World
India's COVID-19 tally rises to 28,441,986
India's COVID-19 tally rose to 28,441,986 on Thursday with 134,154 new cases recorded in the past 24 hours, said the federal health ministry.
Besides, 2,887 deaths were reported since Wednesday morning, taking the death toll to 337,989.
Read:7 die in gas cylinder blast in India
There are still 1,713,413 active cases in the country, with a decrease of 80,232 in the past 24 hours. The number of daily active cases has been on the decline over the past few days, after a continuous surge since mid-April.
A total of 26,390,584 people has been cured and discharged from hospitals across the country, showed the latest data from the federal health ministry.
Read: India to start trials on safety, efficacy of mixing Covid vaccine doses
India kicked off a nationwide vaccination drive in January, and so far over 221 million vaccination doses have been administered across the country, and 2,426,265 doses were given on Wednesday alone.
Presently the third phase of vaccination is going on, covering all people aged 18 years and above. However, an acute shortage of vaccines is being seen across the country.
Read: India's COVID-19 tally reaches 28,175,044 with 127,510 new cases
Meanwhile, the federal government has ramped up testing capacities, as 353,782,648 tests were conducted till Wednesday, out of which 2,159,873 tests were conducted on Wednesday alone, said the latest data issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday.
Three types of vaccines are being administered in India, including Covishield, Covaxin and Russia-made vaccine Sputnik-V.
In Syria camp, forgotten children are molded by IS ideology
At the sprawling al-Hol camp in northeast Syria, children pass their days roaming the dirt roads, playing with mock swords and black banners in imitation of Islamic State group militants. Few can read or write. For some, the only education is from mothers giving them IS propaganda.
It has been more than two years since the Islamic State group’s self-declared “caliphate” was brought down. And it has been more than two years that some 27,000 children have been left to languish in al-Hol camp, which houses families of IS members.
Most of them not yet teenagers, they are spending their childhood in a limbo of miserable conditions with no schools, no place to play or develop, and seemingly no international interest in resolving their situation.
Only one institution is left to mold them: remnants of the Islamic State group. IS operatives and sympathizers have networks within the camp, and the group has sleeper cells around eastern Syria that continue to wage a low-level insurgency, awaiting an opportunity for a revival.
Kurdish authorities and aid groups fear the camp will create a new generation of militants. They are pleading with home countries to take the women and children back. The problem is that home governments often see the children as posing a danger rather than as needing rescue.
Read: Israel says it strikes targets in Syria after missile attack
“These children are ISIS’s first victims,” said Save the Children’s Syria Response Director Sonia Khush. “A 4-year-old boy does not really have an ideology. He has protection and learning needs.”
“The camps are no place for children to live or grow up,” she said. “It does not allow them to learn, socialize or be children ... It does not allow them to heal from all that they have lived through.”
In the fenced-off camp, row after row of tents stretch for nearly a square mile. Conditions are rough. Multiple families are often crammed together; medical facilities are minimal, access to clean water and sanitation limited; the tents flood in the winter, and fires have broken out from use of gas stoves for cooking or heat.
Some 50,000 Syrians and Iraqis are housed there. Nearly 20,000 of them are children. Most of the rest are women, the wives and widows of fighters.
In a separate, heavily guarded section of the camp known as the annex are housed another 2,000 women from 57 other countries, considered the most die-hard IS supporters, along with their children, numbering 8,000.
The IS influence was clear during a rare visit by The Associated Press to the camp last month. Around a dozen young boys in the annex hurled stones at the team, which was accompanied by Kurdish guards. A few waved sharp pieces of metal like swords.
Read: 'No Sweets': For Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a tough Ramadan
“We will kill you because you are an infidel,” screamed one child who looked around 10. “You are the enemy of God. We are the Islamic State. You are a devil, and I will kill you with a knife. I will blow you up with a grenade.”
Another child slid his hand across his neck and said, “With the knife, God willing.”
At a market inside the annex where women sold shampoo, bottled water and used clothes, one woman looked at a reporter and said, “The Islamic State endures” — a slogan of the group.
During its nearly 5-year rule over much of Syria and Iraq, IS made a priority out of indoctrinating children in its brutal interpretation of Islamic law, aiming to entrench its “caliphate.” It trained children as fighters, taught them how to carry out beheadings using dolls, and even had them carry out killings of captives in propaganda videos.
A Russian-speaking woman in the annex, who identified herself as Madina Bakaraw, said she feared for the future of the children, including her own son and daughter.
“We want our children to learn. Our children should be able to read, to write, to count,” said the 42-year-old, who was fully covered in black, including her face and hands. She said her husband was dead but refused to say how. “We want to go home and want our children to have a childhood.”
The women in the camp are a mix. Some remain devoted to IS, but others became disillusioned by its brutal rule or by its defeat. Others were never ideologically committed but were brought into the “caliphate” by husbands or family.
Read:Pleas for more aid to Syria: 'We don't have nearly enough'
The camp began to be used to house the families of IS fighters in late 2018 as U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces recaptured territory in eastern Syria from the militants. In March 2019, they seized the last IS-held villages, ending the “caliphate” that the group declared over large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
Since then, the Kurdish administrators running eastern Syria have struggled to repatriate camp residents in the face of local opposition to their return or because of the residents’ own fears of revenge attacks. Earlier this year, hundreds of Syrian families left the camp after a deal was reached with their tribes to accept them. Last month, 100 Iraqi families were repatriated to live in a camp in Iraq, but still face sharp opposition among their neighbors.
Some former Soviet Union states have let back some of their citizens, but other Arab, European and African countries have repatriated only minimal numbers or have refused.
“Those children are there through no fault of their own, and they should not pay the consequences of their parents’ choices,” Ted Chaiban, Mideast and North Africa director of the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, told the AP. Chaiban visited al-Hol in December.
The Kurdish-led administration says it doesn’t have the resources to maintain and guard the camp.
If home countries won’t repatriate, at least they should help set up facilities to improve children’s lives, said Shixmus Ehmed, head of the administration’s department for refugees and displaced.
Read:10 years on, Syria is a hungry nation
“We have suggested schools be opened, as well as rehabilitation programs and fields to do sports,” Ehmed said. “But so far, there is nothing.”
In the camp’s main section, UNICEF and Kurdish authorities had set up 25 learning centers, but they have been closed since March 2020 because of COVID-19. UNICEF and its partners have distributed books for kids to study on their own.
In the annex, authorities have been unable to set up learning centers. Instead, children there are largely taught by their mothers, mostly with IS ideology, according to U.N. and Kurdish officials.
Though the annex residents are considered the strongest IS supporters, the group has a presence in the main section housing Syrians and Iraqis as well.
In late March, the Kurdish-led forces assisted by U.S. forces swept through the camp, seizing 125 suspected IS operatives, including Iraqis and Syrians.
Those sleeper cells had been carrying out a campaign of killings against residents suspected of abandoning the group’s ideology, working as informants or defying its rules by, for example, working as prostitutes for survival. At least 47 people were killed this year, according to Kurdish-led forces, while U.S. officials put the number at 60.
Read: UN chief asks for continuing to reach all Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance
A Syrian woman who left the camp with her five grandchildren earlier this year told the AP she knew of several women killed for alleged prostitution. In each case, a masked man appeared at the woman’s tent, identified himself as an IS member and shot the woman in front of neighbors or even her children, she said.
“The next morning, news spread around the camp,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity for her security.
She said it was common even in the main part of the camp to see children chanting “the Islamic State endures” and carrying a stick with a black bag tied to it to symbolize an IS flag.
Amal Mohammed, a 40-year-old Iraqi in the camp, said her wish is to return to Iraq where her daughters can live a normal life.
“What is the future of these children?” she said. “They will have no future ... Here they are learning nothing.”
Slow to start, China mobilizes to vaccinate at headlong pace
In the span of just five days last month, China gave out 100 million shots of its COVID-19 vaccines.
After a slow start, China is now doing what virtually no other country in the world can: harnessing the power and all-encompassing reach of its one-party system and a maturing domestic vaccine industry to administer shots at a staggering pace. The rollout is far from perfect, including uneven distribution, but Chinese public health leaders now say they’re hoping to inoculate 80% of the population of 1.4 billion by the end of the year.
As of Tuesday, China had given out more than 680 million doses — with nearly half of those in May alone. China’s total is roughly a third of the 1.9 billion shots distributed globally, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.
Read: China reports human case of H10N3 bird flu, a possible first
The call to get vaccinated comes from every corner of society. Companies offer shots to their employees, schools urge their students and staffers, and local government workers check on their residents.
That pressure underscores both the system’s strength, which makes it possible to even consider vaccinating more than a billion people this year, but also the risks to civil liberties — a concern the world over but one that is particularly acute in China, where there are few protections.
“The Communist Party has people all the way down to every village, every neighborhood,” said Ray Yip, former country director for the Gates Foundation in China and a public health expert. “That’s the draconian part of the system, but it also gives very powerful mobilization.”
China is now averaging about 19 million shots per day, according to Our World in Data’s rolling seven-day average. That would mean a dose for everyone in Italy about every three days. The United States, with about one-quarter of China’s population, reached around 3.4 million shots per day in April when its drive was at full tilt.
It’s still unclear how many people in China are fully vaccinated — which can mean anywhere from one to three doses of the vaccines in use — as the government does not publicly release that data.
Zhong Nanshan, the head of a group of experts attached to the National Health Commission and a prominent government doctor, said on Sunday that 40% of the population has received at least one dose, and the aim was to get that percentage fully vaccinated by the end of the month.
In Beijing, the capital, 87% of the population has received at least one dose. Getting a shot is as easy as walking into one of hundreds of vaccination points found all across the city. Vaccination buses are parked in high foot-traffic areas, including in the city center and at malls.
Read: China easing birth limits further to cope with aging society
But Beijing’s abundance is not shared with the rest of the country, and local media reports and complaints on social media show the difficulty of getting an appointment elsewhere.
“I started lining up that day at 9 in the morning, until 6 p.m., only then did I get the shot. It was exhausting,” Zhou Hongxia, a resident of Lanzhou, in northwestern Gansu province, explained recently. “When I left, there were still people waiting.”
Zhou’s husband hasn’t been so lucky and has yet to get a shot. When they call the local hotlines, they are told simply to wait.
Central government officials on Monday said they’re working to ensure supply is more evenly distributed.
Before the campaign ramped up in recent weeks, many people were not in a rush to get vaccinated as China has kept the virus, which first flared in the country, at bay in the past year with strict border controls and mandatory quarantines. It has faced small clusters of infections from time to time, and is currently managing one in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Although there are distribution issues, it is unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will have problems with scale, according to analysts and those who have worked in the industry.
Sinovac and Sinopharm, which make the majority of the vaccines being distributed in China, have both aggressively ramped up production, building brand new factories and repurposing existing ones for COVID-19. Sinovac’s vaccine and one of the two Sinpharm makes have received an emergency authorization for use from the World Health Organization, but the companies, particularly Sinopharm, have faced criticism for their lack of transparency in sharing their data.
“What place in the world can compare with China on construction? How long did it take our temporary hospitals to be built?” asked Li Mengyuan, who leads pharmaceutical research at Western Securities, a financial firm. China built field hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic in just days.
Read: China, Philippines swap protests over Manila-occupied island
Sinovac has said it has doubled its production capacity to 2 billion doses a year, while Sinopharm has said it can make up to 3 billion doses a year. But Sinopharm has not disclosed recent numbers of how many doses it actually has made, and a spokesman for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Sinovac has produced 540 million doses this year as of late May, the company said on Friday.
Government support has been crucial for vaccine developers every step of the way — as it has in other countries — but, as with everything, the scope and scale in China is different.
Yang Xiaoming, chairman of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group, recounted to state media recently how the company initially needed to borrow lab space from a government research center while it was working on a vaccine.
“We sent our samples over, there was no need to discuss money, we just did it,” he said.
Chinese vaccine companies also largely do not rely on imported products in the manufacturing process. That’s an enormous benefit at a time when many countries are scrambling for the same materials and means China can likely avoid what happened to the Serum Institute of India, whose production was hobbled because of dependence on imports from the U.S. for certain ingredients.
But as the availability of the vaccine increases so, too, can the pressure to take it.
In Beijing, one researcher at a university said the school’s Communist Party cell calls him once a month to ask him if he has gotten vaccinated yet, and offers to help him make an appointment.
Read:China may buckle down to reunify Taiwan after crackdown on Hong Kong
He has so far declined to get a shot because he would prefer the Pfizer vaccine, saying he trusts its data. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns he could face repercussions at his job at a government university for publicly questioning the Chinese vaccines.
China has not yet approved Pfizer for use, and the researcher is not sure how long he can hold out — although the government has, for now, cautioned against making vaccines mandatory outright.
“They don’t have to say it is mandatory,” Yip, the public health expert, said. “They’re not going to announce that it’s required to have the vaccine, but they can put pressure on you.”
Free beer, other new incentives for Biden’s ‘vaccine sprint’
Dangling everything from sports tickets to a free beer, President Joe Biden is looking for that extra something — anything — that will get people to roll up their sleeves for COVID-19 shots when the promise of a life-saving vaccine by itself hasn’t been enough.
Biden on Wednesday announced a “month of action” to urge more Americans to get vaccinated before the July 4 holiday, including an early summer sprint of incentives and a slew of new steps to ease barriers and make getting shots more appealing to those who haven’t received them. He is closing in on his goal of getting 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated by Independence Day — essential to his aim of returning the nation to something approaching a pre-pandemic sense of normalcy this summer.
“The more people we get vaccinated, the more success we’re going to have in the fight against this virus,” Biden said from the White House. He predicted that with more vaccinations, America will soon experience “a summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get togethers and celebrations. An All-American summer.”
The Biden administration views June as “a critical month in our path to normal,” Courtney Rowe, the director of strategic communications and engagement for the White House COVID-19 response team, told the AP.
Read: Biden’s $6T budget: Social spending, taxes on business
Biden’s plan will continue to use public and private-sector partnerships, mirroring the “whole of government” effort he deployed to make vaccines more widely available after he took office. The president said he was “pulling out all the stops” to drive up the vaccination rate.
Among those efforts is a promotional giveaway announced Wednesday by Anheuser-Busch, saying it will “buy Americans 21+ a round of beer” once Biden’s 70% goal is met.
“Get a shot and have a beer,” Biden said, advertising the promotion even though he himself refrains from drinking alcohol.
Additionally, the White House is partnering with early childhood centers such as KinderCare, Learning Care Group, Bright Horizons and more than 500 YMCAs to provide free childcare coverage for Americans looking for shots or needing assistance while recovering from side effects.
The administration is also launching a new partnership to bring vaccine education and even doses to more than a thousand Black-owned barbershops and beauty salons, building on a successful pilot program in Maryland.
They’re the latest vaccine sweeteners, building on other incentives like cash giveaways, sports tickets and paid leave, to keep up the pace of vaccinations.
“The fact remains that despite all the progress, those who are unvaccinated still remain at risk of getting seriously ill or dying or spreading the disease to others,” said Rowe.
Read: Biden orders more intel investigation of COVID-19 origin
Aiming to make injections even more convenient, Biden is announcing that many pharmacies are extending their hours this month — and thousands will remain open overnight on Fridays. The White House is also stepping up its efforts to help employers run on-site vaccination clinics.
Biden will also announce that he is assigning Vice President Kamala Harris to lead a “We Can Do This” vaccination tour to encourage shots. It will include first lady Jill Biden, second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Cabinet officials. Harris’ travel will be focused on the South, where vaccination rates are among the lowest in the country, while other officials will travel to areas of the Midwest with below average rates.
To date 62.9% of the adult U.S. population have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 133.9 million are fully vaccinated. The rate of new vaccinations has slowed to an average below 555,000 per day, down from more than 800,000 when incentives like lotteries were announced, and down from a peak of nearly 2 million per day in early April when demand for shots was much higher.
The lengths to which the U.S. is resorting to convince Americans to take a shot stands in contrast to much of the world, where vaccines are far less plentiful. Facing a mounting U.S. surplus, the Biden administration is planning to begin sharing 80 million doses with the world this month.
“All over the world people are desperate to get a shot that every American can get at their neighborhood drugstore,” Biden said.
“Incentives can work, and I think the White House’s focus on making vaccination the easy and convenient choice is important,” said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician, public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner.
“It’s the height of American exceptionalism that we are having to beg people to get a life-saving vaccine, when healthcare workers and vulnerable people around the world are dying because they can’t get access to it,” she added.
Read: Face to face: June summit for Biden, Putin as tensions rise
Thanks to the vaccinations, the rate of cases and deaths in the U.S. are at their lowest since the beginning of the pandemic last March, averaging under 16,000 new cases and under 400 deaths per day.
As part of the effort to drive Americans to get shots, the White House is borrowing some tools from political campaigns, including phone banks, door-knocking and texting. The administration says more than 1,000 such events will be held this weekend alone. Additionally, it is organizing competitions between cities and colleges to drive up vaccination rates.
Other new incentives include a $2 million commitment from DoorDash to provide gift cards to community health centers to be used to drive people to get vaccinated. CVS launched a sweepstakes with prizes including free cruises and Super Bowl tickets. Major League Baseball will host on-site vaccine clinics and ticket giveaways at games. And Kroger will give $1 million to a vaccinated person each week this month and dozens of people free groceries for the year.
The fine print on the Anheuser-Busch promotion reveals the benefits to the sponsoring company, which will collect consumer data and photos through its website to register for the $5 giveaway. The company says it will hand out credits to however many people qualify.
Netanyahu opponents reach coalition deal to oust Israeli PM
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents announced Wednesday that they have reached a deal to form a new governing coalition, paving the way for the ouster of the longtime Israeli leader.
The dramatic announcement by opposition leader Yair Lapid and his main coalition partner, Naftali Bennett, came shortly before a midnight deadline and prevented what could have been Israel’s fifth consecutive election in just over two years.
“This government will work for all the citizens of Israel, those that voted for it and those that didn’t. It will do everything to unite Israeli society,” Lapid said.
The agreement still needs to be approved by the Knesset, or parliament, in a vote that is expected to take place early next week. If it goes through, Lapid and a diverse array of partners that span the Israeli political spectrum will end Netanyahu’s record-setting but divisive 12-year rule.
Netanyahu, desperate to remain in office while he fights corruption charges, is expected to do everything possible in the coming days to prevent the new coalition from taking power. If he fails, he will be pushed into the opposition.
Read:Gaza’s bereaved civilians fear justice will never come
The deal comes at a tumultuous time for Israel, which fought an 11-day war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip last month while also experiencing mob violence between Jews and Arabs in cities across the country. The country also is emerging from a coronavirus crisis that caused deep economic damage and exposed tensions between the secular majority and the ultra-Orthodox minority.
Under the agreement, Lapid and Bennett will split the job of prime minister in a rotation. Bennett, a former ally of Netanyahu, is to serve the first two years, while Lapid is to serve the final two years — though it is far from certain their fragile coalition will last that long.
The historic deal also includes a small Islamist party, the United Arab List, which would make it the first Arab party ever to be part of a governing coalition.
In the coming days, Netanyahu is expected to continue to put pressure on hard-liners in the emerging coalition to defect and join his religious and nationalist allies. Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, may also use his influence to delay the required parliamentary vote. There was no immediate comment from Netanyahu or Likud.
Lapid called on Levin to convene the Knesset for the vote as soon as possible.
Netanyahu has been the most dominant player in Israeli politics over the past three decades — serving as prime minister since 2009 in addition to an earlier term in the late 1990s.
Despite a long list of achievements, including last year’s groundbreaking diplomatic agreements with four Arab countries, he has become a polarizing figure since he was indicted on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in 2019.
Read:Netanyahu could lose PM job as rivals attempt to join forces
Each of the past four elections was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule. And each ended in deadlock, with both Netanyahu’s supporters as well as his secular, Arab and dovish opponents falling short of a majority. A unity government formed with his main rival last year collapsed after just six months.
The new deal required a reshuffling of the Israeli political constellation. Three of the parties are led by hard-line former Netanyahu allies who had personal feuds with him, while the United Arab List made history as a kingmaker, using its leverage to seek benefits for the country’s Arab minority.
“This is the first time an Arab party is a partner in the formation of a government,” said the party’s leader, Mansour Abbas. “This agreement has a lot of things for the benefit of Arab society, and Israeli society in general.”
Among the concessions secured by Abbas were agreements for legal recognition of Bedouin villages in southern Israel, an economic plan for investing 30 billion shekels ($9.2 billion) in Arab towns and cities, and a five-year plan for combating violent crime in Arab communities, according to Army Radio.
Lapid, 57, entered parliament in 2013 after a successful career as a newspaper columnist, TV anchor and author. His new Yesh Atid party ran a successful rookie campaign, landing Lapid the powerful post of finance minister.
But he and Netanyahu did not get along, and the coalition quickly crumbled. Yesh Atid has been in the opposition since 2015 elections. The party is popular with secular, middle-class voters and has been critical of Netanyahu’s close ties with ultra-Orthodox parties and said the prime minister should step down while on trial for corruption charges.
The ultra-Orthodox parties have long used their outsize political power to secure generous budgets for their religious institutions and exemptions from compulsory military service. The refusal of many ultra-Orthodox Jews to obey coronavirus safety restrictions last year added to widespread resentment against them.
Read:Israel, Egypt talk truce with Hamas, rebuilding Gaza Strip
Bennett, 49, is a former top aide to Netanyahu whose small Yamina party caters to religious and nationalist hard-liners. Bennett was a successful high-tech entrepreneur and leader of the West Bank settler movement before entering politics.
In order to secure the required parliamentary majority, Lapid had to bring together eight parties that have little in common.
Their partners include a pair of dovish, left-wing parties that support Palestinian independence and three hard-line parties that oppose major concessions to the Palestinians and support West Bank settlements. Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Blue and White, a centrist party headed by Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and the United Arab List are the remaining members.
The coalition members hope their shared animosity toward Netanyahu will provide enough incentive to find some common ground.
“Today, we succeeded. We made history,” said Merav Michaeli, leader of the dovish Labor Party.
The negotiations went down to the wire, with Labor and Yamina feuding over the makeup of a parliamentary committee.
Earlier this week, when Bennett said he would join the coalition talks, he said that everyone would have to compromise and give up parts of their dreams.
Read:Blinken claims progress in effort to boost Gaza truce
In order to form a government, a party leader must secure the support of a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament. Because no single party controls a majority on its own, coalitions are usually built with smaller partners. Thirteen parties of various sizes are in the current parliament.
As leader of the largest party, Netanyahu was given the first opportunity by the country’s figurehead president to form a coalition. But he was unable to secure a majority with his traditional religious and nationalist allies.
After Netanyahu’s failure to form a government, Lapid was then given four weeks to cobble together a coalition. That window was set to expire at midnight.
Lapid already faced a difficult challenge bringing together such a disparate group of partners. But then war broke out with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip on May 10. The fighting, along with the eruption of Arab-Jewish mob violence in Israeli cities during the war, put the coalition talks on hold.
But after a cease-fire was reached on May 21, the negotiations resumed, and Lapid raced to sew up a deal. He reached a breakthrough on Sunday when Bennett agreed to join the opposition coalition.
Gaza’s bereaved civilians fear justice will never come
The al-Kawlaks, a family of four generations living next door to each other in downtown Gaza City, were utterly unprepared for the inferno.
Like others, they were terrified by the heavy bombing in Israel’s fourth war with Gaza’s Hamas rulers that began May 10. The explosions felt more powerful than in previous fighting. At night, parents and children slept in one room so they would live or die together.
Yet the relatively well-to-do Rimal neighborhood where the family lived in a cluster of apartment buildings seemed somewhat safer than areas along Gaza’s border with Israel, which had been devastated in this and past fighting.
Then one night disaster struck. Azzam al-Kawlak’s four children had gone to bed, and he and his wife were preparing to join them.
At around 1 a.m. on May 16, a thunderous boom shook his top-floor apartment, followed quickly by a second and third. “The floor cracked below our feet and the furniture was thrown to the wall,” the 42-year-old engineer said.
The four-story building collapsed, with Azzam’s apartment dropping to the ground. The family escaped through the kitchen balcony, now almost ground level. Bizarrely, the laundry hanging on a clothesline seemed untouched.
Read:Israel, Egypt talk truce with Hamas, rebuilding Gaza Strip
It took a day for the full horror to emerge, as bodies and survivors were pulled from the rubble. The family and neighbors used ropes to clear chunks of concrete, working alongside ill-equipped rescue teams.
By nightfall, the family’s death toll stood at 22. Eight bodies were dug out of Azzam’s building and 14 from the one next door. The dead included 89-year-old family patriarch Amin, his son Fawaz, 62, his grandson Sameh, 28, and his great-grandson, 6-month-old Qusai.
Just a day earlier, Qusai’s parents had celebrated a small milestone, his first tooth. Azzam’s two younger brothers were killed. Three nieces — 5-year-old Rula, 10-year-old Yara and 12-year-old Hala — were found in a tight embrace, their bodies the last to be pulled out, said Azzam’s surviving older brother, Awni.
The bombing along several hundred meters (yards) of al-Wahda Street took just minutes. In all, it brought down three houses — two in the al-Kawlak compound and one nearby — and killed a total of 43 people, making it the single deadliest air raid of the 11-day war.
Israel said the target was a Hamas tunnel underneath the street, part of what it called a roughly 350-kilometer-long (220-mile) underground network. The tunnels served offensive and defensive purposes, military officials said, accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said during a war-time briefing that the military target in Rimal collapsed, causing nearby houses and their supporting structures to collapse as well. “That caused a large amount of civilian casualties, which were not the aim,” he said.
Read:Blinken claims progress in effort to boost Gaza truce
He said the army was reviewing the incident and “adjusting the analysis and the ordnance used in the future” to prevent similar events from occurring again. “It’s not a totally mathematic exercise in choosing the ordnance,” he said.
He said Israel carried out dozens of airstrikes in areas just as densely populated, with far fewer casualties.
Sinovac vaccine restores a Brazilian city to near normal
Just one COVID-19 patient is in critical condition at the Dr. Geraldo Cesar Reis clinic in Serrana, a city of almost 46,000 in Sao Paulo state’s countryside. The 63-year-old woman rejected the vaccine that was offered to every adult resident of Serrana as part of a trial.
Doctors say the woman was awaiting one of Pfizer’s shots, which remain scarce in Brazil. But she is an outlier here. Most adults rolled up their sleeves when offered the vaccine made by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac, and the experiment has transformed the community into an oasis of near normalcy in a country where many communities continue to suffer.
Doctors who treated COVID-19 in Serrana have seen their patient loads evaporate. They now help colleagues with other diseases and recently started eating lunch at home. Life has returned to the streets: Neighbors chat and families have weekend barbecues. Outsiders who previously had no reason to set foot in Serrana are arriving for haircuts and restaurant outings.
Read:In Brazil’s Amazon, rivers rise to record levels
“We’re now as full as we used to be,” Rogério Silva, a staffer at a store for cheap refreshments and snacks, said in an interview. “Weeks ago, people wouldn’t form a line in here, wouldn’t eat in, and I wouldn’t let them use the bathroom. Now it’s back.”
The success story emerged as other population centers keep struggling with the virus, enduring rising infections and new government-imposed restrictions. Meanwhile, the vaccine appeared headed for wider use. The World Health Organization on Tuesday granted emergency use authorization to the Sinovac shot for people 18 and over, the second such authorization it has granted to a Chinese company.
The experiment known as “Project S” lasted four months and tested Sinovac’s shot in real-world conditions. The preliminary results made public Monday suggest the pandemic can be controlled if three-quarters of the population is fully vaccinated with Sinovac, said Ricardo Palacios, a director at Sao Paulo state’s Butantan Institute and coordinator of the study, which was not peer-reviewed.
“The most important result was understanding that we can control the pandemic even without vaccinating the entire population,” Palacios said.
The results offer hope to hundreds of millions of people, especially in developing nations. Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and others are likewise reliant on the Chinese shot, which is cheaper than vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The city’s population was split into four geographic areas regardless of age and gender, and most adults received two shots by the end of April. Results released Monday showed that the pandemic was controlled after three of the areas had been vaccinated. It was not clear if vaccine uptake was the same in each area.
Serrana saw vast improvements: Deaths fell by 95%, hospitalizations by 86% and symptomatic cases by 80%.
The project “shows the protection exists and that the vaccine is effective. No doubt,” Gonzalo Vecina, one of the founders of Brazil’s health regulator and a medical school professor, told The Associated Press.
Likewise, Denise Garrett, vice president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, which advocates for expanding global vaccine access, called the results “good and very encouraging.”
Both Vecina and Garrett said unanswered questions remain and that more data is needed to properly analyze the results, including information about people who got shots but did not develop immunity.
Read:In Argentina, doctors adapt as COVID-19 strains hospitals
The spread of the virus in Serrana slowed while neighboring communities like Ribeirao Preto, just 12 miles west, saw COVID-19 surge. The upswing was largely blamed on more contagious variants.
Hospitals in Ribeirao Preto are so full of COVID-19 patients that the mayor imposed strict shutdown measures last week, including halting public transportation and limiting hours for the city’s 700,000 residents to buy groceries. Some will wait months for their vaccines. Almost all shops are closed, and 95% of intensive-care unit beds are occupied by virus patients.
Elmano Silveira, 54, works at a local drugstore and for the first time wishes he lived in Serrana, which was looked down upon before the vaccination drive.
“My friends from there used to call me all the time. ... Now I’m the one calling them,” Silveira said. “Before the pandemic, we had a big city vibe here. It was really busy. Now it’s like a desert.”
Just months ago, it was Serrana struggling to cope, according to Dr. João Antonio Madalosso Jr. For every patient who recovered in the first three months of 2021, two more arrived in bad shape, he said.
“Then, by the end of January, we heard this project was coming to Serrana. And calmness set in, little by little,” said Madalosso, 32, as he pointed at empty seats of the hospital’s COVID-19 ward. “Just look at this. This is much calmer than Ribeirao Preto and the entire region. The vaccine is no cure, but it is the solution to transform this into a light flu so people can carry on.”
That doesn’t mean Serrana is entirely rid of the virus. Some residents refused to get the shot. Others skipped the second dose or got infected before the vaccine took full effect. A few had prior diseases that prevented them from getting the vaccines.
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly cast doubt on the shot’s efficacy. He said last year his administration wouldn’t buy the Chinese vaccine and that he wouldn’t let Brazilians become “guinea pigs.″ His health ministry signed a deal to buy tens of millions of doses only after Brazil’s health regulator approved the shot in January.
Had the government acted sooner, Brazil could have had twice as many Sinovac vaccines by now — 100 million doses, Butantan’s head, Dimas Covas, told a congressional inquiry last week. The shot accounts for half the vaccines made available to date in the country.
Vaccines arrived too late for some of the 463,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in Brazil, which has the world’s second-highest death toll.
The relative return to normal “could be happening all over Brazil if it were not for the delay in vaccinations,” said João Doria, Sao Paulo’s governor and an adversary of Bolsonaro. “These results show there’s only one way to control the pandemic: vaccines, vaccines, vaccines.”
Bolsonaro-fueled skepticism of Sinovac’s shot reached Serrana. It didn’t help that Sao Paulo state’s release of efficacy data was confusing, with Doria initially claiming 78% protection against mild cases on Jan. 7, then revising that five days later to 50.4%, barely above the level required by health authorities.
Carmen da Silva Cunha, 81, has lost friends to the virus, and she got vaccinated despite “a lot of people trying to get into my head regarding the vaccine.”
Read:At least 25 dead during Brazilian police raid in Rio
“Serrana got better, but it could be much more if a lot of people had taken their second shot,” she said in an interview at the hospital, where she sought treatment for a sore throat. She tested negative for COVID-19, and doctors expected her to return home in short order.
Mayor Leo Capitanelli is pleased with results. Standing beside a health screening station on the road into the city, he said people have had only mild and moderate COVID-19 cases in recent weeks. And he boasted about Serrana’s plan to host a music festival for about 5,000 spectators, all vaccinated with Sinovac’s shot.
“This project brought our pride back,” he said. “And it will bring hope for a fresh start next year.”
Iran’s largest navy ship catches fire, sinks in Gulf of Oman
The largest ship in the Iranian navy caught fire and later sank Wednesday in the Gulf of Oman under unclear circumstances, semiofficial news agencies reported.
The Fars and Tasnim news agencies said efforts failed to save the support ship Kharg, named after the island that serves as the main oil terminal for Iran.
Read: Iran successfully tests domestic coronavirus vaccine on humans
The blaze began around 2:25 a.m. and firefighters tried to contain it, Fars said. The vessel sank near the Iranian port of Jask, some 1,270 kilometers (790 miles) southeast of Tehran on the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf.
Photos circulated on Iranian social media of sailors wearing life jackets evacuating the vessel as a fire burned behind them. State TV and semiofficial news agencies referred to the Kharg as a “training ship.” Fars published video of thick, black smoke rising from the ship early Wednesday morning.
Satellite photos from Planet Labs Inc. analyzed by The Associated Press showed the Kharg off to the west of Jask on Tuesday. Satellites from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that track fires from space detected a blaze at the site of the Jask that started just before the time of the fire reported by Fars.
Read: Iran a key topic as US envoy Blinken meets UK counterpart
The Kharg serves as one of a few vessels in the Iranian navy capable of providing replenishment at sea for its other ships. It also can lift heavy cargo and serve as a launch point for helicopters. The ship, built in Britain and launched in 1977, entered the Iranian navy in 1984 after lengthy negotiations that followed Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian officials offered no cause for the fire aboard the Kharg. However, it comes after a series of mysterious explosions that began in 2019 targeting ships in the Gulf of Oman. The U.S. Navy later accused Iran of targeting the ships with limpet mines, timed explosives typically attached by divers to a vessel’s hull.
Read: US Navy fires warning shots in new tense encounter with Iran
Iran denied targeting the vessels, though U.S. Navy footage showed members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard removing one unexploded limpet mine from a vessel. The incidents came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
The sinking of the Kharg marks the latest naval disaster for Iran. In 2020 during an Iranian military training exercise, a missile mistakenly struck a naval vessel near the port of Jask, killing19 sailors and wounding 15. Also in 2018, an Iranian navy destroyer sank in the Caspian Sea.
In Brazil’s Amazon, rivers rise to record levels
Rivers around the biggest city in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest have swelled to levels unseen in over a century of record-keeping, according to data published Tuesday by Manaus’ port authorities, straining a society that has grown weary of increasingly frequent flooding.
The Rio Negro was at its highest level since records began in 1902, with a depth of 29.98 meters (98 feet) at the port’s measuring station. The nearby Solimoes and Amazon rivers were also nearing all-time highs, flooding streets and houses in dozens of municipalities and affecting some 450,000 people in the region.
Read:In Argentina, doctors adapt as COVID-19 strains hospitals
Higher-than-usual precipitation is associated with the La Nina phenomenon, when currents in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean affect global climate patterns. Environmental experts and organizations including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say there is strong evidence that human activity and global warming are altering the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including La Nina.
Seven of the 10 biggest floods in the Amazon basin have occurred in the past 13 years, data from Brazil’s state-owned Geological Survey shows.
“If we continue to destroy the Amazon the way we do, the climatic anomalies will become more and more accentuated,” said Virgílio Viana, director of the Sustainable Amazon Foundation, a nonprofit. ” Greater floods on the one hand, greater droughts on the other.”
Large swaths of Brazil are currently drying up in a severe drought, with a possible shortfall in power generation from the nation’s hydroelectric plants and increased electricity prices, government authorities have warned.
But in Manaus, 66-year-old Julia Simas has water ankle-deep in her home. Simas has lived in the working-class neighborhood of Sao Jorge since 1974 and is used to seeing the river rise and fall with the seasons. Simas likes her neighborhood because it is safe and clean. But the quickening pace of the floods in the last decade has her worried.
“From 1974 until recently, many years passed and we wouldn’t see any water. It was a normal place,” she said.
Read:At least 25 dead during Brazilian police raid in Rio
Aerial view of streets flooded by the Negro River in downtown Manaus. (AP Photos/Nelson Antoine)
When the river does overflow its banks and flood her street, she and other residents use boards and beams to build rudimentary scaffolding within their homes to raise their floors above the water.
“I think human beings have contributed a lot (to this situation,” she said. “Nature doesn’t forgive. She comes and doesn’t want to know whether you’re ready to face her or not.”
Flooding also has a significant impact on local industries such as farming and cattle ranching. Many family-run operations have seen their production vanish under water. Others have been unable to reach their shops, offices and market stalls or clients.
“With these floods, we’re out of work,” said Elias Gomes, a 38-year-old electrician in Cacau Pirera, on the other side of the Rio Negro, though noted he’s been able to earn a bit by transporting neighbors in his small wooden boat.
Gomes is now looking to move to a more densely populated area where floods won’t threaten his livelihood.
Read:3 killed, 27 hospitalized after boat capsizes off San Diego
Limited access to banking in remote parts of the Amazon can make things worse for residents, who are often unable to get loans or financial compensation for lost production, said Viana, of the Sustainable Amazon Foundation. “This is a clear case of climate injustice: Those who least contributed to global warming and climate change are the most affected.”
Meteorologists say Amazon water levels could continue to rise slightly until late June or July, when floods usually peak.
7 die in gas cylinder blast in India
At least seven people died and an equal number injured after a cooking gas cylinder explosion triggered the collapse of two adjacent buildings in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, officials said on Wednesday.
The blast occurred in one of the two houses in Tikri village in the state's Gonda district on Tuesday night, when a family living there was cooking.
The powerful explosion caused the collapse of the house and the adjacent building as well, killing at least seven people, including two women and three children, on the spot and injuring seven others, officials said.
Rescue efforts are ongoing as officials fear that more people could be trapped in the debris of the two buildings. The injured have been admitted to a local government hospital, officials said.
Also read: 7 injured in Khagrachhari gas cylinder blast
"We received a call about a cylinder blast that made the roof collapse of house. With the help of the police force and local people we started rescue operations," district police chief Santosh Kumar Mishra told the media.
"So far, some 14 people have been pulled out of the debris, seven of them have been declared dead and seven others are undergoing treatment at a hospital," he added.
Also read: 5 of a family burnt in Chattogram gas cylinder blast
A probe has been ordered into the explosion, the police chief said.