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New study data showed Pfizers experimental Covid-19 pill was highly effective at keeping patients out of the hospital, but less adept at erasing milder symptoms often associated with breakthrough infections.

Pfizer disclosed findings from two studies in a statement Tuesday. In one, its treatment, Paxlovid, failed to meet the primary goal of reducing self-reported symptoms in 673 adults at standard risk of developing Covid-19 complications. The drug showed a trend toward reducing hospitalizations in the group by 70%, however.

In the other study, the treatment remained 89% effective in preventing hospitalizations in high-risk unvaccinated people when used within 3 days of the appearance of symptoms. That confirmed Pfizer’s earlier analysis of results from a smaller number of patients.

The complicated results suggest that the pill remains likely to become a standard treatment for Covid patients at risk of developing severe disease. But the mixed reading in healthier patients shows more study is likely to be needed before it becomes a go-to option for vaccinated individuals who develop frustrating but not life-threatening infections.

The high-risk finding “underscores the treatment candidate’s potential to save the lives of patients around the world,” Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in the statement. “If authorized or approved, this potential treatment could be a critical tool to help quell the pandemic.”

The shares rose 0.3% as of 9:44 a.m. in New York. A separate study by South African researchers found that a two-shot course of Pfizer and BioNTech SE’s Covid vaccine prevented 70% of hospitalizations and a third of infections caused by the omicron variant. The findings from Discovery Ltd., South Africa’s largest health insurer, were based on about 78,000 Covid test results.

Pfizer said lab tests indicate that Paxlovid will also retain its activity against omicron, as expected. The medication targets an internal protein, called a protease, that isn’t thought to mutate much between variants. By contrast, vaccines take aim at the so-called spike protein, which is highly mutated in omicron and could change more in future variants.

The data in high-risk unvaccinated people looks clear-cut. If confirmed by regulators, the results could pave the way for an emergency clearance and widespread use in such patients as soon as Pfizer is able to produce it in large quantity.

In an interview, Pfizer senior vice president Annaliesa Anderson said the company started submitting data needed to gain a U.S. emergency authorization in high-risk patients “a while ago,” and that it would provide the new updated data to U.S. regulators shortly.

The other tranche of study data suggests a more complicated path for using the drugs in patients at lower risk of complications from the virus.

The standard-risk trial included vaccinated patients who had at least one risk factor for severe disease and low-risk unvaccinated people. Pfizer didn’t release additional details on the primary endpoint of self-reported symptoms. It said in its statement that an independent data monitoring committee had recommended that the trial continue.

Adverse events were similar between the drug and placebo group in both trials, Pfizer said, suggesting there are no major side effect problems so far.

In the standard-risk trial, the apparent decline in hospitalizations wasn’t statistically significant due to the small numbers of patients involved, said Anderson, who heads Pfizer’s hospital unit, which includes antiviral research.

Anderson said the company had focused on symptom reduction as the primary goal of the standard risk study, not hospitalization, as it had figured proving a reduction in hospitalizations would be hard to achieve in the lower-risk people.

“We are working through what our path forward will be in this patient population,” Anderson said, adding that the company should have full results from the standard-risk trial “soon.”

From a public-health perspective, a drug that can reduce deaths among the unvaccinated and reduce strain on the health-care system is crucial.

But over the long-term, showing the drug can help the vaccinated as well is also important. Over time, unvaccinated adults are becoming an increasingly smaller minority. And if the immune-evading omicron variant takes over from delta, or at least becomes a major player going forward, less serious Covid cases among vaccinated people may become even more common.

Published : December 15, 2021

By : Bloomberg

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The omicron variant of Covid-19 is scrambling the European Unions plans to simplify its travel rules, particularly as some countries move ahead with new unilateral restrictions.

EU governments are split over a plan to shift the rules to base them on a person’s vaccination status rather than on case levels in a particular country, with some countries asking for a delay to better understand the impact of the new variant, according to an diplomat familiar with talks. One of the EU’s largest members suggested pushing off discussions until January, the official said.

As those talks continue, Italy is planning to require Covid tests for all visitors, including vaccinated people from other EU countries, starting on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the discussions. The change would be an expansion of the rules that is likely to further harm the airline and travel industries.

More broadly, several EU countries are now pushing to require Covid tests for anyone traveling into the bloc — including EU citizens — while several others are opposed to such a comprehensive approach, according to the diplomat. The bloc is also split over how and whether to remove a travel ban imposed on southern African nations, where the spread of the variant was first identified.

Last month, just as the new variant was emerging, the European Commission proposed making travel fully dependent on the status of the traveler as of March 1. Under that plan, vaccinated people from any country would be allowed into the EU. Those with a vaccine approved by the World Health Organization that isn’t yet recognized by Europe’s drug regulator would have to show proof of a negative PCR test as an additional safeguard.

The pushback comes as EU leaders head to Brussels this week for a summit that is set to address developments around Covid-19 and the omicron variant.

“Coordination of our measures, based on the best available scientific evidence, is critical, notably in order to preserve mobility,” European Council President Charles Michel wrote in a letter Tuesday inviting EU leaders to the summit.

EU leaders are expected to push for more urgency on booster shots, including encouraging a shorter timeframe between shots, according to an EU diplomat.

Some member states want to see more science-based data on the new strain before taking a decision on the proposals, the diplomat said, even as they remain split on which steps to take.

Several governments also pushed back against the commission’s attempts to streamline the passenger locator forms the bloc uses to track incoming visitors, citing data privacy concerns, the diplomat said.

Despite the differences, member states are expected to back the EU’s proposal to limit the validity of Covid vaccine certificates to nine months for travel purposes to encourage the use of booster shots, the diplomat added.

Published : December 15, 2021

By : Bloomberg

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A fuel tanker exploded overnight in Cap-Haïtien, Haitis second-largest city, killing at least 60 people and wounding hundreds more, officials said Tuesday, the latest in man-made and natural calamities to rock the beleaguered Caribbean nation this year.

Images showed bright red and orange flames licking at buildings in the dark night, charred cars and motorcycles on city streets, roofs partially blown off homes and the mangled remains of the tanker capsized in a ditch.

The blast in the port city some 124 miles north of Port-au-Prince caused extensive damage, Prime Minister Ariel Henry said in a tweet. He was headed to the coastal city on Tuesday with other government officials and doctors.

“Three days of national mourning will be decreed throughout the territory, in memory of the victims of this tragedy that the entire Haitian nation is grieving,” Henry said in a tweet. “Field hospitals will be quickly deployed in Cap-Haïtien to provide the necessary care to the victims of this terrible explosion.”

Officials said that the death toll would probably rise as the true extent of the damage became clearer and issued urgent pleas for medical aid.

“I am dismayed by the tragedy affecting our city,” Yvrose Pierre, a mayor of Cap-Haïtien, said in a tweet.

Nelson Deshommes, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said he visited the scene of the explosion early Tuesday morning. First responders were removing corpses, including many burned beyond the point of recognition, he said, putting some into body bags and piling others onto trucks.

“It’s sad,” Deshommes said. “I could not stay. It’s too difficult for me to see what’s going on.”

Patrick Almonor, one of Cap-Haïtien’s three mayors, said the fuel tanker capsized shortly after midnight, spilling gas into a ditch. As locals crowded around to collect some of the gas with containers, the truck exploded, he said. Firefighters arrived with 1,500 gallons of water, but could not extinguish the flames and had to call for aid from airport firefighters.

Almonor said the incident appeared to be an accident and that at least 20 homes had been burned.

“We have critical needs to take care of the burned people and clean the area,” he said.

The explosion is the latest tragedy to strike Haiti this year.

The country, saddled by endemic poverty, is being led by an interim government after its president was assassinated in July. A massive, 7.2-magnitude earthquake the next month killed more than 2,000 people and injured scores more. Powerful gangs have stepped in to fill a leadership vacuum, kidnapping Haitians from all walks of life and worsening insecurity. U.S. and Canadian officials have urged their nationals to leave the country.

In recent months, the country had been left virtually paralyzed by a fuel shortage that hit hospitals and schools, which rely on diesel generators for electricity. Many businesses were forced to close, and transportation workers took part in a nationwide strike to protest the crippling shortages.

The growing stranglehold of gangs was in part to blame for the fuel crisis, officials said. Many had hijacked fuel trucks and kidnapped their drivers for ransom or blocked fuel distribution at ports in an attempt to get Henry to resign. Earlier this year, they had blocked the main corridors for convoys bringing aid to victims of the earthquake.

Deshommes said the largest hospital in Cap-Haïtien is no longer operating after it was attacked by armed bandits in November, so victims from the explosion have been sent to other facilities, which lack critical resources. Local media reported that some victims were being cared for in the courtyard of one hospital.

“I did not see an ambulance on-site to take care of burned people,” Deshommes said. “I did not see living burned people either.”

Published : December 15, 2021

By : The Washington Post

On June 20, 2020, the temperature in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk soared to a searing 100.4 degrees – more befitting of the Mediterranean than far east Russia. Scientists with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have now confirmed the measurement is the Arctics hottest temperature on record.

“This new Arctic record is one of a series of observations reported to the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes that sound the alarm bells about our changing climate,” said WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas in a statement.

Last year, 2020, was a record-breaking year across the globe, ranking in the top three warmest years on record. The Arctic, which has been warming more than twice as fast as the global average, experienced an abnormally hot January-to-June time period that year. During those six months, monthly temperatures in Siberia were as high as 18.5 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) above average.

The warm temperatures helped fuel a large number of wildfires in the region, which started earlier than normal in 2020. Around half of the fires burned through areas with thawed peat soil – decomposed organic matter abundant in carbon. Fires on peatlands can release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. In June and July, fires in Arctic Russia released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any entire previous fire season since records began in 2003.

Shortly after the temperature spike, researchers determined Siberia’s anomalously warm months, as well as Verkhoyansk’s record-breaking temperature in June, were virtually impossible without human-induced climate change. Climate change made the prolonged heat from January to June at least 600 times more likely; such extended heat in the region would occur less than once in 80,000 years without the observed increase in temperatures.

To verify the June record, an international committee of experts conducted a thorough analysis of data, including from European weather forecast models. The group also evaluated information from the Russian meteorological agency on the type of equipment used, quality-checks, calibration of the instrument, monitoring techniques and data from surrounding stations.

“Verifying records of this type is important in having a reliable base of evidence as to how our climate’s most extreme extremes are changing,” said Blair Trewin from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and a member of the evaluation committee, in a statement.

The record also prompted the WMO to create a climate category for such extreme events in the region – “highest recorded temperature at or north of 66.5⁰, the Arctic Circle,” encompassing both polar regions. The committee also included the official coldest temperature at or north of the Arctic Circle and Northern Hemisphere: minus-93.3 degrees (minus-69.6 Celsius) on Dec. 22, 1991, in Greenland. Verkhoyansk also holds the record for one of the coldest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere at minus-90 degrees (minus-67.8 Celsius) in February 1892.

The WMO stated that greater extremes will likely in occur again in the Arctic region. While 2021 did not experience all-time highs, warm and dry conditions prompted one of the worst fire seasons in Siberia. Wildfires in Siberia were greater than all other blazes in the world at the time, including those in Greece, Turkey and the western United States. Smoke transited the North Pole. The Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union reported carbon emissions from fires in northeastern Siberia during the summer were record-setting “at more than double previous years.”

The record-high Arctic temperature came in the same year that Antarctica posted its highest temperature ever observed of 65 degrees on Feb. 6, which the WMO confirmed this summer.

The confirmation of these records serves as a “snapshot” of our warming climate, the WMO said. The agency is also verifying extreme temperature readings of 129.9 degrees (54.4 degrees Celsius) in both 2020 and 2021 in Death Valley, Calif. and a new European record of 119.8 degrees (48.8 degrees Celsius) in Sicily this past summer.

“The WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes has never had so many ongoing simultaneous investigations,” Taalas said in a statement.

Published : December 15, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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LONDON – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has mostly been able to do what he wants since his Conservative Party won a historic majority of seats in Parliament, but on Tuesday he faced a massive rebellion from his own side, as lawmakers came out against his proposals to head off an exploding number of infections driven by the new omicron variant.

Johnson wants people to work from home if they can, to wear face coverings in more settings, and most controversially, and to prove they are fully vaccinated or have had negative coronavirus test before they can enter large, crowded gatherings, both indoors and out – like company Christmas parties and sports events.

In a vote on “covid passes,” 99 Conservative lawmakers voted against Johnson’s measure, even more than the 70 to 80 who had earlier pledged to rebel. Another 17 Conservative lawmakers abstained.

The measure still passed easily, as did others, with support from the opposition Labour Party. But it was an embarrassing rebuke for Johnson – the largest rebellion he has seen since the December 2019 election and one of the biggest for a Conservative prime minister.

People in British political circles have begun to speculate about whether, perhaps, Johnson might possibly be replaced in the new year.

Conservative backbenchers say they are tired of his restrictions, zigzags, and mixed messaging on the virus, and who remember well how the government last year essentially “canceled” Christmas at the last minute.

Many in his party have grumbled that they don’t trust Johnson, who is at a low in public opinion polls these days, amid outcry about Christmas parties that may or may not have happened at Downing Street during lockdown last year.

Those from the libertarian wing of the Tories, as the Conservatives are called, say Johnson’s call for masks and passes smacks of nanny-state overreach and represents only the beginning of more intrusive measures to come.

And so “#Gestapo” was trending on Twitter throughout the day in Britain.

Conservative lawmaker Marcus Fysh insisted to BBC Radio that “we are not a papers please! society,” riffing off the common cinematic cliche of a German soldier in World War II asking for documents at a check point.

“This is not Nazi Germany,” Fysh said.

In a surreal scene in the House of Commons on Tuesday, opposition Labour Party lawmaker Wes Streeting stood to defend the government and declare, “We are not living in the 1930s, and the Secretary of State and his team are not Nazis.”

The new rules apply only to England. Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales set their own guidelines.

Johnson has warned of a “tidal wave” of new coronavirus infections and highlighted emerging evidence that omicron appears to easily overcome two vaccine doses – but not two plus a booster. He calls the restrictions “balanced and proportionate” in light of the new variant.

Previously, the largest revolt since the election was in December 2020, when 55 Tory lawmakers opposed (and 16 abstained) a multi-tier system of covid restrictions for England.

That December 2020 vote was angry and shouty. Tuesday’s proceedings were much more calm.

In addition to compulsory mask-wearing and “covid passes,” the government wants mandatory coronavirus vaccination for staff of the National Health Service. That would be in line with existing requirements that nursing-home workers get the jabs.

During the afternoon debate in Parliament, Conservative lawmakers criticized modeling that forecast an explosive number of new cases and hospitalizations as “hysterical” and “lurid” and “severely flawed.”

Health Secretary Sajid Javid agreed that some epidemiologists had been wrong in the past, when they predicted skyrocketing deaths.

“But if some models are flawed, it doesn’t mean all are,” Javid told the chamber.

Other Tories wondered aloud why the government was going to all the trouble, as new research from South Africa suggested the omicron variant was more transmissible but caused less severe illness.

That’s maybe a good thing, lawmakers suggested, for achieving “herd immunity” or using omicron “to get rid of delta,” the currently dominant variant in Britain and around the world.

Javid patiently explained that even if omicron were less severe, an explosion of cases could still send enough patients to the hospital to overwhelm the national health-care system. Javid said scientists estimate there are 200,000 new cases of omicron a day in Britain.

There was a lot of speechmaking about freedom, mirroring previous debates in the United States, and fulsome paeans to the importance of keeping the pubs open during the holiday season.

Some Tories charged that Johnson’s government was needlessly panicking. Others wondered aloud if the new restrictions were a tactic to distract voters from scandals about parties at Downing Street during lockdown last year.

While the lawmakers were debating the new restrictions for England, the Scottish government on Tuesday urged people to limit socializing to no more than two other households at a time.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, told Scottish parliament that she was “not asking anyone to cancel Christmas” itself, but they were advising limited mixing on either side of Christmas. She said that the omicron variant – which accounts for at least 27 percent of Scotland’s cases – must be taken “extremely seriously.”

Published : December 15, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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Time magazine has named Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, as its 2021 Person of the Year, calling him “the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”

Edward Felsenthal, Time’s editor in chief, wrote in a profile of Musk on Monday that the magazine’s Person of the Year – a nearly century-old tradition – highlights people of influence, and that “few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too.”

“In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society,” Felsenthal added.

In 2021, Musk, who has gone back and forth with Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest person in the world, made history – at least his spaceflight company did. In September, SpaceX launched Inspiration4, the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit.

Musk’s company was also selected by NASA to help develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon.

According to Time magazine:

“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars. His start-up rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds. He dominates Wall Street: ‘The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,’ Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere.”

The multibillionaire has also elicited scorn over the years – even more so over the course of the pandemic as he spread misinformation about the coronavirus and downplayed the risks.

NBC’s announcement earlier this year that he would host “Saturday Night Live” drew intense backlash, including from SNL cast members. Shortly after the news, Musk tweeted, “Let’s find out just how live Saturday Night Live really is,” adding a purple devil emoji.

When Musk appeared on the show in May, he revealed possibly for the first time that he is on the autism spectrum.

“I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL,” he said on the show. “Or at least the first to admit it. So I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”

(Former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd has been vocal about his own Asperger’s diagnosis.)

Time’s Person of the Year designation is not necessarily an award; it is an acknowledgment of a person or group of people who have influenced society. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris received the nod in 2020, and teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg received it in 2019.

Published : December 14, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 14.41 million across Southeast Asia, with 24,501 new cases reported on Monday (December 13). New deaths are at 371, bringing accumulated Covid-19 deaths in Asean to 297,725.

Cambodia on Monday received another batch of 300,000 doses of Chinese-made Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine through the COVAX Facility. With the newly arrived vaccines, Cambodia has so far received a total of 40.8 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines from three sources through bilateral procurement, the COVAX Facility, and donations. Of the total, over 90 percent were purchased from or donated by China.

Meanwhile in Vietnam, the People’s Committee of Hanoi’s Dong Da District has ordered the temporary halting of on-site dining at restaurants, outdoor exercise, and in-person study, from 12pm December 13. The move was made after the district ’s pandemic risk level was raised to Level 3 – high risk. Restaurants and food and beverage establishments are still allowed to open for delivery and must close before 9pm.
 

Published : December 14, 2021

By : THE NATION

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Olympic boycotts tend not to work. The one in 1956 by Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands over the Soviet invasion of Hungary had little geopolitical impact.

Most of Washington’s European allies failed to join President Carter’s 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games, undermining its goal to isolate the Soviets while dashing the gold, silver and bronze dreams of American athletes.

Ahead of the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, President Biden is taking a different tack. Last week, the White House announced that no U.S. government officials would attend the Games, though athletes could still compete. The “diplomatic boycott” aims to protest Beijing’s human rights abuses, and especially its treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. China stands accused of incarcerating more than 1 million Uyghurs in harsh “political education” camps and prisons, while indoctrinating their children and engaging in torture – charges China denies.

This isn’t the first time a world leader has sat out an Olympic event hosted by China to make a point, but the effort this year is the most far-reaching. Since the United States announced its diplomatic boycott last week, New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Canada and Kosovo have followed suit. Days before the U.S. announcement, representatives of top Lithuanian officials reportedly said the officials would not attend.

By embracing what some critics have dismissed as a half-measure, Biden and other leaders may nevertheless be on to something. Full boycotts, experts say, are blunt instruments that often do little harm to boycotted nations while inflicting real pain on the boycotters. Star athletes are robbed of their peak windows to medal. Making things worse, bitter fissures can be opened between the politicians who declare them and the competitors, domestic sports officials, broadcasters, corporate sponsors and domestic viewers who suffer from those decisions.

When boycotts, or threats of boycotts, do become agents of change – as in 1968, when African nations vowed to walk if apartheid South Africa wasn’t barred from competition, which it ultimately was – it is typically because of overwhelming participation and specific, sports-related goals, Heather Dichter, a professor at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, argued in The Post.

While a diplomatic boycott may be just as unlikely to spark change as a full boycott, it could fulfill a narrower purpose: To show disapproval and raise awareness – in this case, of China’s serious human rights abuses – without penalizing athletes.

“What Biden is doing, rather than opening himself to criticism of punishing his own athletes more than the Chinese government, is sending a diplomatic signal of disapproval,” John Soares, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who has written about politics and the Olympics, recently told me. “Even if that doesn’t change things overnight, it serves notice to the Chinese government. . . . [And maybe] you can gradually affect some change, as regimes that used to not talk about human rights at least start to talk about them.”

The Biden administration’s efforts may not gain much traction if more countries don’t follow suit. But the international showing so far – hardly overwhelming – also underscores the risk that Washington would have seen even fewer countries participate in a full boycott, potentially embarrassing the United States as much, if not more, than China. Voice of America noted that winter sport powerhouse Norway will not join the United States in a diplomatic boycott, nor will NATO allies France and Italy. Eastern European governments like Poland and Hungary, with weak track records on human rights and an eagerness to court China as an economic partner, are also ignoring the boycott.

“If it’s only what the Chinese sometimes call the ‘Anglo-Saxon clique,’ if the vast majority of the nearly 100 countries participating don’t follow at all or take a long time to follow, then [the diplomatic boycott] will have less impact,” Susan Brownell, an anthropology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis with expertise in Chinese sports and the Olympic Games, told VOA Mandarin last week.

Beijing’s official response, my colleague Lily Kuo reported, is that China couldn’t care less about the Biden boycott and that American officials were never invited anyway. But in a news conference, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian sure sounded wounded, threatening that Washington would “pay a price for its wrong behavior.”

As an awareness tool, the diplomatic boycott may already be working. Zumretay Arkin, a Uyghur activist, recently told me that she had hoped for a full U.S. boycott of the Games, “because, in our view, genocide should be a red line for the international community.” But she also saw Biden’s decision as a powerful victory that suddenly propelled the Uyghurs to the top of the global agenda. China had initially denied the Uyghur camps existed, though later conceded they did – calling them vocational centers to combat extremism. In late 2019, Reuters reported, China said all people in the camps had “graduated.”

“We’ve definitely made some headlines before, but since the announcement of the boycott, it’s been nonstop,” Arkin said. She continued: “Now, people who never knew the Uyghurs before are hearing about us, they’re reading about us. I’d call that a victory.”

Heads of state have used their absence at the Olympics to signal displeasure before. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t attend the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and senior German officials didn’t go to the showy Opening Ceremonies – though Berlin insisted that their absence should not be seen as a “boycott” related to China’s crackdown in Tibet. Donald Tusk, then the Polish prime minister, made a finer point of skipping the opening events.

“The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate,” Tusk said at the time. “I do not intend to take part.”

Leaders have also found other ways to send political messages at the Olympics. President Barack Obama named openly gay athletes Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow to prominent positions in the U.S. Olympic delegation to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, a move widely seen as a shot across the bows to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies.

Yet experts still see the broader “diplomatic boycott” used this year as a relatively novel concept, and Biden is winning praise for deploying it from some unlikely quarters.

The Florida-based outlet Baptist News Global opined that “a broader-than-usual coalition of religious liberty and human rights groups are praising the Biden administration’s Dec. 6 announcement that the United States will not send a diplomatic delegation to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.”

My colleagues recently noted that even some, if certainly not all, of Biden’s most well-known Republican critics hailed his decision. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) – hardly a Biden backer – pushed back against calls from some Republicans for a full boycott.

“I don’t agree with what some people are calling for, which is a boycott of our athletes, which is stopping our athletes from going to the Olympics,” he said during a radio interview last week. He added: “I think there are young men and young women who have spent years, decades practicing and getting ready for the Olympics. And I don’t think it’s fair to make them the victims.”

Published : December 14, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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A Hong Kong court sentenced democracy activist Jimmy Lai to 13 months in prison over his role in banned Tiananmen Square vigils last year, although the sentence wont extend his time behind bars.

Lai, who was convicted on Thursday of inciting others to join an unauthorized assembly, was already serving 20 months in jail for his participation in 2019 anti-government protests. He also faces charges under Hong Kong’s national security law that are punishable by up to life in prison.

Veteran pro-democracy activists Chow Hang Tung, Gwyneth Ho and Lee Cheuk-yan were among a total of eight defendants sentenced Monday over their roles in events to commemorate the June 4, 1989, crackdown in Beijing. Lee, a former lawmaker, was given a term of 14 months, to be served concurrently with a previous sentence.

However, Chow and Ho, who weren’t already serving jail sentences, received terms of 12 months and six months, respectively.

Lai offered a defiant responses to his conviction before the hearing Monday, saying through his lawyer that he was willing to share the burden with those “who shed their blood on June 4th to proclaim truth, justice and goodness.” Chow denounced the convictions as “one step in the systemic erasure of history, both of the Tiananmen Massacre and Hong Kong’s own history of civic resistance.”

The former Apple Daily newspaper publisher has been a central target of the government’s campaign to punish democracy activists who have challenged Beijing’s authority in the former British colony. Earlier this year, the Next Digital media company he founded and the Apple Daily, which was known for stories on the hidden wealth of high-ranking leaders in the ruling Communist Party, closed amid government pressure.

Thousands of people defied a police ban last year to hold the vigil for victims of the Tiananmen crackdown some three decades ago, an event that once drew tens of thousands of people annually. Democracy advocates say the authorities used rules for fighting the pandemic to curb the right to assembly in the former British colony.

The media tycoon’s presence “was a deliberate act to rally support for and publicly spotlight” the June 4 event, District Court Judge Amanda Woodcock said in her earlier judgment. “He need not use words of incitement to intend to incite others.”

Authorities have charged 24 people for their role in the vigil last year, with Lai, Chow and Ho the only ones to plead not guilty. The other defendants, including former student activist Joshua Wong, have been handed jail terms ranging from four to 10 months. Three received suspended sentences.

Published : December 14, 2021

By : Bloomberg

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40009932

Italy is set to extend the governments emergency powers until March 31 as the country faces a rise in Covid cases, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The decision to extend the previous deadline which was the end of this year, may come as soon as Tuesday, the person said. The government has used emergency powers, which streamline decision making, since the start of the pandemic.

Rising numbers of Covid cases around the world, combined with concerns over the omicron variant, are pushing governments to keep or even tighten curbs against the virus.

In the week ending Dec. 12 Italy reported 15,186 new Covid cases and 115 more deaths than the week before. According to government data 88.2% of Italians over 12 have received at least one dose of a vaccine against the disease.

Published : December 14, 2021

By : Bloomberg