North Chinas Shanxi Province had lowered its emergency response for floods to Level IV from Level III at 6 p.m. Monday, said the provincial flood control and drought relief headquarters.
China has a four-tier flood-control emergency response system, with Level I being the most severe.
The flood situation in the province has been stabilized. The water levels of small and medium-sized rivers have fallen below the warning mark, said the headquarters.
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The headquarters require that related departments closely monitor the flood situation and strictly implement all measures to ensure the safety of people’s lives and property.
Located on the eastern end of the Loess Plateau, Shanxi is usually dry. However, the average precipitation of the province reached 119.5 mm from 8 p.m. on Oct. 2 to 8 a.m. on Oct. 7 this year, three times the normal average rainfall for October in previous years, said the provincial meteorological bureau.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern extended a lockdown in Auckland and pushed back plans to reopen schools in the nations largest city as its coronavirus outbreak continues to spread.
Auckland will remain at Alert Level 3, under which most people are required to stay at home, for at least another week, Ardern told a news conference Monday in Wellington. That means the city will be in lockdown for at least nine weeks. Similar restrictions in the neighboring Waikato and Northland regions have been extended until at least midnight on Oct. 14, Ardern said.
“New Zealand is at one of the trickiest and most challenging moments in the Covid-19 pandemic so far,” she said. “However, there is a clear path forward over the coming months in which New Zealanders should be able to move to living with fewer restrictions and more freedoms as a result of higher levels of vaccination.”
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Ardern has conceded that even New Zealand’s strict lockdown measures are unlikely to beat the delta strain of Covid-19 but said they need to remain in place until enough people are vaccinated. The government has announced a “National Day of Action” on Oct. 16 to boost vaccination so that it can begin to gradually ease restrictions while the virus is still circulating in the community.
About 57% of eligible people aged 12 and over are fully vaccinated, while around 82% have had at least one dose.
Delta “has spread through communities that are harder for us to reach,” Ardern said. “This has made getting to zero cases in Auckland very tough. Regardless, throughout this outbreak we have maintained our approach — test, contract trace, isolate. We are continuing to try and stamp out the virus wherever we find it. We will keep doing that.”
Despite the government announcing a lockdown after just one case was detected in mid-August, the total number of cases in the current outbreak has risen to 1,622. Health authorities reported a further 35 new cases earlier Monday after recording 60 new infections on Sunday.
Auckland schools won’t reopen on Oct. 18 as initially planned, with further advice to be provided next week. The government today also made vaccination mandatory for large parts of the health and education workforces.
“In coming weeks I’ll outline the framework for our next steps as vaccination rates lift,” Ardern said. “We remain in a very strong position to make the transition from lockdown restrictions to the individual armor of vaccines while maintaining our world leading position on case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths, as well as delivering a strong economy and low unemployment.”
Two dozen additional countries have signed up for a global methane pledge, vowing to cut emissions of the potent greenhouse gas by 30 percent by 2030.
At a virtual ministerial meeting hosted in Brussels on Monday, the European Union’s top climate negotiator, Frans Timmermans, and the White House special envoy for climate, John F. Kerry, announced the new signatories and stressed the importance of slashing methane.
The pledge is now backed by nine of the world’s top 20 methane-emitting countries, and accounts for 60 percent of the global economy, the organizers said.
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But with just a month left before a crucial climate summit to be held in Scotland, some of the world’s biggest methane emitters – including Russia, China, India and Brazil – have still not signed on.
Three nations named on Tuesday – France, Germany and tiny Malta – were already committed to the pledge, thanks to their membership in the E.U. bloc. The most significant new additions were Canada, the Central African Republic, Nigeria and Pakistan. Some of the other countries mentioned – including Costa Rica, Jordan and Liberia – have only a small role in the global methane emissions picture.
Still, the U.S. and E.U. negotiators hailed the progress. In all now, 34 countries have now signed the pledge.
The call to reduce methane emissions by 2030 was pushed by President Joe Biden at the White House last month. Methane is not as long-lived in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, but it is more than 80 times more powerful over a 20-year period. The heat-trapping gas is produced by coal mining, the oil and gas industry and agriculture and livestock.
Scientists forecast that future global warming could be reduced by 0.2 Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) by the 2040s if countries take up the challenge to cut methane now. Timmermans and Kerry called the bid “the single most effective strategy to reduce near-term global warming and keep the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.”
“If the world is serious about keeping the climate safe, it’s got to get serious about cutting methane,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development. “The Methane Pledge is a good start.”
The new 24 supporters are Canada, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Federated States of Micronesia, France, Germany, Guatemala, Guinea, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Malta, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Rwanda, Sweden, and Togo.
These countries join the earlier signatories, including the United States, European Union, Argentina, Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Mexico and Britain.
Kerry said he hoped to have more than 100 countries pledged to cut methane by the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next month. In addition to the new methane pledges by nations, more than 20 philanthropies on Monday announced plans to spend $200 million to support implementation of the global methane goals.
“Momentum is building for a methane moment at Glasgow,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Cutting methane pollution is the fastest opportunity we have to help avert our most acute climate risks, including crop loss, wildfires, extreme weather and rising sea levels.”
SYDNEY – On a rainy Monday morning, John Church sat near the door of the Corner Pub holding a pint with the affection of a new father.
“Icouldn’t wait to get my first draft beer,” the 65-year-old retired wool packer said as he sank his mustache into the glass of Victoria Bitter.
But this beer wasn’t his first. That had been five hours and four pubs ago, when he lined up before dawn outside another bar for a taste of Sydney’s newfound freedoms.
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For the first time in 106 days, pubs swung open their doors for vaccinated patrons on Monday. Barbers broke out their clippers, cafes dusted off their china and gyms cranked up the classic rock. Sydney was alive again.
Soaked with rain, relief and alcohol, the reopening marked the easing of one of the world’s toughest lockdowns. And few parts of the city had endured more than Church’s, one of a dozen areas put under a curfew barring people from venturing out at night.
“I’ve been locked up for three months like a prisoner,” he said, as he drank with a friend. “I just needed to talk to people.”
Since an outbreak of the delta variant began in June, Sydney’s 5 million residents have been barred from traveling more than a few miles from home. Friends and family members have been unable to visit one another, let alone pop down to the pub.
The loss of freedom was a shock for a beer-swigging, jet-setting city that had largely dodged the pandemic because of Australia’s once-successful “covid zero” approach.
Now, Sydney’s reopening poses another shock, as soaring vaccination rates have enabled Australia’s largest city to become the first to ease lockdown despite the ongoing outbreak.
“We want to lead Australia out of this pandemic,” New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said on Sunday from – where else – a pub.
“It’s been 100 days of blood, sweat, and no beers,” he added, moments after spraying suds on his face while ceremonially tapping the first keg of Australia’s post-covid-zero era.
Sydney’s reopening has been powered by a surge in vaccinations. When the outbreak began in June, Australia’s sluggish vaccination rollout went into hyper drive. In just over three months, Australia’s inoculation rate went from single digits to rivaling that of the United States.
In New South Wales, the ramp-up in vaccinations has bent the pandemic’s curve downward and empowered officials to ease restrictions for vaccinated people, after the state fully inoculated 70 percent of people 16 and older.
By Monday, the tally had neared 75 percent. More than 90 percent had received at least one dose.
Sydney had had its shots. Now it was time for the chaser.
As of Monday, the fully vaccinated can visit pubs, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, shops, hairdressers, nail salons and places of worship, although under reduced capacity. They can travel anywhere in the city and host up to 10 fully vaccinated adults at home.
Restrictions will ease further when double doses hit 80 percent later this month. But unvaccinated people will largely be left out until Dec. 1.
Other states and territories are due to follow, starting with the capital, Canberra, and then Victoria, which hit a national record of 1,965 new cases on Saturday – roughly four times the number in New South Wales.
Sydney’s staged reopening is far from the raucous “Freedom Day” celebrations seen in Britain, said Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Melbourne.
“That’s always been the plan, to ease out rather than fling open the doors,” she said. But even a phased approach has proved divisive in a country where covid zero became an article of faith for many.
“There are people who think we shouldn’t come out of lockdown, there are people who think we should have been out of it ages ago, and then there are a lot of people caught in the middle,” Bennett said.
Adding to the division is the uneven way the pandemic unfolded across Sydney. In the wealthy east, where the outbreak began but cases remained low and beaches have been crowded for weeks, some bars opened their doors at midnight.
But in the working-class west, which bore the brunt of infections and deaths, the mood ahead of Monday was one of relief, said Elfa Moraitakis, CEO of multicultural services organization SydWest. Residents felt targeted by curfews, extra restrictions and heavy policing.
“There is a feeling that we are finally free as human beings,” she said.
In Church’s area of Liverpool, one of 12 that endured curfew, city councilor Nathan Hagarty said frustrations had been building.
“There was this police mentality from the government . . . they sent in helicopters, they sent in the army,” he said. “People were very angry and upset.”
Hagarty hoped easing the lockdown would “let some of the steam out.”
Perrottet has acknowledged the lockdown hit western Sydney hardest, and said Sunday he didn’t want to see “a tale of two cities.”
But in Blacktown, another curfew-hit area where playgrounds were closed at one point to keep young people away, some worry reopening will be policed differently as well.
“There is always one rule for the west and another rule for the east,” said Mayor Chagai, a basketball coach and South Sudanese community leader. He said he and others had to push the state to provide sufficient vaccinations for Blacktown, a rapidly growing area that is home to more than 400,000 people.
The vaccination rates in Blacktown, Liverpool and other hard-hit western areas are now on par with the east. But the pride is mixed with fear.
Whenever Nahreen Kaae thinks of the lockdown lifting, she sees her husband’s sunken face and blue-tinged lips. The couple had just received their first vaccine dose when their eldest son brought the virus home from his job as a carpenter. Within days the family of four was sick. One morning, Kaae made her husband tea but he wouldn’t drink it. When she called his name, he could only move his eyes.
As an ambulance took away the previously healthy 52-year-old, Kaae thought to herself, He’s not going to come back, and collapsed on her front lawn.
Her husband spent nine days in intensive care but survived, though he and Kaae are still recovering. Kaae and her son are back at work but terrified of bringing the virus home.
“To be honest I’m scared to go out,” she said. “I just feeling like life is not going to go back to normal.”
As they ate lunch at a busy indoor mall in Liverpool, Mark and Rosemary Dickens felt things were going back to normal. The middle-aged couple had both battled cancer in the last year. They were expecting their first grandchild in a few weeks.
“You can’t live life without any risk at all,” Rosemary said as shoppers streamed past.
At the Corner Pub a few blocks away, Church was looking forward to visiting his daughter. But not before a few more beers with his friends.
“Come over here and sit,” he beckoned to a regular who gave her name only as Debbie.
“Churchie, have a heart attack,” she answered, taking a seat nearby instead.
The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 12.57 million across Southeast Asia, with 33,489 new cases reported on Monday (October 12), lower than Sunday’s tally at 39,996. New deaths are at 403, decreasing from Sunday’s number of 492. Total Covid-19 deaths in Asean are now at 269,058.
Cambodia has started administering 3rd jab of Covid-19 vaccine to general public in 11 out of 14 districts of Phnom Penh since Monday. Eligible candidate must have already received the second jab at least four months while the vaccine provided will be Sinovac. People in the rest three districts will get the booster shot from October 30 onward.
Meanwhile, Myanmar will start giving Covid-19 vaccine to students aged over 12 years old within this week. There are about 1 million students in middle and high school levels that will attend face to face classrooms in the next academic year. The country reported 3,619 new cases and 115 deaths on Monday, bringing cumulative cases to 843,281 patients and total 20,670 deaths.
ENSHI, China – Hundreds of caves are spread throughout the mountains of Enshi prefecture, an agricultural corner of Chinas Hubei province. The most majestic, Tenglong, or “flying dragon,” is one of Chinas largest karst cave systems, spanning 37 miles of passages that contain numerous bats.
Nearby are small farms that collectively housed hundreds of thousands of wild mammals such as civets, ferret badgers and raccoon dogs before the pandemic, farm licenses show – animals that scientists say can be intermediate hosts for viruses to cross over from bats to humans.
The World Health Organization has requested access to China’s wildlife farming areas such as Enshi, calling it a key step in the search for the origins of the coronavirus. Beijing has denied the requests.
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The Washington Post made a rare trip in September to Enshi, six hours’ drive west of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected.
A reporter observed human traffic into Enshi caves, including domestic tourism, spelunking and villagers replacing a drinking water pump inside a cave. Defunct wildlife farms sat as close as one mile from the entrances.
Scientists briefed on The Post’s reporting said it documents a plausible pathway for how a coronavirus could have spread from bats to other animals, then to Wuhan’s markets.
Asked if bats, farmed animals and local residents were tested for the coronavirus in Enshi, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said they could not verify the specific situation at the moment, and said China banned the trade and consumption of wild animals in February 2020. Enshi’s forestry bureau did not respond to faxed questions; two officials declined interview requests in person.
Western Hubei is home to at least seven types of horseshoe bats, according to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One type, Rhinolophus affinis, has been found farther southin China carrying a virus 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2.
In the rolling land near the caves, Enshi officials for years promoted wildlife farming to alleviate poverty. Enshi accounted for 17 percent of Hubei wildlife farms shut down in the pandemic, official announcements show. Authorities estimated that the 290 shuttered Enshi farms had 450,000 to 780,000 animals.
China’s government and the WHO say the likeliest origin of the pandemic is natural transmission through wildlife. Yet little progress has been made in establishing a definitive natural pathway from a bat to a Wuhan market – or for any competing theory, for that matter – because of the Chinese government’s refusal to grant scientists access.
“We really need to find out more about what viruses are circulating in those bats” in the Enshi caves, said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. “That kind of proximity of farmed animals and bats that could be carrying coronaviruses is exactly the kind of thing we worry about.”
Marc Eloit, head of pathogen discovery at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, agrees that much more sampling needs to be done in China, and specifically in these karst areas.
Eloit said he “would be very interested” to obtain samples from bats and caves in Enshi, adding that gathering bat guano could be a start.
Beijing has been less than eager to find answers in Hubei, as it touts its own theory that the virus may have originated overseas. One foreign scientist who worked for years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the institute’s field research in bat caves has been suspended since the pandemic began.
But Chinese authorities had Enshi in their sights before the threat of covid-19 was known.
A clampdown on Enshi’s wildlife trade at wet markets began on Dec. 23, 2019, according to state media, eight days before China publicly acknowledged the new virus. The head start in Enshi doesn’t mean officials found something amiss: It could have been preventive, as rumors emerged of market vendors falling mysteriously ill in Wuhan. But it means evidence on Enshi’s wildlife trade was erased before the world was aware of the existence of a novel coronavirus.
Since then, Beijing has rebuffed international calls for more details on supply chains of live wildlife leading to Wuhan markets, even as local officials shut down wildlife farms – possibly coming across some of the information the WHO seeks. U.S. intelligence agencies told President Biden in August that the virus was not a biological weapon, but that natural transmission and a lab-related accident were possible origins.
During the trip to Enshi, a reporter was followed by men in several cars who did not identify themselves, but who would subsequently talk to interviewees. None of the farm operators would say whether the animals had been tested for SARS-CoV-2 before being disposed of or released.
The Lichuan Juyuanxiang Special Breeding Cooperative in Enshi illustrates the difficulties that the WHO would have in finding fresh evidence, even if granted access. A two-story, concrete structure where the animals were previously kept now stands empty, vines creeping up the side.
“They were released back into the woods,” said a man surnamed Yang at the Lichuan Juyuanxiang farm, which called itself Hubei’s largest civet farm. “The government wouldn’t allow us to raise them anymore.”
Visits to nearly a dozen other former wildlife farms in the area yielded similar stories. Owners were either not home, denied raising animals listed on business registrations, or said they stopped farming before the outbreak.
Yang, who identified himself as the farm owner’s uncle, said they had over 1,000 civets at the time of the outbreak, and that the farm was closed down by May 2020. His nephew, owner Yang Ancui, declined to talk when reached by phone.
Aside from civets, the farm – which sat downhill from a large cave – was licensed for breeding porcupines and wild boars.
Scientists say SARS-CoV-2 probably originated in bats. How it got from a bat to a human is unclear, with debate over two prevailing theories.
According to the natural-transmission theory, the virus could have been passed directly to a human who wandered into a cave – perhaps a villager, a hunter or a scientist. It also could have been transmitted first to an intermediate host like a civet, for instance, if the civet drank water contaminated with bat feces.
A second theory posits that the outbreak could have stemmed from a lab accident; China’s most advanced coronavirus research lab is based in Wuhan. A separate team at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention is known to have searched bat caves in Hubei for new diseases in 2019. Chinese officials have denied a lab accident occurred.
Edward Holmes, a virologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, said that, to his knowledge, bat sampling had been done by scientists near to but not inside Enshi, and that no coronaviruses were detected, but he added that the sample sizes were too small.
“I’m certain that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses will be found in China in places where you find Rhinolophus bats,” Holmes said.
Some scientists are pushing for a more vigorous search for an intermediate host, which, if found, would be strong evidence for natural transmission. Other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS were carried by intermediate hosts: civets and camels, respectively. Wuhan markets with early outbreaks had sold live wild animals.
A person with knowledge of the Wuhan market supply chains, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his contacts, told The Post that live animals sold at markets in Wuhan were sourced from Hubei, particularly Enshi and Xianning prefectures, as well as from Hunan and Jiangxi provinces.
Chinese authorities have deflected questions about the presence of live wild animals at Wuhan markets before the outbreak. A Scientific Reports study in June that catalogued illegal sales of live wildlife at the markets has not been covered by China’s state-run media. The two Chinese authors did not respond to requests for comment about what they knew about those supply chains.
International team members from the joint WHO-China study on coronavirus origins released in March have said they believe live wildlife was removed from Wuhan markets before the official Jan. 1, 2020, closure of the Huanan market, an early infection hot spot. Details in the WHO-China study pertaining to wildlife supply chains at that market focused on chilled and frozen meat products left behind when stall operators cleared out, not on live animals traded there in preceding months.
Wildlife captively bred in Enshi before the pandemic included potential intermediate hosts such as palm civets, raccoon dogs, porcupines, wild boars, hedgehogs, rodents, ferret badgers, ocelots, muntjac deer and flying squirrels, official business registries show.
Huang Shuang, a chicken vendor at Yuanmengzhuang market in Enshi city, recalled live wildlife being sold in late 2019. “The rules are really strict now, so you don’t see any more wild animals,” he said. “There were some around here before, not a lot, but you could find some.”
On Dec. 23, 2019 – eight days before Wuhan announced a mysterious pneumonia – the Enshi forestry bureau ordered a halt of live wildlife sales at wet markets in the prefecture, the state-run Hubei Daily reported in February 2020.
In January 2020, a month before China banned the trade and consumption of wild animals nationwide, the Enshi forestry bureau announced that a goal for the year was rectifying wildlife breeding and strengthening monitoring for wild animal epidemics.
At least six wet markets in Enshi city were closed by March 2020.
An Enshi forestry bureau report in September of this year recounted enforcement steps including wildlife farm shutdowns and cash rewards for tips on violations.
Some online notices about local wildlife farming became inaccessible after The Post approached Enshi authorities.
Humans have long encountered bats at Tenglong Cave, according to local residents and news reports. As early as 1988, the Belgian-Chinese Karst and Caves Association reported “intensive utilisation” of the cave by local residents, including digging out bat dung for fertilizer.
Tourists and adventurers continue to visit. At the entrance to Tenglong’s lower cave, where the Qing River surges toward the Yangtze River, local spelunkers geared up on a recent day, fastening helmets, snaking ropes over their shoulders, packing waterproof bags.
A mile down the road sits Changyan Farm, a small operation with blue and silver corrugated metal roofs that had been licensed to raise civets, porcupines and wild boar. The deserted farm and dilapidated house across the road showed no signs of recent use. A restaurant and hotel behind the property was closed and the caretaker declined to discuss the farm.
“The forestry officials came by early around the Lunar New Year [2020],” said a neighbor, who would not give her name out of fear of official retribution. “They closed everything down on that farm. I’m not sure what animals they had at the time or what they did with them.”
The car bombing reportedly targeted the motorcade of Adens Governor Ahmed Lamlas and other high-ranking Yemeni officials, who survived the attack.
Amassive explosion struck a convoy of high-ranking Yemeni government officials in the country’s southern port city of Aden on Sunday, a security official told Xinhua.
“A booby-trapped vehicle exploded in Aden’s district of Tawahi, targeting a traveling convoy carrying a number of government officials,” the local security source said on condition of anonymity.
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The car bomb attack targeted the motorcade of Aden’s governor Ahmed Lamlas and other officials of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, he said.
According to the local official, the city’s governor and the minister of the agriculture survived the bombing attack unhurt.
Witnesses said that columns of black smoke were seen rising from the bombing site in Tawahi.
Security personnel are seen at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 10, 2021. (Xinhua/Murad Abdo)
An official of Aden’s local authority confirmed to Xinhua that five soldiers in charge of guarding Aden’s governor were killed and a number of others wounded.
No group has claimed responsibility for the car bomb attack yet. However, Yemeni government officials blamed terror groups such as al-Qaida for the bomb explosions during the past months.
Local authorities are trying to maintain security and stability in the strategic Yemeni port city considered as the country’s temporary capital.
Photo taken on Oct. 10, 2021 shows a damaged vehicle at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen. (Photo by Murad Abdo/Xinhua)
However, sporadic bombing incidents and drive-by shooting attacks still occur in Aden, where the Saudi-backed Yemeni government has been based since 2015.
Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized control of several northern provinces and forced the internationally-recognized government of Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.
Photo taken on Oct. 10, 2021 shows damaged vehicles at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen. (Photo by Murad Abdo/Xinhua)
Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, warned that there could be multiple strains of flu ahead of an uncertain winter.
She said what is different this year is that COVID and flu are co-circulating, which increases the risk of serious illness and death.
Another 34,574 people in Britain have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 8,154,306, according to official figures released Sunday.
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The country’s coronavirus-related death toll rose by 38 to 137,735. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test.
There are currently 6,763 patients in hospital with COVID-19.
The data came as Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), warned that there could be multiple strains of flu ahead of an uncertain winter.
People walk by the River Thames in London, Britain, on Aug. 18, 2021. (Xinhua/Han Yan)
Speaking to Sky News, she said what is different this year is that COVID and flu are co-circulating, which increases the risk of serious illness and death.
“Recent studies suggest that about 25 percent of us don’t actually understand that,” she said. “On average, over the last five years, about 11,000 people have died with flu-related conditions.”
“The important thing about this winter is we are likely to see flu, for the first time in any real numbers, co-circulating with COVID,” she added.
Early evidence suggests that those who catch both are twice as likely to die than those who just have COVID alone, according to Harries.
More than 85 percent of people aged 12 and over in Britain have had their first COVID-19 vaccine dose, and over 78 percent have received both, according to the latest figures.
People sit and chat outside a cafe in London, Britain, on Sept. 7, 2021. (Photo by Ray Tang/Xinhua)
Atotal of 64 people were poisoned by surrogate alcohol in Russia’s Orenburg region earlier this week and 32 of them died, TASS news agency reported Sunday.
Of the victims 25 have been hospitalized and seven others are receiving outpatient treatment.
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Methanol was found in the blood of the poisoned and in some cases its concentration was three to five times higher than the lethal dose.
So far 10 suspects have been detained for selling fake alcoholic beverages.
Local police found a warehouse and a production facility in Orenburg’s Orsk city, where 1,279 bottles of surrogate alcohol were seized. About 800 bottles of illegal alcohol were seized in 11 districts of the Orenburg region during two days of mass checks.
The problem of counterfeit alcohol poisoning has long plagued the country, despite the Kremlin’s campaign against surrogate alcohol. In December 2016, over 70 people were killed in Russia’s Irkutsk after drinking fake alcoholic beverages.
Natural gas prices in Europe have been surging and hitting record highs as demand for fuel increases globally, spurring inflation fears and threatening to cripple major industries that are hoping to recover from COVID-19.
Vehicles are seen in heavy traffic in Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)
Vehicles are seen in heavy traffic in Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 8, 2021.
A vehicle passes by a gas station in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)
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A customer fuels a vehicle at a gas station in Berlin, capital of Germany, on Oct. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)
Customers fuel a motorcycle at a gas station in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 9, 2021.(Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)
Photo taken on Oct. 8, 2021 shows a gas station in Frankfurt, Germany. (Xinhua/Lu Yang)
Security personnel are seen at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 10, 2021. (Xinhua/Murad Abdo)
Photo taken on Oct. 10, 2021 shows a damaged vehicle at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen. (Photo by Murad Abdo/Xinhua)
Photo taken on Oct. 10, 2021 shows damaged vehicles at the site of a car bombing attack that killed five soldiers in Aden, Yemen. (Photo by Murad Abdo/Xinhua)
People walk by the River Thames in London, Britain, on Aug. 18, 2021. (Xinhua/Han Yan)
People sit and chat outside a cafe in London, Britain, on Sept. 7, 2021. (Photo by Ray Tang/Xinhua)
Vehicles are seen in heavy traffic in Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)
A vehicle passes by a gas station in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 9, 2021. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)
A customer fuels a vehicle at a gas station in Berlin, capital of Germany, on Oct. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)
Customers fuel a motorcycle at a gas station in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 9, 2021.(Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)
Photo taken on Oct. 8, 2021 shows a gas station in Frankfurt, Germany. (Xinhua/Lu Yang)
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