Italy on Saturday reported its highest number of new COVID-19 cases in a week, a day after the government moved to extend the country’s lockdown with only slight concessions to businesses demanding a restart of the economy.
There were 4,694 new cases, compared with 3,951 a day earlier, civil protection officials said.
The rise came as testing continues to surge, with a record number of tests conducted at the end of the week and about 110,000 performed in the past few days, health officials said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The number of confirmed cases in the country totaled 152,271.
Italy registered 619 deaths linked to the virus in the past 24 hours, compared with 570 the day before. That brought the total number of fatalities to 19,468.
Separately, the mayor of an Italian town famous for its bonfire celebrations on Good Friday was forced to apologize after locals turned up to pray with the town priest in defiance of the lockdown.
The southeastern town of San Marco holds an annual ritual that sees huge trunks of hollowed out trees thrown onto wagons and set alight.
The event was canceled this year because of the pandemic.
The local priest intended to broadcast a video of his silent prayer in front of the town’s main church.
However, San Marco Mayor Michele Merla said families with children and the elderly showed up, and began to pray alongside the priest.
“I made a mistake. I know,” the mayor said in a video posted on Facebook.
“When these people arrived and began to pray on their knees before the Virgin Mary, it was difficult for me to interrupt,” he said.
The incident sparked a lively social media debate in a heavily Catholic country that has been under lockdown longer than any other in Europe — and where the patience of some is wearing thin.
The bishop for the town’s Foggia Province expressed outrage at the act of civil disobedience by the town’s faithful.
The participants “showed neither common sense nor prudence,” Bishop Vincenzo Pelvi said.
At such a difficult time it was important for clergy to act responsibly, local media quoted the bishop as saying.
“Parish priests are still required to adhere categorically to [the lockdown] and to avoid putting citizens and the faithful at risk,” he said.
The priest expressed his sincere regret at what had happened.
“The situation got out of hand,” Don Motteo said tearfully in a TV interview. “I am sorry. I apologize.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS