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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

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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

LONDON – Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Monday that Britain had registered its first death of a patient with the omicron variant, while U.K. health officials warned that the new version of the coronavirus was spreading at jaw-dropping speed.

“Ithink the idea that this is somehow a milder version of the virus, that’s something we need to set on one side and just recognize the sheer pace at which it accelerates through the population,” Johnson told reporters during a visit to a vaccination clinic in London. He urged people to quickly increase their protection with a booster shot.

Long lines formed outside vaccination clinics on Monday, with people waiting to get a first, second or third dose.

The prime minister’s office did not immediately offer any details about the person who died – age, vaccination status or any underlying conditions.

It’s possible that this death is the first in the world to be officially tied to the new variant, though that in itself is of limited significance. There may have been others that weren’t genetically sequenced to determine the variant involved.

The U.K. Health Security Agency said Monday there were 10 patients in hospitals across England, aged 18 to 85, diagnosed with omicron on or before admission, with the majority having received two doses of coronavirus vaccine.

Hospital admissions lag infections, and officials here worry that a coming crush of patients could overwhelm the National Health Service. The new strain is now spreading faster in Britain than it has in South Africa, where the first cases were detected. And, unlike South Africa, Britain was already dealing with a surge of delta variant cases.

Early reports from South Africa suggest that omicron may be milder on average than the delta variant it is competing with. But even a small portion of severe cases among a huge number of infections could put strain British hospitals.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Monday that hospitalizations and deaths are forecast to “dramatically increase” in the coming weeks.

Speaking to lawmakers in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, he said omicron would become the dominant variant in London in the next 48 hours. It already represented 20 percent of all new cases in England, with cases doubling every two to three days.

“No variant of covid-19 has spread this fast,” Javid said in Parliament.

Earlier, he called the growth rate “phenomenal.”

On Saturday, Britain reported 633 new confirmed cases of omicron; on Sunday, 1,239; and on Monday, another 1,576, for a total of 4,713 confirmed cases of the variant in the country.

Scientists suspect there are in reality 10,000s of new but unreported infections a day.

“The best thing we can do is all get our boosters,” Johnson said.

He announced in a televised address on Sunday that Britain would try to get booster shots to everyone age 18 and over by New Year’s Day, bringing forward an earlier deadline by a month.

“A tidal wave of omicron is coming,” Johnson warned. “And I’m afraid it is now clear that two dose of vaccine are simply not enough to give the level of protection we all need.”

To reach that target, the NHS will need to carry out about a million vaccinations a day, double what it had been doing. The government plans to deploy 42 medical teams from the military to assist. General practitioners in the National Health Service are also being told to cancel other nonessential appointments if necessary to meet the booster deadline.

There’s still much that the world doesn’t know about omicron, including just how effective vaccines – and boosters – might be against it. British scientists say answers are likely to come fast, over the next few weeks, as infections spread and real-world studies continue.

On Friday, the U.K. Health Security Agency reported that two doses of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccines offered poor protection against symptomatic infection by omicron.

The primary two doses of the Pfizer vaccine gave 30 to 40 percent protection against symptomatic illness from 25 weeks after second dose. AstraZeneca provided even less protection, though the sample size of the study was so small that scientists are cautious.

The good news: The health services agency said preliminary studies found that a third, booster jab of Pfizer would likely raise protection from omicron considerably – to between 70 and 75 percent.

On Monday, scientists reported research that showed a steep drop-off in the neutralizing antibody response to the omicron variant. The laboratory studies were carried out with blood samples from people vaccinated with the two doses of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer. The studies did not examine the response after a third booster shot. That research is coming soon.

Teresa Lambe, a co-author of the study and professor at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, said neutralizing antibodies might not tell the whole story and that other immune responses against omicron may be stimulated by the vaccines.

Lambe said early studies by others also suggested that a booster dose of existing vaccines may be effective against omicron.

She urged people to get a third shot.

At one vaccination clinic in Streatham, in southwest London, more than 100 people were still waiting in line as night fell – the winter sun sets here around 4 p.m. on Monday.

Sabrina Singh, 44, a child-care worker, said she wasn’t influenced by Johnson’s plea – “in my opinion, he talks rubbish” – but was encouraged to get a booster shot by her eldest daughter, who is recovering from covid after being sick for two weeks.

“She is concerned about me because I’m a heavy smoker,” Singh said. “I think all of this,” she added, waving at a line of people mostly under 45, “is so we can have normal Christmas this year. Or as normal as possible. I think that’s why everyone is rushing.”

Rob Flanagan, 33, a graphic designer, who had finally made it to the front of the queue after two hours, said he had come because “this was first day I was eligible, I think that’s everyone here really. Everyone is looking quite young.”

Flanagan said he started to alter his behavior in recent weeks, as the number of variant cases started to climb sharply. “I’m working from home, reducing socializing, concerned about public transport, definitely feeling worried about being out and about, and will wear a mask on the street as opposed to just on a bus or supermarket,” he said.

Others who tried to book appointments via the NHS website were told to try again later. The government confirmed that the site crashed at one point on Monday.

Johnson is facing another rough week. In addition to the coronavirus surge, he has been immersed in a scandal about several alleged Christmas parties at Downing Street during a strick lockdown last year.

Rebels from his own Conservative Party have threatened to vote against new stricter public health measures. They are opposed to anything that smacks of a fourth “lockdown,” as well as mandatory vaccination and use of “vaccine passports.”

Starting this week, people are being encouraged to work from home, wear face masks in most indoor venues and show proof of vaccination or a negative test for entrance into places with large crowds. The government also said daily testing would replace quarantines for those who come into contact with someone who has tested positive.

Normally, rapid coronavirus tests can be ordered at no charge on a government website. But on Monday, the government website read: “Sorry, there are no more home test kits available right now.”

Published : December 14, 2021

By : The Washington Post

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/international/40009930

WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday announced new investment commitments from an array of private companies to help address the root causes of migration from Central America, aiding her efforts on a daunting task on which she has been longing to show progress.

With the pledges from companies including PepsiCo, Mastercard and Cargill, Harris’s office said such entities have now committed to invest $1.2 billion in the poverty-stricken and violent region since she issued a “call to action” for private-sector help in May.

The announcement comes amid staff departures and other reports of turmoil in Harris’s office. Her portfolio includes several challenging assignments, including a charge from President Joe Biden to address the root causes of migration at the southern border during a large spike in illegal crossings.

“Six months ago, we had a commitment of $750 million. Today we have a commitment of over 1.2 billion,” Harris said in remarks Monday afternoon at a meeting with chief executive officers.

She added, “This is not about us coming in and telling anyone what they should do. It is about being partners and assisting and helping to facilitate the natural desire of the people in these nations. This is important work. This is good work. I think this reflects the best of who we are as the United States recognizing our responsibility as neighbors to these countries in the Western Hemisphere.”

Ahead of the meeting, Harris’s office detailed new investments from seven companies.

It said, for example, that PepsiCo, the global food and beverage company, would invest $190 million in northern Central America through 2025, including improvements to its manufacturing plans in the region. The company already has a long-standing presence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, including a regional manufacturing hub in Guatemala.

Harris’s office also said that Cargill, a global food corporation, would invest an additional $150 million in the region with the aim of improving “farmer livelihoods and building economic resilience” in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, Parkdale Mills, one of the largest providers of spun yarns and cotton consumer products in the world, plans to spend $150 million to build a new yarn spinning facility in Honduras, according to Harris’s office.

Other investments are being announced by CARE International, Grupo Mariposa, Parkdale Mills, JDE Peet’s and PriceSmart.

In addition, three other companies that announced initial investments in May – Mastercard, Microsoft and Nespresso – are announcing further plans in the region.

Published : December 14, 2021

By : The Washington Post