Israel’s leaders on Monday celebrated the country’s 5 millionth COVID-19 vaccination on the same day that the government began vaccinating Palestinian laborers who work in the country.
There was no indication that the two events were coordinated, but their split-screen quality offered a stark contrast between Israel’s world-leading vaccination blitz, and the plight of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Progress in places like Israel, the US and Britain has heightened concerns among human rights advocates of driving a wider gap between wealthy countries and those that cannot afford pricey vaccination programs.
Until Monday, the Palestinian Authority, which administers autonomous areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had received enough doses for only 6,000 people.
Israel has inoculated more than half of its population of 9.3 million and on Monday pushed ahead with the reopening of more of its economy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to vaccinate the entire adult population by the end of next month, which he said would mean “we are out of the corona crisis.”
He attended a news conference in Tel Aviv with Janet Lavi-Azulay, an Israeli woman who became the 5 millionth person in Israel to be vaccinated.
In all, Israel has vaccinated about 80 percent of its adult population, giving decisionmakers confidence to begin reopening stores, restaurants, health clubs and music clubs in the past few days.
Many of these amenities are available only to those who can prove that they have been vaccinated or have recovered from the virus.
About 100km southeast, Anwar Muhammad Awarin got his jab and showed a text on his cell phone certifying the inoculation.
For him and other Palestinian workers, it was less about celebrating and more about survival.
“I got the vaccine so I can work,” said Awarin, who received his inoculation at the Meitar checkpoint in the West Bank. “If you don’t get the vaccine, you don’t get the permit. So, I got the permit and my health as well.”
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
RSS