| Britain and US launch talks for 'ambitious' free trade deal Posted: 04 May 2020 04:41 PM PDT  Britain and the United States are to begin negotiations on an "ambitious" post-Brexit free trade agreement on Tuesday. Liz Truss, the International Trade Secretary, and Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative, will open the talks with a video conference call. The first round of negotiations will then continue for around two weeks, with around 100 negotiators on each side taking part. Further rounds will take place approximately every six weeks with talks being conducted remotely until it is safe to travel again. At official level, the talks will be led by Oliver Griffiths at the Department for International Trade for the UK and Daniel Mullaney, the assistant US trade representative for Europe and the Middle East.
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| Mozambique: Is Cabo Delgado the latest Islamic State outpost? Posted: 04 May 2020 04:04 PM PDT  Islamist militants have stepped up attacks in the north, raising fears of greater instability.
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| Trump's anti-China rhetoric aimed at boosting US leverage Posted: 04 May 2020 03:55 PM PDT  The Trump administration is making ever louder pronouncements casting blame on China for the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to sidestep domestic criticism of the president's own response, tarnish China's global reputation and give the U.S. leverage on trade and other aspects of U.S.-China competition. President Donald Trump has vowed to penalize China for what U.S. officials have increasingly described as a pattern of deceit that denied the world precious time to prepare for the pandemic. The opening salvo isn't in the form of tariffs or sanctions, but in a one-sided accounting of China's behavior that could yank the Chinese lower on the global reputation meter.
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| Gridlock gone, sports car collectors take over Times Square Posted: 04 May 2020 02:55 PM PDT  Danny Lin cruised his white sports car down Broadway, the bright lights of Times Square gleaming off his sharply detailed Audi R8. Now, Times Square has taken a turn toward Tokyo Drift, just without the "Fast and the Furious," as car-loving New Yorkers flock to the barren streets of the theater district. At least 100 pedestrians were wandering the area when the cars began roaring down Times Square's main drag Saturday, along with dozens of motorcycles in one crew that created a deafening buzz.
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| The Chinese government is worried global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since Tiananmen Square Posted: 04 May 2020 02:33 PM PDT  The mounting global backlash against China stemming from the country's handling the early days of the coronavirus pandemic has apparently registered with Beijing's political leaders, Reuters reports.An internal report drawn up by the China Institutes of Contemporary International found that anti-China sentiment around the world is at its highest point since 1989 following the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations, which Beijing cracked down on by declaring martial law and sending the military to occupy parts of the capital.The think tank's research was reportedly presented in early April to top Chinese Communist Party officials, including President Xi Jinping. Reuters' report is based off sources who have direct knowledge of the findings, though the news outlet has not seen the briefing itself. If reports of its contents are accurate, it would at least confirm Beijing is taking the backlash seriously, though Reuters notes it's unclear if those concerns will ultimately influence policy.The paper reportedly concluded the rising anti-China sentiment is in part a result of American efforts to undermine public confidence in Beijing amid the crisis. Relations between the two super powers are fragile at the moment, and the White House has been ramping up its criticism of China's coronavirus response, accusing the CCP of covering up information about the virus' severity and origin. Read more at Reuters.More stories from theweek.com How George W. Bush exposed Trump's biggest failure Trump was the disaster we should have seen coming Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is what real coronavirus leadership looks like
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| Germany to reopen large shops, allow soccer matches - sources Posted: 04 May 2020 01:59 PM PDT |
| Author Colson Whitehead Wins Second Pulitzer Prize, New York Times Tops List of Honorees Posted: 04 May 2020 01:08 PM PDT |
| JBI Report Urges Global Response to Antisemitism and its Human Rights Impact Six Months After Landmark UN Report Posted: 04 May 2020 12:45 PM PDT  The report, Antisemitism: A Persistent Threat to Human Rights, and its annex survey incidents of antisemitic expression and violence in countries around the world from October 2019 to April 2020, both before and since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The JBI report comes six months after an unprecedented report by a United Nations expert recognizing global antisemitism as a serious human rights challenge.
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| Venezuela: 2 US 'mercenaries' arrested in anti-Maduro raid Posted: 04 May 2020 12:26 PM PDT  Venezuelan authorities say they've detained two U.S. citizens accused of involvement in a deadly beach invasion aimed at arresting socialist leader Nicolás Maduro and have mobilized more than 25,000 troops to hunt for other rebels operating in the country. Venezuelan state television didn't identify the Americans, but Florida-based ex-Green Beret Jordan Goudreau said Monday that he was working with the two men in a mission launched a day earlier aimed at "liberating" Venezuela. The two served in Iraq and Afghanistan with him in the U.S. military, Goudreau said.
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| Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070 Posted: 04 May 2020 12:18 PM PDT  In just 50 years, 2 billion to 3.5 billion people, mostly the poor who can't afford air conditioning, will be living in a climate that historically has been too hot to handle, a new study said. With every 1.8 degree (1 degree Celsius) increase in global average annual temperature from man-made climate change, about a billion or so people will end up in areas too warm day-in, day-out to be habitable without cooling technology, according to ecologist Marten Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, co-author of the study. Under the worst-case scenarios for population growth and for carbon pollution — which many climate scientists say is looking less likely these days — the study in Monday's journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts about 3.5 billion people will live in extremely hot areas.
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| Turkey says Hifter 'regressing' in Libya conflict Posted: 04 May 2020 12:13 PM PDT |
| She Predicted the Coronavirus. What Does She Foresee Next? Posted: 04 May 2020 11:55 AM PDT  I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.She and I were Zooming -- that's a verb now, right? -- and she pulled out a 2017 book, "Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes." It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of HIV but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens."I'm a double Cassandra," Garrett said.She's also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about "the Coronavirus Cassandras."Cassandra, of course, was the Greek prophetess doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about -- in her 1994 bestseller, "The Coming Plague," and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks -- is a pandemic like the current one.She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.Despite the stock market's swoon for it, remdesivir probably isn't our ticket out, she told me. "It's not curative," she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of COVID-19 patients. "We need either a cure or a vaccine."But she can't envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while COVID-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that."I've been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that's my best-case scenario," she said."I'm quite certain that this is going to go in waves," she added. "It won't be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it's going to affect how people think about all kinds of things."They'll reevaluate the importance of travel. They'll reassess their use of mass transit. They'll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They'll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.So, I asked, is "back to normal," a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?"This is history right in front of us," Garrett said. "Did we go 'back to normal' after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an anti-terror state. And it affected everything. We couldn't go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn't get on airplanes the same way ever again. That's what's going to happen with this."Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections "with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, 'Oh, my God, it's not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can't make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets, and they own an island that they go to, and they don't care whether or not our streets are safe,' then I think we could have massive political disruption."Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25% unemployment looks like," she said, "we may also see what collective rage looks like."Garrett has been on my radar since the early 1990s, when she worked for Newsday and did some of the best reporting anywhere on AIDS. Her Pulitzer, in 1996, was for coverage of Ebola in Zaire. She has been a fellow at Harvard's School of Public Health, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and consulted on the 2011 movie "Contagion."Her expertise, in other words, has long been in demand. But not like now.Each morning when she opens her email, "there's the Argentina request, Hong Kong request, Taiwan request, South Africa request, Morocco, Turkey," she told me. "Not to mention all of the American requests." It made me feel bad about taking more than an hour of her time on April 27. But not so bad that I didn't cadge another 30 minutes on April 30.She said she wasn't surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. She's Cassandra, after all.But there is one part of the story she couldn't have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States."I never imagined that," she said. "Ever."The highlights -- or, rather, lowlights -- include President Donald Trump's initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well; his scandalous complacency from late January through early March; his cheerleading for unproven treatments; his musings about cockamamie ones; his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states; and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed, long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.Having long followed Garrett's work, I can attest that it's not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting HIV in Africa.But she called Trump "the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable."And she's shocked that America isn't in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me, "I've heard from every CDC in the world -- the European CDC, the African CDC, China CDC -- and they say, 'Normally, our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain't hearing back.' There's nothing going on down there. They've gutted that place. They've gagged that place. I can't get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it's safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the CDC?"The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals' access to health care.But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone; to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. "The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns," she said. "The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.""That's America?" I asked."That's America," she said.And what America needs most right now, she said, isn't this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, superreliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president's tender ego."I can sit here with you for three hours listing -- boom, boom, boom -- what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and it's just incredibly upsetting," Garrett said. "I feel like I'm just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that there's not a whisper of it."Instead of that whisper, she hears wailing: the sirens of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients to hospitals near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she has been home alone, in lockdown, since early March. "If I don't get hugged soon, I'm going to go bananas," she told me. "I'm desperate to be hugged."Me, too. Especially after her omens.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 New York Times News Service
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| Outraging China, Pompeo pushes US hard line over virus Posted: 04 May 2020 11:54 AM PDT  Branded "insane" by Chinese state media but hailed by US conservatives, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is taking the lead in pressing a hard line against Beijing over the coronavirus pandemic. Pompeo has been at the forefront of bringing into the mainstream a theory that the illness that has killed nearly 250,000 worldwide slipped out of a virology laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged last year. The hawkish role is familiar for Pompeo, who has also advocated sweeping pressure on Iran including a January drone strike that killed one of its top generals.
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| For AOC, 'Existential Crises' as Her District Becomes the Coronavirus Epicenter Posted: 04 May 2020 11:45 AM PDT  The dash to overnight millennial celebrity can take abrupt detours.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist from the Bronx in New York City, was propelled from an anonymous existence as a bartender after her upset victory in 2018 straight onto magazine covers, late-night TV and the top of every partisan love-hate list in America. It made her perhaps the most exposed and fixated-on House freshman in history.Today, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress -- known simply as AOC -- owns another distinction, this one far grimmer: She represents the nation's most devastated hot zone of the coronavirus outbreak.New York's 14th Congressional District, which includes the working-class immigrant clusters of the Bronx and Queens, has had 19,200 coronavirus cases as of April 30, more than all of Manhattan, despite having almost 1 million fewer people. Residents of the neighborhoods of Corona and North Corona in her district -- the names are an eerie coincidence -- have had more coronavirus cases than any ZIP code in the country.Ocasio-Cortez, 30, knows many who have died, as well as others who were sickened with the virus, or left hungry or jobless. She sends notes and makes calls to as many surviving family members as she can, serving as a kind of legislative first responder. But it can be hard to keep up."I'll be on calls with service workers, front-line workers, and they're the ones who have to pull bodies out of apartments," she said, sitting in her empty and freezing campaign headquarters in the Bronx on a recent afternoon, surrounded by bags of donated food she was preparing to deliver to families in her district. The usually crowded streets were quiet, except for a steady assault of rain and sirens."There's just so much first-, second- and third-degree trauma here," she said.She wore no mask, either to protect her face from germs during this interview (conducted at a 12-foot distance) or to cover up her emotions generally. The wreckage in her community has made a darkly eloquent case, she said, for her agenda of universal health care and less income inequity. "This crisis is not really creating new problems," she said. "It's pouring gasoline on our existing ones."But more personally, it has exposed the little-seen vulnerabilities and isolation of the most prominent new voice in Congress.A case in point: Ocasio-Cortez had just returned from Washington after a vote last month on the latest relief bill in Congress. She was the only Democrat to vote against the $484 billion package that passed overwhelmingly. She had many problems with the measure: Generally, she found it far too generous to corporations and not to local governments, small businesses and people struggling to buy food or pay rent.Several colleagues had told her they also disliked the legislation, but it was not until right before the vote that she realized she would be by herself. Passage was never in doubt, but to be the lone member of a caucus to vote a certain way carries its own stigma."Our brains are just designed to experience a lot of excruciating pain at the idea of being alone," Ocasio-Cortez said. "When you cast those lonely votes, you feel like your colleagues respect you less, and that you are choosing to marginalize yourself." It can be difficult to appreciate the "powerful psychology of the House floor," she said, along with the overall social pressures of Congress."I walked home in the rain," Ocasio-Cortez said, describing her mood after the bill passed. "I was very in my feelings, big time, and I felt very discouraged." She said she would have appreciated, at least, a heads-up from the colleagues who had said they were probably no votes but then flipped at the last minute."I was just, like, heartbroken," she said.Ocasio-Cortez's colleagues are, for the most part, farther removed from the virus' daily toll, which has only heightened the alienation she felt when she arrived on Capitol Hill last year. "I have, like, existential crises over it," she said.At the root of this has been the hardship the pathogen has imposed on where she lives, something that can be difficult to appreciate from the sanctuary of the Capitol. New York's 14th Congressional District comprises a patchwork of diverse, vibrant and vulnerable urban communities covering the eastern part of the Bronx and north-central Queens. Roughly half of the predominantly working-class population is of Hispanic descent. They make up many of the city's grocery workers, transit operators, custodians and child care providers, 75% of whom are minorities.Nearly everyone in the district has had some personal connection to someone lost to the virus. They include Lorena Borjas, a 59-year-old transgender immigrant activist in Queens and Mohammad Gias Uddin, a 64-year-old Bangladeshi community leader who ran A&A Double Discount in the Bronx. Ocasio-Cortez knew both of them, as well as others she called "strong anchors" in the community."Just this morning, we were just talking to our landlord here who had just lost his brother," she said. "Both of his children are hospital workers." She speaks all the time to people who cannot afford food, rent and burials. The catastrophe is woven tightly into her day-to-day fabric.It is not the same for many members of Congress, a world far from the shuttered taquerias, overrun emergency rooms and refrigerator trucks doubling as makeshift morgues that sit within a few miles of Ocasio-Cortez's home in the Bronx. The disconnected reality contributes to her sense of feeling misunderstood by her colleagues, something she felt well before the virus ravaged her district."I felt like my colleagues were making opinions about me based on Fox News," she said. "It almost felt like instead of them actually talking to the person who was next to them, and physically present in front of them, they were consuming me through television. And I think that added a lot to the particular loneliness that I experienced."Rookie stardom carries its own isolation in Congress, a habitat filled with some of the planet's most jealous and thirsty creatures. Ocasio-Cortez has owned her outsize profile, for better or worse, since beating a 10-term incumbent, Rep. Joseph Crowley, in the 2018 Democratic primary. "You come in and you have a stunning victory, and for whatever reason the media has turned you into a sensation," said Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt. "It's quite a situation to come into."Ocasio-Cortez once made an off-handed remark about how she felt like kissing the ground whenever she returned to New York. A senior colleague chastised her. "You know, I heard what you said," he told her. "Being here is a privilege." Yes, of course it was, she reassured him. Serving in Congress was "the greatest privilege of my life," she added. Of the exchange with that colleague, Ocasio-Cortez summarized it like this: "It's one of those small interactions that will kind of lead to sadness later."She believed misconceptions had taken hold about her: that she was angry and strident. That she was naive. "That I just don't know how this town works," she said. "That I'm stupid. Or I'm lucky. That was a big thing the Democrats were saying. That I was a fluke. Which is basically just 10 different ways of saying she's not supposed to be here."Ocasio-Cortez's life trajectory has always involved toggling between starkly distinct worlds. When she was 5, her parents moved the family from their apartment in the Parkchester section of the Bronx to Yorktown, in Westchester County, so that she and her brother could attend better schools. She would sometimes join her mother, who worked as a house cleaner, to help scrub the homes of the neighbors, including that of a school tutor, which she cleaned in exchange for SAT lessons.She attended Boston University, another enclave of relative wealth and privilege that brought its own culture shock. "The first week everyone was asking each other, 'What school did you go to?' And I was like, 'Uh, public high school,' " she said. "There were all of these unwritten social cues. Everyone knew how to dress."In mid-March, when some of the first coronavirus cases started showing up in the United States but before its rapid spread, Ocasio-Cortez was mostly sheltered at home like everyone else -- in her case, the Parkchester apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Riley Roberts, and a French bulldog named Deco. Getting to spend time in her district has been grounding, she said, despite all the despair. It has allowed Ocasio-Cortez to perform tactile work in her community, reclaiming her previous role as a grassroots activist.Still, national intrigue will inevitably find her. She was a high-profile supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign and remains a coveted potential endorsement for former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Her policy positions, she said, have only been affirmed by the damage the coronavirus has inflicted, disproportionately, upon lower-income populations."When everything started to hit the fan," Ocasio-Cortez said, the more moderate Democrats "had no answers. There was no policy." Her liberal wing did, she said. "It's just doing progressive things faster," she said, mentioning higher wages, hazard pay and lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to zero. "There is no argument from the more conservative part of the party to countervail that."While Ocasio-Cortez said she would support the person Democrats nominate to face President Donald Trump, she has to this point resisted. She is wary of questions that suggest Biden must do certain things to earn her support, which she says could smack of self-importance.But Ocasio-Cortez barely hides her lack of enthusiasm for Biden, although she says she believes that the comfort he engenders could buy him ideological latitude. "I think the fact that he is an older white man kind of has a Santa Claus soothing effect on a lot of traditional voters," she said. "I'm convinced that Biden could essentially adopt Bernie's agenda, and it would not be a factor -- as long as he continued to say things like malarkey. And just not be Trump."Speculation about Ocasio-Cortez's career moves has been another distraction. She has been mentioned as a potential primary challenger in 2022 to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate minority leader -- an idea that is a particular hobbyhorse of Trump's. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has also floated her as a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in a Biden administration."Probably not," she said when asked about serving in a Biden government, although the Friedman column did get her attention, given the U.N.'s headquarters in New York."That was the one perk of this," she said. "I would get to stay home."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| US uses coronavirus to challenge Chinese Communist party's grip on power Posted: 04 May 2020 11:41 AM PDT  Trump administration portrays crisis as example of danger Beijing's leadership poses to China and the world * Coronavirus – latest US updates * Coronavirus – latest global updates * See all our coronavirus coverageThe escalating row between Washington and Beijing over blame for the coronavirus pandemic is fast becoming a battle over the Chinese Communist party's legitimacy, raising the stakes in an already fraught relationship.In castigating Beijing for its failure to contain the outbreak, senior Trump administration officials have gone out of their way to portray the crisis as a deadly illustration of the threat that Communist party rule poses the Chinese people – and the world beyond.In a speech delivered on Monday morning in fluent Mandarin, the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, warned Beijing that its efforts to suppress internal criticism were doomed to backfire."When small acts of bravery are stamped out by governments, big acts of bravery follow," Pottinger said in the remarks delivered by video to a University of Virginia webinar, to commemorate China's May the Fourth movement, a student-led populist uprising in the wake of the first world war.Pottinger asked "whether China today would benefit from a little less nationalism and a little more populism.""Democratic populism is less about left versus right than top versus bottom. It's about reminding a few that they need the consent of many to govern. When a privileged few grow too remote and self-interested, populism is what pulls them back or pitches them overboard," he added."To me it's the most remarkable speech we've ever seen from anyone in the Trump administration," said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China power project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies."If you're a member of the Chinese Communist party, you might read [the invocation of the May the Fourth movement] as encouraging people to challenge some of the existing parts of your political system. It didn't quite say overthrow your leaders, but it certainly encouraged the rise of the masses, shall we say."There are signs that Beijing's rulers see in the pandemic, and the US-led response to it, a direct challenge to the party's hold on power. An internal report produced by the ministry of state security, cited by Reuters on Monday, warned that China should be prepared for a worst-case scenario of armed confrontation.There are two potential flashpoints where the two nuclear powers face off. One is in the South China Sea, where the US navy conducts freedom of navigation patrols – most recently with a destroyer last week – to challenge China's territorial claims to the chains of islands and reefs.At the height of the pandemic, China has also become far more aggressive in testing the air and sea defences of Taiwan. The US maintains a policy of "strategic ambiguity" over whether it would come to Taiwan's defence, but the Trump administration is under internal and external pressure to toughen that stance.Both Washington and Beijing have been careful not to push military brinksmanship too far, and Donald Trump's own affinity and admiration for Xi Jinping has been a counterweight to China hawks in his administration, like Pottinger (a former Beijing-based journalist who reportedly led a push for US officials to insist on the term "Wuhan virus") and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.But as Trump approaches November's election with his own delayed and chaotic response to the pandemic under scrutiny, that moderating influence looks likely to wane.Pompeo has so far led the charge against China, issuing an inflammatory tweet on Sunday, declaring: "China has a history of infecting the world and they have a history of running substandard laboratories."Pompeo claimed there was "enormous evidence" that the Sars-CoV-2 virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory. The evidence has not been presented, and most experts say the disease most likely evolved from interaction between animals and humans.There is little doubt that the suppression by party authorities of early warnings from Wuhan about the danger and the delay in Beijing's response meant an opportunity to contain the outbreak was lost. China's refusal to share samples and to cooperate with World Health Organization investigators has contributed to international distrust.A US department of homeland security intelligence assessment, quoted by the Associated Press, alleged that the Chinese government had played down the danger of the virus so that it could build up its own stockpile of medical supplies. Beijing has denied withholding any information, but such reports are likely to fuel the anti-China backlash around the world.The Trump administration's campaign against China in the coming months will be both economic and diplomatic. The president has said he is contemplating punitive measures, reportedly exploring whether the US might sue China or cancel some of its debt to China as reparations.US officials are meanwhile developing a plan to switch production and supply chains used by US companies out of China, providing incentives to move to friendly nations, in an "economic prosperity network", which ironically resembles the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump withdrew the US from in the first months of his presidency.On the diplomatic front, as well as focusing global attention on Chinese culpability, the US is pushing to upgrade Taiwan's status on the world stage, beginning with a campaign to have the Taipei government invited to the World Health Assembly (the governing body of the WHO) later this month. That is anathema to Beijing, which depicts Taiwan as a renegade province."There's more of a worry at the top in Beijing that what the party has been paranoid about for a really long time is now coming to pass, which is that the US and other nations don't want the party to rule China," said Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society's Center on US-China Relations.Stone Fish said that the cold war-era policy of pushing for a peaceful evolution away from Communist party rule was now "coming back into fashion"."There is a growing awareness in DC that the Chinese Communist party doesn't serve America's interest, that it doesn't serve the interests of many people in China, and there's growing debate about what the US should do about that," he said.Much will depend now on how seriously Xi takes that challenge and how he responds. Glaser said there has been evidence that Beijing is seeking to tamp down militaristic nationalism focused on the reconquest of Taiwan. But Fish argues that calculus could change as the pressure increases."If Xi Jinping or other members of the party feel like they're facing existential threat in terms of legitimacy domestically, going to war with Taiwan could be a very sound strategy for them, in ways that would have a lot of awful impacts globally."
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| Scientists look to 'canary in the coal mine' for ozone layer recovery Posted: 04 May 2020 11:36 AM PDT  The hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole shrank to the smallest it's been in 30 years in 2019, and this year, scientists are eagerly watching and waiting to see what 2020 means for the ozone layer's ongoing recovery over that part of the world.After the sun rises over the South Pole in mid-September, where sunlight has been absent for months and temperatures are bitterly low, the conditions are prime for the ozone depletion reactions that have led to the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer. In the stratospheric clouds, the breakdown is spurred on by an elevated amount of ozone-depleting gases emitted from human activity and chemicals with lifetimes of up to 100 years.The gases that aid in the depletion are reactive chlorine gases called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC gases, Bryan Johnson, an atmospheric chemist who works for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, told AccuWeather in a Skype interview.CFCs had been used since the 1930s as refrigerants and in aerosol sprays. At a ground level, they were nonreactive, nontoxic and nonflammable even when they escaped during parts of the production process. However, CFCs are hardy and can last up to a century before finally breaking down in the stratosphere where they release chlorine and catalyze ozone destruction."It's only when they hang around for these long lifetimes at 50 to 100 years when they eventually get up into the stratosphere where the sunlight will break them down," Johnson said. It's there where these substances do the most damage to the ozone layer.At the Global Monitoring Laboratory at the South Pole, NOAA monitors the ozone hole via weather balloons that have ozone instruments attached to them. Their journey takes the instruments 22 miles high in about two hours, where they can record detailed measurements on a profile of the ozone. About 60 to 70 of the balloons are launched each year, Johnson said, the bulk of which are released during September and October when there is a more rapid depletion of ozone. This image provided by NOAA shows the ozone hole. The Antarctic ozone hole has swelled this month to one of its biggest sizes on record, U.N. and U.S. scientists say, insisting that the Earth-shielding ozone layer remains on track to long-term recovery but residents of the southern hemisphere should be on watch for high UV levels in the weeks ahead. (NOAA via AP) "I think to me the most interesting thing or amazing thing to see with these measurements is in the end of September, or the end of October when the ozone has had its peak, you go through a 4- or 5-mile layer of just zero. There's just no ozone there," Johnson said. "The total amount of ozone is depleted by 60, 65%."According to long-term trends from the data collected, the hole over Antarctica grew from 1980 through the early 1990s before stabilizing in the early 21st century.The first suspicions that there could have been a depletion in the ozone layer surfaced in the 1970s, according to Johnson. Estimates of 3 or 4% had been considered, according to Johnson, until the Bridge Antarctic Service Crews in 1985 reported 30 to 40% losses of ozone."The thing is, you know, the ozone hole, it was a surprise," Johnson said. "It just caught everyone off guard and [we] realized that, well, in the right conditions over Antarctica, the chlorine is a lot more destructive to ozone. So that's the surprise that we just don't want. We don't want to be surprised again like that, so monitoring helps that a lot."According to NASA's Earth Observatory, scientists estimate that about 80 percent of the chlorine and bromine in the stratosphere over Antarctica today comes from human sources.The Montreal Protocol, an environmental agreement ratified in 1987 by the United Nations that regulates the production and consumption of almost 100 man-made chemicals that qualify as ozone-depleting substances, limited the production of CFCs and began to phase them out of production. However, the long lifetime of the destructive chemicals has caused them to be an enduring problem as they drift around in the atmosphere."That's why we expect to still see ozone holes develop for the next 40, 50, 60 years, and it just takes time for the atmosphere to take on all those long-lived gases," Johnson said.These long-lived, ozone-depleting chemicals move around in the air currents or are carried by the wind and ultimately end up in the upper atmosphere with the ozone layer, NOAA research chemist Steve Montzka told AccuWeather over a Skype interview. Eventually, they can make it to Antarctica. This undated photo provided by NOAA in May 2018 shows aurora australis near the South Pole Atmospheric Research Observatory in Antarctica. When a hole in the ozone formed over Antarctica, countries around the world in 1987 agreed to phase out several types of ozone-depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Production was banned, emissions fell and the hole shriveled. But according to a study released on Wednesday, May 16, 2018, scientists say since 2013, there's more of a banned CFC going into the atmosphere. (Patrick Cullis/NOAA via AP) "It just so happens that the physical and chemical characteristics of the atmosphere, in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica allow for rather uniquely, or to a larger extent than other places in the atmosphere, severe ozone depletion," Montzka said. "It's a combination of the extreme cold temperatures that happened over Antarctica and the presence of these chemicals that cause ozone depletion that wreaks havoc on the ozone layer."Johnson breaks down the process of ozone depletion at the poles into basically three parts, beginning with the sun setting over the poles come autumn. With the sun absent, the atmosphere grows bitterly cold, and wind patterns begin to organize.Polar stratospheric clouds begin to form from tiny particles in the cold, dark conditions in the upper atmosphere, processing the chlorine from the chemicals. The stage has been set for once the sun rises in the spring."When the sun comes up and everything remains stable, it's just the right conditions for chlorine to destroy ozone," Johnson said. "The Southern Hemisphere is a little better at doing this, at staying very stable in this containment vessel that we call the polar vortex. It holds the air in and allows all the chemistry to happen."CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APPOzone can be a deadly pollutant closer to the ground, but in mid-latitudes, the ozone layer protects people from high energy UV light along with other possible damage caused by the sun. While ozone holes away from the poles aren't common, the hole over Antarctica served as a warning for scientists."It's the ozone layer everywhere around the world that's impacted and degraded to a certain degree by ozone depleting substances. The place where that depletion is the largest is over Antarctica," Montzka said. "So Antarctica is kind of just a canary in a coal mine where the biggest changes are seen in the ozone, gives us a kind of indication of what happens when the ozone layer goes away because of human-emitted chemicals."During 2019, the Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest it had been in more than 30 years, which Johnson attributes to two factors: the first being the slow decline in CFCs and the second being the meteorological conditions. This image made available by NASA shows a map of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica on Sunday, Oct. 20, 2019. The purple and blue colors indicate the least amount of ozone, and the yellows and reds show the most. In October 2019, NASA says the ozone hole near the south pole this year is the smallest since it was discovered, but it is more due to freakish Antarctic weather than efforts to cut down on pollution. (Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA via AP) "There's still plenty of ozone depletion that we're observing in the atmosphere, and yet more recently as the ozone-depleting chemical concentrations are decreasing, there are hints that the ozone layer is starting to recover," Montzka said. With the Montreal Protocol making "dramatic changes" to the amount of depleting substances emitted into the atmosphere, the concentrations of the "bad actors" causing ozone depletion have also declined."That's had a lot to do with those initial signs of ozone recovery that we've seen," Montzka said.Scientists had also observed a 20% decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016, according to the Earth Observatory."The other factor that plays a big role are the meteorological conditions, the atmospheric dynamics, the waves and these meteorological disturbances that break down that big circulating wind pattern around the Antarctic, we call it the polar vortex," Johnson said. "That polar vortex sets up every winter when the sun goes down, and the chemistry happens when the sun comes back up. That polar vortex remains stable, it allows the chlorine chemistry to complete its cycle and destroy 50 to 60% of the ozone layer, the ozone in the atmosphere."During 2019, the polar vortex had remained stable until September, when the depletion typically begins."The destruction chemistry kind of got shut off early," Johnson said, explaining that an occurrence such as this with the polar vortex breaking down is seen every decade or so. U.S. Associate Director for Research of the Earth Science Division (ESD) within NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Jack Kaye delivers a conference about evolution of the Ozone hole on the Antarctic at the U.S. Pavillon during the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Le Bourget, outside Paris, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015. (AP Photo/Francois Mori) While the recovery process has been long, Johnson stressed that it's natural for the ozone layer to go through a cycle of replenishing ozone and attempting to close back up. However, the goal each year is to see a recovery and, once the CFCs are no longer in the atmosphere, to see a healthy ozone layer."Once all the CFCs and reactive gases that are the sources of the destruction of ozone chemicals are gone, you know it won't matter what the meteorological conditions are," Johnson said. "There just isn't any chlorine that would give you an ozone hole, so 50 years from now you won't see that anymore."
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| 'Murder Hornets,' with sting that can kill, land in US Posted: 04 May 2020 11:33 AM PDT  The world's largest hornet, a 2-inch killer dubbed the "Murder Hornet" with an appetite for honey bees, has been found in Washington state, where entomologists were making plans to wipe it out. The giant Asian insect, with a sting that could be fatal to some people, is just now starting to emerge from winter hibernation. "They're like something out of a monster cartoon with this huge yellow-orange face," said Susan Cobey, a bee breeder at Washington State University.
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| Italy eases virus lockdown, and gets first reckoning of toll Posted: 04 May 2020 11:28 AM PDT  Greece, Portugal and Belgium also eased virus restrictions, while Britain was poised to soon overtake Italy as the country with the most confirmed COVID-19 dead in Europe. Traffic ticked up in city centers, commuter and long-distance trains sold out and more people ventured out after restrictions on movement eased for the first time since Italy locked down March 11. "We are being careful, trying not to do too many things, but at least we are finally outside and breathing some fresh air," said Daniele Bianchi as he strolled through Rome's Villa Borghese park.
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| Senate secretary declines to release possible Reade report Posted: 04 May 2020 10:03 AM PDT  The secretary of the Senate has declined Joe Biden's request to release any potential documents pertaining to an allegation of sexual assault against him from a former Senate staffer, citing confidentiality requirements under the law. Biden made the request Friday after delivering his first public comments responding to the allegation from former staffer Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the spring of 1993. Biden has denied the allegation.
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| Coronavirus: Why are some African states easing lockdowns? Posted: 04 May 2020 09:48 AM PDT  Countries have taken different routes in imposing restrictions, and in lifting some of them.
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| Hezbollah backs IMF help for Lebanon, but with a warning Posted: 04 May 2020 09:46 AM PDT |
| US awards 29 Purple Hearts for brain injuries in Iran attack Posted: 04 May 2020 09:37 AM PDT |
| 3 charged in killing of store security guard over virus mask Posted: 04 May 2020 09:19 AM PDT  A woman, her adult son and husband have been charged in the fatal shooting of a security guard who refused to let her daughter enter a Family Dollar in Michigan because she wasn't wearing a face mask to protect against transmission of the coronavirus. Calvin Munerlyn was shot Friday at the store just north of downtown Flint a short time after telling Sharmel Teague's daughter she had to leave because she lacked a mask, according to Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton. Teague; her husband, Larry Teague, 44; and Ramonyea Bishop, 23; are charged with first-degree premeditated murder and gun charges.
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| Secluded Chesapeake Bay island keeps eye on virus from afar Posted: 04 May 2020 09:10 AM PDT  Far fewer people on Tangier are wearing masks than in much of the U.S. Its watermen, who anchor the economy and make up much of the workforce, still pull up crab pots and sell their bushels to buyers on the mainland. Tangier has come to be viewed by some in America's stifled East Coast cities as the perfect escape. The island also told a New York-based production company that was filming a possible television show about Tangier to stay away until the pandemic subsided.
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| AP PHOTOS: Altered reality of the coronavirus pandemic Posted: 04 May 2020 09:06 AM PDT  The restrictions meant to slow the spread of the new coronavirus are easing in some areas, but life remains altered. The New York City subway system, long celebrated for its all-night service, has started to close from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. to increase cleaning of trains and stations.
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| With split delayed, United Methodists face a year in limbo Posted: 04 May 2020 08:52 AM PDT  Had there been no coronavirus pandemic, America's largest mainline Protestant denomination would be convening this week for a likely vote to break up over differences on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ pastors. Instead, the United Methodist Church was forced to postpone the potentially momentous conference, leaving its various factions in limbo for perhaps 16 more months. "The people who are really in trauma right now cannot pay the price of our differences," said Kenneth Carter, the Florida-based president of the UMC's Council of Bishops.
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| Iran reopens mosques, records almost 80,000 hospital recoveries Posted: 04 May 2020 07:28 AM PDT  Iran on Monday reopened mosques in parts of the country deemed at low risk from coronavirus, as it said almost 80,000 people hospitalised with the illness had recovered and been released. Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said 74 new fatalities brought to 6,277 the total number officially recorded in Iran since it reported its first cases in mid-February. Iran on Sunday recorded 47 deaths, its lowest daily count in 55 days.
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| Gunmen kill 9 police in recaptured, but unruly south Syria Posted: 04 May 2020 07:00 AM PDT |
| What you need to know today about the virus outbreak Posted: 04 May 2020 06:56 AM PDT  Millions of people were allowed to return to work in Italy on Monday as Europe's longest coronavirus lockdown started to ease, while the U.S. took halting steps to lift some of its own restrictions even as tens of thousands of new cases were reported every day. Here are some of AP's top stories Monday on the world's coronavirus pandemic. — U.S. officials believe China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it.
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| Rescued migrants stranded at sea, not allowed to any EU port Posted: 04 May 2020 06:51 AM PDT |
| Virus fear turns deportees into pariahs at home in Guatemala Posted: 04 May 2020 06:48 AM PDT  Migrants returning from the United States were once considered heroes in Guatemala, where the money they send back to their hometowns is a mainstay of the economy. In Haiti, police are guarding a hotel full of quarantined deportees from the U.S. — partly to prevent them from escaping and partly to stop attacks from neighbors frightened of the coronavirus. Vanessa Díaz said her mother heard rumors that neighbors were organizing to keep her from reaching her home in the northern province of Petén after she was deported back to Guatemala on a flight from the United States.
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| Coronavirus in Ghana: Online funerals, face masks and elections without rallies Posted: 04 May 2020 05:54 AM PDT  Ghana is well known for its elaborate funerals and rowdy election campaigns so coronavirus is changing everything.
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| Homeless in NYC: Scared of shelters during COVID-19 crisis Posted: 04 May 2020 05:40 AM PDT  Three hours before mealtime, a line begins to form on the sidewalk outside St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, facing Park Avenue in one of New York City's poshest neighborhoods. Listening to some of them, and to the staff who operate the daily meal program, this much is clear: However difficult it's always been to be homeless in New York, it's tougher and scarier now amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Department of Homeless Services has identified more than 650 cases and more than 50 COVID-19 deaths among the 17,000 single adults in its shelter system.
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| AP Courtside: Supreme Court wraps up its 1st phone arguments Posted: 04 May 2020 05:09 AM PDT  The coronavirus pandemic has forced the tradition-bound Supreme Court into some big changes. Starting Monday, the justices are hearing arguments by telephone for the first time. Chief Justice John Roberts has with those words wrapped up the first Supreme Court argument conducted by telephone and where audio was available live to the public.
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| Before COVID-19, Trump Aide Sought to Use Disease to Close Borders Posted: 04 May 2020 05:00 AM PDT  From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president's chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.The question was, which disease?Miller pushed for invoking the president's broad public health powers in 2019 when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu.When vast caravans of migrants surged toward the border in 2018, Miller looked for evidence that they carried illnesses. He asked for updates on U.S. communities that received migrants to see if new disease was spreading there.In 2018, dozens of migrants became seriously ill in federal custody, and two under the age of 10 died within three weeks of each other. While many viewed the incidents as resulting from negligence on the part of border authorities, Miller instead argued that they supported his argument that President Donald Trump should use his public health powers to justify sealing the borders.On some occasions, Miller and the president, who also embraced these ideas, were talked down by Cabinet secretaries and lawyers who argued that the public health situation at the time did not provide sufficient legal basis for such a proclamation.That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.Within days of the confirmation of the first case in the United States, the White House shut U.S. land borders to nonessential travel, closing the door to almost all migrants, including children and teenagers who arrived at the border with no parent or other adult guardian. Other international travel restrictions were introduced as well as a pause on green card processing at U.S. consular offices, which Miller told conservative allies in a recent private phone call was only the first step in a broader plan to restrict legal immigration.But what has been billed by the White House as an urgent response to the coronavirus pandemic was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy, three former officials who were involved in the earlier deliberations said.One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a "wish list" of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.He had come up with the proposals, the official said, by poring through not just existing immigration laws but the entire federal code to look for provisions that would allow the president to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.Administration officials have repeatedly said the latest measures are needed to prevent new cases of infection from entering the country."This is a public health order that we're operating under right now," Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters earlier this month. "This is not about immigration. What's transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health."The White House declined to comment on the matter, but a senior administration official confirmed details of the past discussions.The architect of the president's assault on immigration and one of Trump's closest advisers inside the White House, Miller has relentlessly pushed for tough restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, including policies that sought to separate families crossing the southwest border, force migrants seeking asylum to wait in squalid camps in Mexico and deny green cards to poor immigrants.Miller argues that reducing immigration will protect jobs for American workers and keep communities safe from criminals. But critics accuse him of targeting nonwhite immigrants, pointing in part to leaked emails from his time before entering the White House in which he cited white nationalist websites and magazines and promoted theories popular with white nationalist groups.The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease.The federal law on public health that Miller has long wanted to use grants power to the surgeon general and president to block people from entering the United States when it is necessary to avert a "serious danger" posed by the presence of a communicable disease in foreign countries.The administration, in adopting the latest restrictions on immigration, has relied not only on that public health authority but also on another provision of federal law that allows the president to deny entry to foreigners whose presence "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States."The provision, section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, grants broad power to the president but sets a high legal bar for its use. The Reagan administration invoked it to block large numbers of Haitians traveling by sea to seek asylum in the United States, and during the Obama administration, it was used to enforce sanctions against Iran.The Trump administration has made use of the authority on occasion, including the sanctions imposed on Iran and a travel ban directed at six predominantly Muslim countries in 2017 as a purported defense against terrorism. But the president has often expressed frustration at being discouraged from using the authority more often and in policies that are more sweeping in scope, including when record numbers of migrant families surged across the southern border.He seemed to discount the stringent standards required to invoke it, often referring to it as his "magical authority" to restrict immigration, one of the former officials who was present for the discussions said.Miller also frequently expressed interest in using the 212(f) authority. On more than one occasion, the official said, he discussed it as a backup option in case the courts blocked a policy such as the administration's public charge rule, which prevents people who have used public benefits from obtaining green cards.The use of section 212(f) and the public health authority during the pandemic is in keeping with a defining characteristic of Miller, as described by the three former officials who worked in proximity to him: his refusal to let things go. When advised that a proposed policy is not legal, they said, he works steadily to find an alternative justification and continues to raise the issue.The former officials who were present for the discussions said Miller suggested using the president's public health authority to seal the border so frequently that it was difficult to recall specific scenarios.In repeated meetings in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room and during late-night phone diatribes that gave few opportunities for his colleagues to chime in, they said, Miller pushed the idea as a legal silver bullet.He and others in the administration frequently talked about migrants as potential vectors of disease, they said. Miller cited historical precedent for invoking the president's public health powers, pointing out that many immigrants were refused entry at Ellis Island in the late 19th century amid concerns that contagious diseases could be brought into overcrowded cities.During the mumps outbreak in 2019, after other White House advisers disagreed with the use of the public health authority to halt immigration, Miller ordered federal immigration officials to begin generating reports on the level of infection among detained migrants for White House review.In the meantime, he encouraged the State Department to step up medical screenings of migrants and crafted a presidential proclamation barring entry for immigrants who could not afford to purchase health insurance, a measure that was blocked by a federal judge.The coronavirus pandemic has created an opening for some of Miller's other long-standing policy goals, such as finding a way to quickly deport children who travel to the United States without a parent or other adult. Miller considered that category of migrants among the most difficult to stop, said one official who had discussed it with him, because the young people are protected legally by substantial due process requirements designed to ensure that deportation would not place them in harm's way.Since border crossings were scaled back under the coronavirus restrictions, even unaccompanied children and teenagers have been turned away.While the administration succeeded in invoking the public health authority to impose the new border restrictions, that is only one of a number of aggressive legal strategies Miller has proposed, some of which have not been adopted.At one point in the first year of the administration, Miller proposed designating smugglers, who are often paid to help migrants across the rugged and cartel-controlled terrain of the southwest border, as terrorists, one of the former officials said. Miller, the official said, argued that this would allow U.S. authorities to deny entry to asylum-seekers on the grounds that they had aided a foreign terrorist organization during their journeys.Miller has also drawn up plans to expand security on the southern border.Over the years, some National Guard and military officers have been deployed there, but they have been relegated mostly to stringing up concertina wire because of legal restrictions on their ability to operate in the United States.To overcome those hurdles, Miller has proposed invoking the Insurrection Act, a law written in the 1800s that allows for the military to be deployed in the face of civil unrest. Under that law, he said, military officers would gain the authority to prevent migrants from crossing the border.The law has not yet been invoked.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| UN response to Haiti cholera epidemic lambasted by its own rights monitors Posted: 04 May 2020 05:00 AM PDT  * 13 top officials denounced 'illusory' promises to Haitian people * Disease brought to Haiti by UN peacekeepers killed 10,000Thirteen UN rights monitors have unleashed blistering criticism of the United Nations for its "deeply disappointing" failure to make amends for having brought cholera to Haiti, causing the deaths of at least 10,000 people.In a letter to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, the independent monitors excoriate the world body for making "illusory" promises to the Haitian people. They note that having pledged $400m for a cholera clean-up mission, the UN has raised just $21m and spent "a pitiful" $3m."This is a deeply disappointing showing following the loss of 10,000 lives," the letter states.Scientific evidence has conclusively shown that cholera was imported into the country by sick Nepalese UN peacekeepers who were relocated in 2010 to Haiti to help with a devastating earthquake. The UN failed to screen the Nepalese force for the disease, which could have been done before they deployed from Nepal for less than $2,000.For six years the UN denied any involvement in the transmission of the cholera bacterium. In 2016 it issued a fudged apology, but has continued to resist accepting any legal responsibility or to pay compensation.Philip Alston, the UN monitor on extreme poverty and human rights who is lead signatory of the letter, told the Guardian that the UN's failings were put into clear relief by the coronavirus pandemic."The world is rightly focused on the horrors of Covid-19 and losing thousands of people. But 10,000 people died in Haiti and there was no response," he said.Alston, who prepared a report to the UN general assembly on Haiti's cholera disaster in 2016, added: "What upsets me most is that the UN has still not acknowledged its responsibility for taking cholera to Haiti."Cholera appears to have been halted in Haiti with the last case reported in January 2019. Even then, the bulk of the public health work devoted to root out the illness was carried out by local health workers and aid groups and not by the UN.In December 2016, the then UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, made an apology of sorts, but it was carefully worded to avoid any legal accountability. He said: "We did not do enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and spread in Haiti."Alston said: "There continues to be an explicit refusal to accept any formal responsibility, let alone legal responsibility."The independent UN monitors who signed the letter include Leilani Farha, special rapporteur on adequate housing; Léo Heller, special rapporteur on water and sanitation; and five members of the working group of experts on people of African descent.The lack of any compensation for the cholera disaster has had serious consequences for thousands of people in the poverty-stricken country. Many of those who died in the epidemic were the main income earners of their families, and their deaths had catastrophic implications for those left behind.Alston told the Guardian that having studied the cholera disaster over many years he had concluded that the UN's reprehensible conduct could only be understood by accepting that "an element of racism is involved here".He said: "If this happened to a white community in a country with any standing globally the UN wouldn't have done – and wouldn't have been able to do – nothing. But this is Haiti, a country which has largely been written off."In a statement, a UN spokesman said: "Since taking office, the secretary-general has been strongly committed to supporting the people of Haiti and the fight against cholera. He reiterates the UN's deep regrets for the loss of life and suffering caused by the cholera epidemic."
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| The COVID-19 Riddle: Why Does the Virus Wallop Some Places and Spare Others? Posted: 04 May 2020 04:59 AM PDT  The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.The Dominican Republic has reported nearly 7,600 cases of the virus. Just across the border, Haiti has recorded about 85.In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.The coronavirus has touched almost every country on earth, but its impact has seemed capricious. Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.The question of why the virus has overwhelmed some places and left others relatively untouched is a puzzle that has spawned numerous theories and speculations but no definitive answers. That knowledge could have profound implications for how countries respond to the virus, for determining who is at risk and for knowing when it's safe to go out again.There are already hundreds of studies underway around the world looking into how demographics, preexisting conditions and genetics might affect the wide variation in impact.Doctors in Saudi Arabia are studying whether genetic differences may help explain varying levels of severity in COVID-19 cases among Saudi Arabs, while scientists in Brazil are looking into the relationship between genetics and COVID-19 complications. Teams in multiple countries are studying if common hypertension medications might worsen the disease's severity and whether a particular tuberculosis vaccine might do the opposite.Many developing nations with hot climates and young populations have escaped the worst, suggesting that temperature and demographics could be factors. But countries like Peru, Indonesia and Brazil, tropical countries in the throes of growing epidemics, throw cold water on that idea.Draconian social distancing and early lockdown measures have clearly been effective, but Myanmar and Cambodia did neither and have reported few cases.One theory that is unproven but impossible to refute: Maybe the virus just hasn't gotten to those countries yet. Russia and Turkey appeared to be fine until, suddenly, they were not.Time may still prove the greatest equalizer: The Spanish flu that broke out in the United States in 1918 seemed to die down during the summer only to come roaring back with a deadlier strain in the fall and a third wave the following year. It eventually reached far-flung places like islands in Alaska and the South Pacific and infected a third of the world's population."We are really early in this disease," said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Research Institute. "If this were a baseball game, it would be the second inning, and there's no reason to think that by the ninth inning the rest of the world that looks now like it hasn't been affected won't become like other places."Doctors who study infectious diseases around the world say they do not have enough data yet to get a full epidemiological picture, and that gaps in information in many countries make it dangerous to draw conclusions. Testing is woeful in many places, leading to vast underestimates of the virus's progress, and deaths are almost certainly undercounted.Still, the broad patterns are clear. Even in places with abysmal record-keeping and broken health systems, mass burials or hospitals turning away sick people by the thousands would be hard to miss, and a number of places are just not seeing them -- at least not yet.Interviews with more than two dozen infectious disease experts, health officials, epidemiologists and academics around the globe suggest four main factors that could help explain where the virus thrives and where it doesn't: demographics, culture, environment and the speed of government responses.Each possible explanation comes with considerable caveats and confounding counterevidence. If an aging population is the most vulnerable, for instance, Japan should be at the top of the list. It is far from it. Nonetheless, these are the factors that experts find the most persuasive.The Power of YouthMany countries that have escaped mass epidemics have relatively younger populations.Young people are more likely to contract mild or asymptomatic cases that are less transmissible to others, said Robert Bollinger, a professor of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. And they are less likely to have certain health problems that can make COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, particularly deadly, according to the World Health Organization.Africa -- with about 45,000 reported cases, a tiny fraction of its 1.3 billion people -- is the world's youngest continent, with more than 60% of its population under age 25. In Thailand and Najaf, Iraq, local health officials found that the 20-to-29 age group had the highest rate of infection but often showed few symptoms.By contrast, the national median age in Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries, is more than 45. The average age of those who died of COVID-19 there was around 80.Younger people tend to have stronger immune systems, which can result in milder symptoms, said Josip Car, an expert in population and global health at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.In Singapore and Saudi Arabia, for instance, most of the infections are among foreign migrant workers, many of them living in cramped dormitories. However, many of those workers are young and fit and have not required hospitalization.Along with youth, relative good health can lessen the impact of the virus among those who are infected, while certain preexisting conditions -- notably hypertension, diabetes and obesity -- can worsen the severity, researchers in the United States say.There are notable exceptions to the demographic theory. Japan, with the world's oldest average population, has recorded fewer than 520 deaths, although its caseload has risen with increased testing.The Guayas region of Ecuador, the epicenter of an outbreak that may have claimed up to 7,000 lives, is one of the youngest in the country, with only 11% of its residents over 60 years old.And Jha of Harvard warns that some young people who are not showing symptoms are also highly contagious for reasons that are not well understood.Cultural DistanceCultural factors, like the social distancing that is built into certain societies, may give some countries more protection, epidemiologists said.In Thailand and India, where virus numbers are relatively low, people greet each other at a distance, with palms joined together as in prayer. In Japan and South Korea, people bow, and long before the coronavirus arrived, they tended to wear face masks when feeling unwell.In much of the developing world, the custom of caring for the elderly at home leads to fewer nursing homes, which have been tinder for tragic outbreaks in the West.However, there are notable exceptions to the cultural-distancing theory. In many parts of the Middle East, such as Iraq and the Persian Gulf countries, men often embrace or shake hands on meeting, yet most are not getting sick.What might be called "national distancing" has also proven advantageous. Countries that are relatively isolated have reaped health benefits from their seclusion.Far-flung nations, such as some in the South Pacific and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, have not been as inundated with visitors bringing the virus with them. Health experts in Africa cite limited travel from abroad as perhaps the main reason for the continent's relatively low infection rate.Countries that are less accessible for political reasons, like Venezuela, or because of conflict, like Syria and Libya, have also been somewhat shielded by the lack of travelers, as have countries like Lebanon and Iraq, which have endured widespread protests in recent months.The lack of public transportation in developing countries may have also reduced the spread of the virus there.Heat and LightThe geography of the outbreak -- which spread rapidly during the winter in temperate-zone countries like Italy and the United States and was virtually unseen in warmer countries such as Chad or Guyana -- seemed to suggest that the virus did not take well to heat. Other coronaviruses, such as ones that cause the common cold, are less contagious in warmer, moist climates.But researchers say the idea that hot weather alone can repel the virus is wishful thinking.Some of the worst outbreaks in the developing world have been in places like the Amazonas region of Brazil, as tropical a place as any."The best guess is that summer conditions will help but are unlikely by themselves to lead to significant slowing of growth or to a decline in cases," said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University.The virus that causes COVID-19 appears to be so contagious as to mitigate any beneficial effect of heat and humidity, said Dr. Raul Rabadan, a computational biologist at Columbia University.But other aspects of warm climates, like people spending more time outside, could help."People living indoors within enclosed environments may promote virus recirculation, increasing the chance of contracting the disease," said Car of Nanyang Technological University.The ultraviolet rays of direct sunlight inhibit this coronavirus, according to a study by ecological modelers at the University of Connecticut. So surfaces in sunny places may be less likely to remain contaminated, but transmission usually occurs through contact with an infected person, not by touching a surface.No scientist has proposed that beaming light inside an infected person, as President Donald Trump has suggested, would be an effective cure. And tropical conditions may have even lulled some people into a false sense of security."People were saying, 'It's hot here; nothing will happen to me,'" said Dr. Domenica Cevallos, a medical investigator in Ecuador. "Some were even going out on purpose to sunbathe, thinking it would protect them from infection."Early and Strict LockdownsCountries that locked down early, like Vietnam and Greece, have been able to avoid out-of-control contagions, evidence of the power of strict social distancing and quarantines to contain the virus.In Africa, countries with bitter experience with killers like HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis and Ebola knew the drill and reacted quickly.Airport staff from Sierra Leone to Uganda were taking temperatures (since found to be a less effective measure) and contact details and wearing masks long before their counterparts in the United States and Europe took such precautions.Senegal and Rwanda closed their borders and announced curfews when they still had very few cases. Health ministries began contact tracing early.All this happened in a region where health ministries had come to rely on money, personnel and supplies from foreign donors, many of which had to turn their attention to outbreaks in their own countries, said Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center."Countries wake up one day, and they're like, 'OK, the weight of the country rests on our shoulders, so we need to step up,'" she said. "And they have. Some of the responses have been beautiful to behold, honestly."Sierra Leone repurposed disease-tracking protocols that had been established in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, in which almost 4,000 people died there. The government set up emergency operations centers in every district and recruited 14,000 community health workers, 1,500 of whom are being trained as contact tracers, even though Sierra Leone has only about 155 confirmed cases.It is not clear, however, who will pay for their salaries or for expenses like motorcycles and raincoats to keep them operating during the coming wet season.Uganda, which also suffered during the Ebola contagion, quickly quarantined travelers from Dubai after the first case of the coronavirus arrived from there. Authorities also tracked down about 800 others who had traveled from Dubai in previous weeks.The Ugandan health authorities are also testing around 1,000 truck drivers a day. But many of those who test positive have come from Tanzania and Kenya, countries that are not monitoring as aggressively, leading to worries that the virus will keep penetrating porous borders.Lockdowns, with bans on religious conclaves and spectator sporting events, clearly work, the World Health Organization says. More than a month after closing national borders, schools and most businesses, countries from Thailand to Jordan have seen new infections drop.In the Middle East, the widespread shuttering of mosques, shrines and churches happened relatively early and probably helped stem the spread in many countries.A notable exception was Iran, which did not close some of its largest shrines until March 18, a full month after it registered its first case in the pilgrimage city of Qum. The epidemic spread quickly from there, killing thousands in the country and spreading the virus across borders as pilgrims returned home.As effective as lockdowns are, in countries lacking a strong social safety net and those where most people work in the informal economy, orders closing businesses and requiring people to shelter in place will be difficult to maintain for long. When people are forced to choose between social distancing and feeding their families, they are choosing the latter.Counterintuitively, some countries where authorities reacted late and with spotty enforcement of lockdowns appear to have been spared. Cambodia and Laos both had brief spates of infections when few social distancing measures were in place, but neither has recorded a new case in about three weeks.Lebanon, whose Muslim and Christian citizens often go on pilgrimages respectively to Iran and Italy, places rife with the virus, should have had high numbers of infections. It has not."We just didn't see what we were expecting," said Dr. Roy Nasnas, an infectious disease consultant at the University Hospital Geitaoui in Beirut. "We don't know why."Roll of the DiceFinally, most experts agree that there may be no single reason for some countries to be hit and others missed. The answer is likely to be some combination of the above factors as well as one other mentioned by researchers: sheer luck.Countries with the same culture and climate could have vastly different outcomes if one infected person attends a crowded social occasion, turning it into what researchers call a superspreader event.That happened when a passenger infected 634 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan, when an infected guest attended a large funeral in Albany, Georgia; and when a 61-year-old woman went to church in Daegu, South Korea, spreading the disease to hundreds of congregants and then to thousands of other Koreans.Because an infected person may not experience symptoms for a week or more, if at all, the disease spreads under the radar, exponentially and seemingly at random. Had the woman in Daegu stayed home that Sunday in February, the outbreak in South Korea might have been less than half of what it is.Some countries that should have been inundated are not, leaving researchers scratching their heads.Thailand reported the first confirmed case of coronavirus outside of China in mid-January, from a traveler from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic is thought to have begun. In those critical weeks, Thailand continued to welcome an influx of Chinese visitors. For some reason, these tourists did not set off exponential local transmission.And when countries do all the wrong things and still end up seemingly not as battered by the virus as one would expect, go figure."In Indonesia, we have a health minister who believes you can pray away COVID, and we have too little testing," said Dr. Pandu Riono, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Indonesia. "But we are lucky we have so many islands in our country that limit travel and maybe infection."There's nothing else we're doing right," he added.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Nigerians cautious as coronavirus lockdown eased Posted: 04 May 2020 03:57 AM PDT  Businesses in key areas reopen but some are reluctant to return to work over health fears.
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| Monday Sunrise Briefing: US tries to balance liberty and safety Posted: 04 May 2020 03:14 AM PDT |
| Iran death toll from coronavirus outbreak rises by 74 to 6,277 - health ministry official Posted: 04 May 2020 02:54 AM PDT |
| Coronavirus Has Exposed Putin’s Brittle Regime Posted: 04 May 2020 02:21 AM PDT |
| Called to order: Supreme Court holds 1st arguments by phone Posted: 04 May 2020 02:19 AM PDT  The arguments were essentially a high-profile phone discussion with the nine justices and two arguing lawyers. The high court had initially postponed arguments in 20 cases scheduled for March and April because of the coronavirus pandemic. Courtroom sessions were seen as unsafe, especially with six justices aged 65 or older and at risk of getting seriously sick from the virus. The court chose a somewhat obscure case about whether the travel website Booking.com can trademark its name for its first foray into remote arguments.
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| Night burials amid Tanzania's coronavirus defiance Posted: 04 May 2020 01:17 AM PDT  Some fear the East African nation is downplaying the pandemic as it seeks to protect its economy.
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| Freedom! In France, a nursing home takes on COVID and wins Posted: 04 May 2020 01:04 AM PDT  As the coronavirus scythed through nursing homes, cutting a deadly path, Valerie Martin vowed to herself that the story would be different in the home she runs in France. The action she took to stop the virus from infecting and killing the vulnerable older adults in her care was both drastic and effective: Martin and her staff locked themselves in with the 106 residents. For 47 days and nights, staff and residents of the Vilanova nursing home on the outskirts of the east-central city of Lyon waited out the coronavirus storm together, while COVID-19 killed tens of thousands of people in other homes across Europe, including more than 9,000 in France.
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| South Korea protests border gunfire it says North started Posted: 04 May 2020 12:55 AM PDT  South Korea said Monday it protested to North Korea over the exchange of gunfire inside their heavily fortified border that it says the North started. It was the first shooting inside the Demilitarized Zone in about 2 ½ years, but there were no known casualties on either side, according to South Korean defense officials. Defense Ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo told reporters Monday that South Korea sent a message of strong protest and urged North Korea to explain the shooting and avoid similar incidents.
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| Amid Moscow lockdown, some dogs find new homes and friends Posted: 04 May 2020 12:40 AM PDT  Stuck at home during Moscow's coronavirus lockdown, Alexandra Novatova opted to use a delivery service — a big decision, because she was ordering more than a pizza or a shipment of toilet paper. Animal shelter volunteers showed dogs and cats to try to match them with humans.
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| Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus Response Fails Better Posted: 04 May 2020 12:28 AM PDT |
| Netanyahu lashes out at top court, threatens new elections Posted: 04 May 2020 12:23 AM PDT  Israel's prime minister urged the country's Supreme Court on Monday not to interfere in his efforts to build a coalition government, threatening that a decision against him could drag the country toward an unprecedented fourth straight election in just over a year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his comments shortly after the court heard a second day of arguments in a series of legal challenges to the coalition deal. The court's rulings, expected by the end of the week, will dictate whether Israel breaks out of its prolonged political paralysis with Netanyahu and his former political rival Benny Gantz joining forces in government, or whether the country is plunged into another election.
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