, all honorable ones," do every day: take receipt of information, communicate about how to protect the source of that information (Manning), and publish it.
"What signal does it send to countries like Russia, China" and other authoritarian governments around the world if this extradition goes ahead, she asked.
'If the law is respected'
Still, it's far from certain that Assange will lose his extradition case. And even if he does, it does not automatically follow he will be sent to the U.S., according to Anand Doobay, an expert in the rules governing extradition at London-based firm Boutique Law.
Doobay said if the judge decides "not to refuse" the U.S. request then Britain's secretary of state will have to decide whether to order it, a call that involves scrutiny of factors such as whether there is a risk that by extraditing him Assange could face the death penalty. British law forbids extradition under such circumstances.
While none of the current charges carry the death penalty, Assange's supporters have argued that the Trump administration can't be trusted and could decide to unveil additional charges that do carry a death sentence once Assange arrives on U.S. soil.
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Doobay noted that most extradition requests the U.S. makes to the U.K. are granted. It's not clear what will happen if Assange prevails in the British court. Because he has already served the 50 weeks for skipping bail he could simply be free to go. But if he is deported to his native Australia, the U.S. could try to mount a new extradition case. It could also issue an international arrest warrant if he travels beyond Britain's borders.
Assange's health will also be considered and Nils Melzer, the United Nations' special rapporteur on torture, said in an interview that when he visited Assange in Belmarsh Prison in May last year he was displaying symptoms akin to "psychological torture" likely caused by prolonged exposure to extreme stress, chronic anxiety and isolation.
"He was very agitated," he said. "Not the normal stress you would see in a prisoner."
In a series of preliminary hearings Assange has attended in person and by video link from prison he has sometimes appeared frail and confused when questioned by the judge. He has also lost weight. However, appearing in court for the extradition hearing in late February he mostly looked relaxed and appeared able to follow along with the proceedings. Although he complained several times that he was struggling to hear the legal arguments being made by both sides because of being forced to sit behind a high glass barrier in the courtroom, a scenario he said that has also prevented him from giving "confidential instructions" to his lawyers.
"I'm as much a participant in the court as a spectator at Wimbledon," he told the court at one point, referring to the British tennis tournament. "This case already has enough spying on my lawyers as it is," he added, an apparent reference to his claims that he was surveilled during his time in Ecuador's embassy.
Assange's legal team asked the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, to consider whether he can sit in the well of court, next to them, when evidence in the case is heard in May.
She said she saw no reason to change the seating arrangement.
WikiLeaks' Hrafnsson said Assange's health has been improving but his father, John Shipton, told reporters ahead of the hearing that his son's long confinement has damaged his health and he feared any U.S. extradition would be akin to a "death sentence."
"His situation is dire, he has had nine years of ceaseless psychological torture where false accusations are constantly being made," said Shipton.
Recently, more than 60 doctors wrote an open letter to Britain's secretary of state saying they fear Assange's health is so bad he could die inside Belmarsh Prison, while 130 prominent figures from the worlds of art, politics and the media in Germany urged authorities to release Assange from detention because of his "critical health."
"If the law is respected, then I don't see any way for him to be lawfully extradited to the U.S.," said Melzer, the U.N.'s envoy on torture, noting that there is a "political offenses exclusion" in Britain's extradition treaty with the U.S. and that "espionage really is the quintessential political offense."
Melzer added that while governments often prosecute leakers and whistleblowers, government employees who actually implement official policy that involves the perpetration of crimes, such as systematic torture, generally enjoy complete impunity.
Instead, he said, with Assange, "we're sanctioning" those that disclose this information.
"That can't be right," he added.
At the hearing, the prosecution has argued that Assange should not be able to rely on the "political offenses" exemption in Britain's extradition treaty with the U.S. partly because in publishing the information he did Assange was not expressly trying to overthrow or a cause a change in the U.S. government or its foreign policy.
Fitzgerald, for the defense, described this argument as "absurd."
"What other reason would Mr. Assange have for publishing this information if it wasn't to cause a change in U.S. policy" in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he said.
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Melzer, who is an academic and a lawyer, also expressed concern over the allegations of rape and sexual assault made against Assange that date from 2010. Sweden's authorities ended their investigations without charging Assange in November due to what they characterized as weakened evidence. Melzer said the police reports are riddled with contradictions and possibly even exculpatory evidence, such as text messages that indicate one of the claimants didn't want to accuse Assange of anything and that it was the police who "made up the charges." This claimant was only concerned about getting Assange to take an HIV test because they had unprotected sex.
Melzer said he has written multiple letters to the Swedish authorities asking for clarifications over inconsistencies in internal police correspondence but the response from the Swedish government has been: "We have no further observations."
In one letter Melzer wrote to Sweden's minister of foreign affairs in May last year he says Assange has effectively been "publicly shamed" and "defamed."
The Swedish Prosecution Authority said in a statement to USA TODAY that its case against Assange is closed and it does not want to comment on Melzer's allegations.
The Swedish allegations may appear tangential to Assange's case, but they are in fact a central plank in the circumstances that have directly led to his current plight: It's unlikely Assange would have fled to the embassy without Sweden's original claims.
Assange 'told the truth'
Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer who previously represented Assange – Robinson, from Assange's defense team, works in the firm he founded, Doughty Street Chambers – said that there was "no doubt" that the Trump administration was prepared to pursue Assange "to the ends of the Earth" because it is "determined to create precedents that will shackle investigative journalism" and prevent it from airing the U.S.'s secrets.
"This is about deterrence," he said.
Still, Robertson added that "America is a beacon of free speech" and the First Amendment is a "phenomenal example to the world" at a time when all over the planet autocratic governments are trying to jail journalists or "shut them up."
It would be a shame, he said, if the U.S. "abandons its principles when we need them."
Robertson, who like Assange was born in Australia, has won landmark rulings on civil liberties from the highest courts in Britain, Europe and elsewhere. He has been a United Nations war crimes judge and defended scores of people facing death sentences.
"What the U.S. wants to do with Julian Assange – let him die in jail, essentially – is completely disproportionate to what he has done: told the truth. And no one has disputed that what Julian Assange did was anything but tell the truth," he said.
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b766ba60126cd78a692e6631eba7020e | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/24/man-drives-car-into-germany-carnival-crowd-volkmarsen-30-injured/4860079002/ | 30 people injured after man drives car into Carnival crowd in Germany; suspect arrested | 30 people injured after man drives car into Carnival crowd in Germany; suspect arrested
BERLIN – A man intentionally drove a car into a crowd at a Carnival parade in a small town in central Germany, injuring around 30 people including children, officials said Monday.
The driver, a 29-year-old German citizen who lived locally, was arrested at the scene in Volkmarsen near Kassel, about 175 miles southwest of Berlin, prosecutors said. He is being investigated on suspicion of attempted homicide.
A spokesman for Frankfurt prosecutors, Alexander Badle, said in a statement that “about 30 people” were injured. They were taken to surrounding hospitals, some with life-threatening injuries.
The suspect was also injured, Badle said.
“The investigation, especially into the circumstances of the crime, continues,” he said. “In particular, no information can yet be provided about a motive. The investigation is exploring all avenues.”
“This is a terrible act committed against people who simply wanted to celebrate Carnival,” said Peter Beuth, the interior minister for the state of Hesse, where Volkmarsen is located. He declined to comment on reports that a second person was detained following the crash.
Beuth said about a third of those injured were children, who had come to watch the parade and collect candy that’s traditionally thrown into the crowds at Carnival celebrations in Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel sent her condolences to those injured in the crash, wishing them a speedy and full recovery. She also thanked the police and all medical personnel involved.
Emergency responders set up a makeshift clinic in a town pharmacy to treat casualties with minor injuries, the regional Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper reported.
Witnesses said the car drove around a barrier blocking off traffic from the parade, according to the paper.
Video from the scene showed a silver Mercedes station wagon with local license plates on a sidewalk, its front windshield badly smashed and hood dented, and its hazard lights blinking, while emergency crews walked by. Forensic experts could be seen taking photos and measurements around the crashed car, walking around fragments of Carnival costumes that littered the ground.
The crash came amid the height of Germany’s celebration of Carnival, with the biggest parades in Cologne, Duesseldorf and Mainz.
All other Carnival parades in the central state of Hesse were ended Monday as a precaution.
Hesse state is still reeling from a racist shooting last week in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau. A 43-year-old man killed nine people with immigrant backgrounds late Wednesday before killing his mother and then himself.
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2487216a606a4c55044a275d1433e0b5 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/24/trump-wikileaks-julian-assange-extradition-hearing/4857467002/ | Assange extradition hearing opens with claims of retribution against the media, danger to U.S. informants | Assange extradition hearing opens with claims of retribution against the media, danger to U.S. informants
LONDON – On the opening day of Julian Assange's U.S. extradition hearing here a lawyer for the U.S. government alleged that the WikiLeaks founder's publication of classified documents revealed the names of informants who later "disappeared," while the Australian national's defense team claimed the indictment against him was part of the Trump administration's determination to put a journalist's "head on a pike."
The U.S. Justice Department wants Assange extradited to the U.S. to face 17 charges pertaining to the Espionage Act 1917 and one "computer misuse" or hacking charge. The charges relate to WikiLeaks' publication a decade ago of hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and information, including information regarding alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq.
The case is a test of media freedoms and the global reach of the U.S. justice system.
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James Lewis, representing the U.S. government at Woolwich Crown Court in southeast London, said that Assange was guilty of "straightforward" criminality for hacking and then publishing secret military and intelligence information that put secret U.S. sources at risk of torture or death in places from Iraq to China. He said some of these sources subsequently vanished, although he acknowledged that "the U.S. can’t prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by WikiLeaks."
He said the U.S. has identified hundreds of "at-risk and potentially at-risk people."
Edward Fitzgerald, who is representing Assange, claimed that if the 48-year-old is forcibly sent to the U.S. he would be denied a fair trial, would be at risk of suicide and, Fitzgerald added that "the prosecution is being pursued for political motives and not in good faith."
Fitzgerald said the Trump administration was pursuing the case against Assange as part of its war on the press in which the media is the "enemy of the people." President Barack Obama's administration decided it could not prosecute Assange because it was concerned it risked criminalizing subsequent national security journalism.
Monday was the first day of a week of legal arguments in a case that could have major implications for First Amendment protections for the press, partly because the U.S. government is arguing Assange should not be treated as a journalist and that, as a foreign national, the First Amendment does not apply to him. The First Amendment does not shield the press from liability for criminal wrongdoing like that alleged by the U.S. government in the charges against Assange.
"These are ordinary criminal charges and any person, journalist or source who hacks or attempts to gain unauthorized access to a secure system or aids and abets others to do so is guilty of computer misuse," Lewis said. Assange is accused of conspiring with the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak the classified documents.
Evidence for the hearing will be heard in May and June and if Assange is extradited to the U.S. he could face a 175-year prison sentence if found guilty on all the charges and the maximum sentence is imposed. Fitzgerald said that Assange's extradition case was going ahead "because of the political opinions that he holds" and that in the U.S. he would likely be subject to lengthy solitary confinement and other degrading conditions.
If Assange is extradited to the U.S., he will be tried in the same court – the Eastern District of Virginia – as John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on a U.S. government-sanctioned torture program in 2007 that was approved by President George W. Bush because of the feared threats posed by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. "It's known as the 'espionage court,'" said Kiriakou in an interview, adding that "Assange doesn't stand a chance" in that federal district court because the jury pool tilts toward individuals who are members of the U.S. intelligence community and their families.
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Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London since September last year after a judge ruled that he was a flight risk ahead of the extradition hearing. He was jailed in May for skipping bail after he fled to Ecuador's embassy in London and stayed there for seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him over sexual assault allegations. The investigation was later dropped.
Human rights organizations and Assange's legal team have argued his extradition should be blocked for, among other reasons, his fragile mental health. Fitzgerald said there was no doubt Assange "would find a way to commit suicide" if sent to the U.S.
Fitzgerald said it was "very unlikely" that Assange himself would testify in court.
However, he did appear in court on Monday. He was dressed in a gray blazer and gray sweater. He looked relaxed. His reading glasses were perched on his head. At one point, he stood up to inform the court that he was having problems concentrating and also hearing the proceedings because of the chants from several dozen of his supporters who were making noise outside the courtroom in the pouring rain.
"I do understand they must be disgusted by these proceedings," he told the judge.
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135abdd6e1aa5cc6d108c748d212b5cf | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/25/antarctica-heat-wave-melts-island-snow/4867504002/ | A heat wave melted 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only 9 days | A heat wave melted 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only 9 days
A heat wave this month in Antarctica sent temperatures soaring into the mid- to high-60s across northern portions of the normally frigid continent.
Surprisingly, the warmth melted about 20% of an Antarctic island's snow in only nine days, according to newly released images from NASA, leaving behind ponds of melted water where the snow had been.
"I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica," said Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, in a statement. “You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.”
Pelto said that during the heat wave, which peaked from Feb. 6 to 11, snowpack on Eagle Island melted 4 inches. This means that about 20% of seasonal snow in the region melted in this one event on Eagle Island, Pelto said.
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He added that such rapid melting is caused by sustained high temperatures significantly above freezing. Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until this century, but it has become more common in recent years, NASA said.
The temperature peaked at 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit at Argentina’s Esperanza Base on Feb. 6, which was Antarctica's warmest temperature on record. A reading of 69.3 degrees was measured a few days later at a research station on Seymour Island, on Feb. 9, but that reading has not yet been officially verified.
This February heatwave was the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020. "If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant,” said Pelto. “It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently."
It's been a busy summer for climate news in the world's coldest continent. In addition to the record warmth, an iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., broke off a glacier there. Also, scientists reported that the continent's "Doomsday glacier" is melting from below because of unusually warm water.
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e32dfa334171598aca89a5c6b24e190c | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/25/gerald-corrigan-terence-whall-guilty-wales-crossbow-killing/4865955002/ | 'Barbaric, medieval-style execution': Man found guilty of killing retired lecturer with crossbow | 'Barbaric, medieval-style execution': Man found guilty of killing retired lecturer with crossbow
A man was found guilty of the "barbaric, medieval-style execution" of a retired lecturer who was shot with a crossbow outside his Welsh island home as he tried to fix his TV satellite.
Gerald Corrigan, 74, was fatally injured outside his home in Anglesey in the early hours of April 19 last year after he went outside when his satellite dish signal was interrupted.
Prosecutors said Terence Whall, a 39-year-old sports therapist and tai chi instructor originally from east London, planned Corrigan's killing, waiting in the dark to shoot the elderly man with a crossbow.
"A crossbow, members of the jury, is a silent, quick and deadly weapon," said prosecutor Peter Rouch. Whall "interrupted the satellite signal ... and, hiding behind the wall, waited for Mr. Corrigan to exit his house. When he did so, he callously shot him."
The killing drew national attention and pleas for information at the time.
Whall's motivation remains unknown, but prosecutors say it may be connected to another man, Richard Wyn Lewis, who was previously convicted of fraud.
Whall was arrested at Lewis' home in May in connection with an incident allegedly over money. And then in June, Whall and three others were arrested in connection with Corrigan's killing.
Corrigan and his partner, Marie Bailey, had previously given Lewis roughly $325,000. The two men also allegedly had a disagreement over cannabis being grown on Corrigan's property, according to the Guardian.
Bailey, 64, said during the trial that Lewis had encouraged her to lie to police about an alleged property fraud.
Defense attorney David Elias denied any connection between Whall and Lewis, and Whall denied ever meeting Corrigan before he shot him.
Corrigan, a retired lecturer in photography and video, died in the hospital on May 11 from multiple organ failure linked to the injury. The crossbow bolt caused serious internal injury, bruised Corrigan's heart and shattered a bone in his arm.
Rouch, the prosecutor, said Corrigan thought he had been electrocuted and went back inside his home, yelling for Bailey, who was asleep. Paramedics found a bloody crossbow bolt in the couple's garden.
Detective Chief Inspector Brian Kearney called the killing a "barbaric, medieval-style execution."
"Terence Whall believed he had planned and committed the perfect murder. There was no forensic evidence, no direct eye witness evidence to the shooting and in fact no one saw him going to and from the scene," he added.
Then-prime minister Theresa May urged anyone with information to come forward and called it "very worrying case," the BBC reported.
Whall told authorities he owned a crossbow but sold it before the attack. He said he bought a second one online but that it arrived after the shooting. However, investigators determined the man had purchased crossbow bolts online before the killing.
Whall denied being near the home when Corrigan was shot, but authorities retraced his car's movement using its GPS data. Prosecutors said the car was near Corrigan's home the night of and before the attack, when he scoped out the property.
Two weeks after police questioned Whall about his crossbow, his Land Rover was found scorched in June.
For that, Whall and a co-defendant, Gavin Jones, 36, were convicted of a United Kingdom charge similar to obstruction of justice for a plot to set fire to Whall's Land Rover. Jones' brother, Darren Jones, 41, and a friend, Martin Roberts, 34, previously pleaded guilty to the arson during the trial.
The four men convicted in the case are to be sentenced Friday.
In a statement, Corrigan's daughter, Fiona, said her father was "just an average bloke enjoying his retirement."
"He enjoyed a lie in, a nice cup of tea and reading books," she said "He loved Laurel and Hardy films and photographing flowers and mountains. Our lives won't be the same without him."
Bailey, who has multiple sclerosis, said Corrigan was "was my partner in life, my best friend, he meant the world to me."
"Every day I am faced with the reality of no Gerry Corrigan in my life any more. Each day my heart is broken, I feel it breaking again and I can do nothing," she said.
Bailey also called Whall a "sad, twisted broken soul" and pleaded for him to reveal the motive in the killing.
"To you, I will say this, I am sorry for you and you have been given what you deserve."
Contributing: The North Wales Chronicle in Bangor
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43dc17cd0b5be3cef6efca222ca9f14a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/25/hosni-mubarak-dies-former-egypt-president-91/4865902002/ | Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak dies at 91, state television reports | Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak dies at 91, state television reports
CAIRO – Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian leader who was the face of stability in the Middle East for nearly 30 years before being forced by the military to resign amid upheaval in 2011, died Tuesday, state-run TV said. He was 91.
Throughout his rule, he was a stalwart U.S. ally, a bulwark against Islamic militancy and guardian of Egypt’s peace with Israel. But to tens of thousands of young Egyptians who rallied for 18 days of unprecedented street protests in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square and elsewhere in 2011, Mubarak was a relic, a latter-day pharaoh.
Inspired by a revolt in Tunisia, they harnessed the power of social media to muster tumultuous throngs, unleashing popular anger over the graft and brutality that shadowed Mubarak's rule. After millions massed in Tahrir Square and other city centers around the country, and even marched to the doorstep of Mubarak’s palace, the military pushed him aside Feb. 11, 2011. The generals took power, hoping to preserve what they could of the system he headed.
State TV said Mubarak died at a hospital where he had undergone an unspecified surgery. The report said he had health complications but offered no other details. One of his sons, Alaa, announced over the weekend that the former president was under intensive care.
Mubarak was convicted along with his former security chief in June 2012 and sentenced to life in prison for failing to prevent the killing of about 900 protesters who rose up against his autocratic regime in 2011. Both appealed the verdict, and a higher court cleared them in 2014.
The acquittal stunned many Egyptians, thousands of whom poured into central Cairo to show their anger.
The following year, Mubarak and his two sons – wealthy businessman Alaa and Mubarak’s onetime heir apparent Gamal – were sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges after a retrial. The sons were released in 2015 for time served, and Mubarak walked free in 2017.
Since his arrest in April 2011, Mubarak spent the nearly six years of his incarceration in hospitals. After his release, he was taken to an apartment in Cairo’s Heliopolis district.
When he was flown from the court to Torah Prison in Cairo in 2011, he cried in protest and refused to get out of the helicopter.
Over the years, Mubarak shunned major policy change, presenting himself as Egypt’s sole protection against Islamic militancy and sectarian division. The United States pushed him harder for changes, which alienated him. Fearful of losing its alliance with the most powerful Arab country, Washington backed off.
The failure to fulfill repeated promises of change steadily deepened public despair, and those seeking a democratic future were dismayed to see Mubarak setting up a succession by his son Gamal.
Hosni Mubarak, born in May 1928, was vice president Oct. 14, 1981, when his mentor, President Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Islamic extremists while reviewing a military parade. Seated next to Sadat, Mubarak escaped with a minor hand injury as gunmen sprayed the reviewing stand with bullets. Eight days later, the brawny former air force commander was sworn in as president, promising continuity and order.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi offered condolences and praised Mubarak’s service during the 1973 war with Israel but made no mention of Mubarak’s almost three-decade rule as president of the most populous Arab state. He announced three days of national mourning beginning Wednesday.
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94b412962dcc4abe3be82a2dd25f0e76 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/25/jakarta-floods-2020-indonesia-capital/4865913002/ | Thousands caught in floods in Jakarta, Indonesia's sinking capital | Thousands caught in floods in Jakarta, Indonesia's sinking capital
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Floods that have crippled much of Indonesia's capital worsened Tuesday, inundating thousands of homes and buildings, including the presidential palace, and paralyzing transport networks, officials and witnesses said.
Overnight rains caused more rivers to burst their banks in greater Jakarta starting Sunday, sending muddy water up to 5 feet deep into more residential and commercial areas, said Agus Wibowo, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency's spokesman.
Floodwaters entered parts of Indonesia's presidential palace complex Tuesday morning but the situation was brought under control with water pumps, said Bey Machmudin, an official at the Presidential Office.
The heavy downpour that hit the capital on Sunday had submerged the state-run Cipto Mangunkusumo hospital, the country's largest hospital, damaging medical machines and equipment, Wibowo said.
Wibowo said the floods on Tuesday inundated scores of districts and left more than 300 people homeless, forced authorities to cut off electricity and paralyzed transportation, including commuter lines, as floodwaters reached as high as 5 feet in places.
Television footage showed soldiers and rescuers in rubber boats struggling to evacuate children and the elderly who were holding out on the roofs of their squalid houses.
Indonesia's meteorological agency is predicting rain for the next two weeks.
The flooding has highlighted Indonesia's infrastructure problems.
Jakarta is home to 10 million people, with a total of 30 million in its greater metropolitan area. It is prone to earthquakes and flooding and is rapidly sinking due to uncontrolled extraction of groundwater. Congestion is also estimated to cost the economy $6.5 billion a year.
President Joko Widodo announced in August that the capital will move to a site in sparsely populated East Kalimantan province on Borneo island, known for rainforests and orangutans.
Severe flooding and landslides that hit greater Jakarta early last month killed more than 60 people, displaced hundreds of thousands and forced an airport to close.
Jakarta Gov. Anies Baswedan, who was criticized when massive floods struck the city last month, blamed widespread deforestation in the southern hills, saying it had destroyed water catchment areas.
Seasonal downpours cause dozens of landslides and flash floods each year in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands where millions of people live in mountainous areas or near fertile plains.
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a34b63df420263cb88311e26b3868263 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/26/greta-thunberg-meets-malala-yousafzai-tweets-heartwarming-photo/4878763002/ | Greta Thunberg snaps heartwarming photo with her hero, education activist Malala Yousafzai | Greta Thunberg snaps heartwarming photo with her hero, education activist Malala Yousafzai
Role models have role models, too.
Climate change activist Greta Thunberg met Malala Yousafzai Tuesday and posted a picture on Twitter to commemorate the occasion. In her post, she referred to Yousafzai as her role model.
Yousafzai also shared the photo on Twitter saying, “she’s the only friend I’d skip school for.”
Thunberg reached out to Yousafzai, a 22-year-old women’s education advocate, during a trip to the United Kingdom for a school protest later this week, according to the Huffington Post. The two met at the University of Oxford, where Yousafzai is a student.
“You guys wanna strike today?”:These activists are too young to vote in 2020 election, but climate change has them fed up
Yousafzai was the youngest person to have won a Nobel Peace Prize, winning in 2014 at age 17. She was awarded the coveted prize for her “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” Thunberg was among the front-runners for the award in 2019 but ultimately lost out to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali.
Yousafzai began her fight for girls' right to an education after the Taliban attempted to assassinate her on the bus home from school in Pakistan in 2012.
However, she has since expanded her activism, focusing lately on how homelessness limits young women’s access to education opportunities. She partnered with a homelessness charity to plan an international “sleep-out” event in December, am event in which people around the world were encouraged to sleep on the streets in solidarity with those who are homeless.
Thunberg has stuck to her roots and recently opened the Greta Thunberg Foundation with money from the 2019 Right Livelihood Award. The purpose of the nonprofit “is to promote ecological and social sustainability as well as mental health,” according to the Right Livelihood Foundation.
Contributing: Associated Press. Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
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7fafa23ea0b7af03ebac8c24f4d15973 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/09/coronavirus-international-developments/4998528002/ | China reports fewest number of coronavirus cases since it started tracking disease in January | China reports fewest number of coronavirus cases since it started tracking disease in January
Authorities in China reported the fewest number of new cases of coronavirus since infections started being tracked in January, but the epidemic is continuing to spread rapidly elsewhere around the world Monday, rattling global stock markets.
In the latest update from China's National Health Commission, the country said it detected 40 new cases of the virus in the past 24 hours, down from 44 new cases the previous day. China now has 80,735 total cases, among which 19,016 remain in treatment and 58,600 have been released. More than 3,000 have died.
Coronavirus live updates:Grand Princess to dock in California with 21 infected people; State Department issues warning
New infections in South Korea also appear to be slowing.
Other international-related coronavirus developments Monday:
Coronavirus fallout:Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Paul Gosar are self-quarantining after interacting with person who tested positive for coronavirus at CPAC
'Scary for everybody': This is what it's like in Seattle and King County, areas under siege from the coronavirus
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483fb7e6dfb47dcb3b448c60e0d4b5a7 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/10/44-dead-iran-drinking-toxic-alcohol-fake-coronavirus-cure/5009761002/ | At least 44 dead from drinking toxic alcohol in Iran after coronavirus cure rumor | At least 44 dead from drinking toxic alcohol in Iran after coronavirus cure rumor
Iranian media reports that at least 44 people have died from alcohol poisoning and hundreds have been hospitalized after consuming bootleg alcohol in an effort to treat the coronavirus.
The Middle Eastern country, which has been especially hit hard by the coronavirus – with 8,042 confirmed cases and at least 291 deaths as of Tuesday – has struggled to prevent the spread of the virus.
The majority of deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the Middle East are in Iran.
A false rumor has circulated throughout the country that drinking alcohol can cure or prevent the coronavirus. Drinking alcohol is prohibited in the country.
Some citizens, according to Iran Health Ministry official Ali Ehsanpour, drank alcohol that substituted toxic methanol for ethanol, using bleach to mask the color. Seven bootleggers have been arrested.
In one part of the country, Khuzestan, more people have died from alcohol poisoning than from the coronavirus in that area, according to the state news agency IRNA. More than 30 people have died from poisoning, and 18 have died from the virus.
The rumor also has circulated throughout Indian social media, reports NDTV and the Times of India, which the World Health Organization has debunked. One iteration of the rumor suggests that spraying alcohol or chlorine can prevent the coronavirus from entering the body.
Coronavirus myths debunked:A cattle vaccine, bioweapons and a $3,000 test
Contributing: The Associated Press. Follow Joshua Bote on Twitter: @joshua_bote
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fea1d1a91604058d6be21e6e5d72684a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/11/climate-change-world-way-off-track-dealing-global-warming/5021961002/ | Planet is 'way off track' in dealing with climate change, UN report says | Planet is 'way off track' in dealing with climate change, UN report says
The planet is "way off track" in dealing with climate change, a new United Nations report says, and experts declared that climate change is a far greater threat than the coronavirus.
"It is important that all the attention that needs to be given to fight this disease does not distract us from the need to defeat climate change," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday, according to Agence France Presse.
Although emissions have been reduced with travel curtailed because of the virus, Guterres noted that "we will not fight climate change with a virus. Whilst the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change has been a phenomenon for many years, and and will remain with us for decades and require constant action.
"We count the cost in human lives and livelihoods as droughts, wildfires, floods and extreme storms take their deadly toll,” Guterres said.
The report confirmed that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record and the past decade the hottest in human history.
Last year ended with a global average temperature that was 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated preindustrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, when a very strong El Niño event contributed to an increased global temperature atop the overall warming trend.
“We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for,” Guterres wrote in the report.
"Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years – when the Earth’s temperature was as much as 3 degrees hotter and sea levels some 15 meters higher,” said Guterres at a joint news conference with World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas at U.N. headquarters in New York.
The main greenhouse gases that cause global warming are carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.
“Given that greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, the warming will continue. A recent decadal forecast indicates that a new annual global temperature record is likely in the next five years. It is a matter of time,” Taalas said.
“We just had the warmest January on record. Winter was unseasonably mild in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Smoke and pollutants from damaging fires in Australia circumnavigated the globe, causing a spike in carbon dioxide emissions.
"Record temperatures in Antarctica were accompanied by large-scale ice melt and the fracturing of a glacier which will have repercussions for sea-level rise," Taalas added.
Professor Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London told the Guardian that "the report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it."
"It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible."
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810f8dc88b2d78119101cd099977505f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/12/coronavirus-european-union-leaders-slam-trumps-travel-ban/5030008002/ | European Union leaders slam Trump's sweeping coronavirus travel ban | European Union leaders slam Trump's sweeping coronavirus travel ban
LONDON – The European Union on Thursday slammed President Donald Trump's decision to "unilaterally" impose a sweeping ban on travel from European countries to the United States as part of efforts to stop the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
"The coronavirus is a global crisis, not limited to any continent and it requires cooperation," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and President of the European Council Charles Michel said in a joint statement.
They said Trump's move was taken "without consultation" from the EU.
Coronavirus updates:EU rips travel ban; US stocks struggle; NBA suspends season; US death toll at 38
Trump announced Wednesday night that he was taking the action to stem the spread of the virus that has infected more than 118,00 people and killed over 4,300 worldwide. He said he was suspending most travel from 26 countries in Europe. The restrictions apply to the bloc's Schengen Area – countries that have officially abolished all passport and all other types of border control at their mutual borders – for 30 days. It begins Friday.
The restrictions do not apply to the United Kingdom.
Q&A:What you need to know about Trump's travel ban from Europe due to coronavirus
The U.S. death toll stood at 38 early Thursday, with more than 1,300 confirmed cases. The travel ban also does not apply to Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings. In interviews with CNN and NBC on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence further clarified that the U.S. will ask every American and legal resident who returns from Europe over the next 30 days to self-quarantine for 14 days. Pence said Americans returning from Europe will be funneled through 13 airports.
Rishi Sunak, Britain's treasury minister, said in a BBC TV interview that the British government does not back Trump's ban. "We (don't believe) that's the right thing to do," he said. "The evidence here doesn't support that."
Sunak's comments were echoed by Tom Bossert, a former homeland security adviser in the Trump administration, who tweeted: "Earlier, yes. Now, travel restrictions/screening are less useful. We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe. We MUST focus on layered community mitigation measures-Now!"
Damon Wilson, executive vice president of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., global affairs think tank, said "rather than consulting and mobilizing our allies and global partners to tackle a truly global problem, we’re erecting more walls. We need serious measures to tackle coronavirus but the challenge demands a coordinated response."
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The British government modestly stepped up its response to the coronavirus Thursday after Prime Minister Boris Johnson chaired a meeting of the government's emergency committee. There are 596 confirmed cases in Britain and Johnson has been reluctant to close schools, ban or restrict large gatherings and encourage people to work from home over concerns that aggressive interventions may need to be reserved for the virus' peak.
Nearby Ireland has already announced that it is closing all schools and cultural institutions until March 29, in a major escalation of its response to the disease. Ireland, which has 43 cases of the virus, is also excluded from the U.S. travel ban.
In a press conference, Johnson called the outbreak the "worst public health crisis in a generation" and asked anyone in Britain with fever or a persistent new cough to self-isolate for seven days. School trips abroad were banned. He said more stringent measures would be gradually announced over the next several weeks.
EU member Italy remains the worst affected country in Europe, with 12,462 cases and over 1,000 deaths and reports that have emerged in recent days from the country's north, which has the highest number of infections, have indicated that doctors are having to make difficult choices about who to treat because of a shortage of critical care beds and other medical supplies such as ventilators, testing kits and portable X-ray machines.
The European Central Bank launched a package of measures to shield EU countries that use the euro currency from the economic havoc created by coronavirus, with planned bond purchases totaling 120 billion euros ($135 billion) and cheap loans to banks. But markets in Europe continued to be roiled by worldwide panic over the virus and when trading on Wall Street opened an early plunge triggered a trading halt. All three main U.S. stock gauges traded near bear-market territory.
Speaking Thursday before the House Oversight Committee, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the UK was exempted from the Trump administration's travel ban because of a "difference in the ease of transportation between the European countries and the UK."
Fauci did not elaborate on what he meant by "ease of transportation."
Market fallout:Stocks extend major losses after being halted for trading
Elsewhere Thursday, Iran's health ministry said it has asked the International Monetary Fund for a $5 billion loan as the virus sweeps across the Middle East nation. Iran has more than 10,000 cases and 429 deaths and years of sanctions have left it poorly placed to deal with an expanding pandemic that is testing global health authorities. For days, Iran experts have been warning that the country may be under-reporting cases.
The office of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, are quarantining themselves at home after she returned from a trip to Britain with a low fever late Wednesday. She is now being tested for coronavirus. Trudeau may be the first world leader who is in self-isolation.
And in Brazil, a government official who attended an official meeting at Trump's Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday and posted a photo of himself standing next to the U.S. president, has tested positive for coronavirus. Fabio Wajngarten is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's communications secretary. Brazilian media reported that Bolsonaro was also being tested for the virus Thursday.
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ef7337c9b7c338c7b4f03d1c72eaffe7 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/13/coronavirus-world-waits-learn-if-political-leaders-have-virus/5041758002/ | Trump joins small group of world leaders who have tested positive for COVID-19 | Trump joins small group of world leaders who have tested positive for COVID-19
President Donald Trump, 74, and first lady Melania Trump, 50, tested positive for COVID-19, the president tweeted early Friday, just hours after Trump announced that Hope Hicks, one of his closest advisers, tested positive for the new coronavirus.
From Washington to Madrid, politicians across the globe have been exposed to the virus, and in some cases caught it. Here's our watch list of presidents, prime ministers and supreme leaders who have been tested or may be at risk for infection.
President Trump tests positive for COVID:Here’s what we know
Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko
Lukashenko, 66, claimed he contracted the new coronavirus in July but was asymptomatic. He has dismissed concerns about the virus as "psychosis" and recommended drinking vodka to stay healthy. Belarus is one of the few countries that has not taken any comprehensive measures against the virus. Lukashenko is accused of rigging a recent election and has cracked down hard on peaceful protesters.
What is happening in Belarus?:We explain the historic pro-democracy protests
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro
Bolsonaro, 65, tested positive for the new coronavirus in July after months of downplaying the virus. He said he had mild symptoms and continued working while he was sick. Bolsonaro often appears in public to shake hands with supporters and mingle with crowds, at times without a mask. He said his history as an athlete would protect him from the virus and it is nothing more than a "little cold." After announcing his illness, Bolsonaro said he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, the unproven malaria drug that he and Trump have promoted as a treatment for COVID-19.
Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro:He followed Trump’s COVID-19 blueprint. Cases are surging
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
In April, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first major world leader to publicly acknowledge having COVID-19. Johnson started off with mild symptoms when he tested positive on March 27. He was rushed to the hospital on April 6 and not long after placed in intensive care. He recovered after spending several days in intensive care. Not long afterward, Johnson, 55, became a new father.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, 45, tested positive for the new coronavirus in March, according to Cameron Ahmad, communications director for the prime minister. She later recovered. Canada's leader, 48, self-isolated at home for 14 days with the couple's three young children but did not test positive. He was the first major world leader to go into quarantine.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 66, tested negative for the new coronavirus, her spokesman said on March 23. The German leader went into self-isolation after she came into contact with a doctor who tested positive for coronavirus. German media reported Merkel had received an unrelated vaccination from the doctor.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández
Hernández, 51, tested positive in June and then spent more than two weeks in a hospital with pneumonia symptoms. His wife, Ana García, 52, and two of his aides also tested positive for the virus.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has self-isolated on at least two occasions after an aide and his health minister tested positive for the virus in March and April. His office said the 70-year-old leader remained in quarantine both times until he was cleared by Israel's Health Ministry and his personal doctor.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Iran’s utmost authority for all domestic and foreign policy has seen several of his closest aides diagnosed with coronavirus. It's not known whether Khamenei, 81, and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, 71, have ever tested positive. But more than 10% of Iran's lawmakers have fallen ill with the disease and it has also not spared top officials, including its senior vice-president, Cabinet ministers, Revolutionary Guard members and health ministry officials. Several lawmakers have died.
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Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte
At one point, Italy was one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe. At least two politicians have publicly disclosed positive infections: Nicola Zingaretti, 54, the leader of the country’s Democratic Party, and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 84. There's no indication Italy's prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, 56, has contracted the disease.
Lockdown in Italy:My quarantine, a worried wait for a test result – and relief
Powerful chief of staff to Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari
Abba Kyari, 67, died from complications related to coronavirus on April 17. Kyari was the trusted chief of staff to President Buhari, 77, and widely viewed as one of the most powerful people in Africa’s largest economy. It is not known if Buhari has been tested.
Prince Albert II of Monaco
Albert, 62, tested positive in March, making him the first reigning monarch to publicly announce a diagnosis for the disease. He later recovered. Britain's Prince Charles, the 71-year-old son of Queen Elizabeth II, also fell ill with the virus, in March. He said he experienced only mild symptoms.
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Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin
Mishustin, 54, confirmed he was infected with coronavirus on May 1. He later recovered. Mishustin's prime minister role is considerably less powerful than Russian President Vladimir Putin's. Putin, 67, has praised a coronavirus vaccine that Russia approved for use earlier this month as effective and safe despite international skepticism because the vaccine has only been studied for two months in a few dozen people.
Putin opponent Alexei Navalny:Poisoned with Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, Germany finds
North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un
There are no officially confirmed coronavirus cases in North Korea. This is not because there aren't any but because the secretive nation has resisted calls to share its public health information. When Kim Jong Un, 36, disappeared from public view earlier this year for more than two weeks, there was speculation he could be hiding from the virus.
Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez
The wife of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, 48, tested positive for the new coronavirus, Spain's government announced on March 15. Begoña Gómez, 45, has since recovered.
Two members of Sanchez’s cabinet, the minister of equality and the minister of regional affairs, have also tested positive. Other members of the cabinet had tested negative.
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b18e758ae2363f6b264a599d4712ddcf | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/15/coronavirus-us-couple-limbo-after-being-forced-off-viking-cruise/5053446002/ | Americans stuck in Cambodia amid pandemic say they are 'being detained,' not quarantined | Americans stuck in Cambodia amid pandemic say they are 'being detained,' not quarantined
When Ryan Knapp and his wife booked a Viking River cruise along the Mekong Delta, they thought it would be a dream trip – a chance to finally see Angkor Wat, the stunning Buddhist temple complex, and explore other parts of Cambodia.
But what began as a long-anticipated vacation on a luxury cruise has become a stress-filled nightmare.
With the COVID-19 pandemicspreading like wildfire across the globe, the Illinois couple is now stranded in a foreign country that is housing them in a "filthy," dilapidated hotel, after three other passengers on the vessel tested positive for the virus.
They have no idea when, or how, they will be able to return to the United States.
"We’re just feeling helpless. It’s hard to see exactly how this plays out," the 57-year-old Knapp said during a phone interview from what he described as an "abandoned hotel" in Kampong Cham, a city in southeastern Cambodia where they were forced to disembark from their cruise. The Viking Mekong is styled as a colonial-era French riverboat.
Foreign governments have been pressuring Cambodian authorities at the highest levels to move the Americans and other foreign nationals to another hotel or more sanitary surroundings, but the Cambodian government has insisted on keeping them at the hotel, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The person spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing relations with Cambodia's government. The person said there is another, separate luxury cruise ship currently stuck in Phnom Penh that also has Americans and foreigners on board.
The Cambodian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the foreign ministry's office.
On Saturday, Cambodia's prime minister criticized a "certain diplomat, from a certain country" for asking them to move the Viking Mekong’s passengers to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, and a nicer hotel. Local media implied that the prime minister was referring to the U.S. ambassador in Cambodia.
A State Department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the agency is aware of reports about the situation. Citing privacy considerations, the official declined further comment except to say the State Department is working “around the clock” to ensure the welfare of U.S. citizens overseas.
The official did not answer a question about how many other Americans may be in a similar kind of limbo.
Knapp's wife, Theresa Gordon-Knapp, said she asked her doctor before leaving the U.S. if it was safe to go on the trip. Yes, he told her. As seasoned world travelers, they were not worried about going, even as the coronavirus spread to the U.S. and outbreaks emerged in new hotspots.
More:Cruise passengers under coronavirus quarantine say they lack food, basic medical attention
They arrived in Vietnam on March 1, did some sightseeing in Ho Chi Minh, and got on the boat on March 4, Knapp said.
Along the way, they learned that one of the passengers was exposed to COVID-19 on the flight over. All the passengers were tested, and three British travelers came back positive for the novel coronavirus.
Cambodian officials transferred those three to local hospitals. The remaining 26 travelers who tested negative – including Knapp and his wife – were initially quarantined on the boat.
But on Friday, "the Cambodian authorities told us we had to get off the boat, and they threatened to arrest the (Viking tour) manager" if they refused, Knapp said.
"They literally sprayed us like insects, with chlorine I think" as they got off the vessel, he said.
Now, they've been confined to a dirty room with a leaking toilet, a barred window, and a door that doesn't lock.
"There are dead bugs everywhere – and also live bugs," said Gordon-Knapp, 60. "Ants, flying insects, little lizards."
Another American traveler, James Cleveland of Michigan, said he and his wife had an “immensely different” experience in Cambodia. They were on a cruise run by Holland America in early February, when the COVID-19 outbreak began to set off alarm bells around the world.
Although everyone on the ship tested negative for the virus, the vessel was denied entry in South Korea, Japan and elsewhere. On Feb. 13, Cleveland said, after days of sailing from one place to another but never being allowed to dock, Cambodia permitted the ship to stop at a small port on its west coast.
After everyone on the ship tested negative for the virus, “we were told that the prime minister and some other ministers of Cambodia were going to come down to welcome us to Cambodia,” Cleveland said.
A group of dignitaries gathered on the dock, he said, and the prime minister gave them scarves and roses. The government then transported them to a four-star hotel in Phnom Penh.
“They were wonderful,” he said of the Cambodians. He noted that Cambodia is a very poor country, but they spared no effort to ensure their comfort.
Knapp said the Viking employees tried to get them moved to a nicer hotel next door, but workers there threatened to go on strike so the plan was nixed. The local health department delivered thermometers and blood pressure pumps to their rooms, with instructions to report their temperatures twice daily back to the ministry.
The Viking crew has been bringing them food every day, Knapp and his wife said, but they're worried about running out of prescriptions and other basic items.
And now, they've been told that the Cambodian government has stopped responding to calls from American Embassy officials in the country, as well as the urgent pleas from Viking representatives.
"We're not being quarantined. We're being detained," said Knapp, a retired employee of Abbott Laboratories, a health care company headquartered in Illinois.
Knapp said they know they have to be quarantined because of their potential exposure to the virus. "But we'd like to do it in much more humane conditions," he said.
He and his wife have grown increasingly anxious about when their confinement will end. Their temperatures are normal, Knapp said, and they feel fine physically.
"But this is pretty mentally and emotionally draining," he said. After the initial publication of this story, Knapp said he was told they will be tested again on March 23.
"If we test negative, which we think we will, we don't know when and how we're going to get home."
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42b358b93810d0449cb88625c5d8330f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/17/coronavirus-how-countries-across-globe-responding-covid-19/5065867002/ | These countries are doing the best and worst jobs fighting coronavirus | These countries are doing the best and worst jobs fighting coronavirus
LONDON – Keep calm and carry on, said Britain, the country with the least restrictive coronavirus measures in Europe (before sharply altering course March 16 amid a new "catastrophic" warning about how many people could die). Batten down the hatches, says China, the nation that is not far from declaring total victory over the COVID-19 epidemic that swept its Hubei province. "Test, test, test," says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.
And the United States? Which countries should it look to for guidance about how to combat a disease that's infected more than 740,000 worldwide and killed over 35,000?
The majority of global public health experts believe that countries need to act quickly and decisively to reduce what Robbert Muggah, a leading Brazil-based risk and security specialist, said "represents the most significant threat to population health and political and economic stability in a generation." These measures include easy and efficient access to testing and results, rigorous contact tracing, consistent science-based messaging, quarantines and a genuine commitment to clamping down on socializing.
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"If you have a fire on your hands, we all know you have to stamp it out fast," said Nicholas Chater, a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School, in central England. "There's no point thinking: 'Well, we don't want to put it out too soon.'"
But Chater added that while scientists are learning more about COVID-19 every day, publics around the world will need to get used to something they don't like: uncertainty. "It could be that we can hold this thing back. We just don't know. No amount of modeling can fix that problem," he said, noting that, with a vaccine potentially months or more away, scientists need time to understand the virus's genetics, how it mutates, transmission rates, the viability of cures and the experiences of different countries.
Still, while it may be too early to draw definitive conclusions about how to respond to COVID-19, some countries have taken actions that have appeared to yield results, while others are struggling to contain and combat deepening public health crises.
Australia
The Australian government activated its emergency response to COVID-19 on February 27, designating it a global pandemic much earlier than the World Health Organization and any other advanced economy in the Group of Seven nations.
Michael Wallach, a vaccines expert at the University of Technology Sydney, said that this enabled authorities there to quickly release emergency funding and tax breaks, and bought precious time for its hospitals to prepare for a potential flood of patients.
As of March 30, the death toll for the country stands at 17, with more than 4,300 confirmed cases. Everyone traveling to Australia must self-isolate for 14 days, whether or not they have had potential exposure to the new coronavirus.
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Prime Minister Scott Morrison has closed Australia's borders.
Wallach said that Australia's early labeling of COVID-19 as a pandemic has been helpful for preparedness, but it also brought "early panic," noting the country was among the first to see consumers stockpile toilet paper.
Britain
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has acknowledged that Britain is facing its "greatest public health crisis" in decades. As of March 30, Britain's outbreak has lagged behind its European counterparts, with more than 19,500 infections and about 1,300 deaths.
Johnson, who himself has tested positive, has conceded that "many loved ones will die." Yet from the start he has also appeared to pursue a relatively laissez-faire, and controversial, policy based on the idea that, because COVID-19 will spread widely in society, the country's best bet will be to try to get to "herd" or majority immunity as quickly as possible. The thinking behind this is that it will protect the country in the long term if, as happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu, a highly fatal second wave of infections occurs at some point in the future.
The concept is not only a massive political gamble. Medical experts say evidence to support the theory won't be available until people who have the disease have recovered and been studied for months. It's also not clear how long any immunity would last. Infections could reoccur. Late on March 16, Johnson dramatically changed tactics after researchers at Imperial College London projected that around 250,000 people in Britain would die if "chains of transmission" for the virus weren't immediately slowed or broken.
The British government has now imposed a total lockdown, with only essential trips to supermarkets and for medicine, as well as exercise, permitted.
Germany, France, Spain
Authorities in Germany adopted relatively strict measures early on, including closing all schools and day-care centers and banning gatherings.
Museums, movie theaters, gyms, swimming pools and nightclubs have also been temporarily shuttered. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also outlawed overnight stays in hotels unless absolutely "necessary and expressly not for tourist purposes."
The measures introduced by Merkel follow an abrupt about-face for Germany's leader. For several weeks, she had argued for close coordination with fellow European Union member states to slow the spread of the virus. But amid a fast rise in the number of infections, Merkel closed Germany's borders with Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark. Germany has over 63,000 confirmed cases and 550 deaths, a relatively low figure that public health experts have been at pains to explain. Germany has undertaken a large amount of testing, has a higher-than-average number of critical care beds and is also one of the main European manufacturers of ventilators.
French President Emmanuel Macron has also strongly limited movement in France. Only trips to the doctor and to food stores will be allowed. Macron also delayed elections. As of March 30, France had more than 40,174 cases of the virus, including 2,606 deaths. Spain, the most virus-infected nation after Italy and the U.S., has taken similar actions to France. It has more than 85,000 cases and 7,300 fatalities.
Israel
More than 4,300 people have been diagnosed in Israel, with the number quickly rising. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has closed Israel's borders to all foreigners.
On March 17, Netanyahu announced that the country's highly secretive Shin Bet internal security service would soon begin deploying its highly sophisticated counter-terrorism technology to help curb the spread of COVID-19 in Israel.
The agency’s capabilities are normally used to track Palestinian militants.
In a statement, Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman acknowledged that using these digital tools to keep track of sick Israeli citizens deviates from the agency's typical operations, but he said the goal was still in line with its overall mission of "saving lives."
Netanyahu said the technology had never been used before on civilians and would involve a certain degree of violation of privacy. He approved its use for 30 days.
Netanyahu is self-isolating after a member of his staff tested positive.
Sweden
Unlike its Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark and Norway, which have placed extensive restrictions on their borders and imposed broad-based lockdowns to stem the outbreak, Sweden has only closed some schools and largely kept restaurants and shops open.
It's a strategy that appears similar to Britain's, before Johnson did an abrupt about-face amid spiraling infections. As of March 30, Sweden recorded more than 4,000 cases and 146 deaths, compared to Denmark's 2,555 cases and 77 deaths, and Norway's 4,300 cases and 31 deaths. Denmark and Norway have similar populations of around 5 million; Sweden's is twice that.
"Sweden has gone mostly for voluntary measures because that’s how we’re used to working," said Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist from Sweden's Public Health Agency, in a CNBC interview on March 30.
"And we have a long tradition that it works rather well."
Iran
Iran's authorities for days denied the risk the outbreak posed even as a high number of its lawmakers have fallen ill with the disease and it has also not spared top officials, including Iran's senior vice-president, Cabinet ministers, Revolutionary Guard members, health ministry officials and close aides to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The virus has killed 2,750 people amid over 42,000 cases, according to Iran's health ministry, although there are concerns the country may be either underreporting infections or simply not know the scale of its outbreak. Years of western sanctions have puts its health system under extreme strain and officials have been slow to enforce quarantines in some areas.
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Khamenei has issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, prohibiting "unnecessary" travel after earlier warning Iranians that "millions" could die if they don't start heeding travel restrictions and public health guidance, such as staying away from religious shrines.
Sources in Iran told USA TODAY that people in Iran have still been widely going about their business in public despite calls from the authorities for people to stay home.
Italy
Italy is only behind the U.S. as the epicenter of COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization. It has almost 98,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths, the majority of them in its wealthy northern regions, where there are world-class hospitals.
Intensive care beds and ventilators are in such short supply in some areas that the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care has drawn up guidelines for doctors about how to manage the crisis if the outbreak intensifies. Among the considerations: prioritizing treatment for those under the age of 80 who don't have any "co-morbidities" - underlying health conditions. With too many patients to care for, many needing life support machines, medical staff would need to effectively choose who lives and who dies. It's a form of triage medicine usually only seen in wartime.
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Italy has imposed a near-total lockdown on its citizens, with only supermarkets and drug stores open to the public. There are curfews and travel restrictions and its normally bustling piazzas and squares and historic sites are virtually empty.
It's too soon to tell if Italy's severe measures are working, although the rate of infections appears to be stabilizing.
In mid-March, an Italian citizen named Giovanni Locatelli shared Facebook footage comparing a Lombardy newspaper’s obituary section on Feb. 9, when it took up just one page, to a copy on March 13, when 10 pages were needed to commemorate the dead.
Singapore
Few countries battling the virus have been as successful as Singapore.
It has 879 cases and just 3 deaths and its rate of recoveries has outpaced infections.
According to Michael Merson, director of the SingHealth Duke-NUS Global Health Institute and the Wolfgang Joklik Professor of Global Health at Duke University, the country has a number of factors that are hard to replicate: an excellent health system; strict virus testing, tracing and containment programs; a small population; and citizens who are largely accepting of what the government orders to them to do.
"There's strong government leadership, but also trust in the government," said Merson, who used to run the World Health Organization's anti-AIDS program. "Every time a case is identified there is a very strong action plan to identify contacts. It's also very good at promoting hand-washing and keeping people at a safe distance from one another."
Merson said Singapore has allowed businesses and some universities to stay open but with very strict guidelines about the size of gatherings (25 or under). "They take prudent steps at prevention, but they haven't entirely shut the country down. They also have experience with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, a much more deadly virus), which has given them some confidence with how to deal with coronavirus," he said.
Still, worryingly, Singapore reported 35 news cases on March 30, the highest number it has reported in a single day.
It has now imposed 14-day quarantines for all arrivals into the country.
South Korea
Most of South Korea's infections are linked to a quasi-Christian sect.
But the Asian country has still become one of the countries hardest-hit by COVID-19 outside China, with more than 9,660 infections and at least 158 deaths.
It has also put in place a rigorous screening program, with more than 200,000 people tested, about 1 in every 250 people. Testing is fast (about 10 minutes) and free (the government pays) and the results are usually sent by text within 24 hours.
South Korea was also among the first countries to roll out a drive-through testing center and it has a well-functioning virus-contact-tracing system.
South Korea, like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, is one of a number of places in Asia where authorities have appeared to have had some success "flattening the curve," or potentially spreading out the number of its coronavirus cases over a longer period so that health systems can have time to mitigate the impact of the disease.
But Merson said that it's not clear how long countries can continue to "flatten the curve" and if COVID-19 will only roar back once current control measures are phased out.
"We need to watch closely what happens in China," he said, referring to its decision to start phasing in school openings and restart factories and businesses in some areas.
China
Despite receiving early criticism for trying to cover up the outbreak, China has been able to turn the tide of an infection that is now rapidly spreading through the global population. It reported fewer than 31 new infections and 4 deaths on March 30, bringing its total number of cases to 81, 470, of which more than 75,700 patients have recovered.
China enacted sweeping measures that forced people inside for weeks, banned all forms of public gatherings and mobilized almost 20,000 medical staff from all over the country to Hubei. At the virus's peak, 120 million school kids were taught online.
Huiyao Wang, a senior adviser to China's government, told USA TODAY in a phone interview from Beijing that the U.S. and other western nations need to do even more to combat COVID-19 than they are doing now, including more harsh restrictions.
"I worry that the economic impact may now cause more casualties than the virus itself," he said, adding that the during the worst of the outbreak authorities in China visited every single household in the affected areas, meticulously took temperatures and isolated the sick in large stadiums and other venues for observation and treatment.
"I understand that some of the Chinese experience can't be transferred, but since we have been dealing with this for months now they should take our advice," he said. referring to what he described as little high-level contact between the Trump administration and President Xi Jinping's government over the pandemic.
In fact, relations have appeared frosty in recent days.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has accused China of spreading "disinformation and outlandish rumors" and needed to stop blaming the U.S. for the spread of the disease first detected in China. Pompeo's comments followed a false suggestion on Twitter from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, shared and retweeted by other Chinese diplomats, that COVID-19 may have originated with the U.S. Army.
"We can help with how to build temporary hospitals, we can transfer some of our technology," said Huiyao Wang. "Let's have an online summit right now."
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United States
President Donald Trump has enacted federal guidance about social distancing and cities and towns across the U.S. have already closed schools, restaurants, sports stadiums, entertainment venues.
Trump has urged Americans to refrain from gathering in groups of more than ten people to stem the spread of the virus. He has also declared a national emergency unleashing billions of dollars as part of a raft of measures aimed at bringing a roiling public health crisis – and a growing economic and financial one – under control. Trump has signed a $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus package.
Trump now appears to be taking COVID-19 seriously.
"If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now, we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus, and we are going to have a big celebration all together. With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly," he said in a news briefing on March 16. "A lot of progress has been made."
He has also said he hopes the U.S. will see a peak in cases by Easter.
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However, Trump continues to reject suggestions his administration could have taken action earlier, such as seeing that more testing was available, to ward off COVID-19's threat to Americans and his earlier public comments on the matter are littered with attempts to downplay the crisis.
"We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control," he said during an a TV interview from Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, just a day after the CDC reported the first travel-related case in the country.
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6dadbbfb836cf02eed6a037a740c8f14 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/19/coronavirus-stranded-americans-frustrated-with-state-department-amid-global-lockdowns-quarantines/2870419001/ | 'I can't help but feel we are abandoned': Stranded Americans seek US help amid global lockdown | 'I can't help but feel we are abandoned': Stranded Americans seek US help amid global lockdown
Kristin Monesmith is stranded in Peru with no way to get back to North Carolina, where the ER nurse is desperately needed at her local hospital.
Arizona resident Gabrielle Almeter and her parents are marooned in Marrakesh after the Moroccan government said it would close its borders and cancel international flights.
Chris Pierce is stuck in the Philippines with his wife and 9-year-old son after that government shut its borders and went into lockdown.
They are among hundreds of Americans suddenly in limbo amid a global freeze on international travel and mass quarantines as the U.S. and other countries respond to the coronavirus pandemic with unprecedented restrictions.
Besieged by pleas for help, the State Department and its embassies around the world have offered little to no assistance, these stranded travelers say. More than 400 Americans are stuck in Peru alone, according to Monesmith and others who have been tracking the problem.
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Chris Pierce and his wife, Nila, have contacted American embassies in both Manila and Cebu in the Philippines via email and phone – 70 times in all. They haven't received a single response.
"I'm a realistic person. I do realize they are probably overwhelmed," Chris Pierce told USA TODAY. "But at the same time, all U.S. citizens should be a priority. ... I can't help but feel we are abandoned."
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the State Department is "working to try and solve problems for each of those American citizens," and he urged patience.
"We just learned about them over the last couple of days," Pompeo said, referring to a group of American students in Peru, among other cases. "It’ll take us some amount of time."
'Unable to return'
But some lawmakers are growing frustrated with the lack of clarity or a coordinated response.
“I have heard from an alarming number of Virginians in the past few days who are abroad and unable to return to the United States due to restrictions on movement, closed borders, nationwide lockdowns, and canceled flights," Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote in a letter to Pompeo on Wednesday.
In an interview, Warner said his office has received more than 20 pleas for help in recent days from constituents stranded in Peru, Honduras, Morocco, China, Guatemala and other countries.
"I'm not sure that department is providing the kind of clarity, outreach and assistance that Americans need," Warner said. "We really just need to reach out to our fellow Americans and make sure we get them back safe."
Sen. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the State Department to begin chartering commercial airplanes to bring stranded Americans home. He said the Trump administration should use an existing civil airfleet program for such evacuations.
“No American citizen should be abandoned overseas as we confront this unprecedented pandemic simply because of a failure of government to provide them the support that they need,” Menendez said Thursday. “If there ever was a need to increase our nation’s aircraft capability during a national crisis, this is it.”
The New Jersey Democrat said the Pentagon should also explore the use of military aircraft to repatriate Americans.
A State Department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the agency could not provide an estimate of how many Americans are trying to get back to the U.S. from overseas amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
"We are considering all options to assist U.S. citizens in these countries and are continuously assessing travel conditions in all areas affected by COVID-19," the official said. "We will continue to update our travel advisories and safety information for U.S. travelers as situations evolve."
Other countries bring citizens home
Meanwhile, other countries were busy arranging emergency flights to bring their citizens home.
Israel has brought 380 students home from Moldova and planned to send a plane to Peru on Thursday to bring back a group of young Israelis stranded there after Peru's president, Martín Vizcarra, announced Sunday that he would close his country's borders, according to The Jerusalem Post.
“The young people will be brought to Israel free of charge,” Foreign Ministry Israel Katz said.
French authorities were arranging emergency flights from Morocco to bring back dozens of French nationals, according to Reuters. And Germany's Foreign Minister announced an "airlift" for thousands of German citizens stranded abroad.
For Americans in similar situations? Shuttered embassies, recorded phone messages and automated emails.
As soon as Candace Kaiser and her friends learned of Peru's lockdown, they scrambled to find flights home to South Carolina.
"Airlines booked up incredibly fast and websites were crashing," she said. "Then came the price gouging." For a one-way ticket back to the U.S., she said, prices ran as high as $6,000.
"I'm 28 years old. I can't afford something like that," said Kaiser, who works in marketing and communications. They've called the embassy, but no one has answered. They tried emailing and received one automated response.
"Due to COVID-19 concerns, the US. consular section in Peru is reduced to emergency services only," the message reads, in part. "While the U.S. government has successfully evacuated many of our citizens in recent weeks, special flights do not reflect our standard practice and should not be relied upon as an option for U.S. citizens abroad who may be impacted by the ongoing spread of COVID-19."
When Monesmith, the North Carolina ER nurse, learned of Peru's lockdown, "the last flight from Cusco to Lima had already left," she said.
So she went to the U.S. Embassy.
“The doors were locked, with a sign on the door just referring people to their website, which said nothing,” Monesmith said. “The embassy has been no help at all. The State Department has said that they do not send flights to bring Americans home, that is not their practice so we should not expect it.”
She noted that Peru's government has deployed its military to enforce the lockdown and has suspended some constitutional rights.
"Life in Cusco is a little scary. Police are all over the streets," she said. "We now have a curfew" from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.
"There are 420 of us here in Cusco. We just want to go home," Monesmith said. "I’m far more needed at home in the ER helping patients."
Possible good news
Chris Pierce said his family received some potentially good news on Thursday; Philippine's tourism authorities may try to arrange flights out of the country for foreign nationals.
"Glad to hear the Philippine government is doing their part on helping us get home," he told USA TODAY, as his wife tried to reach the local tourism office about the possible exit plans.
If they can't get out, Pierce said, he's worried about the consequences of being stuck for as long as a month: Their jobs, their bills.
After speaking with their employers, Chris and Nila have been assured they will have jobs to return to, he said. But they aren't being paid while they are away.
"We will be in debt and then some," Pierce said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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66fd7cb8e36dc63b7153ec0f1545b1b3 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/19/coronavirus-therewithyou-uk-newspapers-unified-front-page/2881417001/ | UK newspapers run unified front page amid coronavirus pandemic: We're #ThereWithYou | UK newspapers run unified front page amid coronavirus pandemic: We're #ThereWithYou
Dozens of newspapers in the United Kingdom ran the same front page Friday morning to launch the #ThereWithYou campaign, an effort to reassure readers during the coronavirus pandemic.
Archant, Reach, JPI Media, Newsquest and Iliffe are involved in the campaign, according to the Borehamwood & Elstree Times in England. Newsquest is owned by Gannett, the parent company for USA TODAY.
“In these difficult days, weeks and perhaps months, our role in providing trusted news and information and publicizing good causes of all kinds has never been more vital," Toby Granville, Newsquest editorial development director, said in an email to USA TODAY. “And we want to do our part to support the most vulnerable members of our community.”
About 25 Newsquest papers will be participating in the campaign, Granville said.
There are more than confirmed 242,000 cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide with nearly 10,000 deaths as of Thursday night, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The UK has over 2,700 cases with nearly 140 deaths.
The headline on the front page reads, "When you're on your own, we're there with you." Each newspaper is also running a statement committing to its community and vowing to keep a reliable flow of news.
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"Our lives are being turned upside down: schools are shutting down; parents are struggling to juggle work and home life; businesses are scrambling to protect their employees whilst safeguarding their very futures," part of the statement reads. "Pubs, clubs, restaurants. Theatres, cafes, sports centres and many, many more small independent traders, all facing months of tradeless isolation.
It adds, "We know that for you, having a constant feed of reliable news and information that you trust is vital, and this is our commitment to you: whatever happens, we will be there for you."
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51b5fae38342b9175b19eec8c7e72aaf | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/19/first-day-spring-tokyo-dc-athens-flowers-blooming/2873172001/ | The first day of spring is here. See flowers blooming around the world | The first day of spring is here. See flowers blooming around the world
The start of spring doesn't stop for anything. Amid a coronavirus pandemic, flowers are beginning to sprout new life. And they are actually doing it earlier than ever recorded across portions of the U.S.
"We’ve known for over a decade now that climate change is variably advancing the onset of spring across the United States," the U.S. Geological Survey said.
For instance, cherry blossoms are blooming in Washington, D.C., and Japan in March — which Japan's weather agency declared the earliest start to the world-renowned cherry blossom season in nearly 70 years.
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To commemorate the first day of spring, here are some images of flowering plants and trees already bursting with life throughout the world.
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48ab847fc210f4d4e0f76ba2f7ea4f41 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/21/coronavirus-stranded-americans-peru-told-border-close-sunday/2889675001/ | U.S. Embassy working with Peru to charter flights for Americans stranded amid pandemic | U.S. Embassy working with Peru to charter flights for Americans stranded amid pandemic
The United States Embassy in Lima said Monday it is “working in close coordination with the Peruvian Government to explore charter repatriation flights” for hundreds of Americans stranded amid the coronavirus pandemic.
It's a situation that has become frustrating for not only the stranded Americans, but also for the government of Peru. The nation's defense minister said over the weekend that Saturday is the last day the government will support the return of foreigners from the country before declaring the border "closed permanently" because of the coronavirus situation.
Defense Minister Walter Martos said in a previous interview with Canal N that President Martín Vizcarra, who had initially closed the borders March 15, had ordered all airports and borders closed completely as of Sunday and will take a "much stricter measure," El Comercio reported Saturday.
As of Monday afternoon, the U.S. Embassy said that approximately 600 Americans had already left Peru on expatriation flights. The Embassy did warn Americans against scams and added that Peru was “limiting air traffic to repatriation travel for U.S. citizens facilitated through the U.S. government.”
Israel brought in planes on Thursday to take out hundreds of its citizens and Canada was repatriating many of its citizens Saturday.
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Jared Anderson, a 37-year-old New Yorker who flew to Peru on March 10 to visit his girlfriend, is one of the Americans stuck behind closed borders and under a 15-day quarantine. He said the U.S. Embassy has told them they are essentially on their own.
Anderson spoke to USA TODAY on Friday, only hours after Israeli planes brought out its citizens.
Anderson said it is almost impossible to reach anyone on a U.S. Embassy phone in Lima and when he has, the embassy says "we are pretty much told this was the situation and you've got to figure it out."
On Monday, Anderson updated USA TODAY via text message and said he still hasn't had luck in getting out of Peru.
"Overall feel that the Peruvian government has done a good job of managing things for the most part and feel the issue around repatriation squarely falls on the U.S. government," Anderson wrote. "We have also been told that we are expected to sign a promissory note that we will repay the government if they repatriate us and it could be $1,500 one way. This is definitely higher than everyone's return airfare that we had booked with the airlines.
"Many can't afford this and wonder how the government could be asking so much money especially as they are bailing out the airlines in the US and there are many aircraft sitting idle."
In Monday's release, the U.S. Embassy asked that Americans interested in repatriation flights email their information to the Embassy, so that it could work on adding those interested to flight manifests.
In the release, the Embassy said the flights would not be free, but that the passengers would not be asked to pay costs up front.
After an outcry from individuals and members of Congress, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that the department is using "all of the tools we can" to bring Americans home, including a mix of commercial and private flights. He said the agency is also discussing with the Pentagon the possibility of employing military aircraft.
He said State Department has put together a "repatriation task force," which is working on reports from individual citizens and members of Congress, and is urging stranded travelers to log in to the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program.
"We'll track you and try to get everybody back," Pompeo said.
The U.S. military’s Southern Command said Friday that it was flying 89 U.S. citizens from Honduras to Charleston, South Carolina, after they were unable to return home because of the virus outbreak in the second Air Force Mission to bring people from Honduras, the Associated Press reported.
Anderson is in Lima, but said many of the Americans are scattered around the country particularly near the popular tourist destination of Machu Picchu and jungle cities of Iquitos and Pucallpa.
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The personal and tourist trips were disrupted when the Peruvian president closed the border on March 15 and issued a strict, 15-day, stay-indoors quarantine – for the entire country.
Pauline Saade, from Cliffside, New Jersey, tells USA TODAY that she and 12 other "self-isolating" Americans and Canadians are stuck in the town of Pisac in south-central Peru, where they have been since Feb. 24.
Saade, 38, said that the Canadians were contacted by their embassy on Friday and were getting picked up Saturday to take them to Cusco to get a flight home.
She said the U.S. Embassy had come up short in their efforts to get out.
"There’s lack of consistent information, lack of resources to get us out from point A to point B, lack of leadership, lack of seamless communications between countries and most important compassion to do what’s right to get us home to our families so we can get through this difficult time in our homes surrounded by our loved ones," she said.
Saade also said she had spent hours online and on the phone trying to rebook her flight or talk to a carrier representative.
She added that those stranded there were having to pay up to $100 a night "in order for us to safely stay here."
"I understand our leaders are doing what they can to contain the virus and protect people with compromised immune systems," Saade said. "I just wish the communication between countries like Peru and U.S. were more organized and efficient so the process of getting people out to there families can be achieved."
Anderson said the Americans in his group are confined to a hotel, following a rigorous 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. He said only one person from a family is allowed to go for groceries and must buy them and return directly.
The group has even started a Facebook page called Americans Stuck in Peru.
He said the group includes a pregnant woman, elderly people and one person with Lyme disease.
Anderson said on Monday that there "are many scams going on" with companies posting to the Facebook page, claiming they can get the stranded travelers home but asking for funds – sometimes thousands of dollars – to be wired to them.
Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has been pressing the State Department for help in repatriating three Oregonians stranded in Peru.
"He has been told a task force is working to extract all Americans overseas, and he remains determined to make sure this task force translates into action that gives all Americans trying to leave Peru, and any and all other countries, clear guidance and urgently needed assistance to bring them home," a spokesman for Wyden said on Saturday.
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Jason Gramling, from Milwaukee, said on the Facebook page that he is stuck there with his wife and two daughters, ages 6 and 10.
"Please, we need to get out of here and get back home," he wrote. "We have a place to stay but very soon will be running out of money and food and I won't know what we will be able to do.please I don't want to die here."
"My children are scared because there will be nothing to eat soon," he wrote.
"What we don't know is what is happening," Anderson said. "The good news is that the grocery stores have food, but the medical care system is very different than the American standard and a little bit scary."
"A lot of us are in good spirits and definitely ready to come home and be with family," he said.
Americans who are not in Lima or Cusco but are interested in repatriation flights are being asked to shelter in place and follow quarantine measures until receiving flight information and transportation details from the Embassy.
Contributing: Associated Press
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b4dcd0b1d4ccfa70b4e54b72ef13fe16 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/23/coronavirus-what-happens-if-italys-lockdowns-dont-work/2897362001/ | 'Every part of me hopes it doesn’t come to that': What if Italy's coronavirus lockdowns don't work? | 'Every part of me hopes it doesn’t come to that': What if Italy's coronavirus lockdowns don't work?
ROME — This could be the week Italy receives some desperately needed sustained good news about the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country. If it doesn’t, it may have to tighten one of the strictest peacetime lockdowns in modern European history.
Over the weekend, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called the month-long outbreak Italy's worst crisis since World War II, and it is hard to disagree.
Doctors in the northern regions of the country have been forced to make decisions usually reserved for wartime triage tents: deciding who lives or dies when the number of respirators is outnumbered by the patients who need them. Morgues are running out of space to hold corpses. Medical staff are collapsing from exhaustion during shifts lasting as long as 36 hours. The country’s economy has ground to a halt.
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With more than 50,000 active cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, Italy has more sick than any other country. Nearly 6,000 have died – also higher than in any other country, including China, where the outbreak began in December. Italy now has more than 3,000 patients in intensive care.
Monday marked the two-week anniversary of the country’s first nationwide quarantine, an important milestone that corresponds with the maximum incubation period for the virus. Quarantine rules have been tightened along the way, but under current rules, all factories and offices are closed and more than 60 million Italians have been told to stay at home except for "essential" errands like medical visits or food shopping. Italy's public health experts say the number of new infections should soon start to slow.
"(We will) hopefully reach a peak in the near-term,” said Massimo Bassetti, director of the Infectious Disease Clinic for the San Martino Hospital in Genoa, in an interview. Bassetti is on the front lines of Italy’s coronavirus battle. "From the peak, the numbers should plateau and then after a week or ten days, they should start to drop," he said.
There are some tentative signs that may be happening. New infections continued to rise according to information released Sunday and Monday, but at a slower rate than before. On Monday, the region of Lombardy saw the first decrease in hospitalizations due to COVID-19 since the outbreak began, according to Italian media. But it is too early to draw a conclusion based on these short-term trends.
Government health officials in Italy have circled Saturday, March 28, on their calendars as the date by which it should be clear if the national quarantine is working as expected.
Other countries have similar hopes.
Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's Robert Koch Institute, a federal public health agency, noted Monday that his country, too, could be "seeing signs" that its exponential coronavirus growth curve may be starting to flatten off amid "social distancing" measures including school closures and bans on public gatherings.
In China, where the government's coronavirus restrictions extended to forcibly limiting trips to supermarkets and pharmacies, all of its new cases of coronavirus are now being imported from abroad, according to China's National Health Commission.
Governors in New York, California and other large states have ordered most businesses to shut and people to stay inside, with some exceptions, as the number of U.S. coronavirus cases continues to climb. But the Trump administration has yet to impose a national lockdown. In fact, President Donald Trump signaled in a tweet early Mondaythat he is actually considering lifting social distancing guidelines that may be slowing the spread of the coronavirus but are hurting the economy.
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But what happens in Italy if this week passes with no significant reduction in the rate of new infections? When asked, Bassetti breathed out a long sigh.
"Then I guess we would have to tighten the rules even more, as the Chinese did in Wuhan," he said, referring to the Chinese city where the coronavirus first appeared last year. "We’d have to lock everyone in their homes with no option to leave under any circumstances. We’d have to deploy the military in the streets to force anyone who steps outside to go back home."
After a pause: "Every part of me hopes it doesn’t come to that," he said.
Riccardo Alcaro, a research coordinator for the Institute of International Affairs, a Rome-based think tank, agreed.
"If the numbers don’t start to come down there are only two explanations,” Alcaro said. “Either coronavirus infections were far more widespread than we have been able to prove, or the lockdown measures put in place were not strong enough."
Neither Bassetti nor Alcaro had any idea what Italy could do to slow the spread of the virus besides even more stringent lockdowns.
Elizabeth Ramborger, 45, a Seattle native working as a consultant for United Nations organizations in Rome, said that if Italy's restrictions don't appear to be yielding any progress in dampening down the virus' spread, it could break her spirits.
"I’ve tried to stay calm but worry has been creeping in as I watch the news every day and see the numbers climb higher," she said. "I’ve already seen a change in my mood. If we don’t see any progress I guess I’d just hunker down and stay inside, scared and unsure what to do."
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Leonardo Gambardella, a 47-year-old actor and acting coach, echoed those sentiments.
"I would be completely deflated," said the father of two young children. "The prospect that we’re making all these sacrifices, that we can’t go for a stroll, that we can’t take the children out, and that it was all for nothing. It would be very difficult to accept."
Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard
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81f623a25ef36e5855ffe41f2b7dc8ac | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/25/coronavirus-greta-thunberg-says-extremely-likely-she-had-covid-19/5076804002/ | Greta Thunberg says it's 'extremely likely' she had coronavirus after her trip to central Europe | Greta Thunberg says it's 'extremely likely' she had coronavirus after her trip to central Europe
Young climate change activist Greta Thunberg told her followers that it was “extremely likely” she had the novel coronavirus as she urged the public to stay at home.
The 17-year-old Swede said in an Instagram post Tuesday that she began feeling symptoms after returning from a trip around central Europe.
“Around ten days ago I started feeling some symptoms,” she said. “I was feeling tired, had shivers, a sore throat and coughed.”
Thunberg said her father, who she traveled with to Brussels, also experienced similar symptoms but much more intense. She didn’t get tested for COVID-19, explaining that everyone in Sweden who had symptoms and weren’t in need of emergency medical care were told to stay home and isolate themselves.
She said she recovered from the illness with a message: Stay home. According to Thunberg, she experienced symptoms that were milder than her last cold and that she knew she had COVID-19 only because her father was simultaneously recovering from the same illness.
“And this is what makes it so much more dangerous,” she said. “We who don’t belong to a risk group have an enormous responsibility, our actions can be the difference between life and death for many others.”
She urges young people, even those who may not notice symptoms, to remain at home to avoid passing the virus unknowingly to at-risk groups.
Health experts have reiterated the importance of social distancing and staying at home to “flatten the curve,” or spreading out the number of coronavirus cases over a longer period to time in order to avoid a rapid spike of cases that could overwhelm the health care system.
While many European countries are moving closer to a near-lockdown, Sweden has decided to keep a number of businesses open including their popular ski resorts, according to Deutsche Welle.
Sweden has more than 2,300 confirmed coronavirus cases, with a total of 41 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins data. In comparison, the United States has more than 55,000 confirmed cases and 802 deaths.
Contributing: Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY. Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
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2b9edde031f4cbd4bdde8d1671f2a562 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/25/new-zealand-mosque-shootings-white-supremacist-changes-plea-guilty/5084751002/ | New Zealand mosque shootings: Australian white supremacist changes plea to guilty | New Zealand mosque shootings: Australian white supremacist changes plea to guilty
WELLINGTON, New Zealand – One year after killing 51 worshipers at two Christchurch mosques, an Australian white supremacist accused of the slaughter changed his plea to guilty on Thursday.
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 29, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism. The killing spree was the deadliest in New Zealand's modern history and prompted the government to rush through new laws banning most semi-automatic weapons.
Tarrant was scheduled to go to trial on the charges in June.
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A sentencing date has yet to be set. Tarrant faces life imprisonment on the charges.
The plea came at a hastily arranged court hearing as New Zealand begins a four-week lockdown to try and combat the coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown meant that Tarrant appeared in the court from his jail cell via video link and that only a few people were allowed inside the courtroom.
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455c91081c0b0780d9de83e91e68b2b6 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/26/bbc-dad-talks-work-home-kids-during-coronavirus-pandemic/2915486001/ | BBC dad interrupted by kids in viral video opens up about work from home during coronavirus pandemic | BBC dad interrupted by kids in viral video opens up about work from home during coronavirus pandemic
If there's one person any parent working from home amid the coronavirus pandemic can relate to, it's the BBC dad.
Robert Kelly, a political science professor in South Korea, was hilariously interrupted by playful children while doing an interview from his home with the BBC.
The video went viral in 2017, and now Kelly and his family are back as they continue to parent and work from home while people around the world similarly practice social distancing to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.
"It's pretty tough for us," Kelly said in a heartwarming and candid interview on the BBC alongside his wife, Jung-a Kim, and children, Marion and James.
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"Employers who have employees with kids like our age, it can be very, very difficult. I get maybe two hours of work done a day, maybe three with this," he said, pointing to his restless daughter.
"They've got nothing to do. They're climbing the walls. They're are only so many games you can play and puzzles you can do before they just kind of, you know, run around."
Kelly and his family are based in Busan, a city in southeastern South Korea, a country that global public health leaders have praised for its swift response to the outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
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The country has seen 9,241 known cases with 131 known deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
The country "flattened the curve" without widespread lockdowns and instead applied a wide-ranging testing and contact tracing strategy along with isolating suspected cases in designated facilities rather than in homes or hospitals, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom said last week.
Speaking with the BBC, Jung-a Kim described taking her children for short periods of time to the playground or on hikes to let them release energy while still staying far away from others.
"This is springtime in Korea so we try to go see the flowers and trees and they can shout and scream," she added.
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In the original viral video, when Kelly was being interviewed and his family unexpectedly barged in, Jung-a Kim was seen rushing into the room to pull the children out.
Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
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f48d04aeeee3c77f89b495da188d7417 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/26/coronavirus-global-response-falters-virus-spreads-trump-lashes-out/2913342001/ | Global response to coronavirus falters as pandemic worsens and Trump lashes out at China | Global response to coronavirus falters as pandemic worsens and Trump lashes out at China
WASHINGTON – After Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concluded a "virtual" summit on Wednesday with top diplomats from six other countries, he struck a note of solidarity with U.S. allies as the world faces down a common enemy: the coronavirus pandemic.
"I made it clear to our G7 partners – especially to our friends in Italy and the rest of Europe – that the United States remains committed to assisting them in all ways possible," Pompeo told reporters at the State Department after his private video conference with foreign ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
But the Trump administration has not championed an international response to the global disease threat – nor have other world leaders, experts say.
"It’s been very chaotic,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations.
Indeed, after the G7 meeting ended, a German news outlet reported that the seven foreign ministers could not agree on a joint statement because Pompeo insisted on using "Wuhan virus" to describe the pandemic, a move seen as deliberately provocative toward China. Pompeo essentially confirmed that report Thursday.
“Different countries take different approaches," Pompeo told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Thursday when asked about that report. "My theory is we should always be accurate with respect to how we identify something. This virus began in Wuhan; I’ve referred to it as the Wuhan virus.”
During other international crises – such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and the global economic meltdown in 2008 – world leaders joined forces to confront the threat of disease and economic collapse. But the reaction to COVID-19 has been very "state-centric," Huang said, with most afflicted countries turning inward.
Across the globe, individual governments are competing to secure scarce medical supplies from a strained global supply chain, closing borders with little to no notice to their neighbors, and lobbing verbal broadsides that threaten to deepen the discord.
"The world today that’s impacted by this is terribly fractured, terribly fragmented," said Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Affairs, a Washington think tank. "We don’t see much on the horizon in terms of promising diplomatic initiatives to bring the major powers and others together to address both the pandemic virus crisis, as well as the economic dislocations that it’s brought forward."
One reason: The coronavirus is unprecedented in the force and speed with which it has spread from one country to the next. First reported by Chinese officials in late December, it has now infected at least 415,000 people across more than 150 countries, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
"Typically on an international level, the World Health Organization goes into full throttle," in response to disease outbreaks, as does the United Nations, said Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
But the world was "caught off guard" by coronavirus, he said. "And once it began hitting the United States, it’s been a little bit of a catch-up game."
Morrison and others say the virus struck also at a particularly problematic time, when international institutions have been weakened and a nationalistic fervor has swept many governments.
In those countries best positioned to rally an international response, several leaders greeted the outbreak "with a particular level of skepticism" and "were somewhat dismissive of the notion that there needed to be high-level coordinated action," Morrison said. "Certainly that was true in Washington, in London, in Rome, and elsewhere."
In Washington, the Trump administration has, among other steps, shut down travel from Europe without consultation, scorched Iran for its handling of the epidemic, tried to buy up scarce medical equipment from U.S. allies that are themselves under siege with coronavirus cases, and accused China of a virus cover-up.
"China was very secretive, okay?" President Donald Trump said during a March 21 briefing on the U.S. coronavirus response. "Very, very secretive. And that's unfortunate."
There were also reports that the Trump administration offered a large sum of money to a Germany company working to develop a coronavirus vaccine, sparking fears the U.S. was trying gain exclusive rights to inoculate Americans first. Both the German firm and the White House denied the report, but it highlighted the sense that this was an every-man-for-himself battle and demonstrated that traditional allies were eyeing each other with new suspicions.
Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at CSIS, said it's not only the U.S. that has responded to the pandemic with a unilateralist bent.
"There is just an absolute scarcity of coordination and collaboration in Europe," she said.
"This is going to be a soul-searching moment for the European Union," because it’s created the potential for solidarity, coordination and collaboration across the EU, Conley said. Instead, "what we’ve seen is that this pandemic has completely laid bare that ... those institutions are not going to be used for this great challenge."
Pompeo has echoed Trump in criticizing China. At Wednesday's news conference, the secretary of state pivoted from touting America's global generosity to attacking China for what he has labeled a "cover-up" of the initial outbreak.
“The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated," Pompeo said, refusing to use the official medical name – COVID-19 – despite objections from Chinese officials and public health experts who say it could lead to stigmatization and attacks on Asians.
Pompeo noted that China was the first to resist international help. Officials suppressed reports about the outbreak and sought to punish doctors who raised alarms. Xi Jinping’s government refused to allow U.S. medical experts to go to Wuhan, the initial epicenter, and brushed off the Trump administration’s offer of financial assistance.
"We tried ... from the opening days to get our scientists, our experts on the ground there so that we could begin to assist in the global response to what began there in China, but we weren’t able to do that," Pompeo said Wednesday.
Chinese officials have since been more transparent, sharing the virus' genome sequence and other vital data. And some experts fear that picking a fight with China now is counterproductive, particularly because the country dominates the global supply chain for in-demand medical products.
"We should be cooperating with China. This is not a good time for us or for China to say 'Let’s have a spitting match'," said Gayle Smith, who served on the National Security Council and other top positions in the Obama administration. “The fact that we’re interconnected and dependent, it isn’t a political position. It’s a statement of fact."
Smith worked at the White House when President Barack Obama grappled with the Ebola outbreak, and she said he badgered other world leaders to cobble together a campaign against the disease.
"He called pretty much every leader on the planet to say ‘Here’s what we’re doing. we’ve got this many doctors, this much money'," Smith recalled. Then he would say: "'What are you going to do? How much money can you put in? How many health care workers? He really pressed everybody."
As the coronavirus continues its steady march, Smith noted, scientists, epidemiologists and other experts are sharing their research and other information about the virus across borders.
But, she added, "at the level of global political leadership, there’s a real stark absence of the kind of international collaboration that's needed."
Even if the scientists keep cooperating as they race to develop a vaccine, Huang said he doesn’t foresee that happening on the political front.
He fears if and when a vaccine becomes available, those countries that have the capacity to manufacture it “will first satisfy the needs of their people and those countries that do not have the capacity will have to wait. This will probably cause more death and more suffering.”
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259b2f9749535463c59d149f6652d0d7 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/03/27/coronavirus-africa-preparedness-rising-covid-19-infections/5076620002/ | Africa's paradox: It may be the worst and best place to ride out coronavirus | Africa's paradox: It may be the worst and best place to ride out coronavirus
LAGOS, Nigeria – After President Donald Trump touted an anti-malaria drug called chloroquine as a possible treatment for coronavirus, thousands of Nigerians started taking the medicine, some of them overdosing in a rush to "prevent" infection.
In Mali, there is an estimated one ventilator per 1 million people – about 20 in all, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Infection, which serves 31 of Africa's 54 nations. The devices are critical in helping to prevent the respiratory failure that has contributed to a worldwide coronavirus death toll of more than 34,000.
Kenya, a country of more than 50 million people, has 550 intensive-care-unit beds. Many sub-Saharan nations have few medical workers; some have no isolation wards.
As of March 30, the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia had just over 4,300 cases in 46 countries of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, according to the African Union, a pan-African organization that supports political and economic integration among its 55 member states that have highly varied populations, geographies, cultures, social mores and economies.
Yet infections are rapidly rising.
And even as the most modern and well-funded hospitals around the world are bracing for an onslaught of cases that will require hard-to-get life-saving equipment, public health officials worry that Africa's relatively weak health systems, already disproportionately affected by Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, could be overwhelmed. This could further compound problems in a part of the world that has long grappled with conflict, humanitarian disaster and infrastructure inadequacies.
Africa's plight has grabbed little attention amid mounting global medical emergency scenarios stretching from Asia to Latin America despite data released March 25 by the African Union suggesting the continent's infection trajectory over the first 50 days is similar to Europe's. There, the coronavirus has deeply taken hold in Italy and Spain and there are more than 17,000 deaths – almost six times as many as in China, where the outbreak began in December. The U.S. death toll stands at more than 2,500.
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"We need global solidarity now," said Matshidiso Rebecca Moeti, a Botswanan national who is the World Health Organization's regional director for Africa, in a Thursday online briefing about the unfolding coronavirus situation in Africa. Moeti said that unlike industrialized countries across the world, most African nations have virtually no means to manufacture the medical equipment governments are now rushing to procure.
"We need this help. It's urgent," said Moeti.
India's decision this week to lock down its 1.3 billion people means that about a quarter or more of the world's population is now living with some form of enforced restrictions on movement and social contact, according to various COVID-19 trackers, such as Oxford University's "COVID-19 government response gauge" and a manual count by USA TODAY of nations with lockdowns. Like elsewhere, many African nations have closed borders, shuttered schools and houses of worship, and told people to stay inside. They have also tried to adopt the outbreak prevention and management strategies that have proved successful in Asia: testing, tracing and quarantining those who are infected.
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But as African countries prepare to battle the coronavirus on a much larger scale, they have far fewer weapons at their disposal than wealthy nations that have mobilized tens of thousands of health workers, dramatically ramped up testing, deepened essential health equipment inventories, deployed well-trained armies to keep order, sought the advice and resources of sophisticated technology sectors, and unveiled trillions of dollars in financial aid and economic rescue plans for businesses and employees.
Olaniyi Ayobami, a doctor at the main hospital in Nigeria's southwestern city of Ibadan, said that his city "lacks the capacity to even carry out diagnostic tests for the virus," let alone care for those who fall ill from a disease that can leave those infected with only mild symptoms or require invasive medical interventions.
"We have only one functional ventilator, which is not even in very good condition," said Collins Anyachi, a physician at a teaching hospital in Calabar, a Nigerian city in Cross River state that borders Cameroon. Anyachi added that fewer than 10 out of the approximately 600 doctors that serve the area's two million people have access to personal protection equipment, such as face masks and surgical gowns, that can make all the difference in terms of whether medical staff contract the virus.
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In South Africa, which has more coronavirus infections than anywhere else on the continent – more than 1,300 as of March 30 – the government has prohibited all but essential workers from going outside, even for exercise or to walk a dog. Also forbidden: speaking in-person to a neighbor. But crowded townships, where services are basic at the best of times, make it harder for people to observe social distancing measures.
Mary Nxolo, 28, from Khayelitsha, a vast high-density, low-income outlying eastern suburb approximately 20 miles from central Cape Town, said that she was "terrified" about what the government's restrictions would mean for her family.
"I have an elderly mother, who is on a pension, and three kids. I am the only one earning anything. I don’t even know if I qualify as being an 'essential worker,' because I do domestic work ... I’m scared I’ll be arrested if I try to go to work," she said.
South Africa is one of the most medically advanced countries in Africa. Public health officials and hospital administrators say it is likely the best positioned of all African nations to meet the demands of coronavirus. It has about 7,000 intensive-care beds and around 3,000 ventilators, according to Kerrin Begg, a public health specialist who is advising South Africa's government on the crisis. South Africa has 60 million people.
Nandi Siegfried, an epidemiologist who helps advise South Africa's COVID-19 government task force team, said that social distancing in South Africa will be "effectively impossible" for many people crowded together in urban developments.
Still, President Cyril Ramaphosa has imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns, with alcohol sales banned and citizens told to stay sober for 21 days.
In Zimbabwe, there have only been three confirmed coronavirus cases, but already one death, that of a locally well-known TV personality who was infected in New York City. The World Bank estimates that more than a third of Zimbabweans live in extreme poverty; in the hardest-hit rural areas, half of all children face daily food shortages.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation the size of Western Europe, has significant mineral wealth, but is riven by political turmoil and open conflict on its eastern borders.
It also has one of Africa’s weakest health systems after battling another global health emergency, a long-running Ebola outbreak. That outbreak seems all but over, but now Congo faces both a major measles outbreak and increasing coronavirus infections.
More than 2,000 miles to the north, the first coronavirus case in Libya, most of whose terrain lies in the Sahara desert, was reported on March 25. But the country has been engulfed in violent chaos for nearly a decade, since the ouster of its longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Libya's health system, gutted by years of escalating hostilities, may be one of the least well prepared on the planet to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
Tom Garofalo, the Libya country director for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, said that almost 20% of Libyan hospitals and primary health facilities are closed and that only 6% offer a full range of health services.
"The country is ill-prepared for an outbreak of the magnitude of COVID-19," he said.
In fact, the situation for many African countries mirrors circumstances for underdeveloped countries from Venezuela to Pakistan, were millions of vulnerable people live in massive slums with poor sanitation and no or rudimentary plumbing.
But while these factors and others could complicate Africa's ability to respond to the pandemic, countries across the region may also have relative advantages including that the average age in Africa, according to the United Nations, is 20 years old.
While the coronavirus can infect anyone, children rarely get sick and most young adults appear to mostly suffer milder symptoms compared to the elderly or those with underlying health issues such as cancer, diabetes and hypertension.
The median age in Italy, where more people have died from the virus than anywhere else – more than 8,000 – is 47, compared to 37 in China and 38 in the United States.
A few early scientific studies appear to indicate that warmer weather and higher humidity levels may help slow the disease, although the findings are far from conclusive and Australia, which is experiencing late summer in the Southern Hemisphere, has seen a sharp rise in infections. Africa's climate also varies from cool to cold winters.
Africa's experience fighting infectious disease may also prove "painfully useful," said Moeti, the World Health Organization's Africa director. "We think that some of the Ebola lessons learned in the Congo, about talking to people at the community level" about what they should be doing to limit transmission will be relevant, she said.
But the continent may struggle to cope with a huge coronavirus outbreak for other reasons connected to misinformation, cultural superstition and unfounded theories.
"I almost got my two-year-old son killed," said Sarah Lukman, a 21-year-old woman who lives in a refugee camp in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, a region blighted by years of insurgency by the Boko Haram jihadist terrorist organization.
Lukman had given her son chloroquine, the anti-malaria drug, after she heard President Trump say it had proved to be effective in fighting the coronavirus. A few minutes after taking the medicine, her son fell unconscious before a medic was able to revive him.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said there has only been anecdotal evidence the drug was helpful for combatting the virus. It is currently being studied and tested in clinical trials.
Last week, in Egypt, a country that links northeast Africa to the Middle East, authorities forced a journalist from Britain's Guardian newspaper to leave the country after she reported on a research paper that questioned the country's low tally of cases.
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The West African nation of Senegal declared a state of emergency on Monday and imposed a curfew in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The health ministry has been raising awareness of the virus by teaming up with well-known musicians. The Y’en a Marre rap group has recorded videos about washing hands and avoiding crowds.
But Cmda Ba, 32, who works for a recycling company in Dakar, Senegal's capital, was not convinced that he needed to do anything to protect himself against the virus.
"I think the body systems of black people are stronger than other races," he said.
Hjelmgaard reported from London, Erasmus from Cape Town, South Africa
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7a1cc522ad3ec7b39a8b3d9337fed7de | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/06/ireland-prime-minster-leo-varadkar-work-doctor-amid-coronavirus/2952997001/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=exchange&utm_content=news&fbclid=IwAR3cSz28_pQ3iHtyGbsXmZHJIncBYP19v7RjnFkrOSY8_KmJS__hqqwAqy0 | Ireland's prime minister to work as doctor amid coronavirus pandemic | Ireland's prime minister to work as doctor amid coronavirus pandemic
Ireland's prime minister plans to work one day a week as a doctor to help amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Leo Varadkar studied medicine and trained to be a doctor at King’s Hospital and Trinity College Dublin. He worked as a doctor for seven years before entering politics, according to Reuters.
In March, Varadkar re-registered as a doctor to practice one day a week with Ireland's Health Service Executive, his office confirmed in a statement to USA TODAY.
"Many of his family and friends are working in the health service. He wanted to help out even in a small way," the statement said.
Varadkar's father was a doctor and mother a nurse. According to the Irish Times, his partner, sisters and their husbands all work for the country's health services, too.
The prime minister will help with phone appointments, the Times reported. People in Ireland who believe they may have COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, are to call for a first assessment, rather than immediately go to an emergency room, to help slow the spread, according to the newspaper.
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Varadkar was one of some 50,000 medical professionals in the country not currently working in the field who re-registered with the country's health services after a call for more medical workers, the Irish Times reported.
Nearly 5,000 people in Ireland are known to have tested positive for the new coronavirus and more than 150 people have died, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.
Varadkar has been a member of Ireland's parliament since 2007, and in 2017 become the country's youngest prime minister at 38.
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d3cdd3a0374171527a3b7a238d72085a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/07/pandas-finally-mate-hong-kong-zoo-closed-due-coronavirus/2960449001/ | Two pandas tried to mate for a decade. With the zoo closed due to coronavirus, they finally did it | Two pandas tried to mate for a decade. With the zoo closed due to coronavirus, they finally did it
All it took was some peace and quiet.
As a zoo in Hong Kong closed to the public amid the coronavirus pandemic, two giant pandas who hadn't mated after a decade of attempts finally did the deed Monday morning.
Ocean Park said its 14-year-old giant pandas, female Ying Ying and male Le Le, had been showing signs for a couple of weeks that they were entering the breeding season.
About 9 a.m. Monday, the two pandas marked "the first success since the two giant pandas began attempts at natural mating a decade ago," Ocean Park said in a statement.
Zoo officials hope the mating will bring a pregnancy later in the year for Ying Ying. The zoo said the gestation period for giant pandas is 72 to 324 days, though the World Wildlife Fund puts the gestation period at 95 to 160 days.
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The zoo said a pregnancy can't be detected on an ultrasound until 14 to 17 days before birth.
"The successful natural mating process today is extremely exciting for all of us, as the chance of pregnancy via natural mating is higher than by artificial insemination," Michael Boos, Ocean Park's executive director in zoological operations and conservation, said in a statement.
"We hope to bear wonderful pregnancy news to Hong Kongers this year and make further contributions to the conservation of this vulnerable species."
Giant pandas held in captivity around the world take part in breeding programs to boost their population. For years, the species was considered "endangered" and only recently was recategorized as "vulnerable" by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Pandas reach sexual maturity at ages 5 to 7, Ocean Park says. Ying Ying and Le Le arrived in Hong Kong in 2007 but failed to mate naturally since attempts began in 2010.
Beginning in late March, Ying Ying began playing in the water in her habitat more often as Le Le was "leaving scent-markings around his habitat" and looking for Ying Ying's scent, the zoo said.
"Such behaviours are consistent with those common during breeding season," the zoo said in a statement.
Pandas in general are solitary and can be aggressive toward each other when in the same space. However, according to the San Diego Zoo in California, there are two exceptions: mating season and mothers with cubs.
According to the San Diego Zoo, the window for panda mating is small: A female is receptive to breeding for just two to three days.
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f72c177f3350d4b9fef70b167bde501f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/05/22/climate-change-antarctica-has-green-snow-due-warming-temperatures/5242543002/ | Climate change is turning the snow in Antarctica bright green. Scientists are able to see it from space. | Climate change is turning the snow in Antarctica bright green. Scientists are able to see it from space.
The snow in Antarctica is turning green and scientists say climate change may be to blame.
According to a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications, microscopic algae blooms across the surface of the snow is slowly turning Antarctica’s wintry, white landscape green. Although microscopic, scientists say they're able to see the "green snow" from space when the algae blooms en masse.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey created a large-scale map of green snow algae along the Antarctic Peninsula coast using a combination of satellite data and on-the-ground observations over the course of two summers.
The study found that the green snow algae bloomed in warmer areas where the average temperatures are just above 32 degrees Fahrenheit during the southern hemisphere’s summer months from November to February.
While algae prefer warmer temperatures, scientists believe that rising global temperatures could also be to their detriment. Low-lying islands with no high ground may lose their summer snow because of climate change and with it their snow algae.
“As Antarctica warms, we predict the overall mass of snow algae will increase, as the spread to higher ground will significantly outweigh the loss of small island patches of algae,” said Dr Andrew Gray, lead author of the paper, and a researcher at the University of Cambridge and NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility, Edinburgh.
However, researchers say larger blooms of algae can be found north of the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands, where it can spread to higher ground as the snow melts.
The team also discovered marine birds and mammals influenced the distribution of algae. Over 60% of algae blooms were found within three miles of a penguin colony. Scientists hypothesize this may be due to their droppings, which act as a “highly nutritious fertilizer.”
During their two summers in Antarctica, researchers found other algae that turned the snow red and orange. Although they were unable to measure the different colors, they plan to return and further their work to include other algae blooms.
“This is a significant advance in our understanding of land-based life on Antarctica, and how it might change in the coming years as the climate warms,” said Dr. Matt Davey in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, who led the study.
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
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c0571e0cc01d1e949d35dcb17e823e81 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/06/15/black-lives-matter-protestor-patrick-hutchison-carries-injured-white-counter-demonstrator-safety/3190049001/ | 'We saved a life today': Black Lives Matter protester rescues injured counter-demonstrator | 'We saved a life today': Black Lives Matter protester rescues injured counter-demonstrator
LONDON – "We saved a life today," Patrick Hutchinson posted on a social media account after a photo of him emerged carrying a man to safety following a weekend clash here between anti-racism protesters and a suspected right-wing counter-demonstrator.
In the photograph, captured Saturday by Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez, Hutchinson, who is Black, is seen rescuing an injured white man by draping him over his shoulder. Reuters called the image a "moment of high drama that jars with the broader narrative – of anti-racist and far-right protesters fighting each other."
According to multiple accounts he gave to British TV, including the BBC, Hutchinson was participating in peaceful anti-racism protests in London when he "saw a skirmish and someone falling to the ground." While the man who fell to the ground has not been identified, he appears to have been part of a rival group of right-wing soccer hooligans who had congregated in Britain's capital, where they claimed to be protecting historic statues in and around Parliament Square. A total of 113 of them were arrested Saturday during a day of unrest that Prime Minister Boris Johnson described as "racist thuggery."
In Britain, Hutchinson has been widely praised for his bravery and modesty. He is a personal trainer and bodyguard from Wimbledon, a London suburb. He is also a grandfather. Saturday's Black Lives Matter protest was the first one he had attended.
An AFP photographer also caught the moment from a different angle.
After seeing the man fall the ground amid increasingly violent clashes, Hutchinson said he could see "the situation wasn't going to end well" for the unidentified man so he "scooped him up into a fireman's carry and marched him out" of the melee with the help of some of his friends. Hutchinson said that some demonstrators continued to try to beat the injured man as he carried him to safety near London's Waterloo Station.
"I wasn't thinking, I was just thinking of a human being on the floor," Hutchinson told the BBC. "I had no other thoughts in my mind apart from getting to safety."
After the incident, Hutchinson wrote on Instagram: "It’s not black v white it everyone v the racists! We had each other’s back and protected those who needed us."
Johnson described Hutchinson as "the best of us."
Like elsewhere around the world, thousands of people in Britain have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis but also to vent anger at racism and police brutality in their own countries. Floyd died last month as a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Four police officers were fired in connection with the incident and are now facing charges over Floyd's death.
Hutchinson told Britain's Channel 4 News that he believed Floyd "would be alive today" if the other police officers had intervened as he and his friends did over the weekend.
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8ba704cb9164f2a52818be4ba152ff8d | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/21/greta-thunberg-wins-gulbenkian-prize-humanity-donate-money/5478938002/?fbclid=IwAR2ZzY7K6d7-R4hLK_XGTxbfrAbP9R_veuUk_SbpVS3EuaL1d2oO2QvyPn0 | Greta Thunberg won a $1.15M humanitarian prize. She's donating it all to environmental groups. | Greta Thunberg won a $1.15M humanitarian prize. She's donating it all to environmental groups.
Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg is pledging to donate $1.15 million she's won in prize money to groups working to fight climate change.
Thunberg was selected to win the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity from 136 nominees from 46 different countries, the foundation said in a statement. She was chosen because of the way she “has been able to mobilise younger generations for the cause of climate change and her tenacious struggle to alter a status quo that persists," said Jorge Sampaio, chair of the prize jury, in a statement.
In a Twitter video posted Monday, Thunberg responded by saying the earnings would be donated: “That is more money than I can begin to imagine, but all the prize money will be donated, through my foundation, to different organisations and projects who are working to help people on the front line, affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis.”
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Thunberg said she'll donate $114,000 to the environmental organization SOS Amazônia to address the coronavirus pandemic in indigenous territories of the Amazon and another $114,000 to the Stop Ecocide Foundation, which works to make ecocide, or environmental destruction, an international crime.
Thunberg said that the rest of the prize money will go to causes that "help people on the front lines affected by the climate crisis and ecological crisis especially in the global South."
The 17-year-old has also been named Time Magazine's 2019 Person of the Year, won Amnesty International’s top human rights prize and used money from the 2019 Swedish Right Livelihood Award, often presented as an alternative Nobel, to open the Greta Thunberg Foundation. The purpose of the nonprofit “is to promote ecological and social sustainability as well as mental health,” according to the Right Livelihood Foundation
Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg
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1c11c0dd45acf3a411e8673091e8bdb5 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/27/st-bernard-dog-named-daisy-rescued-englands-scafell-pike/5516752002/ | St. Bernard dog named Daisy rescued from England's highest peak | St. Bernard dog named Daisy rescued from England's highest peak
An "adorable" St. Bernard dog with rear leg pain was rescued from England's highest peak on Friday, emergency officials said.
Daisy, a roughly 120-pound St. Bernard out for a hike with her owners, collapsed while descending from the summit of Scafell Pike and refused to move.
A group of 16 rescuers at Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team got the call that the dog needed help and quickly consulted with local veterinarians on how best to retrieve her.
"Having team members with their own pampered pooches at home and also our very own much adored search dog Jess, we recognise the distress that both an animal can feel and also that of their owners," the rescue organization said in a statement.
"Our members didn’t need to think twice about mobilising and deploying to help retrieve Daisy off England’s highest," it added.
Daisy's owners kept her hydrated and fed as the team made it to their location. Once they made contact, rescuers greeted Daisy and gave her treats so they could give her pain medicine, too.
Then the team had to figure out how they'd get the dog down from the more than 3,000 foot mountain.
"It had become quickly apparent that Daisy’s cooperation was going to be essential if we were to make progress as Daisy made sure we knew that if she didn’t want to do something, she wasn’t going to do it," rescuers said.
Once Daisy got comfortable on the stretcher, getting her down was "not that much different to a normal adult evacuation which is of course is the bread and butter of our team, which we have done hundreds of times before," the team said.
Video of the nearly 5-hour rescue showed the team of rescuers donning red jackets, white helmets and face masks to slow the spread of the new coronavirus as Daisy sat on the stretcher. At one point, the team toting Daisy crossed over a rocky stream.
First bred in the Alps by monks, St. Bernard dogs were bred as "powerful working dogs able to locate and rescue luckless travelers buried by drifts and avalanches," the American Kennel Club says. The monks operated lodging for pilgrims traveling to Rome as they crossed a treacherous mountain pass, named Great St. Bernard Pass.
As for Daisy, the pup has been resting and is in good spirits, the team said, but "she apparently feels a bit guilty and slightly embarrassed about letting down the image of her cousins bouncing across the Alpine snows with barrels of brandy around their necks."
The AKC said, however, the dogs didn't actually carry brandy around their necks despite the common myth. Instead, the dogs' incredible sense of smell and path finding led to them saving more than 2,000 people in their three centuries of rescue work, the AKC says.
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d9a5f8f8e8367831002e81b583161f99 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/10/belarus-election-protestor-dies-second-night-clash-authorities/3340316001/ | Protester dies in second night of clashes after disputed Belarus vote | Protester dies in second night of clashes after disputed Belarus vote
MINSK, Belarus (AP) — A protester died amid clashes between police and thousands of people gathered for a second straight night Monday in Belarus after official results from weekend elections — dismissed by the opposition as a sham — gave an overwhelming victory to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Interior Ministry spokesman Alexander Lastovsky said the victim was part of a crowd of people protesting results of Sunday’s presidential vote. The protester intended to throw an explosive device, but it blew up in his hand and killed him, Lastovsky said.
The death came amid demonstrations in at least four areas of Minsk that met with a harsh response from police who tried to disperse protesters with flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. Near the Pushkinskaya subway station, some 3,000 protesters tried to build barricades.
Lukashenko's hardline rule began in 1994 and his victory would extend it until 2025. He derided the opposition as “sheep” manipulated by foreign masters.
Dozens were injured and thousands detained hours after Sunday's vote, when police brutally broke up mostly young protesters with tear gas, water cannons and beat them with truncheons. Rights activists said one person died after being run over by a police truck — which authorities denied.
Election officials said Lukashenko won a sixth term in office with 80% of the vote, while opposition challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya got 10%. Tsikhanouskaya submitted a formal request for a recount to the Central Election Commission.
After submitting the request, both Tsikhanouskaya and her spokeswoman remained unreachable. Upon leaving the commission’s headquarters she said, “I have made a decision, I must be with my children.”
It was unclear if her statement meant that she was heading abroad to reunite with her children, whom she had earlier sent to an unspecified European country after receiving threats.
On Monday evening, scattered groups of opposition supporters began gathering in downtown Minsk, chanting “Freedom!” and “Long live Belarus!” A heavy police contingent blocked central squares and avenues, moving quickly to disperse protesters and detained dozens.
Later, about 1,000 protesters gathered near a big shopping mall in downtown Minsk before being dispersed by police. The Viasna rights group said protesters also gathered in several other Belarusian cities, including Brest, Mogilev and Vitebsk, where detentions also took place.
The police crackdown drew harsh criticism from European capitals and will likely complicate Lukashenko’s efforts to mend ties with the West amid tensions with his main ally and sponsor, Russia.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that the election was not “free and fair” and added: “We strongly condemn ongoing violence against protesters and the detention of opposition supporters.”
Lukashenko, whose iron-fisted rule since 1994 has fueled growing discontent in the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million, warned that he wouldn’t hesitate to use force again. He argued that the protesters met a due response overnight after injuring dozens of police officers and attempting to take control of official buildings in several Belarusian cities.
“We will not allow them to tear the country apart," he said.
The 65-year-old former state farm director asserted that the opposition was being directed from Poland and the Czech Republic, adding that some groups in Ukraine and Russia could also have been behind the protests.
“They are directing the (opposition) headquarters where those sheep don't understand what they want from them,” he said in a dismissive reference to Tsikhanouskaya and her campaign.
Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek dismissed Lukashenko's claim, saying his country has not organized any protests.
The Interior Ministry said 89 people were injured during the protests late Sunday and early Monday, including 39 law enforcement officers, and about 3,000 people were detained, some 1,000 of them in Minsk.
Tsikhanouskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher without any prior political experience, entered the race after her husband, an opposition blogger who had hoped to run for president, was arrested in May. She has managed to unite fractured opposition groups and draw tens of thousands to her campaign rallies — the largest opposition demonstrations since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
“We don’t agree with (election results), we have absolutely opposite information,” Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press on Monday. “We have official protocols from many poll stations, where the number of votes in my favor are many more times than for another candidate."
The coronavirus-induced economic damage and Lukashenko's swaggering response to the pandemic, which he airily dismissed as “psychosis,” has fueled broad anger, helping swell the opposition ranks. The post-election protest, in which young demonstrators — many of them teenagers — confronted police, marked a previously unseen level of violence.
Internet and mobile networks went down after the polls closed as authorities tried to make it more difficult for protesters to coordinate.
“The more they beat us, the less we believe in the official results,” said Denis Golubev, a 28-year-old IT specialist who joined the protests.
The European Union condemned the police crackdown and called for an immediate release of all those detained.
In a joint statement, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and the EU commissioner responsible for relations with Europe’s close neighbors, Oliver Varhelyi, lamented that “the election night was marred with disproportionate and unacceptable state violence against peaceful protesters.”
Belarus' EU and NATO neighbors, Poland and Lithuania, also issued strong rebukes. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called on European Union’s leaders to convene an extraordinary summit to support the Belarusian people's democratic aspirations.
The U.K. Foreign Office also urged Belarusian authorities to “refrain from further acts of violence following the seriously flawed presidential elections.”
In the early 2000s, the United States and the European Union slapped sanctions against Lukashenko's government, but they lifted most of the penalties in recent years after Lukashenko freed political prisoners and allowed some opposition protests.
The Trump Adminsitration has recently sought to improve long-strained ties with Lukashenko, who some officials believe could be a valuable partner in countering Russian influence in eastern and central Europe. In early February, Pompeo became the first U.S. chief diplomat in more than 25 years to travel to Belarus, and offered to sell U.S. oil and gas to the country to reduce its dependence on Russian energy.
The administration has also nominated an ambassador to Belarus who, if confirmed, would be the first to the country since 2008.
Throughout his tenure, Lukashenko has tried to exert pressure on the Kremlin with the prospect of normalizing ties with the West in a bid to win more Russian subsidies. But the violent crackdown now appears likely to derail Lukashenko's hopes for those ties as Russia exerts pressure on its small neighbor.
Moscow this year cut supplies of cheap oil to Belarusian refineries, depriving the country of an estimated $700 million in revenues from oil product exports. Russia-Belarus ties were further strained last week, when Belarusian law enforcement agencies arrested 33 Russian private military contractors and accused them of planning to stage “mass riots."
Moscow has rejected the charges. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Lukashenko Friday to mend the rift, and quickly congratulated him Monday on winning the vote. The Belarusian leader also received congratulations from Chinese President Xi Jinping and heads of several ex-Soviet nations.
Associated Press journalists Jim Heintz, Vladimir Isachenkov and Daria Litvinova in Moscow, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Matthew Lee in Washington, Danica Kirka in London, Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Karel Janicek in Prague contributed to this story.
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5a08cf9decd7cb446122e34f01c3ef5e | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/17/lego-piece-stuck-new-zealand-boys-nose-two-years/5598449002/ | Boy finds missing Lego piece in his nose — two years after it got stuck | Boy finds missing Lego piece in his nose — two years after it got stuck
A New Zealand boy found a missing Lego piece in his nose — two years after it was stuck there, local media reported.
How? After a big sniff of cupcakes.
According to the New Zealand Herlad, Mudassir Anwar's 7-year-old son, Sameer, lost a piece of Lego in 2018, telling his parents that he had put it up his nose.
But when the family went to their doctor, nothing was found. The doctor advised them that the piece may not have entered Sameer's nose – or had already moved into his digestive tract and would pass naturally.
Sameer didn't show signs of further uncomfort, so the parents forgot about the missing piece. "Since then he’s never complained or anything," Anwar told the Guardian, adding that his son was "quite playful and a mischievous character."
But last weekend, as Sameer took a big sniff of a cupcake he had been served, he felt pain in his nose and told his parents he thought he inhaled cake crumbs.
"So his mother then helped him blow his nose, and then this thing came out that was missing for the last two years," Anwar told the NZ Herald.
"It was shock, y'know? And it had a bit of fungus on it."
The family was stunned to see the missing piece again – which, by the look of it, Anwar believes to be a tiny Lego character's arm.
"His eyes were wide open and he was like, "Mum, I found the Lego!" Amar told the NZ Herald.
"You were telling me it wasn't there, but it was there!"
According to Seven Sharp, Sameer is in good health.
"It's good that ... it didn't make any complications in his nose," Amar said.
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32946b309d2efac139e097a4640bdb19 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/18/new-zealand-jacinda-ardern-hits-back-donald-trump-over-covid-19-remarks/3392023001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories | Trump slams New Zealand's 'big surge' of 13 COVID-19 cases. More than 400 US counties reported more than that in a day | Trump slams New Zealand's 'big surge' of 13 COVID-19 cases. More than 400 US counties reported more than that in a day
At a campaign rally on Monday President Donald Trump said that despite New Zealand claiming to have succeeded in wiping out COVID-19, the South Pacific country was in fact in the grip of a "terrible" upsurge in COVID-19 cases.
"You see what's going on in New Zealand?" Trump said in Mankato, Minnesota. "They beat it, they beat it, it was like front page they beat it ... because they wanted to show me something. The problem is ... big surge in New Zealand, you know, it's terrible. We don't want that."
Authorities in New Zealand confirmed 13 new infections on Tuesday.
At least 407 American counties reported at least 14 new cases Monday, a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows. Five counties reported more than 14 deaths on Monday alone, and three of those — Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward, and Missouri's St. Louis counties — reported more deaths Monday alone than New Zealand has reported in its entire encounter with coronavirus.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern fired back at Trump, calling his remarks "patently wrong."
"I think anyone who's following COVID and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand's nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States' tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world," she said.
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Authorities in New Zealand, which has a population of 5 million, confirmed 13 new infections on Tuesday, taking its total number of cases since the pandemic began to about 1,300, with 22 deaths. This compares to more than 5.4 million cases and 170,000 deaths in the USA, according to John Hopkins University's COVID-19 dashboard.
New Zealand has a case fatality rate of 1.7%, according to Our World In Data, a statistical website affiliated with researchers at the University of Oxford. The case fatality rate is the number of confirmed deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. By comparison, the USA has a case fatality rate of 3.1%, according to Our World In Data.
Until last week, New Zealand had passed 100 days without any new coronavirus cases.
The discovery of a cluster of new cases linked to several members of the same family prompted the government to extend a lockdown in Auckland, a city with 1.7 million residents, until Aug. 26. Social distancing rules are in place in other towns and cities.
Ardern has also postponed New Zealand's general election, scheduled for Sept, 9, for about a month to give authorities time to fight the new outbreak and so that campaigning by political parties is not impacted. That move followed calls from leaders of other parties, including the deputy leader of Ardern's ruling coalition, to delay the vote.
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d20486471dc08d0c7daae22fc519db48 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/23/coca-cola-bottled-poison-mexico-finds-covid-19-villain-soda/5607741002/ | Soda or 'bottled poison'? Mexico finds a COVID-19 villain in sugary drinks | Soda or 'bottled poison'? Mexico finds a COVID-19 villain in sugary drinks
MEXICO CITY – While touring southern Chiapas state last month, Mexico’s coronavirus czar took aim at a vice he considers culpable for the country’s pandemic problems: rampant soda consumption
Health Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell tried to connect soda consumption with COVID-19 deaths, blaming sugar for causing comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension – maladies common in Mexico, where almost three-quarters of the population is overweight, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“Why do we need bottled poison in soft drinks?” López-Gatell asked. “Health in Mexico would be very different if we stopped being deceived by these lifestyles sold on television and heard on radio and which we see on adverts – as if this was happiness.”
As COVID-19 cases mount and the death toll soars – Mexico trails only Brazil and the USA in pandemic fatalities – López-Gatell and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have pinned Mexico’s pandemic problems on its poor nutrition habits – soda consumption chief among them.
Mexicans drink more soda per capita than any other country – about 163 liters per year. Bottlers such as Coca-Cola deliver products to the remote corners of the country – where potable water is scant and soda is often sold for less than water.
López-Gatell and López Obrador equivocate on the effectiveness of wearing face masks, but they’ve expressed fewer doubts on the negative impact of junk food and soda and its connection to COVID-19 fatalities.
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“The evidence is very clear, but there are many interests, which have led to information being covered up in other administrations,” said López-Gatell, who claimed sugary drink consumption claimed 40,000 deaths annually in Mexico. “With products that do damage, we have to discourage their consumption so that fewer people are unhealthy.”
López-Gatell has been criticized for his handling of the pandemic. He has not tested widely for the coronavirus or conducted contact tracing as the death toll passed 60,000.
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López Obrador has peddled self-help lists as the pandemic worsens – with tips such as eating a “traditional diet” of corn, rice and beans, avoiding consumerism and finding spirituality. He’s spoken favorably of families acting as a social safety net rather than announcing robust economic relief packages.
“Dr. López-Gatell has decided to adopt a new strategy: find scapegoats,” said Malaquías López-Cervantes, public health professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It’s a pretext because the fact that sugary drinks contribute to gaining weight and obesity in Mexico is nothing new.”
Mexico’s beverage industry shot back at López-Gatell, saying Mexicans consume less than 6% of their daily calories from sugary drinks.
Public health proponents said the castigation of big soda is long overdue. And some states are starting to act.
Southern Oaxaca state approved a ban this month on the sale of sodas and sugary snack foods to children. Tabasco state approved a similar measure this month, and federal lawmakers raised the possibility of a national ban on junk food sales to kids, citing COVID-19 complications.
Oversized labels are set to appear on products containing high amounts of sugar, salt, calories or saturated fats, starting in October.
“There was already a pandemic, and we were calling attention to it and saying people are dying,” said Alejandro Calvillo, director of El Poder del Consumidor, a consumer organization and longtime critic of Mexico’s beverage industry.
The soda habit starts young in Mexico. A survey by El Poder del Consumidor from Guerrero state found 70% of children consumed soda for breakfast; another 70% of children reported drinking sodas at least three times the previous day.
“What really strikes me is seeing people at 7 a.m. already poisoning themselves by drinking Coca-Cola,” said Pedro Arriaga, a Jesuit priest in rural Chiapas.
Beverage companies are among Mexico’s biggest advertisers and political lobbies. Calvillo and other proponents of a tax on sugary drinks were among the targets of an espionage campaign, in which sophisticated spyware was surreptitiously installed on their smartphones. (The government and beverage industry denied any involvement in the espionage.)
Mexico introduced a tax on sugary drinks and high-calorie snacks in 2014 as part of a fiscal package. The 1-peso-per-liter tax (roughly 5 cents) diminished soda consumption by 6% in 2015 and 7.5% in 2016, according to Juan Rivera Dommarco, general director of Mexico’s National Public Health Institute.
The money raised by the tax hasn’t gone toward public health as promised or paid for installing fountains in dilapidated schoolhouses, which often lack running water, according to Calvillo.
The impact of the soda tax is disputed by the owners of Mexico’s ubiquitous mom-and-pop retailers, who said people prioritize sugary drinks before other purchases.
“Soda-drinking habits correspond to poverty and the economic needs of the country,” said Cuauhtémoc Rivera, director of the National Alliance of Small Merchants, Anpec, which represents thousands of stores.
“There’s no money to consume (a healthy) diet or eat better,” he said, and small merchants depend on soda for 25% of sales.
In Mexico City’s southern Xochimilco borough, stricken with COVID-19 cases, locals purchasing sodas spoke of risks – and the difficulty of kicking the habit.
“It’s like an addiction. Even though we know it does damage, we keep on consuming it,” Víctor Martínez Alvarado, a government employee, said after buying a 3-liter bottle of sugar-free Coca-Cola. “They say sugar-free doesn’t do damage, but I think it’s the same. It does the same damage.”
“I’m aware as a consumer that this causes damage,” David González Flores, a construction worker, said between sips of Coca-Cola. “But it’s something that I like.”
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1054c190998ba7fc25ab13e6d747a40a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/08/27/covid-family-fights-get-fathers-remains-after-he-died-overseas/5633546002/ | 'Help me bring my daddy home': Months after a man died of COVID-19 overseas, his family can't get his remains | 'Help me bring my daddy home': Months after a man died of COVID-19 overseas, his family can't get his remains
WASHINGTON – “Your dad is dead. To much sick.”
That blunt, misspelled message is what Charleen Shakman woke up to May 12. Her father, Charles Pyles, 77, a lifelong Kentuckian, had been in the Philippines when he grew ill with COVID-19 and succumbed to the virus.
Little did she know, those seven words would be the start of a months-long nightmare that has cost her thousands of dollars, countless tears and hours of frustrated calls and emails to the U.S. Embassy and members of Congress seeking help with a seemingly simple task: bringing her father’s remains back to the USA.
Nothing is simple in a pandemic that has sickened millions of people, slowed global travel and slashed U.S. Embassy services.
“I am desperate and heartbroken,” Shakman said in an interview Monday, crying as she talked about trying to fulfill her father’s final wishes.
The State Department has helped bring home thousands of American travelers who became stranded amid the global shutdown when the pandemic began.
The agency does not keep statistics on how many Americans have died of COVID-19 abroad. Hundreds of U.S. citizens die annually of various causes – from car accidents to drownings to homicide, an agency database shows.
Normally, when Americans die abroad, embassy officials can help with a gamut of tasks – from notifying next-of-kin to repatriating remains.
Shakman said that hasn't happened in her father's case. Shakman leads the family's effort to get Pyles' remains home, with the help of her mother, Doris Pyles, who lives in Kentucky and was not traveling with her husband.
After the initial shock of her husband's death, Doris said she and her daughter thought about their next steps. "We'll send money and we'll talk to the embassy, and everything will be OK," she thought. "Well, nothing was OK. Absolutely nothing."
They said they feel scammed by the Philippine funeral home that took $4,000 of the family’s money – a fee that included “Repatriation of Urn/Ashes to Kentucky USA,” according to the contract she shared with USA TODAY. And they feel abandoned by the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Manila, which Shakman beseeched for assistance.
“PLEASE HELP ME BRING MY DADDY HOME!!!!” Shakman wrote in one email. “He is currently sitting in a jar on the shelf of a funeral home that I have never seen nor visited."
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The U.S. Embassy in Manila referred questions to the State Department in Washington.
A State Department official did not address Shakman's specific case. Speaking on the condition of anonymity under the agency's policy, the official said that because of the pandemic, "embassies may face delays due to local conditions, availability of necessary foreign government officials, and COVID-19-related logistical challenges."
In the case of the Pyles family, the delay has lasted 106 days – and counting.
"I want his ashes. I want him back here in the United States. And I know that’s what he wants," Doris Pyles, 75, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. "He didn't want to stay in the Philippines in a box somewhere on a shelf."
When the pandemic emerged, Shakman asked her dad to come back to the USA. He had become an avid traveler after retiring from his job as a civil servant at Fort Knox. He loved the Philippines, making it his home-away-from-home with a circle of friends in the expat community.
In early May, some of his friends grew concerned that they had not seen Pyles out and about. They went to his apartment and discovered he was seriously ill. Doris Pyles said her husband refused to go to the hospital and died soon after that visit.
Grief-stricken, the family began make the necessary arrangements.
“He made it very clear to all of the people he loved that what he wanted was to be cremated in the Philippines, have his ashes shipped home to my mother and have us gather at his parents' grave" to scatter his ashes, said Shakman, a U.S. Army veteran who works for Johnson Controls in Missouri.
Until that happens, she said, "we're all kind of in limbo and unsettled."
It's not clear exactly what the holdup is. A representative of the funeral home in the Philippines suggested, via email, that it had been unable to find an airline that would carry Pyles' remains. The funeral home shared copies of text messages and emails with Shakman, in which it denies scamming the family and says it's working with "heart and sincerity" to help return her father.
"Not all airlines is accepting cargo, not just a cargo, a CREMATED HUMAN REMAIN," one message reads in part.
When Shakman asked the embassy for help, she was told, "Here’s the forms you need ... good luck," she said.
Shakman contacted her U.S. senators in Missouri, where she lives, and her mother wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Shakman said the lawmakers sent her and her mother form responses referring her back to the embassy.
After USA TODAY made inquiries with the offices of McConnell and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., staff from both offices contacted Shakman and vowed to help.
Once the lawmakers intervened, Shakman said, a representative from the U.S. Embassy in Manila called her, and her situation received high-level attention at the State Department.
Doris Pyles said she is ready to pick her husband's ashes up at a moment's notice.
"All they have to do is call and say there's a package for Doris Pyles," she said. "I just want him to be home."
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1330c9ebd07c1f8a61488ca8af866bf6 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/10/02/trumps-coronavirus-infection-draws-sympathy-putin-merkel/5892529002/ | President Donald Trump's coronavirus infection draws international sympathy and a degree of schadenfreude | President Donald Trump's coronavirus infection draws international sympathy and a degree of schadenfreude
There was widespread international sympathy but also something that resembled schadenfreude after President Donald Trump announced Friday on Twitter that he and first lady Melania Trump tested positive for the new coronavirus.
"Wishing my friend @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and @FLOTUS a quick recovery and good health," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose relationship with Trump has grown close in recent years, tweeted.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was hospitalized for a week in April – some of it in intensive care – after he contracted COVID-19, wished Trump a "speedy recovery."
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Israel's leader Benjamin Netanyahu struck a similar tone and even used some of the same words: "Like millions of Israelis, Sara and I are thinking of President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump and wish our friend a full and speedy recovery," he said.
The news that the 74-year-old American president caught a potentially lethal virus was carried in new bulletins and on TV screens across the globe from Dubai to Beijing.
Stocks markets in London, Tokyo and Australia fell sharply, and U.S. stock futures on Wall Street also declined as investors pondered what the announcement could mean for the Nov. 3 election between Trump, a Republican, and Democrat Joe Biden.
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"To say this potentially could be a big deal is an understatement,” the Dutch financial services firm Rabobank said in a commentary. "Anyway, everything now takes a backseat to the latest incredible twist in this U.S. election campaign."
But as the world expressed sympathy, some quarters appeared to take satisfaction in Trump's infection.
The news "reminded me of how widely masks are worn in Japan," said Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, speaking at a weekly news conference. Koike did not mention Trump’s reluctance to wear masks when asked about his infection.
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In China, where the government has bristled at Trump’s attempts to blame Beijing for the outbreak, there was no immediate official reaction to the news beyond a brief announcement on CCTV, the country's state broadcaster. But Hu Xijin, the outspoken editor of the state-owned Global Times newspaper, tweeted in English that "President Trump and the first lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the COVID-19."
The topic was the most-searched topic in China on the widely used social media app Weibo a few hours after the announcement, with most comments mocking or critical.
However, on Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message of sympathy and wished "the presidential couple an early recovery from COVID-19."
In Iran, state TV announced the news of Trump's infection with an unflattering image of him surrounded by what appeared to be giant graphical depictions of coronaviruses.
The Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera news channel brought in commentators to discuss the "prevailing state of uncertainty" in the U.S., questioning whether Trump could effectively steer a reelection campaign and run the country from quarantine.
On social media, some users appeared to revel in the announcement and pointed to some of Trump's misleading claims about the disease and how to treat it.
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"Here comes a chance for him to try his idea of injecting disinfectant and fighting back (against allegations that) it was fake news!" tweeted Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur, referring to an idea Trump suggested earlier this year for treating COVID-19. Trump has since claimed he was being sarcastic.
Masaru Kaneko, an economics professor at Japan's Keio University, tweeted that leaders like Britain's Johnson and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro "got infected because they tended not to take the coronavirus seriously." Since getting infected themselves, he said, Johnson and Bolsonaro started taking the virus more seriously. "Will the United States follow their examples?" Kaneko wondered.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom Trump has not always seen eye to eye on a range of issues from immigration to NATO spending, had a more forthright reaction.
"I send all my best wishes to Donald and Melania Trump. I hope that you will survive your #corona # Corona infection well and will soon be completely healthy again. @POTUS @FLOTUS," Merkel tweeted via her official spokesman, Steffen Seibert.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin also weighed in.
"I am certain that your inherent vitality, good spirits and optimism will help you cope with this dangerous virus," Russia's leader said in a telegram sent to Trump, according to Russia's official Interfax news agency.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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9bedd7a565324ac4e309ed6215832f5d | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/10/22/pope-francis-video-same-sex-civil-union-endorsement-raises-doubts/3727785001/ | Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions in an interview. Where did the footage come from? | Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions in an interview. Where did the footage come from?
VATICAN CITY — Questions swirled Thursday about the origins of Pope Francis’ bombshell comments endorsing same-sex civil unions, with all evidence suggesting he made them in a 2019 interview that was never broadcast in its entirety.
The Vatican refused to comment on whether it cut the remarks from its own broadcast or if the Mexican broadcaster that conducted the interview did. And it didn’t respond to questions about why it allowed the comments to be aired now in the documentary “Francesco,” which premiered Wednesday.
In the movie, which was shown at the Rome Film Festival, Francis said gay people have the right to be in a family since they are “children of God.”
“You can’t kick someone out of a family, nor make their life miserable for this,” the pope said. “What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
Those comments caused a firestorm, thrilling progressives and alarming conservatives, given official Vatican teaching prohibits any such endorsement of homosexual unions.
While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages. However, he had never come out publicly in favor of legal protections for civil unions as pope, and no pontiff before him had, either.
One of Francis’ top communications advisers, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, insisted the pope’s comments were old news, saying they were made during a May 2019 interview with Mexican broadcaster Televisa.
“There’s nothing new because it’s a part of that interview,” Spadaro told The Associated Press as he exited the premiere. “It seems strange that you don’t remember.”
But Televisa didn’t air those comments when it broadcast the interview — nor did the Vatican when it put out its recordings of it. The broadcaster has not commented on the intrigue.
The Vatican frequently edits the pope in official transcripts and videos, especially when he speaks on sensitive issues. Yet some version of the footage was apparently available in the Vatican archives, which were opened to filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky.
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Televisa has not confirmed that the comments were made during its interview, but the scene of the documentary is identical to the Televisa interview, including the yellow background, a chair in the corner and slightly off-center placement of the chain of Francis’ pectoral cross.
The official 2019 Vatican News transcript of that interview, as well as the official Vatican edit, contains no such comment on the need for legal protections for civil unions. The official edit does include his comments on the need for gay people to feel they are part of a family, as he has said previously.
Further muddying the waters is the fact that Afineevsky, when pressed by reporters late Wednesday, said the pope made the comments to him directly, through a translator, but declined to say when.
When The Associated Press interviewed Afineevsky on Oct. 14, the director was asked if he realized at the time that Francis’ comments were going to grab headlines.
Afineevsky dodged the question about the origin of the quote and seemed to not appreciate its significance. But he said that he hoped journalists would take more away from the film.
“If journalists will be focusing on this movie only on that, then it will be a pity,” he said. “But I think that’s one of the issues that our world needs to understand, that we’re all equal.”
The head of the Vatican communications branch, Paolo Ruffini, refused to speak to reporters who attended an award ceremony Thursday in the Vatican gardens for Afineevsky, and the director himself kept his distance.
The Catholic Church teaches that gay people must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” A 2003 document from the Vatican’s doctrine office stated the church’s respect for gay people “cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
Doing so, the Vatican reasoned, would not only condone “deviant behavior,” but create an equivalence to marriage, which the church holds is an indissoluble union between man and woman.
That document was signed by the then-prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and Francis’ predecessor.
Afineevsky, who is gay, had expressed surprise after the premiere that the pope’s comments had created such a stir, saying Francis wasn’t trying to change doctrine but was merely expressing his belief gay people should enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals.
On Thursday, he declined to take any further questions and sought to put attention on the main issues dealt with in the film: climate change, refugees and poverty.
“I am so proud that finally ‘Francesco’ is on its way to the road to change hearts and minds,” he said at the prize ceremony in the Vatican gardens. “Finally, I am happy that I can bring voices from the Rohingya refugees, refugees from Syria, the voices of victims of sexual abuse, voices from different points from different corners of the world.”
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f16703b9b93b395ac69ed16fadbd3dc1 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/11/11/theodore-mccarrick-abuse-survivors-react-reported-church-missteps/6254248002/ | 'So many opportunities to stop him’: Survivors react to McCarrick abuse report | 'So many opportunities to stop him’: Survivors react to McCarrick abuse report
RICHMOND, Va. – Men who have come forward with allegations of abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick expressed disgust, frustration and outrage after an internal Vatican report outlined what was known about the clergyman’s behavior — and what was ignored.
“It was very emotional to read. It was very emotional because there were so many opportunities to stop him. So many opportunities to stop him. And maybe my life would be different, maybe I wouldn’t be a victim if someone had,” said John Bellocchio, a New Jersey man who has sued both McCarrick and the Holy See, alleging the prelate abused him in the 1990s when he was a teenager.
In interviews with The Associated Press, Bellocchio and others demanded that the Vatican institute changes to ensure nothing like what was described in Tuesday’s extraordinary report can happen again.
Spanning 449 pages, the internal investigation found that bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct by the now-90-year-old McCarrick, who as one of the highest-ranking, most visible Roman Catholic officials in the U.S. traveled the world and hobnobbed with presidents.
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'You’re almost like a small nut and bolt in this giant machine of predatory behavior'
McCarrick was defrocked by Pope Francis in 2019 after a separate Vatican investigation determined he sexually abused minors as well as adults. An attorney for McCarrick, who now lives as a layman in a residence for priests, declined to comment on the report.
The report detailed the alarm bells that were ignored, excused or dismissed in 1992-93 when six anonymous letters were sent to U.S. church officials and the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., alleging McCarrick was a “pedophile” who would sleep in the same bed with young men and boys.
The report contained heartbreaking testimony about McCarrick’s inappropriate behavior, including from a woman identified only as “Mother 1” who told Vatican investigators she also sent anonymous letters in the 1980s when McCarrick was bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, after she saw McCarrick “massaging (her two sons’) inner thighs” at her home.
“It’s crushing,” said Geoffrey Downs, who in a lawsuit filed in New Jersey accused McCarrick of abusing him when he was a teenager and serving as an altar boy. “It’s just crushing to those of us who went through it because you realize how small and incidental you are to these creatures, predators. You’re almost like a small nut and bolt in this giant machine of predatory behavior.”
Both Bellocchio and Downs suggested the church create lay review boards as a way to give parishoners an actionable role in holding priests accountable.
Bellocchio, who formerly worked as an administrator in Catholic school systems and went on to found a company that trains service dogs, said Francis should consider removing former Pope John Paul II, who took most of the blame in the report, from the calendar of saints. As pontiff, John Paul appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington, D.C., in 2000, despite having commissioned an inquiry that confirmed he slept with seminarians, according to the report.
SNAP, a network representing survivors of sex abuse by clergy, said many more preventive steps need to be taken and that the crisis is an ongoing one, with transparency and accountability still lacking.
“This report contains no punishments, no concrete steps to prevent future crimes, and consequently gives us no faith that this investigation was conducted in earnest,” the group said in a statement.
SNAP puts pressure on Biden
SNAP and another organization that represents survivors, Ending Clergy Abuse, called on President-elect Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, to assist their efforts.
In an open letter to Biden, released Tuesday, the groups requested a say in the selection of the next U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, as well as a commitment from Biden to convene a task force designed to investigate institutional sexual abuse and eliminate inconsistencies in states’ handling of the issue.
They also asked Biden to urge the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to release the names of all known sex offender clerics and their files at its national meeting next week.
The Conference’s president, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, described the McCarrick scandal as “another tragic chapter in the Church’s long struggle to confront the crimes of sexual abuse by clergy.”
“To McCarrick’s victims and their families, and to every victim-survivor of sexual abuse by the clergy, I express my profound sorrow and deepest apologies,” Gomez said. “This report underscores the need for us to repent and grow in our commitment to serve the people of God.”
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'The church takes hundreds of years to change'
Michael Reading, an inactive priest who has said McCarrick harassed him and touched him inappropriately without his consent when he was a seminarian, said the report angered and saddened him but also helped him realize he was not alone in his suffering.
Reading said he was glad the Vatican had done the investigation. He hoped it was a sign that the church was headed to a new era of accountability, but he said he still felt a degree of skepticism.
“The church takes hundreds of years to change,” he said.
James Grein, a Virginia man who came forward publicly in 2018 to disclose that McCarrick had abused him for about two decades, starting when he was a child, said the report’s release marked a “powerful day” for both him and other survivors of clergy sexual abuse. But he and his attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, said there was more to be done.
Garabedian – known for his work representing survivors of Catholic clergy sex abuse, including those who took part in a 2002 settlement with the Boston Archdiocese – called for an investigation by law enforcement about why what he called a cover-up went on for decades. Grein, who has filed lawsuits in both New York and New Jersey over the abuse allegations, said he wants an apology from the church. He said the abuse had taken an immense toll on his life, describing suicidal thoughts, feelings of post-traumatic stress, and a decades-long struggle with drugs and alcohol.
“How they could ever repair my damage, I don’t know,” Grein said.
Contributing: Associated Press writers David Crary in New York and Nicole Winfield in Rome.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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3ea1ced29780f12fbc0437ca8f83f3a4 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/11/23/astrazeneca-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-oxford-university/6388023002/ | AstraZeneca says its COVID-19 vaccine is 'highly effective' in preventing disease | AstraZeneca says its COVID-19 vaccine is 'highly effective' in preventing disease
LONDON – AstraZeneca said Monday that late-stage trials showed its COVID-19 vaccine with Oxford University was up to 90% effective in preventing disease.
The results are based on interim analysis of trials in the U.K. and Brazil of a vaccine developed by Oxford University and manufactured by AstraZeneca. No hospitalizations or severe cases of COVID-19 were reported in those receiving the vaccine, AstraZeneca said.
The trial looked at two different dosing regimens. A half-dose of the vaccine followed by a full dose at least one month apart was 90% effective. A second regimen using two full doses one month apart was 62% effective. The combined results showed an average efficacy rate of 70%.
“These findings show that we have an effective vaccine that will save many lives,” Andrew Pollard, chief investigator for the trial, said in a statement. “Excitingly, we’ve found that one of our dosing regimens may be around 90% effective.”
AstraZeneca is the third major drug company to report late-stage results for its potential COVID-19 vaccine as public health officials anxiously wait for vaccines that will end the pandemic that has killed almost 1.4 million people. Last week, Pfizer and Moderna reported preliminary results from late-stage trials showing their vaccines were almost 95% effective.
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Unlike many of its rivals, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine does not have to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures, which would make it far easier to distribute in developing countries.
AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said the simple supply chain for AstraZeneca’s vaccine and the company’s commitment to provide it on a nonprofit basis during the pandemic mean it would be affordable and available to people around the world.
“This vaccine’s efficacy and safety confirm that it will be highly effective against COVID-19 and will have an immediate impact on this public health emergency,” Soriot said.
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COVID-19 infection rates are rising in most U.S. states and in many countries, once again prompting governments to shut down businesses and restrict social gatherings. England is in the middle of a four-week lockdown that closed all nonessential shops, and the U.S. government’s top health agency recommended that Americans not travel to visit family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday this week.
Now that AstraZeneca has released its interim results, regulators must approve the vaccine before it can be widely distributed.
Britain has ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine, and the government said several million doses could be produced before the end of the year if it gains approval from the regulator.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he felt “a great sense of relief” at the news of the AstraZeneca vaccine’s effectiveness.
He said months ago, as the virus raged, “the idea that by November, we would have three vaccines, all of which have got high effectiveness … I would have given my eye teeth for.”
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83d60e1c86a7f8e16a4e5b960f88263c | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/11/23/china-moon-mission-change-5-lunar-rock-earth/6388140002/ | China's most ambitious moon mission yet attempts to bring back lunar rock | China's most ambitious moon mission yet attempts to bring back lunar rock
WENCHANG, China — Chinese technicians were making final preparations Monday for a mission to bring back material from the moon's surface in what would be a major advance for the country’s space program.
Chang’e 5 is China's most ambitious lunar mission yet and marks the first time in four decades that any country has sought to bring rocks and debris from the moon to Earth. That could boost human understanding of the moon, its age and resources, and of the solar system more generally.
The four modules of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft are expected be sent into space Tuesday aboard a massive Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang launch center along the coast of the southern island province of Hainan, according to a NASA description of the mission.
The secretive Chinese National Space Administration has only said that a launch is scheduled for late November.
The mission's key task is to drill almost 7 feet beneath the moon's surface and scoop up about 4.4 pounds of rocks and other debris to be brought back to Earth, according to NASA. That would the first opportunity scientists have had to study newly obtained lunar material since the American and Russian missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
The mission is “indeed challenging," but China has already landed twice on the moon with its Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 missions, and showed with a 2014 Chang'e 5 test mission that it can navigate back to Earth, re-enter and land a capsule, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. All that's left is to show it can collect samples and take off again from the moon, McDowell said.
“As a result of this, I’m pretty optimistic that China can pull this off," he said.
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Such experience is growing in value with more and more countries conducting asteroid sample returns and considering Mars sample returns, McDowell said.
After making the three-day trip from Earth, the Chang’e 5 lander’s time on the moon is scheduled to be short and sweet. It can only stay one lunar daytime, or about 14 days, because it lacks the radioisotope heating units that China’s current lunar rover, the Chang’e 4, possesses to withstand the moon’s freezing nights.
Launched as a single space craft, Chang'e 5 is actually composed of a lander, ascender, service module and return capsule.
The lander will dig for materials with its drill and robotic arm and transfer them to the ascender, which will lift off from the moon and dock with the service capsule. The materials will then be moved to the return capsule for the trip home to earth.
The technical complexity of Chang'e 5, with its four components, makes it “remarkable in many ways," said Joan Johnson-Freese, a space expert at the U.S. Naval War College.
If successful, it could be a blueprint for a Mars sample return or even a crewed lunar mission, Johnson-Freese said.
“China is showing itself capable of developing and successfully carrying out sustained high-tech programs, important for regional influence and potentially global partnerships," she said.
The mission, named for the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e, is among China’s boldest since it first put a man in space in 2003, becoming only the third nation to do so after the U.S. and Russia.
While many of China's crewed spaceflight achievements, including building an experimental space station and conducting a space walk, reproduce those of other countries from years past, the CNSA is now moving into new territory.
Chang’e 4 —the first soft landing on the moon’s relatively unexplored far side — is providing full measurements of radiation exposure from the lunar surface, information vital for any country that plans to send astronauts to the moon.
China in July became one of three countries to have launched a mission to Mars, in China's case an orbiter and a rover that will search for signs of water on the red planet. The CNSA says the spacecraft Tianwen 1 is on course to arrive at Mars around February.
China has increasingly engaged with foreign countries on missions, and the European Space Agency will be providing important ground station information for Chang'e 5.
U.S. law however still prevents most collaborations with NASA, excluding China from partnering with the International Space Station. That has prompted China to start work on its own space station and launch its own programs that have put it in a steady competition with Japan and India among Asian nations seeking to notch new achievements in space.
China's space program has progressed cautiously, with relatively few setbacks in recent years. The Long March-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” because of its bulky shape, failed on a previous launch attempt, but has since performed without a glitch, including launching Chang'e 4.
“China works very incrementally, developing building blocks for long-term use for a variety of missions," Freese-Johnson said. China's one-party authoritarian system also allows for “prolonged political will that is often difficult in democracies," she said.
While the U.S. has followed China's successes closely, it's unlikely to engage China in space amid political suspicions, a sharpening military rivalry and accusations of Chinese theft of technology, experts say.
“A change in U.S. policy regarding space cooperation is unlikely to get much government attention in the near future," Johnson-Freese said.
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1b9cdb179086ce7960722e495850f90a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/11/24/even-trump-critics-say-he-may-have-gotten-some-foreign-policy-right/6353491002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories | Even Trump's fiercest critics say he may have gotten some world affairs right | Even Trump's fiercest critics say he may have gotten some world affairs right
On the world stage, many foreign policy experts say President Donald Trump has slashed and burned his way through international agreements and commitments on climate change, trade, troop deployments, public health, nuclear weapons and more.
But for the mother of an American hostage held overseas, the outgoing U.S. president has been exactly the global "advocate and ally" she's needed.
"Obviously there's only one measure of success in this situation, and we haven't had it yet because Austin is not home," said Debra Tice, speaking about her son, a 39-year-old former U.S. Marine who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012 while working as a journalist. He has not been heard from since.
GSA:Trump admin clears way for President-elect Biden's transition to officially begin
However, U.S. officials believe the Texan is alive and likely in the custody of either the Syrian government or a government-aligned militia. Trump has taken an active interest in the case and sent presidential envoys to Damascus to engage directly with President Bashar Assad's regime, most recently in August, when Trump's representatives discussed Tice's disappearance with the head of Syria’s intelligence agency.
Tice said her family's contact with U.S. officials during the Obama administration was dominated by "a constant shuffling of the cards" – being passed from official to official without clear purpose, and with little apparent strategy to secure her son's release. By contrast, she said, Trump has made "Austin's release a very high priority. He really has in his heart an intolerance for Americans being held against their will."
An American is detained or goes missing abroad:What happens next? Call Trump?
A complicated record
Trump got a "hell of a lot more" wrong than he got right, said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. diplomat and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
He threatened war with North Korea and Iran, and picked trade fights with Canada. He publicly attacked American allies and praised ruthless dictators. And as he leaves office, many fear he is ordering a precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan that will come back to haunt the next administration.
The U.S. on Sunday formally withdrew from the Treaty on Open Skies, an agreement that allowed Russia and 34 participating nations to carry out reconnaissance flights over each other's territories. It was intended to reduce the risk of an accidental war.
In Trump's waning days:Pentagon to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Iraq
But some foreign policy experts, ex-diplomats and even Trump's harshest opponents concede that for all of his "America First" nationalism and unorthodox style, Trump's various overseas initiatives have produced limited, qualified successes.
Streamlining the way American hostage cases are handled and improving communications with families is one such example, according to Bill Richardson, former New Mexico governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who has spent decades trying to bring home Americans wrongfully held overseas.
Regarding NATO, Trump undermined the military alliance viewed for decades as integral for U.S. and European security. He made a point of truculently calling out rich allies who for years have failed to meet their share of NATO spending. Many, in fact, had been increasing their contributions before Trump's presidency.
But NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has credited Trump's relentless complaints about the issue with having an impact.
Trump's Israel policy has been criticized for measures that deeply favored Israelis over Palestinians, such as moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Palestinians also claim as part of their future capital.
But Trump also presided over historic "normalization" agreements signed between some Arab states and Israel.
"We have to give credit where credit is due," said Shira Efron, a Tel Aviv-based policy advisor for the Israel Policy Forum, an American Jewish organization that works for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We can fault Trump for mismanaging the public relations around it. We can question his motivations," Efron added, mentioning that the deals are linked to arms sales. "But it is possible these agreements could be the start of something positive for the Middle East."
Reports:Israeli PM traveled to Saudi Arabia for clandestine meeting with crown prince
'Getting tougher on China'
While Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including his continuing alienation of China, has been criticized, other moves were necessary and there are areas where Trump is deserving of more credit, some analysts and experts say.
"In certain areas I think his instincts were right," said Lewis Lukens, who spent three decades in the U.S. foreign service, including stints as the U.S. ambassador to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and as the acting ambassador to the United Kingdom. Lukens was abruptly fired in 2018 by Trump's U.S. ambassador to the U.K. after speaking positively about former President Barack Obama during a speech to English college students.
"Getting tougher on China and trying to really address some of Beijing's trade practices and military expansion in the South China Sea. That needed to be done," he said, referring to complaints that China makes it extremely difficult for American companies to compete on a level playing field. China is controversially building military bases on artificial islands in disputed sea territory as part of its pursuit of offshore resources.
There is now bipartisan consensus in the U.S. that China is a growing economic and national security threat to the U.S. And president-elect Joe Biden may keep some of Trump's hardline China policies in place even if he adopts a less controversial tone.
'His first love': Why Biden may be a foreign policy president despite domestic crises
Nuclear threats: No new wars
Lukens, now a senior partner in London for Signum Global Advisors, a public policy consultancy, said Trump was also correct to point out that the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, including the U.S., did not nearly go far enough in addressing Tehran's ballistic missile program or support for regional militias.
'Treating us like garbage':Many Iranian Americans feel fed up with Trump
"What I have an issue with is the execution," he said, noting that there's been no indication whatsoever that Trump's unilateral decision to pull the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear agreement has accomplished what was intended: reigning in Iran.
On the contrary, a report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, concluded this month that Iran’s uranium stockpile is now 12 times larger than permitted under the nuclear accord that Trump abandoned. It's a dramatic increase that may partly account for why, according to a report in The New York Times, Trump recently asked his senior advisers whether he had options to take action – military strikes – against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks.
Reports:Trump explored military strike on Iran
On perhaps the most dangerous threat he faced – North Korea's nuclear arsenal –Trump veered from bellicose threats to fuzzy diplomacy. He held three high-profile summits with North Korea's dictator-leader Kim Jong Un aimed at denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, which Tufts University's Fletcher School Korean studies professor Sung-Yoon Lee characterized as yielding "less than nothing" and ultimately "dangerous" because it has bought Pyongyang time to develop its nuclear weapons program while "being nice and saying: 'Let's meet.'"
The summits produced little beyond photo-ops.
'Faded away into a dark nightmare': North Korea says Trump's diplomacy has failed
Max Abrahms, a professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University, said that for all Trump's tough and sometimes non-sensical talk on China, Iran and North Korea, he has not started anynew wars.
Afghanistan: Closer to ending 'endless war'
In Afghanistan, Trump has actually moved closer to ending America's longest military conflict by reaching a conditional peace deal with the Taliban and supporting separate peace talks between Afghanistan's government and the militant Islamic group.
Few impartial observers believe Trump's drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 4,500 to 2,500 by January will benefit Afghanistan itself. In fact, it's likely to boost the Taliban's bloody insurgency and further destabilize the region. But it's in keeping with Trump's pledge to end "endless wars." It's also consistent with polls that show most Americans want a leader who focuses on needs at home, not overseas projects.
"Leaving Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy objective of the remaining days of the Trump administration, and it should be the Biden administration’s first priority if Trump fails to remove all U.S. forces," said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington, D.C.-based security think tank.
But more, not less, foreign intervention may be in the cards if the records of Biden's advisers is anything to go on.
Anthony Blinken, Biden's nomination for Secretary of State, was a key national security adviser to Biden when the then-Senator voted to give President George W. Bush's administration authority to launch a military attack against Iraq. He advocated for U.S. involvement in Libya's now chaotic civil war. Blinken previously argued the U.S. should be open to a "broader and riskier" military intervention in Syria to oust Assad.
Biden's pick as National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is regarded as an exceptionally smart, dedicated and experienced multilateralist who shares the hawkish foreign policy instincts of his former boss at the State Department, Hillary Clinton.
Secretary of State:Biden to name Antony Blinken as America's top diplomat
Countering ISIS
Abrahms believes that Trump's contribution to destroying the five-year grip that ISIS had on large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria is also under-recognized.
Brian Glyn Williams, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, and author of "Counter Jihad: America's Military Experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria," has calculated that the Obama administration had liberated about 50% of ISIS territory in Iraq and Syria "before handing off the war effort to Trump."
Abrahms said that Trump did not, as has been repeatedly claimed by the Washington foreign policy establishment, "essentially just maintain the Obama administration's counter-terrorism strategy" in Syria and sit back and watch as ISIS "imploded."
He said Trump's withdrawal of support for Syrian rebel groups battling Assad's regime, and a separate but related action to remove some U.S. troops fighting alongside Kurdish anti-ISIS fighters in Syria, hastened the terrorist organization's demise. He said Trump's move effectively enabled Assad to refocus his armies on thwarting ISIS militants.
Hostages: 'He wants them home'
At least 40 Americans are currently being held in 11 countries, according to data released this month by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, an organization that advocates for Americans held hostage abroad and is named after a journalist who was murdered by the Islamic State group (ISIS) in Syria during the Obama administration.
The White House claims it's secured the release of 56 American "hostages" in 24 countries over the last four years. However, some of these "hostages" were imprisoned by governments (albeit wrongly, or on thinly-disguised political charges) and counting overseas imprisoned, missing or kidnapped Americans is not an exact science.
For a mixture of privacy, logistical and definitional reasons it's also not easy to make direct comparisons between the number of overseas captives freed under the Obama administration versus those released while the Trump administration has been in power.
Robert O'Brien, Trump's national security adviser, said during a Nov. 16 forum on global security that reuniting families with Americans wrongfully held overseas is a "pure distillation" of the Trump administration's "America First" foreign policy.
"I think that he is personally offended that either a government or a terrorist organization would take an American hostage and so he's made it literally one of the top priorities," O’Brien said in comments streamed online. "He doesn't care why they were there, what they were doing when they were taken hostage. He doesn't care about their background, he doesn't care about their political affiliation, their religion. If there's an American that's taken overseas, he wants them home," he said.
Trump's critics claim he is drawn to the issue because it makes for good politics, reinforces his image of himself as a deal-maker, and affords him opportunities to claim tangible victories in the international realm when they have been few and far between.
'I have been living a nightmare':Iran releases American Navy veteran Michael White
"Here’s the problem," said Richardson, the ex-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"The president turned hostage release into political grandstanding and personalized it to the point where his photos-ops, I believe, caused many countries to say 'Oh, this is how we get their attention," Richardson said. "I think that’s harmful," he said.
Trump has used the Oval Office and political rallies as a backdrop to photo-ops with Americans he's helped to free from Turkey, North Korea, Iran and elsewhere.
Some families coping with the detention of their relatives overseas say the Trump administration has not been tirelessly working on their behalf or all that engaged.
David Whelan is still desperate for answers about why Trump has not raised his brother Paul's imprisonment in Russia with President Vladimir Putin. Paul Whelan has been jailed for nearly two years on what his family says are bogus espionage charges.
"They go after the windfalls. I shouldn't say easy wins, but it can feel like that," he said.
Paul Whelan:Ex-U.S. Marine convicted on spying charges gets 16-year jail sentence
Tice may be delighted by Trump's attentiveness to her son's case but she released a scathing statement last month about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after he said he tried to "compartmentalize" hostage issues from foreign policy. "Unfortunately for Austin," she said, "Mike Pompeo is undermining the president's crucial outreach, refusing any form of direct diplomatic engagement with the Syrian government."
Diane Foley, whose son James was murdered by ISIS in 2014 and who runs the foundation that bears his name – said that "as you might expect, people who have had their loved ones come home in general are very supportive of the Trump administration. Those who have not are hopeful because he tends to emphasize it."
However, Foley said overall Trump's prioritization of American detainee issues represents, for the majority of families, an improvement – even if it was the Obama administration, not Trump's, that established a coordinated hostage response unit and a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs position that's improved family outreach.
"All I'm saying is Trump has helped," she said.
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f6db55321dbd44ad519e1fa23be0e027 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/12/07/mystery-illness-andhra-pradesh-india-200-hospitalized-one-dead/3855842001/ | Unidentified disease in India leaves hundreds hospitalized, 1 dead | Unidentified disease in India leaves hundreds hospitalized, 1 dead
NEW DELHI – At least one person has died and 200 have been hospitalized because of an unidentified illness in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, reports said Monday.
The illness was detected Saturday evening in Eluru, an ancient city famous for its hand-woven products. Since then, patients have experienced symptoms ranging from nausea and anxiety to loss of consciousness, doctors said.
A 45-year-old man who was hospitalized with symptoms similar to epilepsy and nausea died Sunday evening, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Authorities are trying to determine the cause of the illness. Water samples from affected areas haven’t shown any signs of contamination, and the chief minister's office said people not linked to the municipal water supply also have fallen ill. The patients are of different ages and have tested negative for the coronavirus and other viral diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and herpes.
An expert team sent by the federal government reached the city to investigate the illness Monday.
State chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy visited a government hospital and met patients who were ill. Opposition leader N. Chandrababu Naidu took to Twitter to demand an “impartial, full-fledged inquiry.”
Andhra Pradesh state is already among those most devastated by COVID-19, with more than 800,000 detected cases. The health system in the state, like the rest of India, has been frayed by the virus.
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bdb1e75b91ecd863c88449b250d4b7af | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/12/14/blood-donation-uk-eases-restrictions-gay-and-bisexual-men/6536817002/ | UK eases restrictions on blood donations from gay and bisexual men in 'landmark change' | UK eases restrictions on blood donations from gay and bisexual men in 'landmark change'
Health officials in the United Kingdom announced Monday that blood donation rules for gay and bisexual men will be relaxed next year in what the government called a "landmark change."
Under the new guidelines, which will take effect in summer 2021, donors who have had the same sexual partner for more than three months, have not been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection and are not using anti-HIV drugs PreP or PEP can donate "regardless of their gender, the gender of their partner, or the type of sex they have."
The Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs, which advises U.K. health departments, recommended the changes after a report from the For Assessment of Individualised Risk steering group, a collaboration of U.K. blood services and LGBT charities, was published. The report proposed ending the blanket ban on men who have had sex with men within the last past three months.
“This landmark change to blood donation is safe and it will allow many more people, who have previously been excluded by donor selection criteria, to take the opportunity to help save lives,” Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, said in a statement Monday.
Opinion:Red Cross is asking for blood donations amid coronavirus. Because I'm gay, I'm excluded.
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Officials emphasized that the change will have no effect on the safety of blood donated in the U.K., adding that blood services will monitor results of the change and develop a survey to get feedback from donors.
Ethan Spibey, founder of FreedomToDonate, has been campaigning to lift the restrictions for years and celebrated the announcement in a statement.
"This means the U.K. has one of the world’s most progressive blood donation policies and more people than ever will be able to safely donate for those who need it," Spibey said.
Michael Brady, medical director at Terrence Higgins Trust, also welcomed the change but acknowledged in the release that "there is certainly more work to do."
"We will continue to work to ensure that our blood donation service is inclusive, evidence based and both maximises the numbers who can donate while ensuring our blood supply is safe," he said.
Britain is one of many countries, including the United States, which have long restricted donations from gay and bisexual men and other groups in an attempt to prevent the spreading of HIV through the blood supply. LGBTQ activists have challenged these policies, saying that they are unnecessary given current testing technology and that they stigmatize gay and bisexual men.
Donated blood is screened for a number of infectious diseases, including HIV. The new coronavirus can’t be spread through blood.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in April decreased the required abstinence period for male donors who have sex with men from 12 months to three months. The change, which also applied to people with recent tattoos and piercings, came in response to a drop in the nation’s blood supply triggered by the coronavirus outbreak.
From April:FDA eases restrictions on blood donations from gay and bisexual men during coronavirus pandemic
Contributing: The Associated Press
Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg
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500b302b35839a387918252d26aab073 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/12/15/russias-vladimir-putin-congratulates-joe-biden-on-us-election-win-after-electoral-college-victory/3901405001/ | Russian leader Vladimir Putin congratulates Joe Biden on winning election | Russian leader Vladimir Putin congratulates Joe Biden on winning election
Just hours after the Electoral College elected Joe Biden the next president, formalizing the former Democratic vice president's win in the Nov. 3 election, Russia's leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday acknowledged Biden's victory, saying he "wished the president-elect every success" and was "ready for interaction and contact."
The Kremlin, which has decried what it has called Biden’s "sharp anti-Russian rhetoric" but praised the president-elect's comments on arms control, had said it preferred to wait until the election results were official before congratulating a winner.
Putin was one of the last world leaders who had not acknowledged Biden's victory. President Donald Trump is still refusing to concede the election. Many Republican lawmakers have followed Trump's lead and not publicly endorsed Biden's victory.
Putin's acknowledgment came before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., for the first time, also Tuesday, congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their election win.
Politics live updates: Mitch McConnell congratulates Joe Biden, Kamala Harris for election win
In a telegram sent to Biden – published by Russian state media – Russia's longtime leader "expressed confidence that Russia and the U.S., who bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can facilitate resolution of many problems and challenges faced by the world now despite disagreements."
Still, Putin's remarks come as cybersecurity experts point the finger at Russian state-backed hackersfor a massive, months-long digital spying operation that targeted the U.S. government, military and corporations. Russia denies any involvement.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, issued a highly unusual public appeal for further information about the breach. The federal agency requested that anyone with knowledge of the hack, which dates back to midyear or earlier, to contact an email address: [email protected].
The apparent conduit for the hacks is server software called SolarWinds. It is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations globally, including most Fortune 500 companies, multiple U.S. federal agencies including the Homeland Security, Commerce, State and Treasury departments, all five branches of the U.S. military, and dozens of universities.
None of the potentially targeted U.S. government agencies have responded to requests for comment about the hack or released information about the extent of the possible damage caused by the digital espionage, which is being investigated.
FireEye:What you need to know about the FireEye-SolarWinds cybersecurity hack
The Kremlin's suspected links to criminality were also in focus this week after the U.K.-based investigations outlet Bellingcat unveiled detailed telecommunications evidence that it says links the near-fatal poisoning of outspoken Putin critic Alexei Navalny with operatives from Russia's secretive Federal Security Service. A number of prominent opponents of Putin – journalists, politicians and former associates – have died or been injured in violent or suspicious circumstances, at home and abroad.
Most world leaders congratulated Biden within days of the election. Some analysts have compared Putin's relative tardiness to his response in 2016, when the Kremlin congratulated Trump within hours of the race being called. But Trump's challenger Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech less than a day after the race was called.
Mexico's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro also waited until after Biden's win was confirmed by the Electoral College before congratulating him.
Six weeks after the 2020 presidential vote, Trump hasn't yet explicitly admitted defeat.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia James F. Collins said Biden’s policy toward Russia would be a "distinct contrast" from the past four years.
Trump failed to press Putin over intelligence allegations that a Russian military unit offered Taliban-linked militants bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When the 2019 Mueller report and 2020 Senate intelligence report described Russia’s attempts to sway the 2016 presidential election, the president denied the evidence and did not take action against the Kremlin. Trump has not addressed the recent Kremlin-backed hacking allegations involving the SolarWinds server software.
In separate comments released Tuesday by the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took aim at Russia's behavior in the Mediterranean region.
"Russia continues to threaten Mediterranean stability using a variety of techniques to spread disinformation, undermine national sovereignty, and sow chaos, conflict, and division within countries throughout the region," Pompeo said in a statement.
Contributing: Claire Thornton
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aedba53aa11be794f91cd1218bb99d42 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/12/21/new-covid-strain-us-health-officials-say-no-need-uk-flight-ban/3993897001/ | US health officials: No need to ban flights from UK even as it battles new coronavirus variant | US health officials: No need to ban flights from UK even as it battles new coronavirus variant
WASHINGTON – U.S. health officials say they do not yet see a need to halt flights from the United Kingdom, even as a growing number of other countries ban British travelers amid the rapid spread of a new variant of coronavirus in London and elsewhere.
Political leaders in New York have called on the Trump administration to halt flights from the U.K. to the U.S. in an effort to limit or block the new variant from spreading here.
Canada and dozens of other counties announced new restrictions on U.K. travelers after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the coronavirus variant could be 70% more transmissible and is driving an alarmingly rapid spread of infections in London and surrounding areas.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said Monday that while preliminary analysis in the U.K. suggests the new variant is “significantly more transmissible,” there is no indication that infections are more severe. Experts have warned, however, that even if the variant is not more lethal, it will likely lead to an increase in infections, hospitalizations and virus-related deaths.
Cuomo: 'Another disaster waiting to happen'
"That variant is getting on a plane and landing in JFK, and all it takes is one person," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Sunday. He called on the Trump administration to ban flights from the U.K. or, failing that, for airlines to test passengers before they fly from the U.K. to New York.
Cuomo said Monday that British Airways had agreed to require passengers on flights from the U.K. to New York to produce a negative coronavirus test before departure. In a tweet, he said New York was working with two other air carriers, Delta and Virgin Atlantic, to do the same.
"This is another disaster waiting to happen," he said at a briefing Monday.
Fauci: 'Follow it ... don't overreact'
But President Donald Trump's assistant secretary for health, Admiral Brett Giroir, said the CDC has not made any recommendation to limit travel from the U.K. to the United States. In an interview Monday with CNN, Giroir said he spoke with CDC Director Robert Redfield on Sunday evening about the matter.
COVID-19 POLICIES:House panel subpoenas Azar and Redfield as lawmakers allege 'extensive' political meddling
"There was not a (CDC) recommendation for that," Giroir said, although he said U.S. officials would monitor the situation and could change course if warranted.
"Every hour we get more information," he said. "So I think everything is possible. We just need to put everything on the table, have an open scientific discussion and make a best recommendation."
The White House Coronavirus Task Force is meeting at 2 p.m. on Monday, and the issue could come up for discussion then. The nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said he would oppose new travel restrictions based on current information about the new coronavirus variant.
The U.S. must "without a doubt keep an eye on it," Fauci told CNN on Monday.
"Follow it carefully, but don't overreact to it," he said.
Dr. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said travel bans need to be carefully considered because they can cause fear and disruption. Such restrictions can buy time, he said, but may not always be effective. He noted, for example, that Trump’s oft-cited ban on travel from China occurred after the virus was already circulating in the U.S.
But British officials said they understand the reaction to the new coronavirus variant circulating there.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said the virus variant is “out of control” around London and southeastern England.
Canada, India, France, Germany, Italy and Poland are among the countries that have banned flights from Britain. Eurotunnel, the rail service that links Britain with mainland Europe, also has suspended service.
Germany said all flights coming from Britain, except cargo flights, were no longer allowed to land starting at midnight Sunday. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also moved to ban all flights from the U.K. starting at midnight Sunday. He said travelers who arrived Sunday would be subject to secondary screening and other health measures.
Giroir noted that viruses mutate all the time, and there's no indication this new coronavirus variant is more deadly.
"So I don't think there should be any reason for alarm right now," he said Sunday. "We continue to watch. ... But again, viruses mutate, over 4,000 mutations that we've seen so far in this virus, and it's still acting essentially like COVID-19. And the vaccines should continue to work very robustly against all of these strains."
Who controls travel?
Travel from the U.K. to the United States is already much lower than normal because Trump issued a series of presidential proclamations early in the coronavirus pandemic to ban non-U.S. citizens from certain countries from entering the United States.
The CDC and the State Department can advise Americans against traveling to certain countries based on health threats or other concerns such as crime and terrorism. The CDC currently advises against any travel to the U.K. because of the pandemic.
Trump has used his presidential authority to restrict travel into the U.S., most notably from China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged late last year. On Jan. 31, Trump issued a presidential proclamation limiting travel from China, and he repeatedly touted that as a major success in limiting infections in the U.S.
Trump also banned travelers from the European Schengen Area, a group of 26 European countries that allows open travel across their borders, beginning March 13. Three days later, visitors from the U.K. and Ireland were prohibited. There was speculation as late as last week that the U.K. ban could soon be lifted.
Contributing: Julia Thompson and Nicholas Penzenstadler, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
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e2576baffa8abd02c1396a6fc4d25354 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/12/22/spanish-christmas-lottery-el-gordo-held-under-covid-restrictions/4004873001/ | Spain holds huge Christmas lottery with more than $2.9 billion in winnings amid coronavirus restrictions | Spain holds huge Christmas lottery with more than $2.9 billion in winnings amid coronavirus restrictions
MADRID – Children from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school have begun calling out prize-winning numbers in Spain’s bumper Christmas lottery known as “EL Gordo” (the fat one), which is being held under tight conditions because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The lottery will shell out 400,000 euros ($489,000) or some 325,000 euros after tax, to holders of 20-euro tickets bearing the top-prize number.
The incredibly popular lottery dishes out a total of 2.4 billion euros in prizes this year, much of it in small prizes.
Other lotteries have bigger individual top prizes but Spain’s Christmas lottery, staged each year on Dec. 22, is ranked as the world’s richest for the total prize money involved.
Televised nationally from the city’s Teatro Real opera house, the lottery was held without an audience this year. Organizers and participants on the theater’s stage donned masks and took PCR tests beforehand. The children were allowed to remove the masks briefly as they sang out the numbers and prizes.
Families, friends and co-workers traditionally buy the 20-euro tickets, or “decimos, (tenths),” together as part of a winter holiday tradition. They then wait in hope that fortune may shine on them.
Normally, jubilant street and bar scenes follow of winners celebrating with uncorked bottles of sparkling wine, but this year authorities have urged much caution because of the virus.
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f34db6eda5e611065d49462ec61a538d | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/03/greta-thunberg-18th-birthday-climate-activism-sunday-times/4121533001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomworld-topstories | On 18th birthday, Greta Thunberg says 'we shouldn’t be relaxing' on climate change. She wants new headlights for her bike, too. | On 18th birthday, Greta Thunberg says 'we shouldn’t be relaxing' on climate change. She wants new headlights for her bike, too.
Greta Thunberg had two wishes for her 18th birthday on Sunday.
The first was a “promise from everyone that they will do everything they can” for the planet, she said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times.
She had another, more tangible gift: Replacement headlights for her bike.
“In Sweden, it gets very dark in the winter," she said.
The climate activist, who is from Sweden, also took to Twitter to celebrate her birthday with a jab at climate change conspiracy theorists.
"Thank you so much for all the well-wishes on my 18th birthday!" she said. "Tonight you will find me down at the local pub exposing all the dark secrets behind the climate- and school strike conspiracy and my evil handlers who can no longer control me! I am free at last!!"
Other interview highlights:
The activist, known for her wit, has become a symbol for young people across the world protesting climate change inaction.
Thunberg burst onto the global stage with #FridaysForFuture, an international movement that began in 2018. Thunberg, then 15, started taking weeks off school to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament.
At 16, Thunberg inspired the largest climate strike in history, testified before Congress and addressed the United Nations for the second time.
"People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing ... and all you talk about is money and eternal fairy tales of economic growth. How dare you?" she said before the UN.
Also in 2019, Time magazine named her as its 2019 Person of the Year for "sounding the alarm about humanity's predatory relationship with the only home we have, for bringing to a fragmented world a voice that transcends background and borders" and "for showing us all what it might look like when a new generation leads."
She's also gone up against world leaders on frequent occasions: Russian President Vladimir Putin called her “a kind and very sincere girl” who doesn’t understand the complexities of “the modern world," and Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro labeled her a "brat."
She has most famously clashed with President Donald Trump on multiple occasions.
After Thunberg delivered her emotional speech to world leaders at the UN, news cameras captured her staring at President Donald Trump when he arrived in the same lobby.
Trump tweeted after her speech that Thunberg "seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."
Greta Thunberg won $1.15M. She's donating it all to environmental groups.
Trump also criticized Thunberg after Time's decision to recognize her in 2019.
"So ridiculous. Greta must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill, Greta, Chill!" he tweeted.
Thunberg copied his exact phrasing in her reply to Trump's November 2020 tweetstorm calling for states to "stop the count" in the November election.
She also endorsed President-Elect Joe Biden, who has pledged to return the U.S. to the Paris climate accord.
During the interview with the Times, Thunberg addressed Biden’s pledge, cautioning that "just because of that shift we shouldn’t be relaxing and thinking everything is all right now."
“Of course it will mean a change, mainly because it is one and not the other in charge,” she said.
Contributing: Savannah Behrmann, USA TODAY
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1a76b1bf4819099a8021bba6aba32ede | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/04/uk-judge-rejects-us-extradition-request-for-wikileaks-julian-assange-over-suicide-risk/6536678002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomworld-topstories | British judge denies US extradition request for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, citing suicide risk | British judge denies US extradition request for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, citing suicide risk
A British judge ruled Monday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States on espionage charges because he is a suicide risk, in a move that touches on media freedoms and the international reach of the U.S. justice system.
The legal saga has lasted for almost a decade, full of controversies that pitted Washington against rights campaigners who said the U.S. government tried to redefine what journalists can publish.
U.S. prosecutors said they would appeal the ruling.
Assange was indicted in 2019 by the Department of Justice on 18 counts, alleging 17 forms of espionage and one instance of computer misuse connected to WikiLeaks' dissemination of secret U.S. military documents provided to him by ex-U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Assange denied the charges and claimed the documents exposed war crimes and abuses by the U.S. military in Iraq.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser told London’s Old Bailey Court that a request by the Department of Justice to have the Australian national, 49, sent to Washington to face the U.S. charges was denied because she couldn't be certain he wouldn't find a way to kill himself in a U.S. detention facility before or after any court case.
In her ruling, Baraitser outlined examples of Assange's poor mental health and history of self-harm and suicidal thoughts. "The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man fearful for his future," she said, adding that Assange's high level of intelligence meant he would probably succeed in taking his own life.
"Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the U.S. will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide, and for this reason, I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm," she said.
The ruling does not establish whether Assange is guilty of wrongdoing.
Britain's home secretary has the final say over extraditions, meaning the case will probably drag on.
Assange could face 175 years in prison if convicted in a U.S. court.
In-depth:Julian Assange infuriated Washington. Now he faces life in prison
Assange and his lawyers have long maintained his innocence on the grounds that he simply did what any other journalist would do: publish information in the public interest. Assange's legal team argued the charges were politically motivated, his mental and physical health was at risk and conditions in U.S. prisons breach Britain's human rights laws.
The verdict was delayed several times because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Department of Justice argued, in its indictments and as part of the extradition case in Britain, that Assange should not be considered a journalist because he did not write or edit any of the material WikiLeaks published. U.S. authorities claimed he stole, or convinced Manning to steal, the secret documents.
Baraitser largely agreed with U.S. prosecutors on these points, saying Assange's alleged actions to encourage Manning and others to steal U.S. military documents "went beyond mere" journalism and should not be protected by free speech rules.
"While we are extremely disappointed in the court's ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised," the Department of Justice said in a statement. "In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States."
The First Amendment, as it applies to the press, restrains the government from jailing, fining or imposing liability for what the media publishes.
It does not shield journalists from criminal liability.
Assange describes himself as a political refugee.
He was charged in the USA under the 1917 Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
"If you are able to prosecute someone who has a strong case to be called a publisher, then who's next?" John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst, told USA TODAY.
Kiriakou blew the whistle on a U.S. government-sanctioned torture program in 2007 that was approved by President George W. Bush because of the threats posed by the al-Qaida terrorist organization. He served jail time after pleading guilty to leaking the name of an officer involved in waterboarding.
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Since May last year, Assange has been locked up at London's Belmarsh Prison, a facility that houses some of Britain's most dangerous lawbreakers.
It was not immediately clear whether he will be granted bail while U.S. prosecutors lodge their appeal. If Assange is released, he may not be able to leave Britain without facing arrest if the United States issues an international arrest warrant.
Assange was found guilty of skipping bail in 2012. He fled to Ecuador's diplomatic compound in London rather than turn himself in to British authorities for possible extradition to Sweden. Investigators in the Scandinavian country wanted to question him over sexual assault allegations connected to two women.
Assange hid from British police in Ecuador's poky red-brick embassy building for seven years, yards from the famous luxury Harrods department store, because he feared Sweden would send him to the United States as part of an extradition request.
The Swedish case was dropped.
His extradition case in Britain began after Assange left the Ecuadorean Embassy and was arrested by police. Bail was denied because he was deemed a flight risk.
"The mere fact that this case has made it to court, let alone gone on this long, is an historic, large-scale attack on freedom of speech. The U.S. government should listen to the groundswell of support coming from the mainstream media editorials, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) around the world such as Amnesty and Reporters Without Borders and the United Nations who are all calling for these charges to be dropped," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks' editor-in-chief, before the verdict. "This is a fight that affects each and every person’s right to know and is being fought collectively."
Anas Mustapha, a spokesperson for CAGE, a U.K.-based organization that highlights what it describes as "repressive state policies," said it welcomed the blocking of Assange's extradition but was disappointed he was "spared only on account of his suicide risk." Mustapha said the "ruling makes it clear" that "dissent and truth-telling" are being criminalized.
Assange appeared in court Monday in a face mask. As the verdict was read, he closed his eyes and twiddled his thumbs. Also in the court was his fiancee, Stella Moris, and their two young sons. Moris wept as Baraitser read out highlights from her ruling.
Outside court, Moris said the ruling was "the first step towards justice," but it was not time to celebrate.
"I had hoped that today would be the day that Julian would come home," she said. "Today is not that day, but that day will come soon."
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0fe6f5dea184a0a65c1273ccdebfa31a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/06/naked-fugitive-stuck-australia-crocodile-habitat-found-fishermen/6560998002/ | Fishermen heard a man yell for help. It was a naked fugitive trapped in a crocodile habitat. | Fishermen heard a man yell for help. It was a naked fugitive trapped in a crocodile habitat.
CANBERRA, Australia — Two fishermen have rescued a naked fugitive who they found sitting on a tree branch in Australian crocodile habitat.
Cam Faust said Wednesday he and fellow recreational fisher Kev Joiner heard Luke Voskresensky, 40, yell for help on Sunday as they set crab traps from their dinghy in mangroves on the outskirts of the northern city of Darwin.
Faust said Voskresensky – who was covered in mud, cuts and insect bites – had explained that he had been lost for four days, survived by eating snails and had used his clothes “for bits and pieces over the way.”
“It didn’t make sense to us,” Faust said, referring to the explanation for his nudity. “He had a nest made up in the tree, and he was only laying a meter (39 inches) above the water and there were crocs in the water so he has done well to survive.”
Joiner said the friends hesitated before bringing Voskresensky on board.
“Once we’d seen how bad he was and how many cuts he had all over him and he was dehydrated and pretty weak ... we thought we’d better get him in the boat,” Joiner said.
“We thought he just must have had a big night after New Year’s and got lost and done himself a mischief in the bush,” he added.
Faust said he stripped to his underwear and handed Voskresensky his shorts and a beer as the trio made their way back to Darwin.
“He looked like he needed a beer, although he was in a bad way,” Faust said.
An ambulance was waiting at a Darwin boat ramp when they arrived. Voskresensky was taken to a Darwin hospital, where he was placed under police guard as he was treated for exposure.
Police said Voskresensky had been free on bail after being charged with armed robbery, multiple aggravated assaults, deprivation of liberty and stealing. But he had cut off his electronic monitoring device last week and attempted to evade police.
Because he was hospitalized, Voskresensky was excused from attending court on Tuesday to face new charges of breaching bail and aggravated assault, court official Xavier La Canna said.
Voskresensky will next appear in court on Feb. 9, La Canna said.
Faust said he decided against visiting Voskresensky in the hospital after discovering he had been wanted by police.
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fc8dbae49133fc89fb2f3d438da425f2 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/15/least-34-dead-indonesia-earthquake-topples-homes-buildings/4172015001/ | At least 34 dead as Indonesia earthquake topples homes, buildings | At least 34 dead as Indonesia earthquake topples homes, buildings
MAMUJU, Indonesia — A strong, shallow earthquake shook Indonesia’s Sulawesi island just after midnight Friday, toppling homes and buildings, triggering landslides and killing at least 34 people.
More than 600 people were injured during the magnitude 6.2 quake, which sent people fleeing their homes in the darkness. Authorities were still collecting information about the full scale of casualties and damage in the affected areas.
There were reports of many people trapped in the rubble of collapsed homes and buildings.
In a video released by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, a girl stuck in the wreckage of a house cried out for help and said she heard the sound of other family members also trapped. “Please help me, it hurts,” the girl told rescuers, who replied that they desperately wanted to help her.
The rescuers said an excavator was needed to save the girl and others trapped in collapsed buildings. Other images showed a severed bridge and damaged and flattened houses. TV stations reported the earthquake damaged part of a hospital and patients were moved to an emergency tent outside.
Another video showed a father crying, asking for help to save his children buried under their toppled house. “They are trapped inside, please help,” he cried.
Thousands of displaced people were evacuated to temporary shelters.
The quake was centered 22 miles south of West Sulawesi province’s Mamuju district, at a depth of 11 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The Indonesian disaster agency said the death toll climbed to 34 as rescuers in Mamuju retrieved 26 bodies trapped in the rubble of collapsed homes and buildings.
The agency said in a statement that eight people were killed and 637 others were injured in Mamuju’s neighboring district of Majene.
It said at least 300 houses and a health clinic were damaged and about 15,000 people were being housed in temporary shelters in the district. Power and phones were down in many areas.
West Sulawesi Administration Secretary Muhammad Idris told TVOne that the governor’s office building was among those that collapsed in Mamuju, the provincial capital, and many people there remain trapped.
Rescuer Saidar Rahmanjaya said a lack of heavy equipment was hampering the operation to clear the rubble from collapsed houses and buildings. He said his team was working to save 20 people trapped in eight buildings, including in the governor’s office, a hospital and hotels.
“We are racing against time to rescue them,” Rahmanjaya said.
Relatives wailed as they watched rescuers pull a body of a loved one from a damaged home in devastated Mamuju. It was placed in an orange body bag and taken away for burial.
“Oh my God, why did we have to go through this?” cried Rina, who uses one name. “I can’t save my dear sister ... forgive me, sister; forgive us, God!”
President Joko Widodo said in a televised address that he had ordered his social minister and the chiefs of the military, police and disaster agency to carry out emergency response measures and search and rescue operations as quickly as possible.
“I, on behalf of the Government and all Indonesian people, would like to express my deep condolences to families of the victims,” Widodo said.
The National Search and Rescue Agency’s chief, Bagus Puruhito, said rescuers from the cities of Palu, Makassar, Balikpapan and Jakarta were being deployed to help in Mamuju and Majene.
Two ships were heading to the affected areas from Makassar and Balikpapan carrying rescuers and search and rescue equipment, while a Hercules plane carrying supplies was on its way from Jakarta.
Puruhito is already leading more than 4,100 rescue personnel in a separate massive search operation for victims of the crash of a Sriwijaya Air jet into the Java Sea last Saturday.
Among the dead in Majene were three people killed when their homes were flattened by the quake while they were sleeping, said Sirajuddin, the district’s disaster agency chief.
Sirajuddin, who goes by one name, said although the inland earthquake did not have the potential to cause a tsunami, people along coastal areas ran to higher ground in fear one might occur.
Landslides were set off in three locations and blocked a main road connecting Mamuju to the Majene district, said Raditya Jati, the disaster agency’s spokesperson.
On Thursday, a magnitude 5.9 undersea quake hit the same region, damaging several homes but causing no apparent casualties.
Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysical agency, known by its Indonesian acronym BMKG, warned of the dangers of aftershocks and the potential for a tsunami. Its chairwoman urged people in coastal areas to move to higher ground as a precaution.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 260 million people, is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
In 2018, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake in Palu on Sulawesi island set off a tsunami and caused soil to collapse in a phenomenon called liquefaction. More than 4,000 people died, many of the victims buried when whole neighborhoods were swallowed in the falling ground.
A powerful Indian Ocean quake and tsunami in 2004 killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia.
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f530cafd9f2bf7898bed4f1433b48115 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/17/alexei-navalny-putin-critic-returns-moscow-after-poisoning/4197823001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomworld-topstories | Putin critic Alexei Navalny detained upon return to Moscow after poisoning allegedly linked to Kremlin | Putin critic Alexei Navalny detained upon return to Moscow after poisoning allegedly linked to Kremlin
MOSCOW – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested Sunday at a Moscow airport as he tried to enter the country from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin.
Navalny’s detention at passport control in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport was widely expected because Russia’s prisons service said he had violated parole terms from a suspended sentence on a 2014 embezzlement conviction.
The prisons service said he would be held in custody until a court rules on his case. No date for a court appearance was immediately announced. The service earlier said that it would seek to have Navalny serve his 3 1/2-year sentence behind bars.
Navalny, 44, who is President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent and determined foe, brushed off concerns about arrest as he boarded the plane in Berlin.
“It’s impossible. I’m an innocent man,” he said.
The arrest raises tensions in Russia as it approaches national parliament elections this year, in which Navalny’s organization is expected to be active in trying to defeat pro-Kremlin candidates. Navalny decided to leave Berlin of his own free will and wasn’t under any apparent pressure to leave from Germany.
“This is a real act of bravery for Alexei Navalny to return to Russia, given that government agents already tried to kill him once,” Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth tweeted. “But he understandably wants to be part of the pro-democracy movement in Russia, not a dissident in exile.”
President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for national security adviser called on Russian authorities to free Navalny.
“Mr. Navalny should be immediately released, and the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable,” Jake Sullivan said in a tweet.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded to a question about the arrest by saying “Was he arrested in Germany? I’m not up to date,” according to the online news site Podyom. Peskov, like Putin, is noted for avoiding saying Navalny’s name.
Navalny has sizable popularity in Moscow. Many supporters on Sunday went to Vnukovo airport where his flight was scheduled to land, though it was diverted to Sheremetyevo without explanation.
The OVD-Info organization that monitors political arrests said at least 53 people were arrested, including Navalny supporters and journalists, at Vnukovo, where where the arrivals hall had been blocked off and prisoner transport vehicles were parked outside. There were at least three detentions at Sheremetyevo, it said.
The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and opposition social media reported Sunday that several Navalny supporters in St. Petersburg had been removed from Moscow-bound trains or been prevented from boarding flights late Saturday and early Sunday, including the coordinator of his staff for the region of Russia’s second-largest city.
Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later.
Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
More:Putin opponent Alexei Navalny poisoned with Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, Germany finds
Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison and have challenged German officials to provide proof of his poisoning. Russia refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.
Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake.
Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for a decade, unusually durable in an opposition movement often demoralized by repressions.
He has been jailed repeatedly in connection with protests and twice was convicted of financial misdeeds in cases that he said were politically motivated. He suffered significant eye damage when an assailant threw disinfectant into his face and was taken from jail to a hospital in 2019 with an illness that authorities said was an allergic reaction but that many suspected was poisoning.
A lawyer by training, he began his rise to prominence by focusing on corruption in Russia’s murky mix of politics and business. In 2008, he bought shares in Russian oil and gas companies, so he could push for transparency as an activist shareholder.
Navalny’s work to expose corrupt elites had a pocketbook appeal to the Russian people’s widespread sense of being cheated. Russia’s state-controlled television channels ignored Navalny, but his investigations of dubious contracts and officials’ luxurious lifestyles got wide attention through the back channels of YouTube videos and social media posts that often showed his sardonic sense of humor.
In 2013, he placed second in the race for Moscow mayor behind the candidate of Putin’s power-base United Russia party. That established him as a formidable force and a worry to the Kremlin.
He intended to run for president in 2018, but was kept off the ballot because of his previous criminal convictions. His own legal obstacles and the widespread obstruction authorities set before other independent candidates seeking public office led Navalny and his organization to adopt a new strategy for the 2019 Moscow city council elections.
The “Smart Vote” initiative analyzed which candidate in each district appeared to have the best chance of beating United Russia’s pick and tried to drum up support for that candidate.
The initiative appeared to be a success, with nearly half of the city council seats going to “systemic opposition” candidates, although its effectiveness couldn’t be quantified. Navalny intends to redeploy the same strategy in this year’s national parliament elections.
Geir Moulson in Berlin, and Jim Heintz in Moscow, contributed to this report.
'Extraordinary':Mitt Romney slams White House 'silence and inaction' in response to cyberattack
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a2fc9428fea55b379961db7e183a419f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/19/mike-pompeo-says-chinas-policies-muslims-amount-genocide/4213686001/ | Pompeo says China’s policies on Muslims amount to ‘genocide’ | Pompeo says China’s policies on Muslims amount to ‘genocide’
WASHINGTON — On his way out the door, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hit China with new sanctions by declaring that China’s policies on Muslims and ethnic minorities in western Xinjiang Province constitute a “genocide.”
Pompeo made the determination on Tuesday just 24 hours before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. There was no immediate response from the incoming Biden team, although several members have been sympathetic to such a designation in the past. Pompeo’s determination does not come with any immediate repercussions.
Many of those accused of having taken part in repression in Xinjiang are already under U.S. sanctions, and Tuesday’s move is the latest in a series of steps the outgoing Trump administration has taken against China.
Since last year, the administration has steadily ramped up pressure on Beijing, imposing sanctions on numerous officials and companies for their activities in Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and the South China Sea.
Those penalties have gotten harsher since the beginning of last year when President Donald Trump and Pompeo began to accuse China of trying to cover up the coronavirus pandemic. Just on Saturday, Pompeo lifted restrictions on U.S. diplomatic contacts with Taiwanese officials, prompting a stern rebuke from China, which regards the island as a renegade province.
Five days ago, the administration announced it would halt imports of cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang with Customs and Border Protection officials saying they would block products from there suspected of being produced with forced labor.
Xinjiang is a major global supplier of cotton, so the order could have significant effects on international commerce. The Trump administration has already blocked imports from individual companies linked to forced labor in the region, and the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Communist Party officials with prominent roles in the campaign.
China has imprisoned more than 1 million people, including Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups, in a vast network of concentration camps, according to U.S. officials and human rights groups. People have been subjected to torture, sterilization and political indoctrination in addition to forced labor as part of an assimilation campaign in a region whose inhabitants are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Han Chinese majority.
China has denied all the charges, but Uighur forced labor has been linked by reporting from The Associated Press to various products imported to the U.S., including clothing and electronic goods such as cameras and computer monitors. China says its policies in Xinjiang aim only to promote economic and social development in the region and stamp out radicalism. It also rejects criticism of what it considers its internal affairs.
Contributing: Ben Fox, Associated Press
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2203ac78478f719e26b11e8af5c53dc4 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/20/greta-thunberg-trolls-donald-trump-twitter/4239615001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories | Greta Thunberg ends Twitter feud with 'very happy old man' Donald Trump as he leaves White House: 'So nice to see!' | Greta Thunberg ends Twitter feud with 'very happy old man' Donald Trump as he leaves White House: 'So nice to see!'
Greta Thunberg struck the last blow in a Twitter clash with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday.
The Swedish climate change activist, 18, tweeted a photo of Trump departing the White House for the last time, standing in front of Marine One with his fist held in the air.
"He seems like a very happy old man looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" She captioned the tweet, which she also posted to Instagram.
It was a play on Trump's September 2019 tweet after Thunberg's emotional speech to world leaders at the UN: "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future! So nice to see!" he tweeted at the time.
Trump was bound for Joint Base Andrews, where he later departed for his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida instead of attending the inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden.
Permanently banned from Twitter, Trump will be unable to respond to Thunberg's jab, bringing an end to their social media feud.
Thunberg famously fought with Trump on Twitter on multiple occasions.
Trump also criticized Thunberg after Time magazine's decision to recognize her as "Person of the Year" in 2019.
"So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill, Greta, Chill!" he tweeted.
On 18th birthday, Greta Thunberg says 'we shouldn’t be relaxing' on climate change. She wants new headlights for her bike, too.
Thunberg copied his exact phrasing in her reply to Trump's November 2020 tweetstorm calling for states to "stop the count" in the presidential election.
She's gone up against other world leaders, too: Russian President Vladimir Putin called her “a kind and very sincere girl” who doesn’t understand the complexities of “the modern world," and Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro labeled her a "brat."
Thunberg endorsed Biden, who, on Day One of his presidency, signed an executive order returning the U.S. to the Paris climate accord
During an interview with the Sunday Times for her 18th birthday earlier this month, Thunberg addressed Biden’s pledge, cautioning that "just because of that shift we shouldn’t be relaxing and thinking everything is all right now."
“Of course it will mean a change, mainly because it is one and not the other in charge,” she said.
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2e259fe106cad31623d7a772077b8df8 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/20/inauguration-day-world-watches-trump-exits-biden-takes-over/4209958001/ | Biden promises to 'repair alliances' as world questions U.S. strength, commitment | Biden promises to 'repair alliances' as world questions U.S. strength, commitment
LONDON – Relief and skepticism in Europe. Anger in China over a parting shot. And concern in Russia over what the next four years herald for Moscow's activities on the world stage.
The whole world watched Wednesday as Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president – and outgoing President Donald Trump departed the White House one last time for Florida, turning the page on an administration that has hurt the U.S. image abroad and exposed some of America's most glaring social, economic and racial fault lines.
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"Europeans like Biden, but they do not think that America will come back as a global leader. Most think the U.S. political system is broken, that China will be more powerful than the USA and that Washington will not defend them," said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a London-headquartered think tank.
Leonard's comments accompanied a new European Council on Foreign Relations survey that found that two-thirds of Europeans don't believe, despite their admiration for Biden, that they can always rely on the U.S. to come to their defense, few are confident the U.S. will stage a comeback as the preeminent global player under his leadership, and the majority want to remain neutral in any U.S.-China conflict.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took their oaths in Washington, D.C., in a scaled-down ceremony amid the coronavirus pandemic and heightened security after a siege of the U.S. Capitol building this month by a pro-Trump mob. Harris is the first woman, the first Black person and first Asian person to serve as vice president.
"We learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile and at this moment, my friends, democracy has prevailed," Biden said in his inaugural speech. "Now, on this hallowed ground, where just a few days ago violence sought to shake the Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries."
Biden, a Democrat, called on all Americans to "unite" and "start afresh" in conciliatory comments that appeared aimed at Republicans and other opponents.
"My whole soul is in this, in bringing America together," he said.
Biden also spoke about restoring America's reputation overseas.
"Here’s my message to those beyond our borders: America has been tested. And we’ve come out stronger for it. We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again."
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Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a policy research institute in Sofia, Bulgaria, said that "Donald Trump is no Evita Perón. Few will cry to see him go," referring to the Argentine political figure.
"Yet, it's clear that his tumultuous presidency has left an indelible imprint on Europe’s attitude towards the United States."
Trump's foreign policy did make some gains: He hasn't started any new wars and delivered on his promise to reduce U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump's White House brokered historic "normalization" agreements signed between some Arab states and Israel. But Trump's divisive rhetoric and strict adherence to an "America First" theme alienated allies, buoyed dictators and undermined decades of multilateralism seen as integral to fighting climate change, global disease, nuclear proliferation and preserving hard-won battles connected to democracy promotion and human rights.
Trump abroad:Even Trump's fiercest critics say he got some world affairs right
In the early days of his presidency, Biden is expected to quickly move to transform U.S. domestic and foreign policy through dozens of executive orders and official directives. He announced Wednesday the first of these actions aimed at altering the course of the coronavirus pandemic, rejoining the Paris climate accord, addressing racial inequalities and stopping construction of a border wall with Mexico.
Shifting relations with American adversaries will take more time.
Tension with China
U.S.-China relations sharply deteriorated under the Trump administration over disputes on trade and the coronavirus pandemic, and Biden's first few days in office could be a diplomatic challenge after outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Tuesday that China's violent repression of its Uighur population constituted "genocide." It was the strongest such condemnation yet by the U.S. government of the Chinese authorities' campaign of mass internment of more than 1 million Muslim minorities.
America's next top diplomat?:'The world’s on fire' and other takeaways from Biden's secretary of state confirmation hearing
Biden’s campaign claimed, well before the Nov. 3 presidential election, that genocide was occurring in China's western Xinjiang region, and human rights groups have documented evidence of forced labor, sterilizations and other human rights violations against Uighurs. But the official "genocide" determination by Pompeo's State Department, supported by Biden's secretary of state nominee, Antony Blinken, is a more diplomatically sensitive allegation and has drawn a strong rebuke from China.
China's embassy in Washington described the claim as a "lie and farce," and Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that Pompeo's characterization amounted to "poison" and that Pompeo had turned "himself into a doomsday clown and joke of the century" with his "lies."
China's dislike for the Trump administration was made clear in a tweet by its official state Xinhua News Agency, which offered the following remark: "good riddance, Donald Trump!"
Just minutes after Biden was sworn in, China's foreign affairs ministry announced sanctions on 28 Trump administration officials, including Pompeo.
Tension with Russia
Top officials in the Kremlin, meanwhile, are worried Biden could take a more combative stance against Russia than Trump, whose critics have long alleged that he has been inexplicably soft on Moscow over the past four years, whether in his effusive praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, his refusal to discuss with Putin U.S. intelligence reports accusing Russia of offering bounties to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops, or Trump's apparent shrugging off of a massive cyberattack targeting multiple U.S. federal agencies. Lawmakers and cybersecurity experts have blamed Russia for the attack.
"Biden has not yet said anything positive about Russia. On the contrary, his rhetoric has always been openly unfriendly, harsh, even aggressive," wrote Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russia president, in a lengthy opinion piece published by Russian state news agency Tass on Saturday. "He has repeatedly stated that Russia is the biggest threat to the United States in terms of undermining our security and alliances," Medvedev said in the op-ed, headlined: "America 2.0 after the election."
He added that Biden's team "includes politicians who hold similar views and have no interest whatsoever in improving relations between Moscow and Washington."
Putin gave no formal reaction to Biden's inauguration, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not foresee a change in the U.S.-Russia relationship.
"Russia will continue to live just the way it has lived for hundreds of years, seeking good relations with the U.S.," he told reporters. "Whether Washington has reciprocal political will for that will depend on Mr. Biden and his team."
'Law, order and democracy have prevailed'
As Biden officially became president, words of encouragement filtered in from overseas.
"The events at the U.S. Capitol shocked us so much," said Charles Michel, president of the European Council – the body that shapes the European Union's overall political direction – in a speech to the European Parliament.
Michel was referring to the uprising on Jan. 6 when supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol, leading to five deaths and more than 100 charges related to the siege. About 25,000 troops guarded inauguration ceremonies in Washington after the riot.
Republican leader McConnell:Attack at the Capitol was ‘provoked by the president’
"But the darkness of violence will never dim the light of democracy. Law, order and democracy have prevailed over this disgraceful attempt to overturn the election," Michel added. "Today is more than a transition. Today is an opportunity to rejuvenate our transatlantic relationship, which has greatly suffered in the last four years."
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier released a video statement on his website before the inauguration, calling it a "good day for democracy."
Steinmeier said the U.S. had "faced tremendous challenges and endured."
He said that "despite the attempts to tear at America’s institutional fabric, election workers and governors, the judiciary and Congress have proven strong. I am greatly relieved that, today, Joe Biden is being sworn in as president and will be moving into the White House. I know many people in Germany share this feeling."
There were similar remarks from leaders in Spain, France and Italy.
And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to work "hand in hand" with Biden on a range of shared interests, including security and "defending democracy."
For Iran, it was also an opportunity to make a fresh pitch to the incoming administration to lift U.S. sanctions on Tehran and rejoin the 2015 nuclear agreement exited by Trump.
"The ball is in the U.S. court now," Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised address. "Today, we expect the incoming U.S. administration to return to the rule of law and commit themselves, and if they can, in the next four years, to remove all the black spots of the previous four years."
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72df78e422d6f8d928360c95399634ee | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/24/china-miners-11-rescued-after-being-trapped-underground-2-weeks/6692994002/ | 11 miners rescued in China after being trapped for 2 weeks after explosion | 11 miners rescued in China after being trapped for 2 weeks after explosion
BEIJING – Eleven workers trapped for two weeks by an explosion inside a Chinese gold mine were brought safely to the surface Sunday.
State broadcaster CCTV showed workers being hauled up one by one in baskets on Sunday afternoon, their eyes shielded to protect them after so many days in darkness.
One worker was reported to have died from a head wound after the blast that poured rubble into the shaft on Jan. 10 while the mine was still under construction.
The fate of 10 others who were underground at the time is unknown. Authorities have detained mine managers for delaying reporting the accident.
The official China Daily said on its website that seven of the workers were able to walk to ambulances on their own.
State broadcaster CCTV showed ambulances parked alongside engineering vehicles at the mine in Qixia, a jurisdiction under Yantai in Shandong province.
Increased supervision has improved safety in China’s mining industry, which used to average 5,000 deaths a year. But demand for coal and precious metals continues to prompt corner-cutting, and two accidents in Chongqing last year killed 39 miners.
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945d699c54e89ef9c908350e16659d69 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/25/9-workers-found-dead-china-mine-explosion-toll-now-10/6698140002/ | Nine workers found dead in China mine explosions, raising death toll to 10 | Nine workers found dead in China mine explosions, raising death toll to 10
BEIJING – Chinese rescuers have found the bodies of nine workers killed in explosions at a gold mine, raising the death toll to 10, officials said Monday.
Eleven miners were rescued a day earlier after being trapped underground for two weeks at the mine in Shandong province. One person was still missing.
The cause of the accident at the mine, which was under construction, is under investigation. The explosions on Jan. 10 released 70 tons of debris that blocked a shaft, disabling elevators and trapping workers underground.
Rescuers drilled parallel shafts to send down food and nutrients and eventually bring up survivors on Sunday.
Chen Yumin, director of the rescue group, told reporters the nine workers recovered Monday died more than 1,320 feet below ground. He said there had been two explosions about an hour and a half apart.
Rescuers will search for the missing miner until he is found, said Chen Fei, mayor of Yantai city, where the mine is located.
“Until this worker is found, we will not give up,” he said at a news conference.
Chen and other officials involved in the rescue held a moment of silence for the victims, bowing their heads.
“Our hearts are deeply grieved. We express our profound condolences, and we express deep sympathies to the families,” he said.
Authorities have detained mine managers for delaying reporting the accident.
Such protracted and expensive rescue efforts are relatively new in China’s mining industry, which used to average 5,000 deaths a year.
Increased supervision has improved safety, although demand for coal and precious metals continues to prompt corner-cutting. A crackdown was ordered after two accidents in mountainous southwestern Chongqing last year killed 39 miners.
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b87690a1278fc50d6f97718afbe94686 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/25/spanish-woman-died-covid-nursing-home-mix-up/6698214002/ | Woman who 'died' of COVID-19 returns to Spanish nursing home after identity mix-up | Woman who 'died' of COVID-19 returns to Spanish nursing home after identity mix-up
A family in Spain is in disbelief after their 85-year-old relative returned to her nursing home 10 days after they were told she had died of COVID-19, local media reported Sunday.
Officials from a nursing home in Xove in northern Spain told the family of Rogelia Blanco she was transferred to a facility in Pereiro de Aguiar for specialized care on Dec. 29 and died there on Jan. 13, La Voz de Galicia reported. The woman was buried the next day, and the family was unable to attend because of safety protocols aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
To the family's surprise, Blanco returned to the nursing home free of the virus on Saturday, according to La Voz. Her family was informed that the woman who died was her roommate, Concepción Arias.
Arias' brother Maximino, 85, told the newspaper he traveled to the nursing home Saturday believing his sister had recovered from COVID-19.
“When I got there they gave me the news: that my sister had been dead for 10 days," he said. "That they were very sorry for the mistake and that now the court had to act and give permission for the transfer of the body."
The San Rosendo Foundation, which runs the nursing home, said the identity mix-up happened when Blanco and other residents who tested positive for the coronavirus were transferred to Pereiro de Aguiar.
“Among the elderly people transferred were two women who were assigned the same room,” the foundation said in a statement to La Voz. “An identification error during the process of transfer from Xove to Pereiro de Aguiar led to the death of one of them being certified on Jan. 13, although the identity was wrongly assigned."
The foundation expressed regret in its statement to La Voz de Galicia for the “unfortunate incident” that it described as a "one-off event, among more than 100 transfers." The foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.
Blanco's husband, Ramón, was overwhelmed when a doctor informed him his wife had returned to the nursing home where they both live, relatives told the newspaper.
"He didn't believe it. Of course, he was crying since the 13th for the death of his wife,” a relative told La Voz
More:Nursing home residents, caregivers who want COVID-19 vaccine should have had first shot by Monday, pharmacies say
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3e09eb1091e5e4f9094bf51aaa2c177a | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/26/india-republic-day-farmers-storm-red-fort-tractor-rally/4257399001/ | Angry farmers storm India's Red Fort in huge tractor rally as nation celebrates Republic Day | Angry farmers storm India's Red Fort in huge tractor rally as nation celebrates Republic Day
NEW DELHI — Tens of thousands of protesting farmers drove long lines of tractors into India's capital on Tuesday, breaking through police barricades, defying tear gas and storming the historic Red Fort as the nation celebrated Republic Day.
They waved farm union and religious flags from the ramparts of the fort, where prime ministers annually hoist the national flag to mark the country's independence.
Thousands more farmers marched on foot or rode on horseback while shouting slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At some places, they were showered with flower petals by residents who recorded the unprecedented rally on their phones.
Police said one protester died after his tractor overturned, but farmers said he was shot. Television channels showed several bloodied protesters.
Leaders of the farmers said more than 10,000 tractors joined the protest.
For nearly two months, farmers — many of them Sikhs from Punjab and Haryana states — have camped at the edge of the capital, blockading highways connecting it with the country's north in a rebellion that has rattled the government. They are demanding the withdrawal of new laws which they say will commercialize agriculture and devastate farmers' earnings.
"We want to show Modi our strength," said Satpal Singh, a farmer who drove into the capital on a tractor along with his family of five. "We will not surrender."
Riot police fired tear gas and water cannons at numerous places to push back the rows upon rows of tractors, which shoved aside concrete and steel barricades. Authorities blocked roads with large trucks and buses in an attempt to stop the farmers from reaching the center of the capital. Thousands, however, managed to reach some important landmarks.
"We will do as we want to. You cannot force your laws on the poor," said Manjeet Singh, a protesting farmer.
Authorities shut some metro train stations, and mobile internet service was suspended in some parts of the capital, a frequent tactic of the government to thwart protests.
The government insists that the agriculture reform laws passed by Parliament in September will benefit farmers and boost production through private investment.
Farmers tried to march into New Delhi in November but were stopped by police. Since then, unfazed by the winter cold, they have hunkered down at the edge of the city and threatened to besiege it if the farm laws are not repealed.
The government has offered to amend the laws and suspend their implementation for 18 months. But farmers insist they will settle for nothing less than a complete repeal. They plan to march on foot to Parliament on Feb. 1, when the country's new budget will be presented.
The protests overshadowed Republic Day celebrations, in which Modi oversaw a traditional lavish parade along ceremonial Rajpath boulevard displaying the country's military power and cultural diversity.
The parade was scaled back because of the coronavirus pandemic. People wore masks and adhered to social distancing as police and military battalions marched along the route displaying their latest equipment.
Republic Day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the country's constitution on Jan. 26, 1950.
Farmers are the latest group to upset Modi's image of imperturbable dominance in Indian politics.
Since returning to power for a second term, Modi's government has been rocked by several convulsions. The economy has tanked, social strife has widened, protests have erupted against discriminatory laws and his government has been questioned over its response to the pandemic.
Agriculture supports more than half of the country's 1.4 billion people. But the economic clout of farmers has diminished over the last three decades. Once producing a third of India's gross domestic product, farmers now account for only 15% of the country's $2.9 trillion economy.
More than half of farmers are in debt, with 20,638 killing themselves in 2018 and 2019, according to official records.
The contentious legislation has exacerbated existing resentment from farmers, who have long been seen as the heart and soul of India but often complain of being ignored by the government.
Modi has tried to allay farmers' fears by mostly dismissing their concerns and has repeatedly accused opposition parties of agitating them by spreading rumors. Some leaders of his party have called the farmers "anti-national," a label often given to those who criticize Modi or his policies.
Devinder Sharma, an agriculture expert who has spent the last two decades campaigning for income equality for Indian farmers, said they are not only protesting the reforms but also "challenging the entire economic design of the country."
"The anger that you see is compounded anger," Sharma said. "Inequality is growing in India and farmers are becoming poorer. Policy planners have failed to realize this and have sucked the income from the bottom to the top. The farmers are only demanding what is their right."
AP video journalist Rishabh R. Jain contributed to this report.
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6da2dc06389a7231768676d95a01bfad | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/27/linda-thomas-greenfield-biden-pick-ambassador-un-gets-hearing/4253389001/ | Republicans grill Biden's pick for UN ambassador over speech at Confucius Institute at HBCU | Republicans grill Biden's pick for UN ambassador over speech at Confucius Institute at HBCU
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said she regretted giving a speech in 2019 at a Chinese-funded institute in Savannah – remarks that quickly became a flashpoint at her confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
In the October 2019 speech, she seemed to downplay China's expansionist ambitions and its investments across Africa, which critics have called "debt diplomacy." Her remarks were made at a "Confucius Institute" at Savannah State University, a historically black college.
Thomas-Greenfield said it was a "huge mistake" on her part to speak at the Confucius Institute. She said she agreed to address students at the university as part of her longstanding commitment to encouraging young Black students to consider a career in the foreign service.
Thomas-Greenfield, who is Black, said she came away from the event "frankly alarmed" at the way the institute was engaging with the Black community, which she said involved "going after those in need."
Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Thomas-Greenfield's 2019 remarks "the elephant in the room." And Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., expressed shock that she did not seem to realize how China has used state-funded Confucius Institutes to spread propaganda. Many universities, including Savannah State University, have closed or otherwise severed their ties with such institutes in recent years.
"China is a strategic adversary and their actions threaten our security, they threaten our way of life," Thomas-Greenfield said, seeking to reassure lawmakers that she is clear-eyed about China's often predatory tactics. "They're a threat across the globe."
Democrats on the committee noted that in other settings, Thomas-Greenfield had issued many public warnings about China's growing aggression. And they suggested Republicans were twisting her words to make her sound soft on China.
Sen. Bob Menendez, the incoming Democratic chairman of the committee, said Thomas-Greenfield for years had been "sounding the alarm" that the U.S. withdrawing from the international community – as it did during the Trump administration – created a vacuum for China to fill. In her 2019 speech, Menendez said, she seemed to challenge to China "to promote values such as good governance, gender equity and the rule of law" in Africa.
"That was exactly my intention," Thomas-Greenfield responded.
She said she would push back aggressively against China's efforts to gain leverage and influence at the UN, among other multilateral institutions.
“We know China is working across the U.N. system to drive an authoritarian agenda that stands in opposition to the founding values of the institution – American values,” she said. “Their success depends on our continued withdrawal. That will not happen on my watch.”
In her 2019 remarks, she downplayed the idea that the U.S. and China were engaged in a new "Cold War" style confrontation.
"There is a growing sense that the U.S. and China are in competition to carve out their share of this African future. Some have even dubbed this a 'new scramble for Africa,'" she said. "These are certainly uneasy times in the U.S.-China relationship, but I disagree with these narratives and this zero-sum approach. We are not in a new Cold War – and Africans have far more agency than those narratives would have us believe."
Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and the only Black lawmaker on the committee, blasted the GOP attacks on Thomas-Greenfield and sharply defended her decision to accept a speaking invitation from a historically Black college.
"You are one of the generations of women that are breaking down barriers and showing the way for women and African Americans," Booker said.
In her opening remarks, Thomas-Greenfield noted that when she joined the foreign service in 1982, she was "not the norm" in the State Department's diplomatic corps as a woman or an African American.
Over a 35-year career in the foreign service, Thomas-Greenfield has held numerous diplomatic posts around the world – from Kenya to Pakistan. She was the U.S. ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012 before becoming the top U.S. diplomat for African affairs in the Obama administration.
She promised lawmakers she would bring a different tone to the UN than her recent predecessors.
“When America shows up – when we are consistent and persistent – when we exert our influence in accordance with our values – the United Nations can be an indispensable institution for advancing peace, security, and our collective well-being," Thomas-Greenfield told lawmakers in her opening remarks.
If confirmed, Thomas-Greenfield may face lingering skepticism and resentment on the job after former President Donald Trump derided the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. He withdrew the US from the United Nations Human Rights Council and a United Nations’ aid program for Palestinian refugees. Trump's first ambassador to the UN, ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, cut a high profile at the international body in championing Trump's "America First" foreign policy. Haley's successor, Kelly Knight Craft, seemed to eschew the spotlight.
Thomas-Greenfield's allies say she is widely admired inside the State Department and will help Biden restore America's reputation on the global stage.
"She understands peacekeeping, she understands the UN, she understands the developing world," Wendy Sherman, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Obama administration, told USA TODAY in November. Sherman is also poised to join the Biden administration, if confirmed, as deputy secretary of state.
In the face of burning crosses and machine guns
Thomas-Greenfield, was born in Baker, Louisiana, in the early 1950s and attended segregated schools as a child. In a 2019 speech, she described growing up in a town "in which the KKK regularly would come on the weekends and burn a cross in someone's yard."
When she attended Louisiana State University, David Duke, a white supremacist and Klan leader, had a significant presence on campus, Thomas-Greenfield said, in recounting the deep racism she faced during her college years.
In 1994, Thomas-Greenfield was dispatched to Rwanda to assess refugee conditions amid the genocide in that country. She said she was confronted by a "glazed-eyed young man" with a machine gun who had apparently mistaken her for a Tutsi he had been assigned to kill.
"I didn’t panic. I was afraid, don’t get me wrong," she said in her 2019 remarks. She asked him his name, told him hers, and managed to talk her way out of the situation.
Her secret negotiating tool, she says, is "gumbo diplomacy," which she employed across four continents during her foreign service. She would invite guests to help make a roux and chop onions for the "holy trinity" (onions, bell peppers and celery) in the Cajun tradition.
"It was my way of breaking down barriers, connecting with people and starting to see each other on a human level," Thomas-Greenfield said. "A bit of lagniappe (or 'something extra' in Cajun) is what we say in Louisiana."
On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Antony Blinken to lead the State Department by a vote of 78 to 22.
Contributing: Maureen Groppe
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e600a1b458891decb9683c46c7b643d2 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/28/daniel-pearl-death-pakistani-court-release-acquitted-beheading/4289953001/ | Pakistani court orders release of man accused in beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl | Pakistani court orders release of man accused in beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the release Thursday of a Pakistani-British man convicted and later acquitted in the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
The court also dismissed an appeal of Ahmad Saeed Omar Sheikh's acquittal by Pearl's family and the Pakistani government. It wasn't immediately clear whether Sheikh would be freed Thursday; the government of the province where he is being held has previously refused to honor such release orders.
"The Pearl family is in complete shock by the majority decision of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to acquit and release Ahmed Omer Sheikh and the other accused persons who kidnapped and killed Daniel Pearl," the Pearl family said in a statement released by their lawyer, Faisal Siddiqi.
The brutality of Pearl's killing shocked many in 2002, years before the Islamic State group regularly began releasing videos of their beheadings of journalists. An autopsy report told of the gruesome details of Pearl's killing and dismemberment.
More:DOJ says it's ready to prosecute Pakistani man for 2002 death of Wall Street Journal reporter
Sheikh was convicted of helping lure Pearl to a meeting in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, during which he was kidnapped. Pearl had been investigating the link between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, dubbed the "shoe bomber" after his attempt to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes.
Pearl's body was discovered in a shallow grave soon after a gruesome video of his beheading was delivered to the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Sheikh long denied any involvement in Pearl's death, but the Supreme Court on Wednesday heard that he acknowledged writing a letter in 2019 admitting a minor role — raising hopes for some that he might remain behind bars.
Sheikh has been on death row since his conviction in Pearl's death. He is currently being held in a Karachi jail, but a three-judge Supreme Court ruled 2 to 1 to uphold Sheikh's acquittal and ordered him released, said Siddiqi.
A lawyer for Sheikh said the court also ordered the release of three other Pakistanis who had been sentenced to life in prison for their part in Pearl's kidnapping and death.
"These people should not have been in prison even for one day," Mehmood A. Sheikh, who is not related to his client, said.
He warned the government of southern Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, against delaying their release, as it has done in the past with his client, even after being slapped with a contempt charge.
"I expect the Sindh government will not make a mockery of justice by continuing ... to not release them for no good reason whatsoever," he said.
Washington previously said it would seek Sheikh's extradition to the United States to be tried there, if the acquittal was upheld. It's not clear whether Pakistan would support his extradition or even under what grounds it could go ahead.
The case seems certain to test the new Biden administration's skill in dealing with Pakistan, considered a key ally in getting peace in neighboring Afghanistan. There was no immediate reaction from the U.S. Embassy to the court order upholding the appeal.
The Pearl family urged both the U.S. and Pakistani governments to take action to "correct this injustice."
"Today's decision is a complete travesty of justice and the release of these killers puts in danger journalists everywhere and the people of Pakistan," the family's statement said.
Siddiqi, the Pearl family lawyer, said the only legal avenue available now is to ask for a review of the court's decision to uphold Sheikh's acquittal. However, he said the review would be conducted by the same court that made that decision. "In practical terms," that means the case is closed in Pakistan, he said.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard Sheikh admit to a minor role in Pearl's kidnapping — a dramatic turn of events after he had denied any involvement for 18 years. Siddiqi, the Pearl family lawyer, had expected it would advance his case.
Still, Siddiqi had previously said winning was an uphill battle because the prosecutor in the original case tried four men — including Sheikh — together, with the same charges against all even though each played a different role.
All four were acquitted in April by the Sindh High Court on the grounds that the initial prosecution's evidence was insufficient. During the appeal of that acquittal, Siddiqi tried to convince the Supreme Court of Sheikh's guilt on at least one of the three charges he faced, specifically the kidnapping charge, which also carries the death penalty in Pakistan.
The court is expected to release a detailed explanation for Thursday's decision in the coming days.
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c72f4b0891f9fc7edbc93f7246ffe127 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/28/iran-diplomat-says-window-closing-biden-rejoin-nuclear-deal/6678137002/ | Exclusive: Iran diplomat says 'window is closing' for Biden to rejoin nuclear deal | Exclusive: Iran diplomat says 'window is closing' for Biden to rejoin nuclear deal
WASHINGTON – Iran's highest-ranking diplomat in the USA warned the Biden administration it "must act quickly" to return to the 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by President Donald Trump "because the window is closing" for Washington to lift economic sanctions before Tehran's deadline.
Iran's hard-line-dominated parliament set a deadline of Feb. 21 for Biden to lift U.S. sanctions as part of a move back into the now-breached agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. If the United States fails to act, Iran plans to suspend some inspections of its nuclear sites by United Nations nuclear inspectors – a key provision of the accord – and further boost uranium enrichment.
"We have said time and again that if the U.S. decides to go back to its international commitments and lift all the illegal sanctions against Iran, we will go back to the full implementation of JCPOA, which will benefit all sides," said Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, in exclusive remarks to USA TODAY.
Asked about the ambassador's comments on Friday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to given a timeline for reviving talks with Iran.
"The first step here is to Iran is for Iran to comply with the significant nuclear constraints under the deal," she said during a White House press briefing.
But the White House signaled its own urgency on Friday, naming Robert Malley as a special envoy for Iran on Friday. A longtime diplomat with extensive experience in Middle East issues, Malley will lead the Biden administration's team on any Iran negotiations, the State Department said Friday.
If Iran's deadline passes without some kind of compromise, it could effectively push Iran one step closer to the 90% uranium enrichment level required for a nuclear weapon. Iran has been enriching at about 20%, a violation of the accord, as part of its response to the U.S. exit from the deal.
Ravanchi said in the interview the U.N. nuclear inspectors would not be expelled from Iran, but additional access to its nuclear sites it provided on a voluntary basis would be halted.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States will rejoin the accord only after Iran comes back into compliance. This means, in part, limiting uranium enrichment to less than 4%.
"President Biden has been very clear in saying that if Iran comes back into full compliance with its obligations under the JCPOA, the United States would do the same thing," Blinken said Wednesday.
Tehran wants Washington to rejoin on the same terms it left the accord. Ravanchi's comments underscore the difficulties Iran and the United States face in resuming nuclear diplomacy, as both sides insist the other must act first.
"The party that needs to change course is the United States, and not Iran," said Ravanchi, who helped negotiate the agreement that Trump withdrew from in 2018. He said Iran cannot accept a "renegotiation of the nuclear deal."
Escalating tensions
Washington accuses Iran of escalating tensions through provocative acts such as seizing cargo ships in the Persian Gulf (a vital route for oil supplies), backing Iranian proxies who have repeatedly launched rockets at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and imprisoning Iranian Americans on false spying charges.
Blinken said the United States is a "long ways" from meeting President Joe Biden's aspiration to rejoin the deal.
"Iran is out of compliance on a number of fronts, and it would take some time, should it make a decision to do so, for it to come back into compliance and for us then to assess whether it was meeting its obligations. So we're not there yet, to say the least," Blinken said at a news briefing.
Iran counters that Washington, not Tehran, is behind escalating tensions. It points to the Pentagon's killing of Iran's top commander, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad last January and the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, its top nuclear scientist, outside Tehran in November. Iran's government accuses Israel, with U.S. support, of being behind Fakhrizadeh's killing.
Iran insists, despite skepticism from the international community, that it is not interested in developing a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear activities are intended for civilian purposes only.
Nasser Hadian, a professor of international relations at the University of Tehran who has close links with officials in Iran's Foreign Ministry, predicted that the United States and Iran would return to the nuclear deal as it existed under President Barack Obama's administration.
"Washington may not be happy about it, but it knows it's the only game in town," he said.
On the homefront
Biden risks political blowback if he returns to the deal without gaining any concessions from Iran.
Republicans in Congress, as well as some Democrats, press Biden to make the most of Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran. Under that policy, the Trump administration slapped hundreds of sanctions on Iran. Lawmakers said Biden should use that leverage to force Iran to curb its malign activities, including its ballistic missile program and its support for terrorist proxy groups.
"I fear returning to the JCPOA without concrete efforts to address Iran's other dangerous and destabilizing activity would be insufficient," Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Blinken at his confirmation hearing Jan. 19.
Menendez said there is bipartisan support for a "comprehensive diplomatic approach" that would limit Iran’s antagonistic activities.
Republicans have been far more vocal in their campaign to dissuade Biden from rejoining the deal.
"Unfortunately, the Iranian regime thinks it has successfully waited out the maximum pressure program that we have in place," said Idaho Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Blinken said the priority is to get Iran's nuclear capabilities "back in the box," then try to negotiate over other concerns.
If the JCPOA can be revived, he told lawmakers Jan. 19, "we would use that as a platform to build, with our allies and partners, what we called a longer and stronger agreement and to deal with a number of other issues that are deeply problematic in the relationship with Iran."
Psaki echoed that position on Friday.
"(The president) believes that through follow-on diplomacy, the U.S. should seek to lengthen and strengthen these nuclear constraints and address other issues of concern, including Iran's ballistic missiles program and its regional activity," Psaki said.
'Ticking time bomb'
Ali Vaez, an expert on Iran with the Crisis Group, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to prevent conflict, said Iran’s Feb. 21 deadline “has now basically thrown a ticking time bomb into this process.”
If there’s no progress by that date, he said, “I'm afraid … that significant nuclear escalation is on the horizon.”
He said the Biden administration faces a difficult calculation: Alienate members of Congress and ignite a domestic firestorm, or “prevent Iran's nuclear program from crossing the Rubicon towards weaponization.”
Despite the obstacles, Vaez said there is “political will on both sides” to revive the JCPOA.
Biden could issue an executive order revoking Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, he said. Iranian leaders could issue a similar decree declaring their intention to come back into compliance. The two sides could then craft a road map that would spell out “staggered but coordinated and simultaneous steps for coming back to full compliance with the deal,” Vaez said.
Vaez said Iran could be open to a broader deal once the United States rejoins the JCPOA, despite Tehran’s rhetoric to the contrary.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an American-born Iranian political analyst at the University of Tehran, said the deadline was intended to signal to the Biden administration that Iran is aware that much of the Trump administration's actions were done by decree.
"This is about testing his sincerity," he said. "Just as Biden has been busy reversing many of Trump's executive orders, he could easily do this with the Iranian nuclear deal. There's nothing particularly complicated about this. It has nothing to do with Congress. Biden's hands are by no means tied. He can do it with one signature."
Marandi said, "Iran didn't appease Trump for four years, and it's not going to appease Biden," whom Tehran views to be in a weakened position domestically because of social divisions and an economic crisis caused by the raging coronavirus pandemic.
U.S. sanctions on Iran target many of the drivers of its economy, such as the oil industry. These measures impeded Iran's access to personal protective equipment, vaccines and health services during its coronavirus outbreak, which is the worst in the Middle East. The Trump administration said that by withdrawing from the nuclear accord and reimposing sanctions, Iran would come crawling back to the United States. That hasn't happened.
Ravanchi said the sanctions "are taking a heavy toll on all Iranians, and particularly vulnerable segments of the society. Even medicines are not being spared from sanctions during the pandemic."
He said it's time for the Biden administration to "gain the trust of the Iranian people."
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f3f0dba3c6f6e4d64748a09aa6e38f97 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/01/31/alexei-navalny-russia-arrests-thousands-backing-opposition-leader/4330628001/ | Russia arrests 3,300 during wide protests backing Alexei Navalny | Russia arrests 3,300 during wide protests backing Alexei Navalny
MOSCOW (AP) — Chanting slogans against President Vladimir Putin, tens of thousands took to the streets Sunday across Russia's vast expanse to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, keeping up the nationwide protests that have rattled the Kremlin. More than 3,300 people were detained by police, according to a monitoring group, and some were beaten.
Russian authorities mounted a massive effort to stem the tide of demonstrations after tens of thousands rallied across the country last weekend in the largest, most widespread show of discontent that Russia has seen in years. Yet despite threats of jail terms, warnings to social media groups and tight police cordons, the protests again engulfed many cities on Sunday.
The 44-year-old Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator who is Putin's best-known critic, was arrested on Jan. 17 upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusations. He was arrested for allegedly violating his parole conditions by not reporting for meetings with law enforcement when he was recuperating in Germany.
The United States urged Russia to release Navalny and criticized the crackdown on protests.
“The U.S. condemns the persistent use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists by Russian authorities for a second week straight,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Twitter.
More:Biden must sanction 'the cronies and wallets of Putin,' says key ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny
The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected Blinken's call as a “crude interference in Russia's internal affairs" and accused Washington of trying to destabilize the situation in the country by backing the protests.
On Sunday, police detained over 3,300 people at protests held in cities across Russia's 11 time zones, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests.
In Moscow, authorities introduced unprecedented security measures in the city center, closing subway stations near the Kremlin, cutting bus traffic and ordering restaurants and stores to stay closed.
Navalny’s team initially called for Sunday’s protest to be held on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, home to the main headquarters of the Federal Security Service, which Navalny claims was responsible for his poisoning. Facing police cordons around the square, the protest shifted to other central squares and streets.
Police were randomly picking up people and putting them into police buses, but thousands of protesters marched across the city center for hours, chanting “Putin, resign!” and Putin, thief!" a reference to an opulent Black Sea estate reportedly built for the Russian leader that was featured in a widely popular video released by Navalny’s team.
At some point, crowds of demonstrators walked toward the Matrosskaya Tishina prison where Navalny is being held. They were met by phalanxes of riot police who pushed the march back and chased protesters through courtyards, detaining scores and beating some with clubs. Still, protesters continued to march around the Russian capital, zigzagging around police cordons.
Nearly 900 people were detained in Moscow, including Navalny's wife, Yulia, who joined the protest. “If we keep silent, they will come after any of us tomorrow,” she said on Instagram before turning out to protest.
Several thousand marched across Russia's second-largest city of St. Petersburg, and occasional scuffles erupted as some demonstrators pushed back police who tried to make detentions. Nearly 600 were arrested.
Some of the biggest rallies were held in Novosibirsk in eastern Siberia and Yekaterinburg in the Urals.
“I do not want my grandchildren to live in such a country," said 55-year-old Vyacheslav Vorobyov, who turned out for a rally in Yekaterinburg. "I want them to live in a free country.”
As part of a multipronged effort by authorities to block the protests, courts have jailed Navalny's associates and activists across the country over the past week. His brother Oleg, top aide Lyubov Sobol and three other people were put Friday under a two-month house arrest on charges of allegedly violating coronavirus restrictions during last weekend’s protests.
Prosecutors also demanded that social media platforms block calls to join the protests.
The Interior Ministry issued stern warnings to the public not to join the protests, saying participants could be charged with taking part in mass riots, which carries a prison sentence of up to eight years. Those engaging in violence against police could face up to 15 years.
Nearly 4,000 people were reportedly detained at demonstrations on Jan. 23 calling for Navalny’s release that took place in more than 100 Russian cities, and some were given fines and jail terms. About 20 were accused of assaulting police and faced criminal charges.
Soon after Navalny's arrest, his team released a two-hour video on his YouTube channel about the Black Sea residence purportedly built for Putin. The video has been viewed over 100 million times, helping fuel discontent and inspiring a stream of sarcastic jokes on the internet amid an economic downturn.
Russia has seen extensive corruption during Putin’s time in office while poverty has remained widespread.
Demonstrators in Moscow chanted “Aqua discotheque!,” a reference to one of the fancy amenities at the residence that also features a casino and a hookah lounge equipped for watching pole dances.
Putin says neither he nor any of his close relatives own the property. On Saturday, construction magnate Arkady Rotenberg, a longtime Putin confidant and his occasional judo sparring partner, claimed that he himself owned the property.
Navalny fell into a coma on Aug. 20 while on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow and the pilot diverted the plane so he could be treated in the city of Omsk. He was transferred to a Berlin hospital two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to the Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities have refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, claiming a lack of evidence that he was poisoned.
Navalny was arrested immediately when he returned to Russia earlier this month and jailed for 30 days on the request of Russia’s prison service, which alleged he had violated the probation of his suspended sentence from a 2014 money-laundering conviction that he has rejected as political revenge.
On Thursday, a Moscow court rejected Navalny's appeal to be released, and another hearing next week could turn his 3 1/2-year suspended sentence into one he must serve in prison.
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192e550f614f8724c1c18f0c77115f3b | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/08/uttarakhand-india-glacier-burst-what-to-know/4434591001/ | How does a glacier burst? Flooding in India leaves at least 31 dead and 165 missing. | How does a glacier burst? Flooding in India leaves at least 31 dead and 165 missing.
At least 31 people are dead and 165 are missing after a flood hit northern India on Sunday. The flood was caused when part of a Himalayan glacier broke off and sent a wall of water and debris down a mountain, sweeping away everything in its path.
Rescuers on Monday were trying to rescue 37 power plant workers who remained trapped in a tunnel.
More than 2,000 members of the military, paramilitary groups and police have been taking part in search-and-rescue operations in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
The flood was caused when a portion of the Nanda Devi glacier snapped off Sunday morning, releasing water trapped behind it.
“Everything was swept away, people, cattle and trees,” Sangram Singh Rawat, a former village council member of Raini, the site closest to the glacier, told local media, according to Reuters.
Here's what to know:
How are glaciers formed?
Glaciers begin to form when snow remains in the same area year-round, where enough snow accumulates to transform into ice, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said. Each year, new layers of snow bury and compress the previous layers.
Most of the world's glacial ice is found in Antarctica and Greenland, but glaciers are found on nearly every continent, even Africa.
A large cluster of glaciers is in the Himalayas, which are part of India’s long northern border. Sunday’s disaster occurred in the western part of the Himalayas.
More:2020 falls just short of being Earth's hottest year on record as global warming continues
How does a glacier burst?
Proglacial lakes, formed after glaciers retreat, are often bound by sediment and boulder formations. Additional water or pressure, or structural weakness, can cause both natural and man-made dams to burst, sending a mass of floodwater surging down the rivers and streams fed by the glacier.
In this case, National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Bruce Raup told USA TODAY that the cause of this burst appears to be a landslide that collided with a steep glacier.
He said that steep mountain environments can be hazardous for a number of reasons, including the fact that snow and ice on steep slopes can be unstable and slide catastrophically. In addition, rock and soil slopes, which undergo freeze/thaw cycles, can be unstable and can release, particularly during thaw cycles, Raup said.
Is global warming involved?
Experts said the disaster could be linked to global warming, and a team of scientists was flown to the site Monday to investigate exactly what happened.
Geologist Dwarika Dobhal, from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, told the Guardian that "climate change will make these events more common."
High temperatures coupled with less snowfall can accelerate melting, which can cause water to rise to dangerous levels.
“Most mountain glaciers around the world were much larger in the past and have been melting and shrinking dramatically due to climate change and global warming,” said Sarah Das, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Some 3 million Olympic-size swimming pools full of water melt from glaciers in the Himalayas each year, a 2019 study said, and climate change is the primary cause.
Since the early 20th century, with few exceptions, glaciers around the world have been retreating at unprecedented rates, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said.
Can glacial floods be predicted?
Deadly or highly destructive glacial floods have occurred in Peru and Nepal. In Peru in 1941, 6,000 people died when a glacial lake burst through its dam, flooding the town of Huaraz below it.
A number of areas at risk of glacier bursts have been identified worldwide, including in the Himalayas and in the Andes in South America.
But while monitoring is possible, the remoteness of most glaciers presents challenges.
“There are many glaciers and glacial dammed lakes across the Himalayas, but most are unmonitored,” Das said. “Many of these lakes are upstream of steep river valleys and have the potential to cause extreme flooding when they break. Where these floods reach inhabited regions and sensitive infrastructure, things will be catastrophic.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
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9f09dabd37367e432273e8b1eb5f8897 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/12/stonehenge-mystery-rebuilt-stone-circle-wales-research/6735719002/ | Was Stonehenge moved? New clues suggest the prehistoric monument was first built in Wales | Was Stonehenge moved? New clues suggest the prehistoric monument was first built in Wales
Origins of the prehistoric Stonehenge remain a mystery 5,000 years later, but new research suggests that its bluestones may actually be a dismantled Welsh stone circle.
Archaeologists at University College London recently found that Waun Mawn – an even older stone circle in Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales – has a diameter of about 361 feet, the same as the enclosing ditch of Stonehenge in Salisbury Plain, England.
The recent discovery was connected to Stonehenge because one of its bluestones fits into a hole left by the Welsh circle. Both circles were built so the summer solstice will shine onto the center, researches say, but the exact purpose of the monument remains a mystery.
Mike Parker Pearson, the lead researcher of the university's "Stones of Stonehenge" team who has been leading projects for nearly 20 years, called this "one of the most important discoveries I've ever made."
Only four stones remain at the Waun Mawn site, leading researchers to believe that as people migrated, they took the stones with them.
"This extraordinary event may also have served to unite the peoples of east and west Britain," Parker Pearson said in a news release.
Cremated human remains unearthed in 2018 first linked Stonehenge to Wales. A 2019 study then provided more insight, finding the bluestones were actually moved 180 miles from Wales.
Researchers theorized that the stones ended up so far away because they were relatively easy to remove – a unique characteristic as other Neolithic monuments in Europe used stones from no more than 10 miles away.
Since the bluestones are natural vertical pillars, the joints between them were easily broken apart with wood mallets. Then, quarry workers lowered the 2-ton stones onto wooden sledges and dragged or carried them to the present location, the 2019 study said.
But researchers aren't sure exactly why they were moved.
"It’s as if they just vanished," Parker Pearson said.
Some believe the stones may have ties to the migrants' ancestral identities, which may have prompted them to bring them along as they "start again in this special place," according to Parker Pearson.
Stonehenge is built with of two types of stones: smaller bluestones that date back to 5,000 years ago and more-recentmassive sarsen stones, which all 15 of the monument’s central horseshoe are made from and can weigh up tens of thousands of pounds.
Stonehenge's massive sarsen stones, however, are from Marlborough, England, just 15 miles away, researchers found last year.
With Stonehenge and the nearby Bluestonehenge comprising of nearly 80 stones, researchers say Waun Mawn may not be the only contributing stone circle and there's more discoveries to be made.
"Someone might be lucky enough to find them,"Parker Pearson said.
The study was published Fridayin Antiquity, a peer-reviewed journal.
Contributing: Doyle Rice and Joshua Bote
More:Stonehenge builders came from Wales, new study suggests
Stonehenge mystery solved? Prehistoric French may have inspired it and other European megaliths
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1c8bff2b26272fcac437214fedec4387 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/13/young-americans-may-get-covid-vaccine-before-poorer-nations-elderly/6721043002/ | 'Unethical and unconscionable': Richer nations getting more COVID-19 vaccines than poorer | 'Unethical and unconscionable': Richer nations getting more COVID-19 vaccines than poorer
While images of people lined up for long-awaited COVID-19 vaccinations spurred hope in millions across the globe, they stirred up something else in Dr. Juan Jose Velez: frustration.
Velez runs the coronavirus ward in one of the biggest public hospitals in Colombia, a country with one of the highest death rates and coronavirus positivity rates in the world.
While more than 152 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered globally, with roughly a third of those in the U.S., according to Bloomberg's vaccine tracker, Colombia is among a number of lower- to middle-income countries that still had not administered a single dose by mid-February.
“I think the greatest thing this has shown us is the lack of solidarity ... the fact that lots of countries have started vaccinating while many poorer countries haven't even started," Velez said.
This disparity is playing out across the world, and it’s one health experts have warned of since the onset of the pandemic: While richer countries rapidly vaccinate their populations and buy up doses, other nations are projected to not have wider access to the vaccine until late 2022 or 2023, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
'On the brink of a catastrophic moral failure'
Though some efforts are being made to close that gap, WHO officials warn vaccine nationalism – where countries prioritize vaccination of their own citizens over the rest of the world – has put the world “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.”
“Progress on vaccinations has been wildly uneven and unfair,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said during a Feb. 17 meeting on equitable global distribution.
“Just ten countries have administered 75% of all COVID-19 vaccines,” the UN chief said. “Meanwhile, more than 130 countries have not received a single dose.”
In his hospital in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, Velez said a refrigerator that would eventually carry COVID-19 vaccine vials had arrived, but it was still uncertain when he and other medical staff on the front lines would have access to their first shot. He said he lost count months ago of how many of his patients had died.
Dr. Salim Abdool Karim of South Africa was one of the first to warn of vaccine disparities.
When the pandemic began, he called for a “global public good.”
“The alternative is what we have now: which is countries scrambling, those with deep pockets going and outbidding others to get vaccines, and everyone is in a race to buy up vaccines,” said the infectious diseases epidemiologist, who has worked on HIV/AIDS and polio in Africa. “So middle-income countries, lower-income countries, they just fold their arms and say: 'What are we going to do? We don't have vaccines.'”
He told USA TODAY he’s concerned, but not shocked, at the inequality that has emerged.
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a deal to purchase an additional 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses.
“We’ve now purchased enough vaccine supplies to vaccinate all Americans,” Biden said.
In addition to finalizing contracts with Pfizer and Moderna for 100 million more doses each that will be delivered by the end of July, Biden said 100 million other doses that were supposed to arrive in June will now be delivered in May.
“That’s a month faster,” Biden said. “That means lives will be saved.”
To fulfill his promise of administering 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days, Biden has taken steps both to increase production of vaccines and improve vaccination rates. Biden said Thursday that goal will be surpassed.
Despite high vaccination rates, disparities have also emerged within the U.S. People of color have suffered disproportionate rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths as a result of longstanding systemic inequities and racism. A lack of data is further masking vaccination rollout transparency, health equity researchers say, and the data deficit is hurting those most vulnerable. So far, only 16 states are releasing vaccination counts by race and ethnicity, and the data is incomplete. Early findings show states that rank high on COVID-19 vulnerability indexes are falling behind on vaccinations.
'Just not equal at all': Vaccine rollout in Chicago a microcosm of racial disparities nationwide
OPINION:The hard truth about Black America and the COVID vaccine
In Britain, more than 12 million people have now had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Officials say they are on track to offer first doses to 15 million in the top-priority groups by Monday, and have set a target of vaccinating every adult in the country by the fall.
In Israel, vaccines were made available to all citizens over 16 last week.
It has delivered more than 3.5 million first doses of the Pfizer vaccine and at least 2.1 million second doses in a push to inoculate most of its population since late December. Tel Aviv also has started administering vaccines free of charge to the city’s foreign nationals, many of whom are undocumented asylum seekers.
While Israel's vaccination campaign has won praise internationally for its pace, WHO has also raised concerns that it does not include Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip.
In Africa, countries have counted lower rates of infections and COVID-19 deaths than South America – but the new variant that originated in South Africa has brought with it a worrying increase in infections.
“Vaccine hoarding will only prolong the ordeal and delay Africa's recovery,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. “It is deeply unjust that the most vulnerable Africans are forced to wait for vaccines while lower-risk groups in rich countries are made safe.”
Guterres said people affected by conflict and insecurity are at particular risk of being left out of vaccination campaigns and warned of dire consequences if the world did not respond.
“If the virus is allowed to spread like wildfire in the global south, or parts of it, it will mutate again and again,” he said. “New variants could become more transmissible, more deadly and, potentially, threaten the effectiveness of current vaccines and diagnostics.”
What about COVAX?
In April 2020, WHO launched the COVAX vaccination initiative with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, with a goal to distribute 2 billion doses before 2022. The aim is to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines to participating countries, regardless of income levels, and to distribute enough doses to allow countries to vaccinate 20% of their populations – largely health care workers and the elderly.
“That way, you avoid what in my view would be an unethical and unconscionable thing, which would be countries like the U.K. or the U.S. vaccinating low-risk young people (when) countries in Africa haven't even vaccinated their eldery,” Abdool Karim said.
“It would be completely unacceptable,” he said. Yet, he conceded, it’s probably going to happen. The world throwing its weight behind COVAX would be the best solution, he said.
At that UN session, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. would provide “significant financial support to COVAX,” though he did not provide a specific dollar figure.
The Trump administration had refused to participate in COVAX.
“Every country needs to do its part and contribute to the COVID-19 response,” Blinken said, noting the U.S. had already committed more than $1.6 billion in emergency economic, health, and humanitarian aid to try to help governments and other entities mitigate the effects of COVID.
Blinken said the U.S. would also pay more than $200 million in dues to the World Health Organization, which the Biden administration rejoined after the Trump White House moved to withdraw from the global health body.
“It reflects our renewed commitment to ensuring the WHO has the support it needs to lead the global response to the pandemic, even as we work to reform it for the future,” Blinken told the United Nations during a virtual session.
Iran plans to import about 17 million doses of vaccine from COVAX and millions from other countries. But for now, it's using recently delivered Russian Sputnik V vaccines to inoculate health care professionals. Iranian media have reported that 2 million Russian vaccines will arrive in Iran in February and March.
Cambodia is set to get 7 million doses through the COVAX initiative. For now, China has donated 1 million doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine, enough for half a million people, and the first shipment of 600,000 doses arrived in Cambodia on Feb. 7. Australia also announced a grant of $28 million to purchase 3 million doses.
WHO and global leaders have repeatedly urged richer countries to step up funding to COVAX to aid countries that have less capacity to buy doses. But those calls have been met with mixed success, said Dr. Felicia Knaul, a global health expert and economist.
Countries like Canada, which has done well to control the spread of the virus, has enough vaccines reserved to inoculate its population four times over. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, New Zealand and the European Union have also locked down more vaccines than their population counts. Yet Canada, New Zealand and Chile also elected to use COVAX for doses, as well, spurring criticism.
Global authorities said the move is a form of "double dipping" with vaccines – taking from a global aid scheme while also getting doses from private companies, which poorer nations may not be able to afford.
Canada’s international development minister defended the decision in an interview with CBC News in early February: “Our top priority is to ensure Canadians have access to vaccines. … Canada made the decision, as other countries have, to take on this first allocation, because we recognize how important it is that all Canadians have access to vaccines."
The European Union also recently came under fire when it announced export controls on vaccines produced in its territory, which could affect about 100 countries across the world.
“COVAX, ideally, could be enough. Let's put it this way: If all the world's governments stepped up to support COVAX ... it could be a strategy that could help to ensure equity in vaccine availability,” Knaul said. “There's going to be a lag in timing no matter what, but it could do an amazing amount to help poor countries get access more quickly and at better prices.”
Obstacles from infrastructure to mistrust
Lower- and middle-income countries also face greater challenges when vaccines do arrive.
Abdool Karim explained that many parts of Africa don’t have the medical infrastructure to distribute the shots.
Colombia is covered by large swaths of rurality and roadways that make it challenging to deliver basic medical services, let alone vials that require freezing temperatures.
While Colombia is considered a middle-income country and critics are fast to say a major cause of vaccination lags has also been government failure, it’s also one of the most unequal countries in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, decades of conflict feeds an endemic distrust of government agencies that would have to distribute doses.
Clemencia Carabalí, a community leader in a remote nook of Cauca, Colombia, said she is “not that hopeful” vaccines will come.
“It’s always been difficult to access health services,” she said. “And for the vaccines to arrive to our land, that’s going to be really hard because of problems with intermediation and corruption. It’s possible that they’ll never arrive.”
Others, like Carlos Lopez, a director of a migrant shelter in Guatemala, said he has similar worries about migrant populations in the region because they often lack access to basic health services.
“The majority of migrants don't have any economic resources,” he said. “They're practically going to be the last to be taken into consideration.”
In such zones, Knaul said that ensuring citizens receive two doses will be challenging and that countries will need to play a balancing act in which vaccines they choose to distribute: weighing transportability, price, access, effectiveness and public trust.
In an encouraging sign for nations scrambling for the limited vaccine supply, a single shot of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine reduced transmission of the coronavirus by 67% and provided substantial protection against COVID-19 for at least three months, according to preliminary data from three trials unveiled earlier this month. Knaul and other experts said a single-dose vaccine could cut back significantly on logistical hurdles and concerns that many will get only half-vaccinated.
Johnson & Johnson also has developed a single-dose COVID vaccine.
'Until it is over for us all'
Despite worrying numbers, there have also been signs that point toward the gap closing.
Last week, UNICEF announced a deal with the Serum Institute of India that would create 1.1 billion doses of both the AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines. The vaccines would cost $3 a dose and go to the poorest countries in the world.
UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said that the deal was just an initial agreement and that “more will follow.”
“For countries which have already initiated vaccination drives, and those yet to begin,” Fore said in a statement, “this information is a hopeful marker on the winding path out of a pandemic that will not be truly over, until it is over for us all.”
Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
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132d05a5c5943d517a310cae0142374f | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/19/covid-variant-uk-spread-like-wildfire-and-us-isnt-locking-down/4504001001/ | COVID-19 variant found in UK spreads 'like wildfire.' British experts fear what will happen if US won't lock down | COVID-19 variant found in UK spreads 'like wildfire.' British experts fear what will happen if US won't lock down
LONDON – On Jan. 4, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made yet another somber coronavirus-related address to the nation: A variant first identified in Kent, England, was thought to be 50%-70% more infectious. In little more than a week, hospital admissions had increased by nearly a third. Deaths had risen by 20%. Johnson ordered the country's third full lockdown since the start of the pandemic.
"That means," Johnson said, "the government is once again instructing you to stay at home. You may only leave home for limited reasons permitted in law, such as to shop for essentials, to work if you absolutely cannot work from home, to exercise, to seek medical assistance such as getting a COVID test or to escape domestic abuse."
Monday, amid a dramatic drop in coronavirus infections, Britain's leader will unveil his plan for unwinding one of the world's strictest COVID-19 lockdowns. Only Cuba has tougher restrictions in place, according to an index of government measures compiled by Our World in Data, a research unit attached to Oxford University.
The COVID-19 Government Stringency Index looks at nine different national coronavirus response indicators, including school and workplace closures, travel bans and limits on public and family gatherings. Thomas Hale, one of the researchers behind the index, said it conceals some local and regional variations – particularly in places such as the USA, where city, state and federal authorities rely on a patchwork of coronavirus measures – but overall, it is instructive.
Out of a possible score of 100, Britain hit 86.11 on the index Feb. 18.
The U.S. figure was 68.06.
In Cuba, where even road access to the Caribbean nation's capital, Havana, is restricted, the number is 90.74.
'Like wildfire': B.1.1.7 may soon dominate across the US
American public health officials will watch what Johnson says closely, not least because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that as early as the end of next month, B.1.1.7, the more transmissible coronavirus variant originally identified in Britain in September, is likely to be the dominant one circulating within U.S. borders.
The USA has seen peaks and declines of COVID-19 cases since the first infections were reported in North America in January 2020, but there are concerns that the B.1.1.7 variation is among a number of different variants that could help precipitate a so-called fourth wave of American coronavirus infections.
'It's like we're trying our best to help the virus':A fourth coronavirus wave is looming if the US fails to contain variants, experts say
Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said in a Twitter thread Thursday that a steady decline in U.S. coronavirus cases that has brought levels back to where they were in late October could be threatened by the "rapid take-off of B.1.1.7." He said there is evidence that the B.1.1.7 variant "will reach 50% frequency in the U.S. perhaps by late March."
In the USA, there were 1,523 cases of B.1.1.7 reported across 42 states as of Feb. 18, according to CDC data. To put that in perspective, though new coronavirus infections in the USA have been falling broadly for about a month, the daily new case count for February still averages about 95,000, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. In February, U.S. coronavirus deaths have averaged about 2,520 per day.
In Britain, new daily coronavirus case counts have hovered around 12,000 for the past week. Christina Pagel, who leads a team of researchers at University College London who apply mathematics to problems in health care, said the B.1.1.7 variant makes up about 90% of new cases in Britain.
Variants also emerged from Brazil, South Africa and California. Researchers said the United States is almost certainly undercounting cases of the B.1.1.7 variant. The case count has more than quadrupled since Jan. 27.
"It (B.1.1.7) spreads so easily, like wildfire. It's really caught us by surprise," Carl Waldmann, the director of an intensive care unit at a hospital in Reading in southeast England, told German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
'We are sinking'
As the more contagious variant tore through Britain in January, the government warned that hospitals were on the verge of being overwhelmed. There was a steady stream of pleas from doctors, nurses and other health care workers for the public to abide by Johnson's lockdown.
"It’s brutal, and we are sinking," said Sarah Addis, an emergency room doctor at a hospital in York in northern England on Jan. 8. "Quite simply, we are being overrun. And we are starting to see younger and sicker COVID patients."
On Jan. 20, about 1,820 people died in Britain from coronavirus, the largest number of fatalities reported in a single day since the pandemic began – and almost double the peak from a wave of infections in April, according to Public Health England.
Amid the soaring death toll, British hospitals canceled all elective surgeries. Appointments for cancer diagnoses were halted. Health care staffers were redeployed to coronavirus intensive care units even though they lacked specialized training. Ambulances full of coronavirus patients queued up outside hospitals waiting for beds.
Johnson is likely to announce a phased return for some schools starting March 8. It's not clear if rules around gatherings, nonessential retail and hospitality will be relaxed. He clamped down on international travel, adding mandatory hotel quarantine for travelers arriving from some countries.
Britain has administered more vaccines per 100 people than any other advanced economy except for Israel, according to Our World in Data. There is little data to show how well the vaccines affect new U.K. infections.
'We can't control this thing with half-measures'
Simon Clarke, a professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said there is an emerging body of evidence suggesting that the B.1.1.7 variant is not only more contagious but also more lethal, a possibility initially raised by British scientists. He said there is anecdotal evidence from hospitals, not confirmed by studies, that the B.1.1.7 variant could harm more younger people. He cautioned it was too early to drawn firm conclusions.
He expressed concern about how the United States would deal with B.1.1.7 if, as expected, it becomes entrenched as the dominant variant by the spring.
"U.S. coronavirus waves have been based on slower-moving variants," Clarke said.
"If a faster-moving one such as B.1.1.7 starts to take off, then you are going to have yourself a problem if you're not prepared to do a strict, broad-based national lockdown," Clarke said, noting that the United States doesn't seem willing to do this.
Unlike Britain's nationwide orders, not all U.S. states have restrictions on travel for leisure, many states offer exemptions that allow restaurants to stay open and many have resisted calls for entertainment venues, gyms and personal care businesses such as hair salons and tattoo parlors to be closed. It is largely up to local officials to decide whether and how to impose U.S. coronavirus restrictions.
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Other countries in Europe that have not imposed lockdowns as strict as Britain's have struggled to keep rising cases of the B.1.1.7 variant in check.
"If you want to get B.1.1.7 under control, lockdowns just have to be that much tougher," said Kit Yates, a professor of mathematical biology at the University of Bath, England.
Yates said he believes that when schools in Britain reopen, coronavirus cases are likely to rise again despite new evidence that the B.1.1.7 variant's transmissibility may not be as high as originally thought. It may be closer to 30% to 40%, he said, more contagious than that of the more commonly found variants in the USA.
Pagel, the University College London researcher, said Britain's latest lockdown has reduced new cases of coronavirus by about 60%. "That's the good news," she said. "The bad news is that we can't control this thing with half-measures."
She said that if the United States can't or won't order a national lockdown similar to Britain's to deal with the B.1.1.7 variant, its best hope may be to "vaccinate its way out."
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Pagel cautioned that if the variant first detected in Britain is allowed to circulate too freely in the USA, it could lead to an even more aggressive variation that could evade vaccines or better target younger people.
She said that cases of an older variant could fall rapidly enough that it might look like everything was OK even while a new variant spread.
"Effectively, you have two epidemics going on at the same time where one is shrinking, and one is growing," she said. "That's exactly what happened in the U.K. and seems likely for the U.S."
Contributing: Chloe Laversuch, The York Press; Mike Stucka, USA TODAY
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d0d593f6ab98347e11220e5e755363c0 | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/20/alexei-navalny-loses-appeal-against-sentence-calls-putin-voldemort/4522162001/ | Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny loses appeal against prison sentence, calls Putin 'Voldemort' | Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny loses appeal against prison sentence, calls Putin 'Voldemort'
MOSCOW – A Moscow court on Saturday rejected Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s appeal against his prison sentence, even as the country faced a top European rights court’s order to free the Kremlin’s most prominent foe.
Speaking before the verdict, Navalny urged Russians to stand up to the Kremlin in a fiery speech mixing references to the Bible and “Harry Potter.”
A lower court sentenced Navalny earlier this month to two years and eight months in prison for violating terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.
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Navalny, 44, an anti-corruption crusader and President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, appealed the prison sentence and asked to be released. The Moscow City Court's judge on Saturday only slightly reduced his sentence to just over 2 1/2 years in prison, ruling that a month-and-half Navalny spent under house arrest in early 2015 will be deducted from his sentence.
The sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Navalny has rejected as fabricated and the European Сourt of Human Rights has ruled to be unlawful.
His arrest and imprisonment have fueled a huge wave of protests across Russia. Authorities responded with a sweeping crackdown, detaining about 11,000 people, many of whom were fined or given jail terms ranging from seven to 15 days.
In his speech at the hearing, Navalny referenced the Bible as well as “Harry Potter” and the animated sitcom “Rick and Morty” as he urged Russians to resist pressure from the authorities and challenge the Kremlin to build a fairer and more prosperous country.
“The government’s task is to scare you and then persuade you that you are alone,” he said. "Our Voldemort in his palace also wants me to feel cut off,” he added, in a reference to Putin.
“To live is to risk it all,” he continued. “Otherwise, you’re just an inert chunk of randomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe blows you.”
'Putin is turning his main threat into a martyr':Will attack on Navalny, journalists and 5,700 detained Russians backfire?
Navalny also addressed the judge and the prosecutor, arguing that they could have a much better life in a new Russia.
“Just imagine how wonderful life would be without constant lying,” he said. “Imagine how great it would be to work as a judge ... when no one would be able to call you and give you directions what verdicts to issue.”
He insisted that he was unable to report to the authorities in line with his probation requirements while he was convalescing in Germany after his poisoning, emphasizing that he returned to Russia immediately after his health allowed.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he said. “The entire world knew where I was.”
Navalny said he was an atheist before but has come to believe in God, adding that his faith helped him face his challenges. He said he believed the Bible saying that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, and that he felt no regret in returning home.
“Even though our country is built on injustice and we all constantly face injustice ... we also see that millions of people, tens of millions of people, want righteousness,” Navalny told the court. “They want the righteousness and sooner or later they will have it.”
Asked about the impact of Navalny's prison sentence on Russia's politics, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the country's “rich and multifaceted” political scene will develop regardless of the verdict.
Russia has rejected Western criticism of Navalny’s arrest and the crackdown on demonstrations as meddling in its internal affairs.
In a ruling Tuesday, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Russian government to release Navalny, citing “the nature and extent of risk to the applicant’s life.” The Strasbourg-based court noted that Navalny has contested Russian authorities’ argument that they had taken sufficient measures to safeguard his life and well-being in custody following the nerve agent attack.
The Russian government has rebuffed the ECHR's demand, describing the ruling as unlawful and “inadmissible” meddling in Russia’s affairs.
In the past, Moscow has abided by the ECHR’s rulings awarding compensations to Russian citizens who have contested verdicts in Russian courts, but it never faced a demand by the European court to set a convict free.
In a sign of its long-held annoyance with the Strasbourg court’s verdicts, Russia last year adopted a constitutional amendment declaring the priority of national legislation over international law. Russian authorities might now use that provision to reject the ECHR’s ruling.
Later on Saturday, Navalny also faced proceedings in a separate case on charges of defaming a World War II veteran. Prosecutors have asked the judge to order Navalny to pay a fine of 950,000 rubles (about $13,000).
Navalny, who called the 94-year-old veteran and other people featured in a pro-Kremlin video last year as “corrupt stooges,” “people without conscience” and “traitors,” has rejected the slander charges and described them as part of official efforts to disparage him.
Navalny said at the hearing that his accusers “will burn in hell.”
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0d29e5aeeb575fb03eea9e57ef77929d | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/21/iran-nuclear-deal-inspections-javad-zarif-joe-biden/4532047001/ | Iran says it will begin limiting international monitoring of its nuclear sites | Iran says it will begin limiting international monitoring of its nuclear sites
Iran's top diplomat insisted Sunday the United States must lift economic sanctions imposed on it by the Trump administration before the 2015 nuclear pact can be revived.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif's remarks came as Tehran confirmed it would begin limiting additional international monitoring of its nuclear sites Tuesday, a move that for Iran represents another lean away from the accord exited by the U.S. in 2018.
Zarif's comments also follow an offer from President Joe Biden's administration to meet with Iran and other world powers involved in negotiating the agreement.
Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tehran had "not yet responded" to that diplomatic opening.
"It is Iran that is isolated now diplomatically, not the United States," Sullivan told CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "And the ball is in their court."
In an interview with Iran's state-run, English-language broadcaster Press TV, Zarif said: "The United States must return to the deal and lift all sanctions ... The United States is addicted to sanctions, but they should know that Iran will not yield to pressure."
Zarif did not confirm Iran was rejecting Biden's offer of diplomacy.
The nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, was negotiated by the U.S. with Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom.
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His weekend remarks reflect the position Iran has held since the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear deal. Iran has said it will resume negotiations with the U.S. only when the sanctions are lifted because it is Washington, not Tehran, that exited the accord.
The U.S. has been unwilling to take that first step, although the Biden administration's offer Thursday to hold talks was its first public attempt at renewed diplomacy. Sullivan said the U.S. has "begun to communicate" with Iran regarding detained U.S. nationals.
The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Sunday that its inspectors would have "less access" to Iran's nuclear sites, but the agency would still be able to monitor the country's atomic program.
Rafael Grossi made the comments in Vienna, after traveling to Iran to seek "a mutually agreeable solution for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to continue essential verification activities in the country."
Grossi said there still would be the same number of inspectors, but there would be "things we lose."
Zarif said IAEA surveillance cameras at some of Iran's nuclear sites would be shut off Tuesday, in line with a law passed by Iran's Parliament. These cameras were installed as part of an "additional protocol" of the nuclear deal. Also, some nuclear inspectors will be barred from the sites.
The protocol is a voluntary agreement between Tehran and the IAEA reached as part of the nuclear agreement. Under the measure, the agency "collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by its sophisticated surveillance cameras,” it said in 2017, adding that it had placed "2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment."
Iran’s parliament in December approved a bill that would suspend part of IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories did not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by Tuesday. The IAEA is the United Nations' nuclear watchdog.
Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal because he said it didn't go far enough to curb Iran's ballistic missile program and its support for terrorist groups in the region. But Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have also repeatedly said the U.S. would rejoin the agreement – and lift the crippling sanctions imposed by the Trump administration – only if Iran first came back into compliance with the deal.
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In the Press TV interview, Zarif said the new access restrictions placed on the nuclear sites, as well as previous steps Iran has taken to enrich more uranium, were reversible.
"This is not a deadline for the world. This is not an ultimatum," Zarif said.
Mohammad Farahani, editor-in-chief of a news agency linked to Iran's judiciary, said in an email that the U.S. sanctions that have targeted Iran's oil and banking sectors have also hindered the country's access to basic and humanitarian goods.
"Iranians want these cruel sanctions lifted," he said, adding that he saw no path to new diplomacy before the sanctions were addressed.
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7b4963fde5b44717e350981bcd9a90fd | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/02/22/ancient-art-australias-oldest-rock-painting-kangaroo/4544534001/ | At 17,000 years, Australia's oldest painting is of the beloved kangaroo | At 17,000 years, Australia's oldest painting is of the beloved kangaroo
Australia's oldest rock painting is of the continent's most iconic animal: a kangaroo.
At about 17,000 years old, it's the oldest painting yet discovered in Australia, scientists announced in a study published Monday.
"This is a significant find, as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the world these ancient artists lived in," lead author Damien Finch of the University of Melbourne said in a statement.
The kangaroo was painted using dark mulberry paint on the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter in the northeastern Kimberley region of western Australia. Other ancient paintings were found in the same region, researchers said.
The Kimberley region is renowned for its rich rock art galleries, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. said. The naturalistic style analyzed in the study is one of the oldest of at least six distinct phases of paintings documented in the region.
The age of the paintings was determined by ancient wasp nests, of all things. Researchers found that some rock paintings had the remains of 27 wasp nests, which can be radiocarbon-dated, above and below the painted images.
By dating the wasp nests, the authors were able to determine that the paintings were done 17,000 to 13,000 years ago.
Finch said it was rare to find mud wasp nests overlying and underlying a single painting. Researchers were able to sample the nests to establish the minimum and maximum age for the artwork.
"We radiocarbon-dated three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built over it to determine, confidently, that the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old, most likely 17,300 years old," he said.
"We can never know what was in the mind of the artist when he or she painted this piece of work more than 600 generations ago, but we do know that the Naturalistic period extended back into the last ice age, so the environment was cooler and drier than today," Finch said.
Some other images were in the same area: The majority of the paintings were depictions of animals, including a snake, a lizard-like figure and three macropods (a family of marsupials including kangaroos, wallabies and quokkas). Quokkas are animals about the size of a domestic cat.
Sven Ouzman of the University of Western Australia, one of the project's chief researchers, said the rock painting would help broaden the understanding of Indigenous cultural history: "This iconic kangaroo image is visually similar to rock paintings from islands in Southeast Asia dated to more than 40,000 years ago, suggesting a cultural link – and hinting at still older rock art in Australia," Ouzman said in a statement.
Cissy Gore-Birch of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation said: "It's important that Indigenous knowledge and stories are not lost and continue to be shared for generations to come. The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia's history."
The study was published Monday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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1619d3a85ddc48c1d899d594e9134957 | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-collapse-of-the-campaign-finance-regime/ | A Collapse of the Campaign Finance Regime? | A Collapse of the Campaign Finance Regime? This article originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of The Forum. Copyright is given to The Berkeley Electronic Press. The fascinating 2008 presidential election has produced many unexpected twists and turns, with more likely to follow on the long road to the national party conventions and November election. Those of us who profess to be experts on presidential elections have been humbled by the limits of received wisdom and by the rapid pace of change in many aspects of electioneering. Campaign finance is one such change. Developments are sufficiently dramatic as to raise questions about the viability of the entire regime of campaign finance law. The presidential public financing system is largely irrelevant in this election cycle. All of the serious candidates except John Edwards opted out of public matching grants in the nomination phase (in John McCain’s case, not without a legal challenge) and both major party candidates may forego the public grant in the general election. (Even if they don’t, those public funds are likely to be dwarfed by independent expenditures by parties and outside groups.) The striking increase in private funds raised by presidential candidates, initially from maxedout individual donors facilitated by bundlers and later from Internet-based small donors, confirms that many candidates have real alternatives to public funding and the spending limits that come with it. Outside groups have also had a large campaign finance presence in the current election cycle, a presence that will become even more prominent once both presidential nominees are decided and the general election campaign begins in earnest. The new Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts, with Justice Alito replacing Justice O’Connor, has moved in a decidedly deregulatory direction. James Bopp and Brad Smith are mapping and executing a very promising litigation strategy aimed at limiting or reversing earlier decisions – extending from McConnell v. Federal Election Commission to Buckley v. Valeo and before – upholding various forms of campaign finance regulation. They will likely have a sympathetic Court to work with for some time. And an extended political deadlock between Senate Democrats and Republicans over the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky as Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has left the agency with only two members (two short of the majority required for formal action) in the heat of a highly contested presidential election. Assessing how these developments have altered the regulatory regime and exploring how they might more dramatically reshape the role of money in elections are central to this issue of The Forum. I hope it might presage some cooling of the ideologically-charged and tendentious debates about campaign finance that have become so depressingly repetitive and sterile. Most of these debates revolve around the alleged objectives and consequences of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, widely know as McCain-Feingold. Let me be clear about my own perspective on this matter. McCain-Feingold was a very limited legislative initiative designed to restore the effectiveness and credibility of longstanding contribution limits and restrictions on the use of corporate and union treasury funds in federal elections. Its two major pillars – a ban on party soft money and the regulation of electioneering communications – were agnostic about the total amount of money raised and spent in federal elections even while the rhetoric of some of the bill’s supporters in Congress and outside reformers made clear they longed for a reduction in the money chase. The ban on party soft money has been remarkably successful: parties and elected officials are out of the business of soliciting large unlimited contributions from corporations, unions, and individuals. For the most part, soft money contributions have not been diverted to outside groups. And the parties have adapted very well to a post-soft money world. They are today more significant players in the financing of presidential and congressional elections than they were before the enactment of McCain-Feingold. The electioneering communications section of the law was limited to candidate-specific broadcast, cable and satellite communications to targeted audiences in close proximity to primary and general elections. Its purpose was to extend the existing prohibition on corporate and union expenditures on express advocacy to what had become its functional equivalent. McCain-Feingold left untouched the many avenues for campaigning available to corporations and unions not covered by the bright-line test for electioneering (or by the ban on party soft money). The second pillar of McCain-Feingold also imposed no new restrictions on large individual donors. Pre-existing law set a limit of $5,000 for individual contributions to non-party political committees. The electioneering provision of McCain-Feingold largely achieved the limited goal it set for itself, although that goal increasingly appears circumscribed by outside group activity unaddressed and unaffected by the law. Moreover, the successful as-applied challenge in FEC v. WRTL is likely to open new opportunities for candidate-specific advertising supported by corporations and unions (see the Briffault article in this issue). Critics of McCain-Feingold clearly take a much less benign view of the law’s purposes and consequences. Their arguments sometimes emphasize the draconian reach and impact of the law, other times its ineffectualness and pattern of generating unintended negative consequences. Most prominent among the former is that campaign finance law, McCain-Feingold in particular, suppresses free speech. The argument is decidedly theoretical, not empirical. By virtually every indicator available – ads broadcast, dollars spent, the diversity of views expressed in all forms of campaign activity – political speech has been alive and well in the elections since the enactment of McCain-Feingold. Compared with most other democracies which routinely prohibit paid campaign ads, limit expenditures by parties and candidates, and ban independent expenditures by groups and individuals, free speech in this country is guaranteed by a powerful First Amendment. Repeated charges, by such serious analysts as columnists David Broder, Robert Samuelson and George Will, that McCain-Feingold imposes a reign of censorship rest on a house of cards. It is not surprising that campaign finance critics scrambled to put together a test case to bring an as-applied challenge since no real ones were available. Attorney James Bopp, Jr. searched nationally for groups that would be willing to run an appropriate ad and eventually struck pay dirt in Maine and Wisconsin. This was a perfectly legitimate legal strategy that proved successful but hardly evidence of the suppression of political speech. Critics often argue that the law harms political parties by denying them an important source of income and weakening them relative to unregulated nonparty groups. Yet party fundraising and spending in the 2004 and 2008 elections relative to those preceding McCain-Feingold have been robust, with large sums spent (and more efficiently than soft-money financed “issue ads”) on behalf of candidates and state and local party organizations. Moreover, the increase in electioneering activities by 527 and nonprofit organizations began before McCain-Feingold was on the books. Clearly, larger forces are at work. Some have even argued that McCain-Feingold is responsible for the collapse of the presidential public financing system by virtue of its doubling and indexing of individual contribution limits. That is preposterous. Many aspects of the public grant program – state and national spending limits, the size of the match, the timing of payments – fell out of date well before the new law was enacted. George W. Bush successfully opted out of the public match program in 2000 and would have done the same in 2004 without any change in contribution limits. The same is true for Dean and Kerry in 2004 and the major presidential candidates in 2008. Critics also point to the fecklessness of efforts such as McCain-Feingold to limit the amount of money in elections or the overall role of wealthy individuals. I agree that such efforts are likely to fail but insist that they were not objectives of this most recent round of reform. My resistance to the arguments leveled at McCain-Feingold by its critics does not mean that I believe that the constitutional rationale for and traditional approaches to campaign finance regulation will or indeed should have a bright future. The constitutional, political and practical obstacles to maintaining and strengthening the current regime are daunting. The Roberts Court will look askance at legislative initiatives to shore up the regulatory system as they reconsider previous decisions. New opportunities for fundraising will make it even more difficult to use public funds to entice candidates to limit their spending. Parties and nonparty groups will use their constitutionally protected right to make independent expenditures to prevent any election campaign from being fully financed with public funds and to ensure a cacophony of voices in federal election campaigns. Determined wealthy individuals will avail themselves of a myriad of legally-sanctioned channels for attempting to influence the outcome of elections. Continuing partisan battles over the appointment of FEC commissioners will reinforce the many other sources of the agency’s ineffectiveness. Consequently, I think we are overdue for a reconsideration of campaign finance regulation, one that doesn’t simply rehash the old and stale arguments between reformers and deregulators. Technology is dramatically reshaping the ways in which funds are raised and campaigns are conducted. The not-too-distant future may witness major reductions in the cost of campaigns (with targeted digital communications replacing broadcast ads) and the replacement of a limited number of large contributors with millions of small donors. Candidates and parties will have less control of their campaigns as the potential of the Internet for motivated individuals and self-forming social groups is more fully realized. In this new world, some forms of regulation might stymie rather than facilitate constructive change. At the same time, limits on contributions to candidates and parties might well prove of lasting value. The point is that serious rethinking of the new world of campaigns and campaign finance, one characterized by openness and pragmatism, not by ideological rigidity, is to be welcomed. The 2008 presidential election cycle provides some encouraging developments for those concerned about the role of money in politics. These include the rise of small donors, the failure of some well-funded campaigns and the success of others that were poorly funded, the limits of paid broadcast ads, the investments in grassroots campaigning, and the signs that suggest fundraising is more an indicator than a cause of interest, energy and electoral appeal. Huge challenges lie ahead. Encouraging electoral competition, strengthening transparency, promoting political equality, and reducing conflicts of interest in our electoral system require continuing attention to the role of money. But the question of how best to advance those objectives becomes more interesting with each passing year. Read the full forum » |
cc98fb25478845cacd5185ad0012a994 | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/america-slams-the-door-on-its-foot-washingtons-destructive-new-visa-policies/ | America Slams the Door (On Its Foot): Washington’s Destructive New Visa Policies | America Slams the Door (On Its Foot): Washington’s Destructive New Visa Policies On January 28, Ejaz Haider—the editor of one of Pakistan’s most influential newspapers and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution—was stopped outside the Washington think tank by two armed, plainclothes officers from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Haider had originally been invited to the United States by the State Department for a conference on U.S.-Pakistan relations. Nonetheless, he was arrested, hustled into a car, driven to a detention center, and interrogated for hours. The charge: he had allegedly failed to properly register his presence in the country—something now required of visitors from many Muslim countries to the United States as part of a stringent set of immigration restrictions that have been imposed since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Haider’s arrest occurred despite the fact that he had been invited by the U.S. government, had already registered on his arrival, and indeed had been extensively interrogated when he first entered the country, some three months earlier. He had since done exactly as he was instructed by the INS’ own telephone help line. High-ranking officials at the State Department quickly intervened, raising sharp protests with their colleagues at the INS, and Haider was released that night, dumped in suburban Washington, D.C., with little but a subway card in his pocket. Furious, the Pakistani journalist, who had been to the United States six times before, resolved that he would not return as long as such policies continue. “This is not the United States I used to come to,” he told The Washington Post. |
4e4fca6fba59129668487769b837e329 | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-economic-evaluation-of-the-economic-growth-and-tax-relief-reconciliation-act-of-2001/ | An Economic Evaluation of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 | An Economic Evaluation of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 This paper summarizes and evaluates the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act. Enacted in 2001, EGTRRA is the biggest tax cut in 20 years, and features income tax rate cuts, new targeted incentives and estate tax repeal. Our central conclusions are that EGTRRA will reduce the size of the future economy, raise interest rates, make taxes more regressive, increase tax complexity, and prove fiscally unsustainable. |
23061a02fa8d4b3fc05666b8a992b46f | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/an-institutional-gap-for-disaster-idps/?shared=email&msg=fail | An Institutional Gap for Disaster IDPs | An Institutional Gap for Disaster IDPs EXCERPT Climate change is expected to sharply increase the number and severity of natural disasters, displacing millions on all continents. The international community needs to recognize “disaster IDPs”—and establish new institutional arrangements to protect their human rights. When the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement were drafted in the 1990s, there was little consensus over whether they should include the rights of people uprooted by natural disasters. Those opposed argued that only persons fleeing persecution and violence should be considered IDPs—in other words, persons who would qualify as refugees if they crossed a border. But the majority favored including those uprooted by natural disasters because in responding to disasters, governments often discriminate against or neglect certain groups on political or ethnic grounds or overlook their human rights in other ways. Nonetheless, not all experts, governments, international organizations and NGOs endorsed this broad formulation and even today many try to sidestep it. A report of experts to the UK government in 2005 recommended that the IDP concept be limited to persons displaced by violence because the causes and remedies of conflict-induced and disaster-induced displacement were different, making it “confusing” to include both in th IDP definition. [1] Some governments have also shied away from calling persons uprooted by natural disasters IDPs. In Aceh, Indonesia, the government preferred labelling those uprooted by the tsunami “homeless”, presumably to distinguish them from the more politicised “conflict IDPs” to whom the government had barred access. [2] In the US, government officials settled on every possible description of those uprooted by Hurricane Katrina except IDPs. They described them as “refugees”, “evacuees”, and, finally, “disaster victims”, because IDPs in their view were people displaced by conflict elsewhere. Nor does the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) include people uprooted by disasters in its statistics, although it clearly acknowledges that such people are IDPs. Not dissimilarly, UNHCR made clear in 2005 that while it would serve as the lead agency for the protection of “conflict IDPs” in the UN’s new cluster approach, its role would not extend to those uprooted by disaster except “in extraordinary circumstances.”[3] Download complete article » (external link) [1] See Castles, S & Van Hear, N 2005, ‘Developing DFID’s Policy Approach to Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons’, Refugee Studies Centre, p12. http://tiny.cc/DFIDPolicy. [2] Couldrey, M & Morris, T, ‘Post-tsunami protection concerns in Aceh’, Forced Migration Review, July 2005 http://www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/Tsunami/12.pdf. [3] UNHCR, Internally Displaced People: Questions and Answers, September 2007 http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/405ef8c64.pdf. |
a642b9a23001f2c01558d88b623a863f | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/assessing-the-g-20-stimulus-plans-a-deeper-look/ | Assessing the G-20 Stimulus Plans: A Deeper Look | Assessing the G-20 Stimulus Plans: A Deeper Look Editor’s Note: Almost all of the G-20 countries have announced some type of fiscal stimulus plan to get their economies back on track but how strong are the plans and what measures are included? Eswar Prasad and Isaac Sorkin analyze the G-20 stimulus plans in detail in new research. View the interactive map » The financial crisis turned into a broader macroeconomic crisis in the fall of 2008. The world economy has hit a wall since then, with growth plunging in all the major advanced and emerging economies. Monetary policy acted as a first line of defense against the crisis but conventional measures appear to have reached their limits in many countries. Policy interest rates in many countries–including the U.S., U.K. and Japan–are now close to the zero nominal interest rate floor. Moreover, the implosion of financial systems in many economies has rendered monetary transmission mechanisms far less effective. Thus, fiscal policy has become essential to kick-start the global recovery or, at a minimum, to prevent global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from declining further. At the November 2008 G-20 Summit in Washington, DC, the leaders of the G-20 countries promised to “use fiscal measures to stimulate domestic demand to rapid effect, as appropriate, while maintaining a policy framework conducive to fiscal sustainability.” How well have countries been doing on this promise? In this note, we provide a detailed assessment of the stimulus measures in each of the G-20 economies. We first present data on the size of fiscal stimulus packages as announced by the authorities and compiled by the IMF.[1] These data represent estimates of the size of new measures, rather than the announced size of stimulus packages, which typically includes measures already planned before the scope of the crisis became clear. We then supplement these bottom-line numbers with additional information from a variety of sources. This allows us to evaluate the fiscal stimulus packages based on three key criteria: These criteria enable us to systematically evaluate the potential punch packed by fiscal policy in each country. This analysis also sheds some light on the amount of stimulus on a global scale. In an integrated world economy, the effectiveness of stimulus is contingent on how coordinated it is across countries. If the sizes of the stimulus packages (relative to domestic GDP) are very different across countries or if the effects of some countries’ stimulus packages are backloaded, then there could be “leakage” of stimulus from countries that act early and forcefully. Thus, lack of coordination could reduce the global bang for the buck of individual countries’ policies. Given the dire situation the world economy is in, large frontloaded stimulus packages that are coordinated internationally could not only be more effective directly but also boost consumer and corporate confidence. Our analysis is limited to the G-20 countries, mainly because this has de facto become the main global grouping of countries that is driving responses to the crisis. The G-20 countries in this analysis (substituting Spain for the EU) constitute over three-quarters of global GDP (on a market exchange rate basis) and over two-thirds of the world’s population. We begin with a broad assessment of the contours of stimulus packages announced so far. The interactive country map provides extensive details on individual countries’ packages. It also indicates our assessment of countries that have announced packages that are large and frontloaded (green), modest in size and speed (yellow) and unimpressive in both respects (grey). Size of Stimulus Almost all countries in the G-20 have announced fiscal stimulus measures.[2] The total amount of stimulus in the G-20 amounts to about $692 billion for 2009, which is about 1.4 percent of their combined GDP and a little over 1.1 percent of global GDP. This is a significant amount of stimulus, but appears to fall short of what is needed to tackle a crisis of the proportion we are currently in. The IMF, for instance, has called for stimulus equal to 2 percent of global GDP.[3] Three countries—the U.S., China and Japan—account for about $424 billion of the overall stimulus in 2009, with their shares in the overall global stimulus amounting to 39 percent (U.S.), 13 percent (China) and 10 percent (Japan). Measures for 2009 in the U.S. stimulus package amount to 1.9 percent of its 2008 GDP and the corresponding numbers for China and Japan are 2.1 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively. For the remaining G-20 economies, the total fiscal stimulus amounts to 1.0 percent of their overall GDP. In 2010, the U.S. accounts for over 60 percent of planned stimulus. China and Germany are the next largest contributors with China contributing 15 percent of G-20 stimulus and Germany contributing 11 percent. Measures for 2010 in the U.S. stimulus package amount to 2.9 percent of 2008 GDP, China’s 2.3 percent, and Germany’s 2.0 percent. In summary, while almost all countries have signed on to the fiscal stimulus program, the size of the stimulus varies substantially across countries, with some of the stimulus packages looking downright meek (e.g., France, which has proposed measures amounting to only 0.7 percent of GDP in 2009). Composition of Stimulus There is considerable discussion about the relative effectiveness of tax cuts versus spending in stimulating domestic demand. We do not take a position on this but it is useful nevertheless to examine the choices made by different countries in this dimension. We highlight one regularity in the composition of packages across countries and then indicate one dimension in which the structure of the packages differs markedly across countries. Most countries that have announced multiple waves of stimulus have increased the share of spending (compared to tax cuts) in the second round, just as the U.S. has done from January 2008 to January 2009. For example, Germany’s stimulus in November 2008 was largely composed of tax cuts. The second stimulus package announced in January 2009 was largely tilted towards spending. Similar features can be found in the stimulus measures announced in Australia in October 2008 and February 2009, and in Spain in March 2008 in November 2008. There is a great deal of variation across countries in the share of the stimulus that is devoted to tax cuts. In the U.S., this share is about 45 percent. Some countries—including Brazil, Russia and the U.K.—have focused almost entirely on tax cuts. Others—including Argentina, China and India—have mostly proposed spending measures. Among the G-20 countries excluding the U.S., about one-third of the stimulus is accounted for by tax cuts and the remainder by spending measures. Speed of Stimulus Countries vary in the degree of frontloading of their stimulus packages—the speed with which the tax and expenditure measures hit the real economy (in terms of money reaching the pockets of firms and households, or government monies being spent on social programs or procurement). This is partially a function of the vagaries of the budget process in each country—countries may not announce stimulus for the future though they intend to enact it as part of their regular budget process. Of the 19 countries that make up the G-20, only four countries—China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.—plan to spend as much or more on stimulus (as a share of GDP) in 2010 than in 2009. In other words, there is a fair amount of frontloading in the stimulus packages of the G-20 countries, with much of the stimulus taking effect in 2009. Of course, this could reflect different beliefs about the length of the recession. It could also reflect difficulty in ramping up government expenditure quickly, especially on infrastructure and other investment projects. We should also note that some countries recognized the coming crisis and implemented stimulus plans at some point in 2008. This list includes Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, U.K. and the U.S. Bottom Line Fiscal stimulus has a crucial role to play in stabilizing the world economy, especially as conventional monetary policy appears to have reached its limit in many countries. By and large, policymakers in G-20 economies have acted on their leaders’ joint announcement in November 2008 to use fiscal stimulus in a concerted and coordinated manner to boost economic activity. Some countries like China and the U.S. have responded forcefully, with impressive packages. But the execution, both in terms of size and speed, leaves much to be desired in some of the G-20 countries. There are legitimate questions about the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus, especially in economies where the financial system has broken down and where monetary policy can no longer play much of a supporting role. Moreover, excessive government borrowing to finance large budget deficits could itself generate instability and there are serious concerns about medium-term sustainability of fiscal positions in economies that are building up public debt at a rapid pace. Given the dire and fast-deteriorating economic situation and the lack of other tools, however, the world may have little choice but to engage in massive frontloaded fiscal expansion. The consequences of timidity, as history teaches us, could be even worse. View larger version of the table » View map resources » |
8db9a65e9817496c17631f580bb6445a | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bipolar-disorder-is-america-divided/ | Bipolar Disorder: Is America Divided? | Bipolar Disorder: Is America Divided? Have fear, Americans. Ours is a country divided. On one side are those who divide Americans into two sides; on the other are all the rest. Yes, America today is divided over the question of whether America is divided. All right, I’m joking. But the joke has a kernel of truth. In 1991 James Davison Hunter, a professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia, made his mark with an influential book called Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The notion of a country deeply and fundamentally divided over core moral and political values soon made its way into politics; in 1992 Patrick Buchanan told the Republicans at their national convention that they were fighting “a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” By 1996, in his singeing dissent in the gay-rights case Romer v. Evans, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia could accuse the Court of “tak[ing] sides in the culture wars,” and everyone knew exactly what he meant. In 2000 those ubiquitous election-night maps came along, with their red expanses of Bush states in the heartland and their blue blocks of Gore territory along the coasts and the Great Lakes. From then on everyone talked about red America and blue America as if they were separate countries. The 2004 post-election maps, which looked almost identical to the 2000 ones, further entrenched the conventional wisdom, to the point where most newspaper readers can recite the tropes: red America is godly, moralistic, patriotic, predominantly white, masculine, less educated, and heavily rural and suburban; blue America is secular, relativistic, internationalist, multicultural, feminine, college educated, and heavily urban and cosmopolitan. Reds vote for guns and capital punishment and war in Iraq, blues for abortion rights and the environment. In red America, Saturday is for NASCAR and Sunday is for church. In blue America, Saturday is for the farmers’ market (provided there are no actual farmers) and Sunday is for The New York Times. An odd thing, however, happened to many of the scholars who set out to map this culture war: they couldn’t find it. If the country is split into culturally and politically distinct camps, they ought to be fairly easy to locate. Yet scholars investigating the phenomenon have often come back empty-handed. Other scholars have tried to explain why. And so, in the fullness of time, the country has arrived at today’s great divide over whether there is a great divide. One amusing example: In April of last year The Washington Post ran a front-page Sunday article headlined “Political Split Is Pervasive.” It quoted various experts as saying, for example, “We have two parallel universes” and “People in these two countries don’t even see each other.” In June, The New York Times shot back with an article headlined “A Nation Divided? Who Says?” It quoted another set of experts who maintained that Americans’ disagreements are actually smaller than in the past and shrinking. Courageously, your correspondent set out into the zone of conflict. The culture-war hypothesis has generated some fairly rigorous scholarship in recent years, and I examined it. I wound up believing that a dichotomy holds the solution to the puzzle: American politics is polarized but the American public is not. In fact, what may be the most striking feature of the contemporary American landscape—a surprise, given today’s bitterly adversarial politics—is not the culture war but the culture peace. What, exactly, do people mean when they talk about a divided or polarized America? Often they mean simply that the country is evenly divided: split fifty-fifty, politically speaking. And so it indubitably and strikingly is. In 1979 Democratic senators, House members, governors, and state legislators commandingly outnumbered Republicans; since early in this decade the numbers have been close to equal, with Republicans slightly ahead. Opinion polls show that Republicans and Democrats are effectively tied for the public’s loyalty. For the time being, America doesn’t have a dominant party. That may sound odd, given the Republicans’ dominance in winner-take-all Washington. But in fact the 2004 elections confirmed that the parties are remarkably close to parity. The presidential election was tight, especially considering that an incumbent president was in the race. Republicans picked up four Senate seats, but the House of Representatives barely budged. The partisan allocation of state legislative seats (now close to parity) and of governorships (mildly favoring Republicans) also barely budged. As if to make parity official, in the main exit poll voters described themselves as Democrats and Republicans in precisely equal proportions. To political analysts, who live in a world of zero-sum contests between two political parties, it seems natural to conclude that partisan division entails cultural division. Sometimes they elide the very distinction. In his book The Two Americas (2004), Stanley B. Greenberg, a prominent Democratic pollster, opens with the sentence “America is divided” (his italics) and goes on to say, “The loyalties of American voters are now almost perfectly divided between the Democrats and Republicans, a historical political deadlock that inflames the passions of politicians and citizens alike.” In a two-party universe that is indeed how things look. But we do not live in a two-party universe. The fastest-growing group in American politics is independents, many of them centrists who identify with neither party and can tip the balance in close elections. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, since the Iraq War 30 percent of Americans have identified themselves as Republicans, 31 percent as Democrats, and 39 percent as independents (or “other”). Registered voters split into even thirds. On election day, of course, independents who want to vote almost always have to choose between a Republican and a Democrat. Like the subatomic particles that live in a state of blurred quantum indeterminacy except during those fleeting moments when they are observed, on election day purple independents suddenly appear red or blue. Many of them, however, are undecided until the last moment and aren’t particularly happy with either choice. Their ambivalence disappears from the vote tallies because the very act of voting excludes the nonpartisan middle. By no means, then, does partisan parity necessarily imply a deeply divided citizenry. People who talk about culture wars usually have in mind not merely a close division (fifty-fifty) but a wide or deep division—two populations with distinct and incompatible world views. It was this sort of divide that Hunter said he had found in 1991. One culture was “orthodox,” the other “progressive.” The disagreement transcended particular issues to encompass different conceptions of moral authority—one side anchored to tradition or the Bible, the other more relativistic. Not only does this transcendental disagreement reverberate throughout both politics and everyday life, Hunter said, but “each side of the cultural divide can only talk past the other” (his italics). In his book The Values Divide (2002) the political scientist John Kenneth White, of Catholic University, makes a similar case. “One faction emphasizes duty and morality; another stresses individual rights and self-fulfillment,” he writes. The result is a “values divide”—indeed, a “chasm.” Both authors make their observations about culture and values—many of which are quite useful—by aggregating the attitudes of large populations into archetypes and characteristic world views. The question remains, however, whether actual people are either as extreme or as distinct in their views as the analysts’ cultural profiles suggest. Might the archetypes really be stereotypes? In 1998 Alan Wolfe, a sociologist at Boston College, said yes. For his book One Nation, After All, Wolfe studied eight suburban communities. He found a battle over values, but it was fought not so much between groups as within individuals: “The two sides presumed to be fighting the culture war do not so much represent a divide between one group of Americans and another as a divide between sets of values important to everyone.” Intellectuals and partisans may line up at the extremes, but ordinary people mix and match values from competing menus. Wolfe found his subjects to be “above all moderate,” “reluctant to pass judgment,” and “tolerant to a fault.” Because opinion polls are designed to elicit and categorize disagreements, he concluded, they tend to obscure and even distort this reality. I recently came across an interesting example of how this can happen: In an August 2004 article Jeffrey M. Jones and Joseph Carroll, two analysts with the Gallup Organization, took note of what they called an election-year puzzle. Frequent churchgoers and men were much more likely to support George W. Bush than John Kerry. Non-churchgoers and women leaned the other way. That all jibed with the familiar archetypes of religious-male reds and secular-female blues. But here was the puzzle: “Men—particularly white men—are much less likely to attend church than are women of any race or ethnicity.” How, then, could churchgoers prefer Bush if women preferred Kerry? The answer turns out to be that most individuals don’t fit the archetypes. Men who go to church every week overwhelmingly favored Bush (by almost two to one), and women who stay home on Sundays favored Kerry by a similar margin. But these two archetypal categories leave out most of the population. Women who go to church weekly, men who stay home Sundays, and people of both sexes who go to church semi-regularly are all much more closely divided. The majority of actual Americans are in this conflicted middle. To know how polarized the country is, then, we need to know what is happening with actual people, not with cultural or demographic categories. One thing we need to know, for example, is whether more people take extreme positions, such that two randomly chosen individuals would find less common ground today than in the past. In the fifty-fifty nation does the distribution of opinion look like a football, with Americans divided but clustered around the middle? Or has it come to look like a dumbbell, with more people at the extremes and fewer in the center? In an impressive 1996 paper published in The American Journal of Sociology—”Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?”—the sociologists Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, of Princeton University, set out to answer that question using twenty years’ worth of data from two periodic surveys of public opinion. They found no change in the “bimodality” of public opinion over the two decades. The football was not becoming a dumbbell. DiMaggio and his colleagues then looked at particular issues and groups. On most issues (race and gender issues, crime and justice, attitudes toward liberals and conservatives, and sexual morality) Americans had become more united in their views, not more divided. (The exceptions were abortion and, to a lesser extent, poverty.) Perhaps more surprising, the authors found “dramatic depolarization in intergroup differences.” That is, when they sorted people into groups based on age, education, sex, race, religion, and region, they found that the groups had become more likely to agree. The authors did, however, find one group that had polarized quite dramatically: people who identified themselves as political partisans. There had been a “striking divergence of attitudes between Democrats and Republicans.” In 2003 John Evans updated the study using data through 2000. He found, for the most part, no more polarization than before—except among partisans, who were more divided than ever. Could it be that the structure of public opinion shows stability or convergence even as individuals hold their opinions in more vehement, less compromising ways? If so, that might be another kind of polarization. Getting inside individuals’ heads is difficult, but scholars can look at so-called “feeling thermometers”—survey questions that ask respondents to rate other people and groups on a scale from “very cold” to “very warm.” In his recent book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America the political scientist Morris P. Fiorina, of Stanford University (writing with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope), finds little change in emotional polarization since 1980—except, again, among strong partisans. A further possibility remains. Political segregation may be on the rise. Like-minded people may be clustering together socially or geographically, so that fewer people are exposed to other points of view. States, neighborhoods, and even bridge clubs may be turning all red or all blue. Is America becoming two countries living side by side but not together? Fiorina and his associates approached that question by comparing blue-state and red-state opinion just before the 2000 election. What they found can only be described as a shocking level of agreement. Without doubt, red states were more conservative than blue ones; but only rarely did they actually disagree, even on such culturally loaded issues as gun control, the death penalty, and abortion. Rather, they generally agreed but by different margins. To take one example of many, 77 percent of red-state respondents favored capital punishment, but so did 70 percent of blue-state respondents. Similarly, 64 percent of those in blue states favored stricter gun control, but so did 52 percent of those in red states. Red-state residents were more likely to be born-again or evangelical Christians (45 percent, versus 28 percent in blue states), but strong majorities in both sets of states agreed that religion was very important in their lives. On only a few issues, such as whether to allow homosexuals to adopt children or join the military, did blue-state majorities part company with red-state majorities. Majorities in both red and blue states concurred—albeit by different margins—that Bill Clinton was doing a good job as president, that nonetheless they did not wish he could run again, that women’s roles should be equal to men’s, that the environment should take precedence over jobs, that English should be made the official language, that blacks should not receive preferences in hiring, and so on. This hardly suggests a culture war. Red-state residents and blue-state residents agreed on one other point: most of them regarded themselves as centrists. Blue residents tipped toward describing themselves as liberal, and red residents tipped toward seeing themselves as conservative; but, Fiorina writes, “the distributions of self-placements in the red and blue states are very similar—both are centered over the ‘moderate’ or ‘middle-of-the-road’ position, whether we consider all residents or just voters.” By the same token, people in both sets of states agreed, by very similar margins, that the Democratic Party was to their left and the Republican Party to their right. “In both red and blue states,” Fiorina concludes, “a solid majority of voters see themselves as positioned between two relatively extreme parties.” Of course, one reason states look so centrist might be that most states aggregate so many people. A state could appear moderate, for example, even if it were made up of cities that were predominantly liberal and rural areas that were predominantly conservative. Indeed, media reports have suggested that a growing share of the population lives in so-called landslide counties, which vote for one party or the other by lopsided margins. Philip A. Klinkner, a professor of government at Hamilton College, examined this claim recently and found nothing in it. In 2000 the share of voters in landslide counties (36 percent) fell smack in the middle of the historical range for presidential elections going back to 1840. In 2000, Klinkner writes, “the average Democrat and the average Republican lived in a county that was close to evenly divided.” Of course, 36 percent of Americans living in landslide counties is a lot of people. But then, America has always been a partisan place. What John Adams’s supporters said in 1796 about Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton pungently (and correctly) observed recently, would “blister the hairs off a dog’s back.” America is also no stranger to cultural fission. Think of Jeffersonians versus Hamiltonians, Jacksonians against the Establishment, the Civil War (now there was a culture war), labor versus capital a century ago, the civil-rights and Vietnam upheavals. No cultural conflict in America today approaches any of those. By historical standards America is racked with harmony. My favorite indication of the culture peace came in a survey last July of unmarried Americans, conducted by the Gallup Organization for an online dating service called Match.com. Asked if they would be “open to marrying someone who held significantly different political views” from their own, 57 percent of singles said yes. Majorities of independents, Democrats, and (more narrowly) Republicans were willing to wed across political lines. Just how deep can our political disagreements be, I wonder, if most of us are willing to wake up next to them every morning? A picture begins to emerge. A divide has opened, but not in the way most people assume. The divide is not within American culture but between politics and culture. At a time when the culture is notably calm, politics is notably shrill. Now, it bears emphasizing that culture peace, or war, is always a relative concept. America, with its cacophonous political schools and ethnic groups and religions and subcultures, will never be a culturally quiescent place, and thank goodness for that. Given the paucity of nation-splitting disagreements, however, what really needs explaining is the disproportionate polarization of American politics. Reasons for it are not hard to find. They are almost bewilderingly numerous. When I burrow through the pile, I end up concluding that two are fundamental: America’s politicians have changed, and so have America’s political parties. “Who sent us the political leaders we have?” Alan Ehrenhalt asked in 1991. Ehrenhalt is a respected Washington political journalist, the sort of person who becomes known as a “veteran observer,” and the riddle is from his book The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office. “There is a simple answer,” he continued. “They sent themselves.” This, he argued persuasively, was something new and important. Ehrenhalt, who was born in 1947, grew up in the dusk of a fading world that I, at age forty-four, am just a little too young to remember. In those days politicians and their supporters were like most other people, only more so. Ambition and talent always mattered, but many politicians were fairly ordinary people (think of Harry Truman) who were recruited into politics by local parties or political bosses and then worked their way up through the system, often trading on their ties to the party and on their ability to deliver patronage. Party machines and local grandees acted as gatekeepers. Bosses and elders might approach a popular local car dealer and ask him to run for a House seat, and they were frequently in a position to hand him the nomination, if not the job. Loyalty, not ideology, was the coin of the realm, and candidates were meant to be smart and ambitious but not, usually, too smart and ambitious. In a society as rambunctious and egalitarian as America’s, this system was probably bound to break down, and in the 1960s and 1970s it finally did. The smoke-filled rooms, despite their considerable (and often underappreciated) strengths, were too cozy and homogenous and, yes, unfair to accommodate the democratic spirit of those times. Reformers, demanding a more open style of politics, did away with the gatekeepers of old. The rise of primary elections was meant to democratize the process of nominating candidates, and so it did; but hard-core ideologues—with their superior hustle and higher turnouts—proved able to dominate the primaries as they never could the party caucuses and conventions. As the power of the machines declined, ideology replaced patronage as the prime motivator of the parties’ rank and file. Volunteers who showed up at party meetings or campaign offices ran into fewer people who wanted jobs and more who shared their opinions on Vietnam or busing. With parties and patrons no longer able to select candidates, candidates began selecting themselves. The party nominee, Ehrenhalt wrote, gave way to the “self-nominee.” Holding office was now a full-time job, and running for office was if anything even more grueling than holding it. “Politics is a profession now,” Ehrenhalt wrote. “Many people who would be happy to serve in office are unwilling to think of themselves as professionals, or to make the personal sacrifices that a full-time political career requires. And so political office—political power—passes to those who want the jobs badly enough to dedicate themselves to winning and holding them.” Those people, of course, are often left-wing and right-wing ideologues and self-appointed reformers. In the 1920s the town druggist might be away serving in Congress while the local malcontent lolled around the drugstore grumbling about his pet peeve. Today there’s a good chance that the druggist is minding the store and the malcontent is in Washington. The parties, too, have changed. Whereas they used to be loose coalitions of interests and regions, they are now ideological clubs. Northeastern Republicans were once much more liberal than Southern Democrats. Today more or less all conservatives are Republicans and more or less all liberals are Democrats. To some extent the sorting of parties into blue and red happened naturally as voters migrated along the terrain of their convictions, but the partisans of the political class have been only too happy to prod the voters along. Whereas the old party machines specialized in mobilizing masses of partisans to vote for the ticket, the newer breed specializes in “activating” (as the political scientist Steven E. Schier has aptly put it) interest groups by using targeted appeals, often inflammatory in nature. (This past year the Republican National Committee sent mailings in Arkansas and West Virginia suggesting that the Democrats would try to ban the Bible.) Both parties, with the help of sophisticated computer software and block-by-block demographic data, have learned to target thinner and thinner slices of the population with direct mail and telephone appeals. Perhaps more significant, both parties also got busy using their computer programs and demographic maps to draw wildly complicated new district boundaries that furnished their incumbents with safe congressional seats. Today House members choose their voters rather than the other way around, with the result that only a few dozen districts are competitive. In many districts House members are much less worried about the general election than they are about being challenged in the primary by a rival from their own party. Partisans in today’s one-party districts feel at liberty to support right-wing or left-wing candidates, and the candidates feel free (or obliged) to cater to the right-wing or left-wing partisans. It’s not such a surprise, then, that the ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is wider now than it has been in more than fifty years (though not wide by pre-World War I standards). The higher you go in the hierarchies of the parties, the further apart they lean. The top leaders on Capitol Hill are the bluest of blues and the reddest of reds—left and right not just of the country but even of their own parties. (This is especially true on the Republican side. National Journal, a nonpartisan public-policy magazine and a sister publication of The Atlantic, rated House Speaker Dennis Hastert the most conservative member of the House in 2003; Majority Leader Tom DeLay tied for second place.) As party lines have hardened and drawn apart, acrimony has grown between Democratic and Republican politicians, further separating the parties in what has become a vicious cycle. The political scientist Gary C. Jacobson, of the University of California at San Diego, finds that Democrats and Republicans not only enter Congress further apart ideologically, but also become more polarized the longer they stay in Congress’s fiercely partisan environment. Not all of this had to happen—and indeed, happenstance has made matters worse in recent years. It is interesting to wonder how much less polarized American politics might be today if John McCain had won the presidency in 2000. Instead we got Bush, with his unyielding temperament and his strategy of mobilizing conservatives. Even more divisive was the fact that one party—the Republicans—has controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress since 2003. In a fifty-fifty country, shutting one party out of the government can only lead to partisan excess on one side and bitter resentment on the other. Centrist voters, of course, are unhappy, but what can they do? As Fiorina pithily puts it, “Given a choice between two extremes, they can only elect an extremist.” Presented with a credible candidate who seemed relatively moderate, a McCain or a Ross Perot, many independents jumped at him; but the whole problem is that fewer moderates reach the ballot. The result, Fiorina writes, is that “the extremes are overrepresented in the political arena and the center underrepresented.” The party system, he says, creates or inflames conflicts that are dear to the hearts of relatively small numbers of activists. “The activists who gave rise to the notion of a culture war, in particular, and a deeply polarized politics, in general, for the most part are sincere. They are polarized.” But ordinary people—did someone say “silent majority”?—are not. Well. A grim diagnosis. That it is largely correct is simply beyond question. I say this as one of the frustrated independent voters who feel left behind by two self-absorbed and overzealous major parties. In particular, the practice of gerrymandering congressional districts to entrench partisans (and thus extremists) is a scandal, far more insulting to popular sovereignty than anything to do with campaign finance. But that is not the note I wish to end on. Something may be going right as well. It seems odd that cultural peace should break out at the same time that political contentiousness grows. But perhaps it is not so odd. America may be culturally peaceful because it is so politically polarized. The most irritating aspect of contemporary American politics—its tendency to harp on and heighten partisan and ideological differences—may be, as computer geeks like to say, not a bug but a feature. America’s polarized parties, whatever their flaws, are very good at developing and presenting crisp choices. How do you feel about abortion? A constitutional ban on same-sex marriage? Privatizing Social Security accounts? School vouchers? Pre-emptive war? Well, you know which party to vote for. Thanks to the sharply divided political parties, American voters—including the ones in the center—get clear alternatives on most issues that matter. By presenting those alternatives, elections provide a sense of direction. Moreover, although party polarization may disgruntle the center (can’t we be for stem-cell research and school vouchers?), it helps domesticate fanatics on the left and the right. Though you would be partly correct to say that the mainstream parties have been taken over by polarized activists, you could also say, just as accurately and a good deal more cheerfully, that polarized activists have been taken over by the mainstream parties. The Republican Party has acquired its distinctively tart right-wing flavor largely because it has absorbed—in fact, to a significant extent has organizationally merged with—the religious right. As Hanna Rosin reports elsewhere in this package, religious conservatives are becoming more uniformly Republican even as their faiths and backgrounds grow more diverse. On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out by their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around. In the end what may matter most is not that the parties be moderate but that they be competitive—which America’s parties are, in spades. Politically speaking, our fifty-fifty America is a divisive, rancorous place. The rest of the world should be so lucky. |
8fd038681c0470d55aad0100e03c97ce | https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bushs-second-term-blues/ | Bush’s Second-Term Blues | Bush’s Second-Term Blues The middle of a second-term in office is notoriously difficult for US presidents. To take just some more recent cases, in Dwight Eisenhower’s sixth year in the White House, 1958, the country suffered a stock market crash and its worst recession since World War II. His chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was caught up in a corruption scandal, the tainted Republicans were creamed at the mid-term elections, and Democrats took the White House back in 1960. For the next two-term president it was even worse. In 1973-1974, Richard Nixon presided over an oil crisis, a recession, a failure in Vietnam, and Congressional election catastrophe before finally resigning in disgrace over Watergate. The middle of Ronald Reagan’s second term, in 1986, saw the Iran-Contra scandal, a farce in which the United States secretly sold weapons to Iran in order to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, and which led to a perjury indictment of Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger.The scandal helped to put control of Congress in Democratic hands. Most recently, after an easy re-election in 1996, Bill Clinton’s second-term was marred by the Monica Lewinsky scandal that broke in early 1998 and was followed later that year by the president’s impeachment by the Senate. Knowing that he has such extensive company will be of little comfort to George W. Bush as he contemplates the bloodied political landscape of his own second-term. For if Bush’s recent difficulties have not exactly reached Nixonian levels, he is certainly climbing the charts ranking presidents who have suffered second-term blues. Last November, Bush lost majorities in both houses of Congress, and now for the first time must try to govern without a docile legislative branch. As a result, having vetoed only one bill in his first six years in office, Bush now faces no fewer than 16 pieces of pending legislation that he opposes.Congress is now also using one of its most important powers—the power of subpoena and investigation—and is holding hearings on everything from Bush’s judicial practices to the management of the Iraq war. The president’s national approval rating has fallen to just 35 percent, and veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak now says that in fifty years of following politics he has never seen a president as isolated from his own party in Congress. The second-term scandals have also begun to set in. In March 2007,Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby was convicted for lying and obstructing justice in an investigation into who leaked the name of the former CIA operative Valerie Plame—revealing just how far the administration was prepared to go to sell its faulty case for the Iraq war. Later that same month, it was revealed that the Justice Department had fired eight US attorneys, ostensibly for incompetence. Some critics alleged that the real reason was to put more ideological Bush loyalists in place—or accelerate potential investigations of Democrats. But the greater problem for the administration was the perception that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had misled Congress about his role in the firings. Even many prominent Republicans called for his resignation. Equally damaging for his reputation was the revelation around the same time that the FBI had been abusing a provision in the 2002 Patriot Act that enabled it to secretly investigate US citizens, examine their personal records, and prevent them from talking about it. Again, many Republicans were as outraged as Democrats over the lack of administration oversight. Bush even finds himself facing a challenge to his presidential authority over foreign policy. Both houses of Congress have now passed bills calling for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2008. Despite widespread public opposition to the war, Bush vows to veto such bills, leading Congressional Democrats, in turn, to threaten to cut off funding for the war if Bush does so. In April 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi infuriated the White House by leading a delegation to Syria, explaining that “elections have consequences” and that she refused to leave foreign policy uniquely in the hands of an unpopular executive branch. Can Bush possibly emerge from this morass? He might take some comfort from the fact that history ended up treating Eisenhower very kindly,while Reagan and Clinton both recovered from their mid-second-term lows and ended their administrations with major accomplishments and recovered popularity ratings. But I don’t know anyone, Republicans included,who thinks Bush’s problems are temporary, and that recovery may be around the corner. That’s sad news, for though we may already be obsessed with the next presidential race, this administration still has 20 long months to go. |
Subsets and Splits