BRAZIL
Veteran, 99, beats virus
A 99-year-old World War II veteran was released from hospital with military honors on Tuesday after recovering from COVID-19. Ermando Piveta, who served in the Brazilian artillery in Africa during World War II, was brought out of Brasilia’s Armed Forces Hospital to trumpet music and applause. “It was a tremendous fight for me, greater than in the war. In war, you kill or live. Here, you have to fight in order to live, and you leave this fight a winner,” Piveta said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
AUSTRALIA
Jailed lovelorn cut quarantine
A man who repeatedly left quarantine, reportedly to visit his girlfriend, was on Tuesday jailed for a month — the first person imprisoned under the country’s lockdown laws. Jonathan David, 35, was arrested earlier this month after jamming open a fire escape and slipping out of mandatory quarantine at a Perth hotel, Western Australia Police said in a statement. He told Perth Magistrates Court on Tuesday that he first flouted the law to get food, but hours later broke quarantine again because he missed his girlfriend, Seven News reported. By escaping through the fire exit, he successfully avoided hotel staff several times, but was caught on CCTV, police said.
CHINA
Virus survey begun: report
The government has started an epidemiological survey in nine regions in an effort to determine the full scale of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections and overall immunity levels, the China Daily reported yesterday. The survey began on Tuesday in Wuhan. Blood samples and throat swabs were taken from randomly selected residents for testing, the China Daily said. The survey is expected to test 11,000 citizens in Wuhan, one-thousandth of its population. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, as well as the provinces of Liaoning, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Sichuan, are also to be surveyed.
INDONESIA
Dead ‘mistook for rebels’
The military is to investigate an incident in Papua in which two men were shot dead, it said yesterday, after rights advocates and a family member said that the men were wrongly identified as separatist rebels. The men were killed at a river near the Grasberg Mine after security forces mistook them for members of the Free Papua Movement, rights advocate Patris Wetibo said. Demi Bebari, the father of one of the dead men, a 19-year-old student, said that the two had gone fishing to find food, because the nearby markets had been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
INDIA
Rural factories to resume
The government is to allow construction of roads and other infrastructure projects in rural areas from Monday next week, the Ministry of Home Affairs announced yesterday. “To mitigate hardship to the public, select additional activities have been allowed,” it said, adding that states are responsible for ensuring that all COVID-19 safety and social distancing protocols remain in place. The government would lift restrictions to allow e-commerce goods and other firms’ goods to move by road, as well as restarting port operations and air cargo, the ministry said.
AFRICA
Debt freeze crucial: Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday called for a moratorium on the debt of African countries as “an essential step” to help the continent get through the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking in an interview with Radio France Internationale, Macron urged a meeting of G20 finance ministers to take action on a moratorium as the pandemic threatens to overwhelm the fragile health systems of the poorest countries. The moratorium would be a first step toward full cancelation of African debt, he said. “At a time of crisis, we need to give the African economies a break rather than servicing the interest on the debt. This is an essential step and I think it is a huge step forward,” he said. “Every year, a third of what Africa exports commercially is used to service its debt. That’s crazy.”
GERMANY
Four IS suspects arrested
Police in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia have arrested four suspected members of the Islamic State (IS) group alleged to be planning an attack on US military facilities. Federal prosecutors said the suspects, all citizens of Tajikistan, were arrested by tactical police units early yesterday at various locations. The men’s alleged leader, a 30-year-old Tajik man identified only as Ravsan B, has been in jail since March last year on unspecified charges. All suspects will be charged with membership in a terrorist organization, prosecutors said.
UNITED STATES
Distancing until 2022: study
The nation might need to endure social distancing measures adopted during the COVID-19 outbreak until 2022, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health said in findings published on Tuesday in the journal Science. “Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available,” they said. Even in the case of “apparent elimination,” surveillance should be maintained, as a resurgence in contagion might be possible as late as 2024, they added.
UNITED STATES
No change to soot standards
President Donald Trump’s administration has said it will not tighten rules for soot pollution, despite research showing that doing so could save thousands of lives each year. Under the current standard set in 2012, polluters can emit enough soot to measure 12 micrograms per cubic meter. Strengthening the standards to 11 micrograms could save about 12,000 lives per year, a Harvard study found. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the agency’s science review “identified a number of uncertainties” and based on those believes that “the current standard remains protective and does not need to be changed.”
CHILE
Pardon for 1,300 prisoners
About 1,300 prisoners at high risk of contracting COVID-19 are to be pardoned after the Constitutional Court on Tuesday approved a special law sent by the government. The law allows prisoners over 75, mothers of children younger than two and pregnant women to serve the rest of their sentences under home confinement.
MEXICO
Hand sanitizer recovered
Detectives on Tuesday said they recovered a truck that was stolen while carrying 12 drums of hand sanitizer gel on the outskirts of Mexico City. The truck had a tracking device. The truck and its cargo — which also included auto parts — was parked at a walled-off lot. No arrests have been made.
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
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
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
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