The late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat's medical records do not give conclusive results regarding what caused his death, the New York Times and Haaretz newspapers reported yesterday, prompting Palestinian officials to call for the publication of the records.
The reports were the first based on the actual medical records since Arafat died in a Paris hospital on Nov. 11 after falling ill in his West Bank compound a month earlier. Arafat's widow and other relatives have kept the records secret.
A stroke was the final blow that killed Arafat, but it is not clear what disease or illness lead to a deterioration in his health, the Times concluded in its report. The records show, according to independent experts who studied them, that Arafat's symptoms make it highly unlikely that he died of AIDS or poisoning, the newspaper said.
But Palestinian doctors continue to insist that he was poisoned, the Times reported.
While the Israeli Haaretz daily cited experts as saying that Arafat died of AIDS, poisoning or an illness, it points out that the medical report states that "a discussion among a large number of medical experts ... shows that it is impossible to pinpoint a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that led to the death of the patient."
Arafat's personal doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, who did not treat Arafat in his final weeks, said that he knows French doctors found the AIDS virus in Arafat's blood, Haaretz reported. The virus given to Arafat by Israel was used to disguise poisoning, he said, according to the daily.
A senior Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, said he had not seen the records but had been told by many doctors that it was still not clear what had caused Arafat's death. Erekat said he had not heard any proof that Arafat had AIDS or had been poisoned.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office called the accusations that Israel infected Arafat with AIDS or poisoned him "nonsense," Haaretz said.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons