UNITED STATES
Juneteenth declared holiday
President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a bill into law to make June 19 a federal holiday commemorating the end of the legal enslavement of black Americans. The bill, which was passed in the House of Representatives on Wednesday after an unanimous Senate vote, marks the day in 1865 when a US general informed enslaved people in Texas that they had been freed two years earlier by then-president Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “Juneteenth marks both a long hard night of slavery subjugation and a promise of a brighter morning to come,” Biden said, adding that the day is a reminder of the “terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take.”
PHILIPPINES
More medics can leave
The Philippines allowed more doctors and nurses to leave for overseas jobs, a week after the nation that is among the world’s top suppliers of nurses halted deployment when it hit a self-imposed limit. Manila raised the annual deployment cap for newly hired health workers to 6,500 from 5,000, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said yesterday. The new ceiling is lower than the 10,000 earlier proposed by the Department of Labor and Employment. Health workers covered by the country’s labor deals with other nations are exempted from the cap, Roque said, without naming specific countries. Manila limited the deployment of health workers last year as it fights a COVID-19 outbreak.
GERMANY
Vaccine trial ‘sobering’
The chief executive of CureVac on Thursday said that interim results from late-stage testing of the firm’s COVID-19 vaccine are “sobering,” but it aims to finish a final analysis within weeks that would determine whether it would still seek regulatory approval. CureVac on Wednesday announced that trials of the vaccine in Europe and Latin America had shown an efficacy of 47 percent. This is below the WHO threshold of 50 percent. The firm said that more than two dozen variants of the virus were found in its trial across 10 countries, a fact that might have affected the outcome. “We recognize that demonstrating high efficacy in this unprecedented broad diversity of variance is quite challenging,” CureVac chief executive officer Franz-Werner Haas said.
CHINA
Eight detained after blast
Police have detained eight suspects over a gas blast that killed 25 people and reduced several buildings to rubble in the central city of Shiyan, authorities said yesterday. More than 100 people were injured in the explosion, which struck a busy two-story building packed with shoppers on Sunday. The suspects included the general manager of the firm that owned the gas pipe where the blast occurred, the Shiyan Government said. Authorities found that “the company’s safety management system was unsound.”
UNITED STATES
Bitcoin donations welcome
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) on Thursday said it would begin accepting campaign contributions in cryptocurrency. The party’s campaign arm said that the move would allow it to use new technology to support candidates as they intensify their bids to retake the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. “We are focused on pursuing every avenue possible to further our mission of stopping [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s socialist agenda and retaking the House majority,” NRCC chairman Tom Emmer said in a statement.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
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