World
9 die in India bus accident
At least nine people were killed and as many missing after a passenger bus crashed into the side railing of a bridge and plunged into a rivulet in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday, officials said.
The accident occurred in the state's West Godavari district, close to 900 kms from Andhra capital Amaravati, when the government bus with 47 people on board, including a driver and a conductor, was on its way to Jangareddygudem from Aswaraopet.
Read:Sole survivor of Indian military chief's chopper crash dies
"The bus hit the bridge railing and fell into the rivulet. We have so far recovered nine bodies, including five female passengers," district police chief Rahul Dev Sharma told the local media. "Some 22 passengers have been rescued so far. Efforts are on to fish out the bus."
Andhra Governor Biswa Bhusan Harichandan expressed "anguish and profound grief" over the tragic bus accident and instructed the officials concerned to provide immediate medical help to all the injured.
"A probe has been ordered to ascertain if the driver was speeding," the police official said.
This is the second major road accident in the state in the past 10 months. In March this year, eight people were killed and six others injured in a head-on collision between a van and a lorry in Nellore district.
Read: India orders tri-services probe into military chief's chopper crash
Road accidents are very common in India, with one taking place every four minutes. These accidents are often blamed on poor condition of roads, rash driving and scant regard for traffic laws.
The Indian government's implementation of stricter traffic laws in recent years have failed to rein in accidents, which claim over 100,000 lives every year.
Biden visiting storm-ravaged Kentucky to offer aid, support
For the fifth time since taking office less than a year ago, President Joe Biden is taking on the grim task Wednesday of visiting an area ravaged by natural disaster to offer comfort and condolences.
Biden was headed to Kentucky to survey damage and offer federal support for the victims of devastating tornadoes that killed dozens and left thousands more in the region without heat, water or electricity.
More than 30 tornadoes tore through Kentucky and four other states over the weekend, killing at least 88 people and demolishing homes, downing power lines and cutting off residents from key utilities as temperatures dropped below freezing in Kentucky earlier this week.
Biden will visit Fort Campbell for a storm briefing and Mayfield and Dawson Springs to survey storm damage. While Biden is not expected to deliver an address, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the president will meet with storm victims and local officials to provide federal support.
Biden “wants to hear directly from people, and he wants to offer his support directly to them,” Psaki said.
Jeff and Tara Wilson, a married couple from Mayfield, were at the Graves County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, where a distribution center has been set up to pass out food, water and clothing to storm victims. They were setting up a mobile site for storm victims to receive counseling and said their home was unscathed.
Read: On a single Kentucky street, the tornado killed 7 children
Asked about the president’s visit and the reception he’ll receive in this prominently Republican region, Tara Wilson replied: “Don’t know. I think that as long as everybody’s hearts are in the right place, we need to not focus on politics right now.” She said it was a “very positive thing” that Biden was visiting, and she and her husband expressed hope the president might help unite the community.
“This place is like a bomb has been dropped on it. And everyone needs to come together,” Wilson said. “So far that’s what’s happening. You’re seeing everyone pull together.”
Biden’s trip to Kentucky comes at the close of a year marked by a notable uptick in extreme weather occurrences driven primarily by climate change. Only a month after he was sworn into office, Biden went to Houston to survey the damage wrought by last winter’s historic storm there. He ultimately traveled to Idaho, Colorado and California to survey wildfire damage during the summer, as well as Louisiana, New Jersey and New York earlier this fall after Hurricane Ida tore through the region.
The disasters have offered Biden urgent and visceral evidence of what he says is the dire need for America to do more to combat climate change and prepare for future disasters — a case he made to help push for passage of his spending proposals.
The $1 trillion infrastructure bill, signed into law last month, includes billions for climate resilience projects aimed to better defend people and property from future storms, wildfires and other natural disasters. His proposed $2 trillion social spending package, still pending in Congress, includes billions more to help shift the nation away from oil, gas and coal and toward widespread clean energy and electric vehicle use.
The White House has spent much of the week engaging with lawmakers on the latter. Biden talked with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key Democratic holdout, in hopes of smoothing over some of his issues in time to pass a package before year’s end.
Read: Kentucky hardest hit as storms leave dozens dead in 5 states
But on Wednesday, Biden’s focus will be squarely on Kentucky. Five twisters hit the state, including one with an extraordinarily long path of about 200 miles (322 kilometers), authorities said.
In addition to the deaths in Kentucky, the tornadoes also killed at least six people in Illinois, where the Amazon distribution center in Edwardsville was hit; four in Tennessee; two in Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed and the governor said workers shielded residents with their own bodies; and two in Missouri.
The president signed two federal disaster declarations for Kentucky over the weekend, providing federal aid for search and rescue and cleanup operations, as well as aid for temporary housing and to help individuals and businesses recover.
Biden said earlier this week during a White House briefing on the tragedy with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other top emergency response officials that the federal government is committed to providing whatever the affected states need in the aftermath of the storm.
“We’re going to get this done,” Biden said. “We’re going to be there as long as it takes to help.”
On a single Kentucky street, the tornado killed 7 children
The little red wagon was strewn upside down on a heap of rubble — a pile of boards and bricks, a mangled blue bicycle, a baby doll.
Behind it, there was little more than a hole in the ground where a house had stood. Across the street, the tidy homes on this cul-de-sac were reduced to mounds of lumber. Clothes hung from the branches of snapped trees. The walls of one house were gone, and the only thing left standing inside was a white Christmas tree.
When a tornado touched down in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in the middle of the night, its violence was centered on this friendly subdivision, where everyone waved at one another and giggling children spent afternoons tooling around on bicycles on the sidewalks. Fourteen people died in a few blocks, 11 of them on a single street, Moss Creek Avenue. Entire families were lost, among them seven children, two of them infants. Neighbors who survived are so stricken with grief they struggle to speak of it. All around them, amid the ruins, is evidence of the kids they used to watch climb off the school bus.
Read: Thousands without heat, water after tornadoes kill dozens
Melinda Allen-Ray has barely slept since early Saturday, when tornado alerts started screaming and she carried her grandchildren into the bathroom as winds whipped her house apart. After just minutes of destruction, there was silence. She went outside and heard her neighbors’ screams.
“I heard them — it traumatized me. I think about that each night when I go to sleep, when I do sleep,” she said. In her dreams she hears the screaming and wakes up. She wept all weekend.
“I just think about all those babies,” she said.
Hers is a diverse community of families from around the world — Bosnia, Myanmar, Nigeria — many of whom fled from violence. For some, this fresh destruction triggers thoughts of the dark days they fled in their homelands, where they hid from bombs and lost whole families.
“We come from war; this reminds us, it touches the memory of that, where we’ve been and how we came here,” said Ganimete Ademi, a 46-year-old grandmother who fled Kosovo in 1999 during the war, in which she lost her uncle and a nephew. Now she looks around her own neighborhood.
“I turn my memory back to 22 years ago,” she said.
One of the families that lost many members was from Bosnia. Two brothers lived in homes next door to each other with their families, Ademi said. They were happy and gregarious, holding summertime parties in the yard. From the two brothers’ households, one woman died, along with two children and two infants, police said. Their surviving relatives said it’s too difficult to speak of it.
Another family here lost six members: three adults, a 16-year-old girl, a 4-year-old boy and another child.
Around the corner, a 77-year-old grandmother was killed. Two others from the neighborhood died of their injuries at the hospital.
“That’s hard to think about — you go to bed, and your entire family is gone the next day,” said Ronnie Ward, with the Bowling Green Police Department. They usually tell people to get in a bathtub and cover up with a mattress, he said, but that probably would’ve made little difference here: Some homes were destroyed so completely the tornado ripped all they way through the floor, exposing the earth below.
Read: 8 factory workers dead, 8 missing from US tornado: Spokesman
Now, they comb through what remains, turning over every strip of dry wall and each twisted car to make sure there aren’t more victims underneath. It can be horrific work, Ward said, but they try to steady themselves enough because they know it must be done.
“So you go about that task of trying to get this work done, and then you come across a wagon,” he said, standing near the Radio Flyer bent and broken on a pile. “And you think, that’s associated with a child somewhere. And did that child live? Those thoughts, they overtake you, they overwhelm you.”
What these children left consumes them. There’s a Barbie doll missing a leg. A reindeer stuffed animal. A scooter, a toy horse, a hula hoop. There’s a pink Disney princess backpack. A car from “Paw Patrol,” and bedding printed with the faces of its goofy animal first responders.
The people who’ve had to see it are reckoning with how close they and their own children came. As the tornado tore through the subdivision, it decimated some houses and damaged others, yet left some just next door unscathed.
“It’s almost hard to look at, because how did it miss that house but it got this house?” Ward said.
A tree shot through the neighborhood like a missile and landed in Ademi’s backyard, about a dozen feet from where she’d cowered with her husband. Her four children and two grandchildren live nearby. “This tree could have come in my house, and we’d all be gone too,” she said.
The tornado turned just as it got to Benedict Awm’s house. Inside, he, his wife, their 2-year-old son and infant held one another under a blanket to protect their eyes and bodies from the broken glass shooting through shattered windows. His wife shook and asked if they would die. He said he didn’t know.
“It’s terrible, you can’t imagine, I thought we were dead,” he said. Had the tornado kept on its course, they would be, he thinks. But instead it turned slightly. Thunderous winds turned to silence, and their house still stood. A miracle, thinks Awm, who moved here from war-torn Burma.
Around the corner, someone spray-painted on their front door the words “By God’s grace we survived,” and hung an American flag from the wreckage of their rafters.
For days now, volunteers have arrived from all over with trucks and tools, and there’s comfort in that.
“Sometimes it makes me want to cry, to see how people are willing to help me,” Awm said.
Ben Cerimovic pulled his truck and trailer in every day over the weekend. He’s an immigrant from Bosnia, and he knows the family that died here.
“The feelings I’m having right now I really can’t explain,” he said. There’s a close-knit, thriving Bosnian community in Bowling Green, which has a robust refugee resettlement program to bring migrants to Western Kentucky. Most of them came here from war so their children would have a better life, he said. Now this subdivision looks like a war zone, scattered with things their children loved.
Cerimovic volunteered Saturday and Sunday, but he had to take Monday off to gather his emotions.
“Every time I see this, and I hear about those kids, I think about mine,” he said. “What if they were my kids?”
US COVID death toll hits 800,000, a year into vaccine drive
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 topped 800,000 on Tuesday, a once-unimaginable figure seen as doubly tragic, given that more than 200,000 of those lives were lost after the vaccine became available practically for the asking last spring.
The number of deaths, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Atlanta and St. Louis combined, or Minneapolis and Cleveland put together. It is roughly equivalent to how many Americans die each year from heart disease or stroke.
The United States has the highest reported toll of any country. The U.S. accounts for approximately 4% of the world’s population but about 15% of the 5.3 million known deaths from the coronavirus since the outbreak began in China two years ago.
The true death toll in the U.S. and around the world is believed to significantly higher because of cases that were overlooked or concealed.
Read: UK reports its first Omicron death
A closely watched forecasting model from the University of Washington projects a total of over 880,000 reported deaths in the U.S. by March 1.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday noted what he called a “tragic milestone.” He again called on unvaccinated Americans to get shots for themselves and their children, and urged the vaccinated to get booster shots.
“I urge all Americans: do your patriotic duty to keep our country safe, to protect yourself and those around you, and to honor the memory of all those we have lost,” Biden said. “Now is the time.”
Health experts lament that many of the deaths in the United States were especially heartbreaking because they were preventable by way of the vaccine, which became available in mid-December a year ago and was thrown open to all adults by mid-April of this year.
About 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated, or just over 60% of the population. That is well short of what scientists say is needed to keep the virus in check.
“Almost all the people dying are now dying preventable deaths,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “And that’s because they’re not immunized. And you know that, God, it’s a terrible tragedy.”
When the vaccine was first rolled out, the country’s death toll stood at about 300,000. It hit 600,000 in mid-June and 700,000 on Oct. 1.
Read: Thousands without heat, water after tornadoes kill dozens
The U.S. crossed the latest threshold with cases and hospitalizations on the rise again in a spike driven by the highly contagious delta variant, which arrived in the first half of 2021 and now accounts for practically all infections. Now the omicron variant is gaining a foothold in the country, though scientists are not sure how dangerous it is.
Beyrer recalled that in March or April 2020, one of the worst-case scenarios projected upwards of 240,000 American deaths.
“And I saw that number, and I thought that is incredible — 240,000 American deaths?” he said. “And we’re now past three times that number.” He added: “And I think it’s fair to say that we’re still not out of the woods.”
Pfizer confirms COVID pill’s results, potency versus omicron
Pfizer said Tuesday that its experimental pill to treat COVID-19 appears effective against the omicron variant.
The company also said full results of its 2,250-person study confirmed the pill’s promising early results against the virus: The drug reduced combined hospitalizations and deaths by about 89% among high-risk adults when taken shortly after initial COVID-19 symptoms.
Separate laboratory testing shows the drug retains its potency against the omicron variant, the company announced, as many experts had predicted. Pfizer tested the antiviral drug against a man-made version of a key protein that omicron uses to reproduce itself.
The updates come as COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalization are all rising again and the U.S. topped 800,000 pandemic deaths. The latest surge, driven by the delta variant, is accelerating due to colder weather and more indoor gatherings, even as health officials brace for the impact of the emerging omicron mutant.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to soon rule on whether to authorize Pfizer’s pill and a competing pill from Merck, which was submitted to regulators several weeks earlier. If granted, the pills would be the first COVID-19 treatments that Americans could pick up at a pharmacy and take at home.
Read: Pfizer says COVID booster offers protection against omicron
President Joe Biden called Pfizer’s drug “another potentially powerful tool in our fight against the virus,” in a statement Tuesday.
The U.S. government has agreed to purchase enough of Pfizer’s drug to treat 10 million people. But company executives have indicated that initial supplies will be limited, with only enough to treat tens of thousands of people before the end of the year. By March Pfizer hopes to ramp up production to provide millions of courses of treatment.
Pfizer’s data could help reassure regulators of its drug’s effectiveness after Merck disclosed smallerthan-expected benefits for its drug in final testing. Late last month, Merck said that its pill reduced hospitalizations and deaths by 30% in high-risk adults.
Both companies initially studied their drugs in unvaccinated adults who face the gravest risks from COVID-19, due to older age or health problems, such as asthma or obesity.
Pfizer is also studying its pill in lower-risk adults — including a subset who are vaccinated — but reported mixed data for that group on Tuesday.
In interim results, Pfizer said its drug failed to meet its main study goal: sustained relief from COVID-19 for four days during or after treatment, as reported by patients. But the drug did achieve a second goal by reducing hospitalizations by about 70% among that group, which included otherwise healthy unvaccinated adults and vaccinated adults with one or more health issues. Less than 1% of patients who got the drug were hospitalized, compared with 2.4% of patients who got a dummy pill.
Read: Pfizer agrees to let other companies make its COVID-19 pill
An independent board of medical experts reviewed the data and recommended Pfizer continue the study to get the full results before proceeding further with regulators.
Across both of Pfizer’s studies, adults taking the company’s drug had a 10-fold decrease in virus levels compared with those on placebo.
The prospect of new pills to fight COVID-19 can’t come soon enough for communities in the Northeast and Midwest, where many hospitals are once again being overloaded by incoming virus cases.
Both the Merck and Pfizer pills are expected to perform well against omicron because they don’t target the coronavirus’ spike protein, which contains most of the new variant’s mutations.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, appearing on NBC’s “Today” on Tuesday, said the best way for people to protect themselves against COVID-19 is to get vaccinated and get a booster shot. She said the Pfizer pill, if authorized by the FDA, “will be another great tool, but we need to diagnose people early.”
10 years at helm, Kim Jong Un’s nukes are still ‘magic wand’
As Kim Jong Un marks 10 years in power this week, the world still doesn’t quite know what to make of the North Korean leader.
Is he the playful scamp who once gave an underling a piggyback ride after a rocket engine test? Or the Western-educated leader tearfully commiserating with his people’s economic misery? How about the global statesman, shaking hands with South Korean and American leaders? Or maybe the brutal pragmatist who had his uncle and virtual No. 2 — along with dozens of others — executed?
Since taking over supreme leadership a decade ago, Kim has presented many faces to an insatiably curious world, but while the image shifts perhaps the most telling way to consider Kim is through his persistent pursuit of a nuclear weapons program meant to target America and its allies.
Read: Taliban Govt reaches out to India seeking visas for Afghan students stuck in Afghanistan
An arsenal of as many as 60 nukes, by some estimates, with the means to add as many as 18 more a year, has allowed Kim to solidify domestic unity and achieve some measure of the global prestige he’s long coveted. It has also flummoxed Washington and its allies by building what Pyongyang claims is a credible deterrence against U.S. hostility.
Crushing U.N. sanctions over that weapons build-up and pandemic-related difficulties may be giving Kim the hardest moment of his rule, observers say, but those weapons are no closer to being wrenched away by outside negotiators than they were when Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, died on Dec. 17, 2011.
“Nuclear weapons are a magic wand for North Korea,” said Kim Taewoo, former head of Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification. “North Korea is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it controls the relationship with South Korea because it has nukes. If it wasn’t for its nuclear bombs, how could Pyongyang sit down for talks with the United States?”
In late 2011, many outsiders wondered if North Korea would survive with an untested, little-known 27-year-old in charge. Some predicted that Kim would push for economic reforms and possibly denuclearization because of his youth and childhood education in Switzerland. Some thought Kim might be a figurehead, relying on elderly officials installed by his father, and worried that North Korea could face political turmoil.
Instead, Kim orchestrated a spate of high-profile executions and purges, eliminating potential rivals and establishing the kind of absolute power enjoyed by his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather and state founder, Kim Il Sung.
Read: Kim Jong Un’s decade of rule: Purges, nukes, Trump diplomacy
A think tank run by South Korea’s spy agency said in a 2016 report that Kim executed or purged about 340 people during the first five years of his rule. That included the 2013 execution of his powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and the 2012 purging of military chief Ri Yong Ho, both of whom helped shepherd Kim into power.
Kim also set aside his father’s trademark “military-first” policy, restored the ruling Workers’ Party’s traditional control over the army and engineered small yet gradual economic growth in the first several years.
Nukes, however, have been a constant.
Kim has staged an unusually large number of weapons tests. And four of North Korea’s six nuclear test explosions and all of its three intercontinental ballistic missile tests have happened during Kim’s rule.
Kim’s big nuclear moves likely quieted those in the military’s old guard who were dissatisfied with Kim’s push to weaken their political clout, said Yang Wook, a military expert who teaches at South Korea’s Hannam University.
In late 2017, Kim claimed to have nuclear missiles capable of reaching the American homeland. In 2018-19, he engaged in ambitious nuclear diplomacy with then-President Donald Trump, holding the first summits between the two wartime foes and also meeting South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Nukes have greatly enhanced Kim’s diplomatic standing abroad. Domestically, they’ve also served as a great propaganda tool to promote the legitimacy of his government and the image that the supreme leader is striving to build an indomitable nuclear power state,” Kim Taewoo said.
The international diplomacy broke down in 2019 when Kim failed to convince Trump to ease tough U.N. sanctions imposed after his run of weapons tests in 2016-17. Kim has since threatened to enlarge his nuclear arsenal and introduce high-tech weapons targeting the United States and its allies.
According to a 2018 South Korean estimate, North Korea has 20-60 nuclear weapons. Experts say North Korea has the capacity to add six to 18 bombs every year.
Kim can be seen as simply carrying forward a national nuclear ambition that stretches back to the 1950s, when Kim Il Sung established an atomic research institute and struck accords with the Soviet Union to receive nuclear training. Kim Jong Il, who succeeded Kim Il Sung as leader in 1994, nurtured the program by overseeing the country’s first atomic and long-range rocket tests.
Read: India 4th most powerful country in Asia; China loses ground to US: Report
But Kim Jong Un’s personality has also likely added to a more aggressive pursuit of weapons tests, said Kim Yeol Soo, an analyst with South Korea’s Korea Institute for Military Affairs.
“He’s a young leader and likely wants to show off his strength to send a message: ‘Don’t look down on me because I’m young,’” he said.
Kim will never abandon nukes, the core of his family’s power, no matter how severe the economic difficulties his people face from sanctions, said Jung Chang Wook, head of the Korea Defense Study Forum think tank.
“The Kim family would lose its power, so he can’t give them up,” he said.
China and Russia have covertly financially supported North Korea to prevent U.N. sanctions from causing “crippling” effects in North Korea, according to Kim Taewoo, the analyst.
During the pandemic, with nuclear diplomacy deadlocked, Kim Jong Un has been hunkering down and calling for stronger public loyalty to him. Last October, South Korea’s spy agency said North Korea was promoting the ideology of “Kimjongunism,” something his father and grandfather did, and removing portraits of the previous leaders from public places.
“Kim Jong Un is trying to fly his own colors (and highlight) things that symbolize his own era, not the authority of the late leaders he’s been leaning on,” said Seo Yu-Seok at the Seoul-based Institute of North Korean Studies.
Taliban Govt reaches out to India seeking visas for Afghan students stuck in Afghanistan
The Taliban government has reached out to the Indian government twice in a row, this time to grant Indian visas to Afghan students so that they could complete their studies in India. The students are stuck in Afghanistan since India cancelled their visas in August shortly after the Taliban took over Kabul, reports NEWS18.
The Taliban had earlier approached New Delhi to start direct flights between the two countries.
Noor Zahid Paiman, a final year Afghan student of BSc Computer Science at Sharda University, said he is stuck in Kabul for over six months now. Noor told News18 over phone, “We met foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi two times and raised the matter with him. He said he reached out to New Delhi regarding it.”
Read: Taliban-ruled Afghanistan stares at major humanitarian crisis: speakers
Noor went back to Kabul in June during the second wave of Covid-19 in India when all educational institutions, including his university, switched to the online mode of teaching. In just two months, Taliban took over his country and things changed forever. With the Covid situation improving, classes switching back to offline mode, Noor along with 2,500 other Afghan students are still unable to fly to India to pursue their studies as there are no direct flights between the two countries and their visas stand revoked.
On August 25, Noor received a communication from the Indian side saying, “In view of the recent developments in Afghanistan and streamlining of the visa process by introduction of the e-Emergency X-Misc visa for Afghan nationals desirous of travelling to India, your above mentioned visa (details concealed) has been cancelled with immediate effect. If you desire to travel to India, you may apply for an e-Emergency X-Misc visa.” Noor said the Afghan students have applied for the new category of visa, but none of the students have been able to get one.
Another student of Pune University, Waris Himmat, is also unable to pursue studies back in India. He said the Indian Embassy in Kabul is not working and he along with 200 students, travelled to Iran to get the visa from the Indian Mission there. But he was told that he will need to apply for the new category of visa meant for Afghan nationals. Himmat told News18 that he requested the Indian Mission in Tehran to grant him the visa so that he can attend the classes in person.
Meanwhile Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), which gives scholarship to Afghan students, said, “ln case, the university/institute has agreed to the physical presence of the students, they may apply for the Indian e-visa. The benefits available under the ICCR scholarship would be available upon joining the institutes as per past practice.”
After the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in August, New Delhi had issued 200 e-Emergency X-Miscellaneous Visas to Afghan nationals, the external affairs ministry informed the Rajya Sabha. On August 17, as a humanitarian gesture, India introduced “e-Emergency X-Miscellaneous visa” for the distressed residents who wanted to leave the country.
Afghan Ambassador Farid Mamundzay to India also raised the matter in an exclusive interview to News18 last week. He said, “Students stranded in Afghanistan are pursuing higher education in various institutions in India. They are enrolled in various universities in Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and other states. The highest assistance to us from India has been in the field of education. Suspension of their visas was not in good spirit.”
Read:Despite mistrust, Afghan Shiites seek Taliban protection
“I appeal to the Government of India to allow these students to come to India and complete their education. Those students have not become Taliban or joined Talibani forces overnight, so suspension of their visas sends is a wrong signal. The loss of an academic year is the biggest loss for students. India should consider this as a humanitarian issue and take steps to resolve this crisis. I hope in the coming days, the problem is resolved,” he added.
India to produce 5 billion Covid vaccine doses next year
India plans to ramp up its Covid vaccine manufacturing capacity and expects to produce 5 billion doses of vaccines in the coming year, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday. Addressing an event of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), Goyal said India was ready to export as many doses as partner nations require, reports Business Standard.
“So far this year, we have already administered 1.33 billion doses. We are manufacturing for exports as well. We will export as many doses as other nations need.” “Next year, we plan to produce 5 billion doses,” Goyal said.
Read:COVID-19: India's 50 pc adults fully vaccinated, Centre targets 100 pc 1st dose coverage by December 31
India-UAE CEPA
India and the UAE will wrap up the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement by next month, Goyal said while addressing the India Global Forum, UAE-2021 through video conference on Monday.
“Hopefully, by the end of this month or next month, we hope to conclude them so that this would probably be one of the fastest trade agreements between two countries ever made.”
7.3 undersea quake in Indonesia triggers tsunami warning
A magnitude 7.3 undersea earthquake struck off Indonesia's Flores Island on Tuesday, and the country's meteorological agency warned that tsunami waves are possible.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit at a depth of 18.5 kilometers (11.5 miles) under the sea, and was located 112 kilometers (74 miles) north of the town of Maumere, the second-largest on the island in East Nusa Tenggara province with a population of 85,000.
National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari said residents in the area felt the earthquake strongly. TV footage showed people running away from buildings that shook from the impact.
Also raed: Strong earthquake in southwest Pakistan kills at least 20
“There is no damage information yet. But the quick reaction team is working to gather the information,” Muhari said.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 270 million people, is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines that arcs the Pacific.
The last major earthquake was in January, a magnitude 6.2 that killed at least 105 people and injured nearly 6,500 in West Sulawesi province.
Also read: Haiti raises earthquake death toll, passes 2,200
There are no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
Kim Jong Un’s decade of rule: Purges, nukes, Trump diplomacy
Friday marks 10 years since Kim Jong Un, the third generation of his family to rule North Korea, took power after his father’s sudden heart attack.
Initially considered inexperienced, Kim quickly showed his ruthless willingness to consolidate his rule by having his powerful uncle and other potential rivals executed or purged. His torrid run of nuclear and missile tests in recent years caused many to fear a second Korean War.
Read: India 4th most powerful country in Asia; China loses ground to US: Report
Kim switched gears again and staged landmark nuclear disarmament summits with then-U.S. President Donald Trump, but their diplomacy collapsed because of disputes over U.S.-led sanctions. Now, with the pandemic and sanctions causing deepening problems, Kim has sealed off his country’s borders and tried to fix its struggling economy.
As Kim enters his second decade in power, here’s a look at key moments in his rule.
HEIR APPARENT
Jan. 8, 1984: Kim Jong Un is born, the third and youngest of Kim Jong Il’s sons.
September 2010: State media say Kim Jong Un has been made a four-star general in the first public mention of his name.
Read: Myanmar democracy in new era as Suu Kyi sidelined by army
October 2010: Kim Jong Un makes his public debut at a military parade, standing next to his gaunt-looking father on a balcony. He smiles, claps and waves as goose-stepping soldiers, tanks and missiles move past.