SAMOA
First virus case confirmed
The country yesterday announced its first case of COVID-19, as the pandemic continued to spread to previously untouched Pacific island nations. Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi called for calm in the nation of 200,000 after confirming that a man who arrived in the country on Friday last week had tested positive while under quarantine. “We now have one case and will be added to the countries of the world that have the coronavirus,” the mask-wearing leader said during a televised address.
HONG KONG
Graduates mark clashes
Dozens of Chinese University of Hong Kong students yesterday turned their graduation ceremony into a march to commemorate protests last year that included clashes with police. Wearing black graduation robes and Guy Fawkes masks, the students marched across the campus. They said that they were organizing their own graduation after the university decided to hold one online. “I want to pass on the spirit ... so the next generation of students doesn’t forget what happened,” said Philip, a social sciences graduate, who declined to give his last name.
JAPAN
Climate emergency declared
Lawmakers yesterday declared a climate emergency in a symbolic vote aimed at increasing pressure for action to combat global climate change after the government last month committed to a firm timetable for net-zero emissions. With the vote by parliament’s lower chamber, the world’s fifth-biggest carbon emitter joins fellow G7 members Britain, Canada and France in similar resolutions. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga last month announced that the country would aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, a major shift for the world’s third-largest economy.
SRI LANKA
Lawmaker bites raw fish
A former fisheries minister bit into a raw fish at a news conference in Colombo on Tuesday to encourage sales following a slump during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fish sales in the country have cratered after a major COVID-19 cluster emerged at the Central Fish Market on the outskirts of the capital last month. “Our people who are in the fisheries industry cannot sell their fish. People of this country are not eating fish,” said Dilip Wedaarachchi, gesticulating with a medium-sized fish. Wedaarachchi, an opposition lawmaker, served as fisheries minister until last year. “I brought this fish to show you. I am making an appeal to the people of this country to eat this fish. Don’t be afraid. You will not get infected by the coronavirus,” he said, before taking a bite out of the whole fish.
GREECE
Santa candles get masks
A candlemaker has come up with a novel way of highlighting the need to wear masks to curb the spread of COVID-19: putting them on his Santa candles. Alexios Gerakis in the northern town of Thessaloniki has made candles of Father Christmas wearing a big blue mask over his white beard. “Because of the times, we are trying to convey a message that health comes first, then everything else,” Gerakis, 37, told Reuters television. “Christmas is a bit of a question mark for all of us this year I think, we don’t know how this will end. We have to be optimistic, but it’s uncertain what will happen.” His snowmen also sport masks.
CENTRAL AMERICA
Iota’s death toll rises
Iota’s death toll on Wednesday rose to more than 30 after the storm unleashed mudslides, smashed infrastructure and left thousands homeless in its wake across Central America. Nicaragua has so far suffered the highest death toll from Iota’s sweep on Monday: 18. Another 14 were killed in Honduras, including five members of the same family whose home was swept away in a landslide. Two people died on Colombia’s offshore islands, two more were recorded dead in Guatemala, and one woman was killed in an indigenous community in Panama. By early on Wednesday, Iota had dissipated over El Salvador, but the storm’s torrential rains remained a threat. Salvadoran presidential official Carolina Recinos said timely evacuations prevented the country suffering a higher toll.
SPAIN
Canaries’ migrants increase
The government was under fire on Wednesday over its handling of a surge in migrant arrivals on the Canary Islands, which has overwhelmed local authorities’ capacity to house them. Conservative opposition parties called for Minister of the Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska to resign after police late on Tuesday allowed about 200 migrants to leave a camp set up in Arguineguin port on the island of Gran Canaria. The migrants were later bussed to the capital, but left there with nowhere to go. Rights groups say about 2,000 people have been sleeping at the port, many in the rough.
UNITED STATES
Virus toll passes 250,000
Deaths from COVID-19 on Wednesday passed a quarter of a million people to reach 250,426, as New York City announced it would close schools to battle a rise in infections. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city’s 1,800 public schools would revert to remote learning beginning yesterday after the city recorded a seven-day average positivity rate of 3 percent. “We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19,” he said.
UNITED STATES
Judge blocks White House
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the federal district court in Washington on Wednesday ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration could not immediately expel immigrant minors who arrive alone at the border, a policy the White House said was necessary due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sullivan ruled in a preliminary injunction that unaccompanied children arrested at the border with Mexico could not be deported without due process. The ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by rights groups on behalf of affected minors. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped a Guatemalan teenager challenge the rule, 13,000 minors have since been sent back to Mexico or their countries of origin without being able to file asylum requests.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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