Asean reports most number of Covid-linked deaths in over two weeks
Southeast Asia reported 29,907 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday, lower than Saturday’s 30,980, however deaths were the highest in over two weeks at 558, increasing from the previous days 534.
The number of Covid-19 cases in Asean crossed 4.53 million, while the death toll rose to 88,119.
Philippines reported 5,803 new cases and 84 deaths on Sunday, the second highest in the region behind Indonesia, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 1,359,015 patients and 23,621 deaths. The Philippine government has signed a purchase contract with Pfizer for 40 million doses of vaccine, which will be delivered within the next eight weeks. So far, the government has procured a total of 157 million doses of vaccine.
Cambodia reported 659 new cases and 17 deaths on Sunday, driving cumulative cases in the country to 42,711 and 431 deaths. The public health ministry reported seven new infections of the delta variant of the virus. Of these, five patients were workers returning from Thailand.
Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from?
Stanley Perlman, who has been studying coronaviruses for 39 years, got a nasty email June 4: “Dr. Frankenstein just wants more public money and wants to research things he shouldnt be messing with. THANKS A LOT FOR CORONA LOSER.”
Perlman, a mild-mannered, grandfatherly virologist at the University of Iowa, didn’t know the author of the dyspeptic email and had nothing to do with the emergence of the coronavirus. But he had co-signed a letter to the Lancet in February 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was not a bioengineered virus and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
That remains the consensus of many scientists – but the “lab leak” theory has never gone away and has become louder than ever. It is not a theory so much as a constellation of scenarios that imagine how the virus may have emanated from a laboratory in China, ranging from the accidental to the sinister.
It dominates news coverage and public discussion of the origin of the pandemic, shoving aside the natural zoonosis hypothesis – which asserts that, like so many previous infectious pathogens, the novel coronavirus most likely jumped unassisted into the human population from a still-unidentified animal host.
Scientists haven’t found that animal, however. Some virologists, including Perlman, have said they can’t rule out some kind of unintentional laboratory accident.
It’s possible, for example, that researchers studying coronaviruses in Wuhan did not even know they had SARS-CoV-2 in their facility. The new openness to such scenarios culminated last month when the journal Science published a letter from 18 prominent scientists calling for a more robust probe of the virus’s origin and criticizing a World Health Organization report that called a lab leak “extremely unlikely.”
This is a fraught moment not only for virologists, but for scientists broadly. They have had to deal with some version of the “Frankenstein” meme for generations. Now, they’re faced with suspicion that somehow they are responsible for a plague that has killed millions of people.
The situation has exacerbated long-standing tensions within the sprawling and often cantankerous scientific community. The lab-origin possibility has reignited debate over “gain of function” experiments that, in an effort to anticipate future pandemics, may alter the potency of viruses in secure laboratory settings. Scientists have clashed repeatedly over the risks and rewards of that kind of research for the past decade.
“There’s sniping going on in all directions,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.
Her message to everyone: Cool it. She doesn’t think a scientist who is open to the possibility of a laboratory accident should be labeled a conspiracy theorist. And some people are proclaiming certainties about the origin of the virus despite having limited knowledge or expertise, she said.
“If anyone is going to come out strongly on one hypothesis or another, the scientific method says that there should be evidence to back it. I worry when some people are very willing to be firm about one origin or the other but fail to either have the evidence or the expertise to back it up,” McNutt said.
Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from?
McNutt and the presidents of the national academies of medicine and engineering published a letter Tuesday staking out a neutral position amid all this rancor. It advocated for a probe “guided by scientific principles” that would consider multiple scenarios for the origin of the pandemic. It called on China to share information about research there. And it defended scientists.
“(M)isinformation, unsubstantiated claims, and personal attacks on scientists surrounding the different theories of how the virus emerged are unacceptable, and are sowing public confusion and risk undermining the public’s trust in science and scientists, including those still leading efforts to bring the pandemic under control,” the letter said.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview that “it’s deeply disheartening to see this terribly difficult worldwide situation that has taken almost 4 million lives and somehow turned into a motivation to demonize some of the scientists who have done the most to try to get through this.”
He cited Anthony Fauci, the director since 1984 of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has managed to serve seven presidents by avoiding political quagmires, but in recent weeks he has been excoriated in the right-wing news media and by some prominent Republican officials for his institute’s past funding of virus research at the Wuhan lab. Peter Navarro, who served as Donald Trump’s trade representative, went so far as to declare in March that “Tony Fauci is the father of the virus.”
Fauci this month fired back.
“It’s very dangerous, because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science. Because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science,” he said on MSNBC. “Science and the truth are being attacked.”
There is more noise than signal here. The lab-leak hypotheses lack direct evidence. Chinese scientists deny they had SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate ancestor in-house. The leak conjectures are fashioned around unknowns, missing information, inconsistent statements by scientists and a lack of transparency among Chinese officials. Suspicion and speculation fill holes in the narrative.
But scientists who support a natural origin have yawning gaps in their own story. They have not identified the intermediate animal host carrying SARS-CoV-2.
So where did this awful thing come from? That is a legitimate scientific mystery. The stakes are high, and crucial pieces of information are absent. As a result, the quest to understand the origin of the pandemic has been caught up in political battles and ideological maelstroms. There’s a hunt for villains before the crime has been fully documented.
“This discussion has just gotten so acerbic. It’s just been terrible,” Perlman said.
Collins and Fauci have called for Chinese scientists to open their records to inspection. President Joe Biden echoed that this month, saying China should let investigators have access to the laboratories: “We have not had access to determine whether or not this was the consequence of the marketplace of animals and environment … or an experiment gone awry in the lab.”
Biden has ordered his intelligence agencies to sort through all possibilities and report back no later than August.
The main argument in favor of natural zoonosis – one that unfolded beyond the walls of a lab – is that this has happened before with countless viruses, including coronaviruses. SARS, the coronavirus that caused a deadly outbreak in 2002 and 2003 but was throttled before it became a pandemic, first passed through an intermediate animal sold in markets – Himalayan palm civets. Scientists believe this new coronavirus probably passed through an intermediate host as well.
For many scientists, the lab-leak hypotheses remain a classic example of an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
Susan Weiss, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied coronaviruses for 40 years, invokes the adage about what people should expect to see coming if they hear hoofbeats.
“You know the thing about horses and zebras,” she said. “Zoonosis is the horse, and the lab leak is the zebra.”
There are many variations on the lab-leak theory, some requiring scientific subterfuge – a conspiracy, in other words, to hide what was being done in the lab. Such hypotheses, built on suspicions of missing information and deception, are hard to disprove. Scientists adhering to the natural origin hypothesis are unlikely to embrace a rival hypothesis that requires, as a fundamental assumption, an impenetrable wall of deceit.
They are more likely, however, to be open to the possibility of an accident at a lab, one without nefarious intent, perhaps involving a virus that slipped into the facility under the radar amid legitimate research efforts.
But the Wuhan Institute of Virology remains something of a black box. Critics say the WHO investigators who delivered a report on the virus origin did only a cursory investigation of the institute. They also note that the WHO investigators included Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that directed a grant from Fauci’s institute to the Wuhan lab. Daszak also signed the 2020 Lancet letter denouncing conspiracy theories about a lab origin.
Even the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, distanced himself from the WHO report’s dismissal of the lab theory and called for a more thorough investigation.
That was followed by calls from scientists to probe more deeply into lab-leak scenarios. The letter to the journal Science, in particular, helped put the imprimatur of mainstream science on an idea previously marginalized as a conspiracy theory.
Perlman said he would not have signed the letter if asked, because of “false balance.”
“It made it sound like all possibilities are equal, which I don’t think is true,” Perlman said.
“There isn’t any balance of plausibility,” Columbia University epidemiologist W. Ian Lipkin said.
Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, one of the organizers of the letter to Science, said the political climate last year made many scientists hesitant to express openness to the lab-leak idea. They did not want to align themselves with a theory closely associated with Trump and his allies, who referred to the coronavirus as “the China virus.”
Relman took the leap, though: In November, he published an essay in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussing possible origins of SARS-CoV-2, including laboratory manipulation: “Even though a definitive answer may not be forthcoming, and even though an objective analysis requires addressing some uncomfortable possibilities, it is crucial that we pursue this question.”
Relman said two scientists who were asked to sign the letter to Science expressed concern that it could contribute to anti-Asian bigotry. Only one signed. Relman noted that the letter concluded with an affirmation of support for Chinese scientists fighting the pandemic.
Relman said he goes back and forth on whether a natural or laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 is more likely. He is open to the possibility that Chinese officials haven’t been forthcoming about their laboratory experiments.
“It seems more likely that either the virus was grown unknowingly and produced an asymptomatic infection, and none of that was recognized, or a laboratory worker infected themselves unknowingly during collection of samples from a natural viral reservoir, like a cave with bats,” Relman said.
“It is also theoretically possible there was some engineering going on there with some recent ancestor viruses that haven’t been talked about, that haven’t been published,” he said. “That would then suggest there has been a deliberate effort to not talk about some work that was going on there.”
Some scientists are dismayed by what they’re reading and hearing. They think the case for natural zoonosis remains strong. A significant fraction of early coronavirus infections were linked to a sprawling Wuhan market where, according to the WHO report, traces of SARS-CoV-2 were found in drains and other surfaces near animal stalls.
A report published this month in the journal Nature said the Wuhan markets in the 21/2 years before the pandemic sold more than 47,000 animals from 38 species, including raccoon dogs, weasels, badgers, hedgehogs, marmots, minks, bamboo rats and flying squirrels. SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be a highly precocious virus that can infect many different kinds of animals. It has been found in domesticated and stray cats across Wuhan.
Although tens of thousands of animals have been tested in China in the search for the intermediate host, researchers have not found a precursor strain of SARS-CoV-2. The animal origins of many zoonotic diseases, including Ebola, have never been conclusively established. Surveillance of viruses capable of jumping into the human species remains spotty.
“Somewhere it’s out there, and there’s a ton of it, and we just haven’t flipped over enough stones yet,” said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University who, like Perlman, was one of the scientists who gave SARS-CoV-2 its name in early 2020.
He is irritated that some fellow virologists have lent weight to the lab-leak idea.
“This is distressing,” he said. “I feel like they’re taking the lab coat off when they say these things.”
Robert Garry Jr., a Tulane University virologist who co-authored an influential Nature Medicine paper in March 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered, is similarly emphatic that a natural origin outside of a lab remains most likely. He said the virus has genetic features that “scream” natural evolution. He noted the clustering of early cases linked to the market and pointed out that the virus has mutated into more transmissible variants – a sign, he said, that the virus is still adapting to the human species.
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“I think people are frustrated, and a lot of people are looking for somebody to hang this on,” he said. He added, “You can’t get over the fact that the outbreak started in Wuhan and there’s a large institute of virology that studies coronaviruses there.”
A fact sheet posted by the State Department on Jan. 15, during the final days of the Trump administration, said several people who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in fall 2019 with symptoms consistent with covid-19 or seasonal influenza. There has been no public documentation of who these workers were, their medical diagnoses or any illnesses among their close contacts.
The controversy put a spotlight on earlier documented instances in which a laboratory accident led to an infection. For example, nine SARS infections in 2004 were traced to laboratory research in Beijing that came after the original outbreak of SARS. And in 1977, Russian research on influenza may have led to the escape of a flu strain that became pandemic.
At the center of the Wuhan lab controversy is Shi Zhengli, a world-renowned coronavirus researcher who has collaborated with U.S. scientists. Shi has said she scoured records in her lab and found no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was ever present. In an interview with the journal Science last year, she said Trump’s allegations jeopardized the academic work and personal lives of her team, adding, “He owes us an apology.”
Although they may be skeptical about a colleague’s research findings, scientists generally assume their colleagues in the international scientific community are honest. But there are lab-leak scenarios that do not require deception. Accidents can happen unknowingly.
Lipkin, the Columbia epidemiologist, was a co-author of the Nature Medicine paper saying the virus was not engineered, and he hasn’t changed his mind. But he has hedged his assessment in recent months, as first noted in a Medium post by science journalist Donald McNeil Jr. Lipkin said it’s possible that the Wuhan scientists had the coronavirus in-house and simply didn’t realize it.
“If they’ve got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren’t characterized, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn’t in this lab? They wouldn’t,” Lipkin said.
Lipkin said two scientific papers co-authored by Shi indicated bat coronaviruses were handled in biosafety level 2 laboratories, rather than more secure BSL-3 or BSL-4 labs. That raises the possibility of sloppy handling of a dangerous virus, he said.
An accidental infection in a lab with an undocumented virus would be nearly impossible to distinguish from one that occurred outside the lab, he said.
“We may never know where this thing came from,” Lipkin said.
Science is not a list of knowns so much as a process of exploring the unknown, and scientists by nature are comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity and provisional conclusions. But the pandemic is a global catastrophe that has killed and sickened millions of people, and there are demands for definitive answers about how this happened. Scientists may never be able to provide answers that satisfy everyone.
“On both sides, there’s really a lack of information. That’s why we have such extensive discussions and, in some cases, vituperative discussions,” Perlman said. “There’s really no data. It’s really just opinions.”
The push for LGBTQ civil rights stalls in the Senate as advocates search for Republican support
WASHINGTON – The long march toward equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgender Americans – whose advocates have eyed major advances with complete Democratic control in Washington – has run into a wall of opposition in the U.S. Senate.
Floundering alongside other liberal priorities such as voting rights, gun control and police reform, legislation that would write protections for LGBTQ Americans into the nation’s foundational civil rights law have stalled due to sharpening Republican rhetoric, one key Democrat’s insistence on bipartisanship, and the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority rule.
While Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., hinted at a potential action this month – the annual LGBTQ Pride Month – Senate aides and advocates say there are no immediate plans to vote on the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected classes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act alongside race, color, religion and national origin.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., one of two openly gay senators, said that she has quietly been lobbying Republican colleagues on the issue and that there has been only “incremental progress,” though efforts are continuing.
“So long as negotiations are productive and we’re making progress, I think we should hold off” on a vote, she said. “There may be a time where there’s an impasse. I’m still trying to find 10 Republicans.”
The House passed the legislation in February, 224 to 206, with only three Republicans joining all 221 Democrats in support. The Senate companion bill is sponsored by 49 Democrats and no Republicans. Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., is the Democratic holdout, and the lone Republican who had sponsored a previous version of the bill, Susan Collins (Maine), is not yet doing so in this Congress.
The partisanship around the issue on Capitol Hill stands in contrast to the wide-ranging support for LGBTQ rights among the public at large, in corporate America, and even in the federal judiciary, which has delivered a string of rulings expanding those rights – including a landmark Supreme Court opinion last year written by conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch that effectively banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual identity.
But lawmakers, aides and advocates say that significant obstacles to progress on the Equality Act remain, including polarized views on how to protect the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and Republicans’ increasing reliance on transgender rights as a wedge issue.
Schumer last month said the bill was “one of the things we’re considering” for a vote during Pride Month but added, “it’s a very busy June.” And while individual conversations are taking place, according to Baldwin and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., the lead Senate author, there appears to be no organized negotiation underway as there has been on other hot-button issues.
“We’re talking about immigration, infrastructure, policing,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a key GOP figure on civil rights matters, said this month. “But not much on the Equality Act.”
The backdrop is a new Republican push to target LGBTQ rights. Advocates count at least 17 new state laws passed this year targeting the community, most of them specifically aimed at transgender Americans. When the House debated the Equality Act earlier this year, numerous Republicans came to the floor to warn of dire consequences if the bill were enacted.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, R-Ga., said passing the bill would be “opening the door for predatory men to prey on [women] in the most vulnerable of places – in shelters, changing rooms, and showers.” Many others raised fears it would put cisgender women athletes at a competitive disadvantage against transgender women, and some said it would open the door to government-funded abortions.
The sharp-edged rhetoric has continued, even as the spotlight has turned elsewhere on Capitol Hill. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference Friday in Florida, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., launched an extended attack on the bill, claiming it would “mean that boys who self-identify as female are competing against your daughters and granddaughters in sports” and that “domestic abuse shelters would have to take in men who self-identify as females.”
“They say, ‘Let’s treat everybody equal.’ We have equality. We have provisions in our Constitution,” she said.
The corps of advocates who see the Equality Act as the capstone of a 50-year struggle for LGBTQ civil rights say they remain optimistic that progress can be made on a lawmaker-by-lawmaker basis. They believe that at least 10 Republicans will ultimately be open to passing the law, vaulting a potential filibuster, and that Manchin will support the bill once a critical mass of Republicans get on board.
Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ rights organization, said the main thrust of the advocacy has been combating “misinformation” about the bill – including the notion that it would impinge on religious freedom.
“We’ve had the First Amendment on the books for decades. We’ve had a clear separation between church and state for decades. The Equality Act does not change the fundamental principles that support religious freedom,” he said. “We heard some of the same arguments, if you will, in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was amended – that this would really radically affect how religious institutions function. That didn’t happen.”
The push has been complicated by the federal courts, which have taken up major cases dealing with LGBTQ rights in recent years. Some Republicans have cited last year’s surprise decision banning employment discrimination in declaring that they no longer see a need for broader civil rights legislation. And on Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected a Philadelphia agency’s decision to sideline organizations that refused to place foster children with same-sex couples on religious grounds – a narrow decision that did not establish a broad new religious freedom doctrine.
But the advocates argue that the courts have left major gaps in LGBTQ rights – such as excluding discrimination in housing, public accommodations and jury service – while also pointing out that existing statutes and court decisions do plenty to preserve religious freedom.
“I like the Equality Act how it’s written – I think it is appropriate and fair,” said Mara Keisling, founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. But, she said, “no bill is perfect, and if there’s some particular thing that anybody wants to talk about, I say we talk about it.”
Some GOP congressional aides, however, said that the Equality Act’s supporters have not been open enough to policy concessions. Tyler Deaton, a political consultant who has helped build GOP support for LGBTQ rights, said the legislation will have to change to win a sufficient number of Republican votes, noting that numerous states who have passed similar civil rights laws have written in those protections.
“Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling, it’s critical that Democrats work with Republicans in the Senate who agree that LGBTQ Americans need federal protections, and people of faith deserve a Civil Rights Act that respects them as well,” Deaton said.
In explaining his opposition to the bill in 2019, Manchin expressed general support for LGBTQ rights but cited the discomfort of school officials in his home state with the bill’s gender implications, saying he was “not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it.” He vowed to “build broad bipartisan support and find a viable path forward for these critical protections.”
The bill’s proponents have been reticent to discuss any changes that would address the GOP objections about transgender sports and other issues they have used as political cudgels. Instead, they have focused on convincing lawmakers that their fears are simply misplaced.
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Women’s sports and other anti-trans issues are “not a primary conversation that anybody in the Senate seems to really want to have,” Keisling said. “Everybody who has looked at that issue understands it is entirely a red herring, red meat, disgraceful diversion.”
Democrats and advocates have been especially perplexed by Collins’s decision not to co-sponsor the reintroduced bill this year after serving as its lone GOP co-sponsor in the previous Congress and joining Democrats on numerous other LGBTQ rights issues, such as opposing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Some have privately speculated that the HRC’s decision to endorse Collins’s opponent, Democrat Sara Gideon, in her 2020 reelection campaign may have soured Collins on the legislation.
Annie Clark, a spokeswoman for Collins, said the endorsement decision has nothing to do with her position and that she “supports protecting the civil rights of all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
“The Equality Act was a starting point for negotiations, and in its current form, it cannot pass,” Clark said. “That’s why there are ongoing discussions among senators and stakeholders about a path forward.”
Collins is seeking amendments that would protect the right of domestic violence shelters to serve men and women separately based on their birth gender as well as protections for faith-based service providers, such as Catholic Charities.
“I would hope that [the endorsement] is not a factor,” David said. “Look, I think if an elected official supports LGBTQ rights, what one organization may or may not do should not affect that senator’s fundamental principles.”
TOKYO – The most popular monk in Japanese history is probably Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481), who served as the abbot of Daitokuji temple — one of the Kyoto Gozan, or top five eminent Zen temples in Kyoto.
Ikkyu is liked not just for his religious achievements but as a result of many events in his life that have resonated with later generations. Stories from his time as a boy monk are particularly famous, but all these tales were created in the Edo period (1603-1867) and later. First conveyed through oral storytelling and other means, they eventually found their way into books for adults and children.
Children loved the anime series “Ikkyu-san” that was broadcast in the 1970s and ’80s. All 296 episodes can be seen on Amazon Prime Video.
In one episode, retired shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu summons Ikkyu after hearing about his reputation for wit and asks him to vanquish a tiger on a folding screen. The shogun says the tiger escapes from the screen at night and causes trouble.
Ikkyu replies, “I’ll catch the tiger, so please take it out of the painting.” Yoshimitsu is left speechless.
Tales like these are called tonchi stories, using a Japanese word that means extemporaneous wisdom or wit. The boy Ikkyu always trips up adults using his wit.
According to Japanese literature scholar Masahiko Oka, a storyteller from the Meiji era (1868-1912) named Shogetsudo Dongyoku created the tiger story by incorporating ideas from the novel “Nanso Satomi Hakkenden” and other tales.
Nevertheless, there must be a reason why Ikkyu was chosen as the main character. In real life, Ikkyu was a high priest who devoted himself to reviving Daitokuji temple after it was devastated during the Onin War (1467-77), in which feudal lords from all over the country fought in Kyoto.
Ikkyu was also a critic of the Kyoto Gozan school of Zen Buddhism, which ended up becoming the official philosophy of the Muromachi shogunate.
Ikkyu vehemently rejected secular thinking obsessed with honor and gain, and was known for his satirical, unrestrained remarks and eccentric behavior. As a result, he continued to be popular even in the Edo period among people who opposed religious authorities.
Another story involves Ikkyu’s friend Rennyo, who restored the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, now the largest sect. One day when Rennyo was not at home, Ikkyu entered his room and took a nap, using as a pillow a statue of Buddha that Rennyo kept nearby and worshipped. When Rennyo came home, he saw Ikkyu and said, “Hey, what are you doing with my business equipment!”The two monks then broke up laughing, as one of them used the Buddha statue as a pillow and the other called it business equipment.
Ikkyu was also known as a poet. A Chinese poem that he created at the age of 15 about springtime, in which he dreamed about the fragrance of flowers, was recited by people all over Kyoto.
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In his later years, Ikkyu lived at Shuonan temple in what is present-day Kyotanabe, in the southern suburbs of Kyoto Prefecture. At 78, he met a blind woman named Shinjo who was probably around 30 years old at the time, and fell madly in love with her. He left many poems on the themes of romance and sensuality.
Ikkyu’s words describing the female body are explicit. I will not quote those parts here, but there is beautiful poetry such as “I will embrace you more tightly and love you. / In the futon at midnight, I find your sensual face. It’s like a dream.”
Published : June 21, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, The Japan News-Yomiuri · Yasuhiko Mori
Death of famed Afghan commander in Taliban massacre highlights the countrys struggles and fears
KABUL, Afgahnistan – He was a generals son, a U.S.-trained officer with a dazzling academic record and a daring military reputation.
Col. Sohrab Azimi, a field commander in Afghan special forces that often rescue troops and retake outposts from Taliban attacks, symbolized the country’s best hope to fend off an insurgent takeover as U.S. troops began to withdraw from the fight.
Azimi, 31, and his squad of 22 men were massacred Wednesday by Taliban forces while defending a base in northern Faryab province and waiting for reinforcements.
The loss unleashed a flood of emotions across social media – grief, anger and fear that even the nation’s most skilled defenders would be undercut by poor military leadership and the departure of Afghanistan’s major foreign military ally.
At a ceremony outside a military hospital in Kabul on Saturday morning, a Muslim cleric blessed the velvet-draped coffins of Azimi and two other commandos, released by the Taliban after negotiations with the International Committee of the Red Cross. They were lifted onto artillery trucks, followed by goose-stepping soldiers and a marching band, then loaded into ambulances.
“This is the price we pay for defending our country’s independence, freedom and dignity,” Rangin Dadfar Spanta, a former foreign minister, told the silent, mostly uniformed crowd that included Azimi’s father, a retired army general. The two men, classmates from another era, embraced and wept.
“No one will be allowed to occupy our landor take our freedom away,” Spanta vowed.
But in Faryab, one of numerous provinces where the Taliban have launched repeated assaults in recent months, the mass killing added to a deepening sense of despair and defeat. After weeks of attacks that wore down local security forces and led many to surrender, the highly trained commandos sent to save the day had been surrounded, isolated and mowed down en masse.
“Government forces don’t have the will to fight. Their morale is weak and there is little coordination among the forces,” Sayed Babur Jamal, a provincial legislator, said Saturday.
He said the insurgents control eight districts in Faryaband continue to overrun military and police bases, seizing military vehicles and weapons from surrendering local forces.
“There is a strong possibility that Faryab will fall,” he said.
A poster showing an image of the late Afghan commando leader, Col. Sohrab Azimi, 31, in Kabul on June 18. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Pamela Constable.
Officials say the pace and aggression of Taliban attacks have increased since the Biden administration announced in April that all remaining troops would be withdrawn by Sept. 11. In some areas, local forces have surrendered after negotiations between community elders and the Taliban. In others, departing U.S. troops have destroyed bases or stripped them of everything usable to keep them from falling into Taliban hands.
Despite the drumbeat of attacks, military officials play down the significance of local Taliban advances and note that many are quickly reversed. After the commando slayings in Faryab’s Dawlat Abad district, the district was recaptured by Afghan forces by Thursday, with insurgents suffering heavy casualties, authorities said.
“The situation that has happened does not mean the victory and power of the Taliban,” Fawad Ahmad, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, said Friday in response to written questions. He said the Afghan security forces have sufficient “combat and professional capabilities” to defend Afghanistan.
“A Taliban victory through military means is impossible,” he said.
Many Afghans say the curtailing of U.S. airstrikes has been a critical loss for ground forces, and some suggest that such strikes could have saved Azimi and his men. Another widespread complaint is ongoing discord and poor coordination by senior Afghan military officials. Some field commanders, desperate for supplies and food, have resorted to appealing for help on social media.
The volatility in Afghanistan could affect how the U.S. military departs in coming days.
On Saturday, two U.S. defense officials said that discussions are underway that would delay the U.S. military’s expected withdrawal from its largest airfield in Afghanistan, Bagram air base, by early July.
One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that some service members at Bagram already have been told to expect their departure to be postponed. The second official acknowledged that discussions to delay are underway, without describing the plan as definitive.
The air base has been used for years to launch both manned strike aircraft and drones. Without it, the United States is expected to rely on long-range flights from bases in the Middle East to provide air support in Afghanistan.
Officials at the top U.S. military headquarters in Kabul referred questions about the delay to counterparts in the United States, who declined to comment on any delay.
“While we cannot provide any timeline for closure of any specific facility in Afghanistan, we are still firmly on track to safely and deliberately withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan by September in accordance with the direction of the president,” Navy Capt. Bill Urban said.
Davood Moradian, director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies and a distant relative of Azimi, said the Faryab fiasco exposed a “huge failure of the system” as the country confronts several problems at once.
“People love the army and admire the commandos, but the government and the military are poorly led, U.S. troops are leaving, and the Taliban are feeling bolder. It is a tragic triangle,” he said.
For the Taliban, Azimi’s killing was a potential propaganda coup.
The group released a video showing him with bullet holes in his chest, lying amid the corpses of men he had led in battle. But Azimi’s father, Zahir, a former Defense Ministry spokesman, wrote on Facebook that he felt pride when he saw the bullets had struck his son from the front.
“You fought face to face with your enemy until the last moment,” he wrote.
In an interview at his home Friday, the elder Azimi also noted that his son – who studied in the United States and Turkey, held several academic degrees and married an American citizen – could have easily chosen a prestigious desk job or foreign posting.
“He had many opportunities, but he wanted to go into operations. Regular Afghan families related to him, those who lost husband and sons,” he said.
The elder Azimi, 67, who fought Taliban extremists before they took power in 1996, said he was disturbed by the lack of planning that had preceded the dangerous mission in Faryab, leaving the commandos with no backup.
He said that with up to 50 of 370 Afghan districts under Taliban control or attack, it would be better to temporarily withdraw from some vulnerable areas and prevent bloodshed.
The ex-general said he respected Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces but that the president was wrong to rush into the pullout just months after U.S. officials signed a deal with Taliban leaders.
“[The Taliban] came to believe they were winning, and they began to attract thousands of volunteer fighters and support from abroad,” he said. “They have a lot more capacity now.”
Afghan soldiers carry the coffin holding the remains of Col. Sohrab Azimi from a mourning ceremony in Kabul on June 19. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Pamela Constable.
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Among hundreds of visitors who called on the Azimi family in recent days, former classmates of the slain commando leader were far more critical. Some bitterly accused the United States of abandoning them for selfish interests at the worst possible time.
“They left the fight and left the field to the Taliban,” said one former classmate. He identified himself only as Sulieman to express a critical opinion. “They preached values like democracy, but now they are going, and we are losing our best men, the real warriors and patriots like Sohrab who fought for those values.”
The slain commando leader was promoted posthumously to brigadier general. His body was flown Saturday to Herat, his ancestral base in far western Afghanistan, and buried before sunset.
Israel struggles to restore vaccine swap deal after Palestinians reject doses for being too old
TEL AVIV – Israeli officials are working to revive talks to deliver vaccine doses to the Palestinian Authority after a deal last Friday was suddenly called off by P.A. officials who said that the vaccines were too close to their expiration date and do not meet their standards.
Some 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are still without sufficient vaccine supplies as shipments from other sources continue to lag even while their neighbor, Israel, is mostly returning to pre-pandemic life.
The announcement and abrupt cancellation of the deal has given rise to conspiracy theories and further damaged the low standing of the Palestinian Authority among its people.
On Friday, Israeli officials celebrated the finalization of the three-way deal between the two governments and Pfizer, by which Israel would ship more than 1 million doses of its vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, in exchange for a similar number of doses to be delivered back to Israel later this year.
Israeli officials signaled that the move marked the beginning of a chapter of re-engagement between Israel and the Palestinians after more than a decade under right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz tweeted on Friday that the “vaccine exchange is in the interest of all parties” and that he hoped it would promote “cooperation between Israel and her Palestinian neighbors.”
“Corona does not recognize borders or differentiate between peoples,” he added.
Hours later, however, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh scrapped the deal, saying that the first shipment of some 100,000 Pfizer doses was due to expire at the end of the month and so too close to their expiration date.
At a news conference Friday evening, Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila said health officials who inspected the vaccines found they “did not meet standards and so we decided to return them.”
The Israeli Health Ministry said they would not accept returned doses and that if they were not used by the Palestinian Authority they would need to be thrown out.
The vaccine exchange had been in the works for several months under Netanyahu and it had been made clear to all sides that the first doses shipped out would be the first to expire, as is also protocol in Israel, said an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
He added that Israel had also offered to donate syringes and other medical equipment to assist with the inoculation campaign, though the PA refused the offer.
After the deal was canceled on Friday, rumors circulated on social media that Israel, in collusion with the P.A., had been trying to “poison” Palestinians with expired doses. Palestinian opposition activists are calling for an independent investigation into the deal and its co-signers.
“We can buy vaccines ourselves and we do not need Israel,” said a Fatah official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that the already deeply unpopular Palestinian Authority has potentially lost an even greater amount of legitimacy in its vaccine campaign with last week’s announcement.
Since its inoculation rollout kicked off in December, Israel has established itself as a global vaccine leader after purchasing millions of doses at above-market prices and signing a data-sharing agreement with Pfizer. On June 15, the Israeli government ended the mask mandate for most indoor spaces, citing health experts who had concluded that Israel has reached a version of herd immunity.
Shipments from Covax – the WHO-linked global vaccination program – Russia, China, the UAE, and several thousand doses donated from Israel have trickled into Ramallah over the past year, though significantly behind the expected schedule.
Kaila, the health minister, said on Saturday that 106 new cases, one death in the West Bank and one death in Gaza had been recorded since Friday. She said that of the some 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, 270,800 have been fully vaccinated and another 174,800 have received the first jab. That number includes around 100,000 Palestinian day laborers who were inoculated by the Israeli army in March.
Israel manages all travel and trade into to the West Bank, most of which is under full Israeli control, as well as into Gaza, which is under a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade.
For months, human rights organizations have called for Israel, as an occupying power, to provide medical intervention that would bolster the lagging vaccination campaign in the Palestinian territories. But Netanyahu repeatedly asserted that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for public health under the terms of the Oslo accords.
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“Israel denied us vaccines for a very long time, even when they had extra millions, now that they’re closed to expiring they made this deal,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and political opposition activist. “Israel wanted to exchange the doses for fresh ones, to sell us something that’s corrupt, and now, as we wait for shipments from Covax and WHO, we’ll need to do a lot of damage control.”
Ugandan Olympian tests positive for virus upon arrival in Japan, the first detection as athletes head to Tokyo
The 2020 Tokyo Games hit another snag after a vaccinated member of Ugandas team tested positive for the coronavirus upon arrival in Japan on Saturday.
It marked the first detection of the coronavirus among incoming athletes five weeks ahead of the competition at a time when cases are surging in many countries, including Japan.
Uganda’s team had all been vaccinated with AstraZeneca shots and tested negative for the virus before departure, Japanese media reported, according to the Associated Press. Japan requires a two-week quarantine for international travelers, though it is waiving the rule for many Olympic athletes and support staffers.
Upon arrival Saturday night at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, one member of Uganda’s team tested positive. That person was denied entry into Japan and sent to a government-run facility. The team’s remaining eight members continued as planned Sunday to the host town of Osaka.
The International Olympic Committee, and the Japanese government and organizers, have insisted that the Games can be held safely with the health protocols in place. But critics say it’s too risky to bring thousands of participants from all over the world together while new waves of infections hit many countries with low vaccination rates.
Under Japan’s rules, Olympians are not required to be vaccinated against the coronavirus but will need to remain in designated social bubbles and test daily.
Public health experts are particularly concerned about highly contagious variants of the virus, such as the delta variant first detected in India, that appear to be driving many of the recent surges.
While no vaccine is 100 percent effective for everyone, cases of fully vaccinated people contracting the coronavirus have raised alarm. There are particular concerns that the Chinese-made Sinopharm and Sinovac versions offer less protection than other vaccines available.
Japan has fully vaccinated less than 6 percent of its 7.1 million residents, the slowest rate among developed countries, according to the AP. At the same time, cases are rising in many cities, including Osaka and the capital, Tokyo.
On Sunday, Japan lifted its pandemic-related state of emergency in most areas, despite concerns that the move could spark another surge. Japan has not imposed lockdowns, but it has used the state of emergency to issue limits on gatherings and order restaurants and shops to close early, among other restrictions.
Uganda is facing an alarming rise in coronavirus cases, leading to surges in hospitalizations and shortages of oxygen for treatment. Just 2 percent of the country has been vaccinated. This month, Uganda hit records for daily infections, which are considered severe undercounts because of limited resources.
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“We have no way to know how far the virus has spread in Uganda because of the low testing capacity in the country,” Mercy Corps, a Seattle-based humanitarian NGO, said in a statement. “The health systems are overwhelmed, and sooner or later, there will be no space or adequate health care staff to admit severely ill patients who need emergency and critical care services. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
Asean sees another major spike in new Covid cases and deaths
Southeast Asia on Saturday saw over 30,000 new Covid-19 cases for the second successive day, and also a higher number of deaths, collated data showed.
There were 30,980 new cases on Saturday, the highest on a single day in over a month, compared to 30,715 on Friday, and 534 deaths, against 512 the previous day.
Total Covid-19 cases are now at 4,502,227 and 87,562 have died.
Singapore reported 21 cases on Saturday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 62,403 with 34 deaths.
On Saturday, 24 private hospitals chosen by Singapore’s Health Ministry administered Sinovac Covid-19 vaccines to people after the country’s government approved it as an alternative vaccine.
The price of a Sinovac vaccine jab is 10-25 Singapore dollars (THB234-285), while about 34,000 people who have allergy due to this mRNA vaccine can bring evidence to the Health Ministry to claim refund.
Singapore has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines as the main vaccines.
Cambodia reported 471 new cases and 20 deaths on Saturday, bringing cumulative cases in the country to 42,052 with 414 deaths.
Of the new patients, at least seven, who have returned from Thailand, have been infected with the Delta variant.
Asean sees another major spike in new Covid cases and deaths
Palestinians cancel vaccine deal with Israel, saying doses are too close to expiration date
JERUSALEM – Just hours after a vaccine-sharing agreement was announced with Israel on Friday, the Palestinian Authority announced that the deal was off because the doses donated by Israel were too close to their expiration date and did not meet its standards.
Israel had sent more than 1 million doses of coronavirus vaccines near their expiration date to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in exchange for a similar quantity of fresh vaccine to be returned by the Palestinians later in the year, officials said Friday.
The arrangement to cooperatively manage their vaccine stocks would have allowed the Palestinian Ministry of Health to accelerate its vaccine campaign while keeping unneeded doses in Israel from going to waste. Israel – which has already reached a significant majority of its residents with vaccines – will get its stocks replenished in time for booster shots later in the year, experts said.
However, Palestinian Health Minister Mai Alkaila told reporters Friday that they had expected the doses to have expiration dates for July or August. After they received them, Alkaila said, they saw that the doses would in fact expire in June.
“That’s not enough time to use them, so we rejected them,” Alkaila said, according to Reuters.
The vaccine deal, announced by the office of new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, had followed criticism from Palestinian activists and human rights groups that say Israel has not done enough to help fight the pandemic in Palestinian populations it largely controls.
Israel donated several thousand doses of vaccine for Palestinian health workers early in the year, and the Israeli army inoculated more than 100,000 Palestinian workers who have permits to work in Israel. But then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to make vaccines available on a wider scale, contending that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for public health under terms of the Oslo accords.
Members of the new government touted their announcement Friday as a means to aid Palestinians while keeping the virus at bay across borders.
The statement, issued jointly by the prime minister and the Health and Defense ministries, said the transfer of up to 1.4 million doses would be paid back from a Pfizer order scheduled to be delivered to the Palestinians in September or October.
“We will continue to find effective ways to cooperate for the benefit of people in the region,” new Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said in a tweet.
The Israeli military unit responsible for coordination with the Palestinian Authority said it delivered 100,000 doses of vaccine on Friday, before the deal was scrapped.
It was not immediately clear if some of the shared vaccine would have been passed on to the Gaza Strip, where vaccine levels are lower. Last month’s 11-day war threatened to create a new surge of infections after thousands of Gazans were forced to shelter in crowded schools and community centers during Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.
Israel has seen a dramatic drop in its need for vaccine inventories as its fastest-in-the-world vaccine program has delivered shots to a significant majority of its population and the country has largely returned to pre-pandemic life.
The virus continues to spread in the West Bank, although the number of positive cases has declined as more people are vaccinated. Officials have mostly depended on doses donated by third countries or the Covax program aimed at inoculating the world’s poorest populations.
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“You are beginning to see people have more weddings and parties,” said Salwa Najjab, a West Bank physician who has served on one of the Palestinian Authority’s coronavirus advisory panels. “The situation is getting better.”
A boost in supply would extend the reach of the vaccine campaign in time to help communities weather an expected jump in outside visitors from Europe, other Arab countries and the United States as global travel restrictions are lifted, Najjab said.
“It will make a difference if they get it out to the villages,” she said.
The U.S. may be ready to see cicadas gone, but this French village has a statue, a song and ceramics in their honor
LE BEAUSSET, France – The five-foot blue iron cicada dangles upside-down from a metal branch, bulging eyes staring at the sky. It appears ready to launch itself at any moment at cars moving through the traffic circle below.
The $34,000 statue was inaugurated last year as a proud defense of the seasonal insect, after complaints from tourists who had dared to ask if the din emanating from the trees could be stopped with an application of insecticide.
The chorus of cicadas, or “cigales,” as they are called here, is an annual and generally beloved phenomenon in southern France, especially in the region of Provence. And the village of Le Beausset, with a population of about 10,000 people and an unknown number of cicadas, is the self-proclaimed cicada capital.
Across the region, visitors can buy cicada postcards and cicada tablecloths and ceramic cicadas in more than three dozen colors. For the biggest fans, shops in Le Beausset’s neighboring town of Le Castellet sell versions that release their deafening sounds whenever anyone comes close.
And so as residents of Le Beausset and across France’s south await the annual chirping of the insects – expected later this month – many here have watched reaction to the U.S. “zombie cicada invasion” with a mix of bewilderment and surprise.
They understand that the cicada species dominant in southern France emerge in lower density than the 17-year periodical cicadas that have roiled the East Coast this summer. But few here would think of the insect as an edible snack. Or something worthy of 911 noise complaints.
“In Provence, cicadas are culturally omnipresent,” said Stéphane Puissant, a cicada expert who works for the city of Dijon’s Science and Biodiversity Garden.
According to a Provincial legend, cicadas were sent from heaven to keep people from dozing off in the midday heat of summer. But the people of Provence found the sound calming, and it lulled them to sleep all the same.
One of France’s most famous poems, “The Cicada and the Ant” – published in 1668 by Jean de La Fontaine and inspired by an Aesop fable – portrays the cicada as improvident, singing the summer through and having to beg for provisions in the winter.
La Fontaine’s cicada may have been a reference to the predicament of artists. And so in the 19th century, a group of Provence-based writers, the Félibrige, adopted a golden cicada as a symbol, along with the phrase, “The sun makes me sing.”
The insect was linked to warmth and light, Puissant said, and that reputation soon spread to the north of France.
Cicadas in France are “really associated with holidays and sunny places, and it’s a really positive image,” said François Dusoulier, head curator at France’s National Museum of Natural History.
French TV ads, for example, feature the sound of cicadas to evoke the joys of summer months.
As an indication of French reverence for cicadas, the country’s Senate voted this year to classify cicada chirping – along with cow smells, rooster crowing and other elements of everyday life in France’s countryside – as national heritage, protected from litigation and elimination.
To the extent that cicadas are the subject of complaints, Dusoulier blamed a growing disconnect between “urban societies, especially maybe in northern countries, and the real life cycle of nature that occurs in the Mediterranean areas.”
Yves Pujol, a singer who lives in Provence, agreed that in his experience, the people registering their disgust primarily come from big cities.
“They don’t mind the noise of ambulances all day and night, but the sound of cicadas bothers them,” he remarked.
“It’s like saying: There’s too much sun. Can we do something against it, can we hide the sun?” he said. “It’s impossible.”
Following the tourist complaints in Le Beausset in 2018, Pujol wrote a song staunchly supportive of cicadas. The refrain – “Don’t touch, don’t touch the cicadas, don’t touch, or you get slapped” – may strike some as aggressive, but it is meant as a symbolic message and reflects how strongly the region feels about the insect, he told The Washington Post.
The song seemed to strike a chord with locals. It has been viewed 250,000 times on YouTube. It’s typically the first song his group plays at concerts in the region, even three years after the controversy. As Pujol stood in the center of Le Beausset’s cicada roundabout earlier this month, talking to The Post, locals asked to take photos with him, and a man cheered from his car.
“The cicada won’t be exterminated – no matter what happens – it won’t be killed, and it won’t be poisoned with pesticides,” said Philippe Marco, Le Beausset’s former deputy mayor for culture, festivities and heritage.
On the national stage, the cross-party support for France’s roosters and cicadas this year was seen as a sign of how all major parties will fight for the votes of rural residents in the presidential elections next year.
But in Le Beausset, there is some distaste for what locals see as the politicization of cicadas.
It was the village’s then-mayor who was the driving force behind the cicada statue, and some residents complain about his conservative group’s reliance on the insect as a symbol in its most recent election campaign.
Other residents have questioned why their iron cicada had to be blue and not look more like the actual insect.
But there are no doubts about how the residents feel about the animal in nature.
In a small tourist shop in the village center, where cicada replicas are available for $2.40, owner Marie-Christine Fenot has been growing more impatient by the day.
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As soon as the first cicadas sing, village residents will post videos on Facebook, she said.
“It’s important for us,” she said. “It really is.”
Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from?
A poster showing an image of the late Afghan commando leader, Col. Sohrab Azimi, 31, in Kabul on June 18. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Pamela Constable.
Afghan soldiers carry the coffin holding the remains of Col. Sohrab Azimi from a mourning ceremony in Kabul on June 19. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Pamela Constable.
Asean sees another major spike in new Covid cases and deaths
