United States
Ukrainians in US mobilize to help 100,000 expected refugees
As the United States prepares to accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees following Russia's invasion of their country, existing communities in cities like Sacramento and Seattle are already mobilizing to provide food, shelter and support to those fleeing the war.
The federal government hasn't said when the formal resettlement process will begin, but Ukrainian groups in the U.S. are already providing support to people entering the country through other channels, including on visas that will eventually expire or by flying to Mexico and crossing over the border.
“No refugee is waiting for you to be ready for them," said Eduard Kislyanka, senior pastor at the House of Bread church near Sacramento, which has been sending teams of people to Poland and preparing dozens of its member families to house people arriving in California.
Read:Russia war ends era of globalization that kept inflation low
Since the war began in late February, over 4 million people are estimated to have fled Ukraine and millions more have been displaced within the country. President Joe Biden said last week that the U.S. would admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and provide $1 billion in humanitarian assistance to countries affected by the exodus.
The federal government has yet to provide a timeline for refugee resettlement — often a lengthy process — or details on where refugees will be resettled. It’s unlikely the United States will see a massive influx of Ukrainians on charter and military flights like happened with Afghan refugees last year.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said the White House commitment of accepting up to 100,000 Ukrainians does not come with a minimum. Aside from the refugee resettlement program, their main avenues will be seeking humanitarian parole and appearing at the border with Mexico, she said.
Many who reach the United States will likely go to cities that already have strong Ukrainian communities.
The Sacramento region is home to the highest concentration of Ukrainian immigrants in the country, with about 18,000 people, according to census data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute. The Seattle, Chicago and New York City areas are also hubs.
Word is spreading about the resources available in Sacramento, where churches like House of Bread are connecting Ukrainians who have already arrived with host families who can offer shelter and help access government resources and transportation. Kislyanka called the church's actions a “stop gap" measure designed to help as people await more clarity about the formal government resettlement process.
“Most of these people do not have any relations, like they don't know anybody here," said Kislyanka, who came to the U.S. as a child in the early 1990s. “Having somebody who can help them navigate the cultural shock and navigate the system. . . it just makes things a lot easier and smoother."
Sacramento has been a destination for Ukrainians since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of those arriving were Christians taking advantage of a U.S. law offering entrance to anyone escaping religious persecution in the former Soviet Union.
Another wave of refugees began arriving after Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Of the 8,000 Ukrainians resettled by the organization World Relief since then, 3,000 have come to Sacramento, said Vanassa Hamra, the group's community engagement manager in Sacramento.
Beyond the dozens of Slavic churches in the Sacramento region, there are schools that serve mainly Ukrainian and Russian students. Eastern European grocery stores and restaurants offer favorite foods like borscht, a type of beetroot soup, and varenyky, a boiled dumpling. Businesses started by Ukrainians try to hire others from their country.
All of that makes it easy for younger people to maintain a sense of connection to their heritage and for older immigrants to adapt without having to become fluent in a new language and culture.
“It's very easy when you come here. Every door, it's open for you," said Oleksandra Datsenko, who came to the U.S. six years ago and works as a waitress at Firebird Russian Restaurant, which serves Eastern European fare in a Sacramento suburb.
Valeriy Goloborodko, who immigrated to Southern California in 2006, wanted to return to Ukraine until he settled with his wife in the Seattle area. There, he found a thriving Ukrainian community and went on to become the country's honorary consul in Seattle in 2015, helping organize an annual festival where as many as 16,000 people a day would show up to feast on traditional food, listen to Ukrainian musicians and wear traditionally embroidered clothing.
Read:Putin misled by advisers on Ukraine, US intel determines
“The Ukrainian community in Washington helped me to feel like I was at home — and this is my home now,” Goloborodko said. “We feel like this is a Little Ukraine.”
Since the invasion, Goloborodko and others in the Washington state Ukrainian community have lobbied hard for support from state officials. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee has vowed that Washington will welcome Ukrainians fleeing the violence. The Legislature has set aside nearly $20 million to help pay anticipated costs of housing, job training, health care and legal aid for Ukrainian refugees. The Port of Seattle has promised to help welcome the refugees at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where they can begin to be connected with services.
In Sacramento, meanwhile, the state's housing crisis could prove challenging as resettlement and community organizations look for lodging for new arrivals. Like much of California, the region is facing a housing crunch with limited supply and rising rents.
“People are coming here; we can help them; we can provide something. But it’s going to get swamped so quick,” said Kislyanka, the head pastor at House of Bread.
The International Rescue Committee's Sacramento branch has an affiliated immigrant welcome center that's already assisting people who entered the country illegally, said Lisa Welze, director of IRC Sacramento. Many are nervous to engage with resettlement agencies but in need of resources — particularly housing — as well as help navigating the immigration system to see if they can find a legal path to stay.
As for when the more formal resettlement process will begin, “we've been told we just need to wait," Welze said.
Russian airstrike hits base in western Ukraine, kills 35
Waves of Russian missiles pounded a military training base close to Ukraine’s western border with NATO member Poland, killing 35 people. The strike followed Russian threats to target foreign weapon shipments that are helping Ukrainian fighters defend their country against Russia's grinding invasion.
More than 30 Russian cruise missiles targeted the sprawling training facility that is less than 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the closest border point with Poland, according to the governor of Ukraine’s western Lviv region. Poland is a key location for routing Western military aid to Ukraine.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Lviv had largely been spared the scale of destruction unfolding further east and become a destination for residents escaping bombarded cities and for many of the nearly 2.6 million refugees who have fled the country.
The training center in Yavoriv appears to be the most westward target struck so far in the 18-day invasion. The facility, also known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, has long been used to train Ukrainian military personnel, often with instructors from the United States and other NATO countries.
It has also hosted international NATO drills. As such, the site symbolizes what has long been a Russian complaint: That the NATO alliance of 30 member countries is moving ever closer to Russia’s borders. Russian has demanded that Ukraine drop its ambitions to join NATO.
Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said most of the missiles fired Sunday “were shot down because the air defense system worked.” The ones that got through through killed at least 35 people and wounded 134, he said.
Russian fighters also fired at the airport in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, which is less than 150 kilometers (94 miles) north of Romania and 250 kilometers (155 miles) from Hungary, countries that also are NATO allies. The airport, which includes a military airfield as well as a runway for civilian flights, also was targeted Friday.
Read:Russians strike near Kyiv, block aid convoy; port city reels
Fighting also raged in multiple areas of the country overnight. Ukrainian authorities said Russian airstrikes on a monastery and a children's resort in the eastern Donetsk region hit spots where monks and refugees were sheltering, wounding 32 people.
Another airstrike hit a westward-bound train evacuating people from the east, killing one person and injuring another, Donetsk's chief regional administrator said.
To the north, in the city of Chernihiv, one person was killed and another injured in a Russian airstrike that destroyed a residential block, emergency services said.
Around the capital, Kyiv, a major political and strategic target for the invasion, fighting also intensified, with overnight shelling in the northwestern suburbs and a missile strike Sunday that destroyed a warehouse to the east.
In Irpin, a suburb about 12 miles (20 kilometers) northwest of central Kyiv, bodies lay out in the open Saturday on streets and in a park.
“When I woke up in the morning, everything was covered in smoke, everything was dark. We don’t know who is shooting and where,” resident Serhy Protsenko said as he walked through his neighborhood. Explosions sounded in the distance. “We don’t have any radio or information.”
Chief regional administrator Oleksiy Kuleba said Russian forces appeared to be trying to blockade and paralyze the capital with day and night shelling of the suburbs. Kuleba said Russian agents were in the capital and its suburbs, marking out possible future targets.
He vowed that any all-out assault would meet stiff resistance, saying: “We’re getting ready to defend Kyiv, and we’re prepared to fight for ourselves.”
Talks aimed at reaching a cease-fire again failed Saturday, and the U.S. announced plans to provide another $200 million to Ukraine for weapons. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned other nations that sending equipment to bolster Ukraine's military was "an action that makes those convoys legitimate targets.”
Read:Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict
Russian soldiers pillaged a humanitarian convoy that was trying to reach the battered and encircled port city of Mariupol, where more than 1,500 people have died, a Ukrainian official said. Ukraine’s military said Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, tightening their siege of the strategic port. Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to break his country apart, as well as starting “a new stage of terror” with the alleged detention of a mayor from a city west of Mariupol.
“Ukraine will stand this test. We need time and strength to break the war machine that has come to our land,” Zelenskyy said during his nightly address to the nation Saturday.
Zelenskyy reported that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had died since the Russian invasion began Feb. 24.
The first major city to fall, earlier this month, was Kherson, a vital Black Sea port of 290,000 residents. Zelenskyy said Saturday that Russians were using blackmail and bribery in an attempt to force local officials to form a “pseudo-republic” in the southern Kherson region, much like those in Donetsk and Luhansk, two eastern regions where pro-Russian separatists began fighting Ukrainian forces in 2014. One of the pretexts Russia used to invade was that it had to protect the separatist regions.
Zelenskyy again deplored NATO’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine and said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defense assets, though he didn't elaborate. U.S. President Joe Biden announced another $200 million in aid to Ukraine, with an additional $13 billion included in a bill that has passed the House and should pass the Senate within days. NATO has said that imposing a no-fly zone could lead to a wider war with Russia.
Moscow has said it would establish humanitarian corridors out of conflict zones, but Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of disrupting those paths and firing on civilians. Russian forces have hit at least two dozen hospitals and medical facilities, according to the World Health Organization.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said just nine of 14 agreed-upon corridors were open on Saturday, and that about 13,000 people had used them to evacuate around the country.
The leaders of France and Germany spoke Saturday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a failed attempt to reach a cease-fire. To end the war, Moscow has demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO and adopt a neutral status; acknowledge the Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014; recognize the independence of separatist regions in the country’s east; and agree to demilitarize.
Thousands of soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed along with many civilians, including at least 79 Ukrainian children, the government said.
The Russian invaders appear to have struggled more than expected against determined Ukrainian fighters. Still, Russia’s stronger military threatens to grind down Ukrainian forces. The United Nations has said the fighting has displaced millions of Ukrainians within the country on top of the millions who have left.
Elena Yurchuk, a nurse from the northern city of Chernihiv, was in a Romanian train station Saturday with her teenage son, Nikita, unsure whether their home was still standing.
“We have nowhere to go back to,” said Yurchuk, 44, a widow who hopes to find work in Germany. “Nothing left.”
US says it is expelling 12 Russian diplomats for espionage
The United States announced Monday it is expelling 12 members of the Russian Mission at the United Nations, accusing them of being “intelligence operatives” engaged in espionage.
The Biden administration's action came on the fifth day of Russia's invasion of neighboring Ukraine, which has sparked condemnation from the United States and dozens of other countries.
The U.S. Mission to the United Nations said in a statement that the Russian diplomats “have abused their privileges of residency in the United States by engaging in espionage activities that are adverse to our national security.”
The mission said the expulsions have been “in development for several months” and are in accordance with the United States’ agreement with the United Nations as host of the 193-member world body.
Also read: EU blacklists 26 Russians, including Kremlin spokesman Peskov, and one company
Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told The Associated Press, when asked his reaction to the U.S. saying the Russians were engaged in espionage: “They always do. That’s the pretext all the time when they announce somebody persona non grata. That is the only explanation they give.”
Did he expect Russia to reciprocate? "That's not for me to decide but in the diplomatic practice, that’s a normal thing.," he said.
The expulsions were first confirmed by U.S. deputy ambassador Richard Mills after Nebenzia told the U.N. Security Council on Monday afternoon that he had just been informed of “yet another hostile step undertaken by the host country step against the Russian Mission.”
Nebenzia, who was presiding as this month’s council president at a session to discuss the dire humanitarian consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, called the U.S. expulsions a “gross violation” of the U.N. agreement with the United States and of the Vienna Convention governing diplomatic relations.
“We’ll see how events develop within the context of this decision,” he said.
Mills then confirmed the expulsions, saying the Russian diplomats “were engaged in activities that were not in accordance with their responsibilities and obligations as diplomats."
He said they are also in accord with the U.S.-U.N. agreement. Nebenzia countered that this was “not satisfactory.”
White Hose press secretary Jen Psaki responded to the Russian ambassador's characterization of the expulsions as a “hostile act” by saying: “I think the hostile act is committing espionage activities on our own soil.”
Also read: Sanctions vs. neutrality: Swiss fine-tune response to Russia
According to the U.N. diplomatic directory, Russia has 79 diplomats accredited to the United Nations. The U.S. Mission did not name those who are being expelled or state how long they are being given to leave the country.
US, Europe step up Russia sanctions to target Putin directly
The United States and European allies said Friday they were stepping up sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by adding measures directly targeting President Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister, putting diplomatic appeals to one side as Russia’s forces closed on Ukraine’s capital.
The move by the U.S., the European Union and Britain sends “a clear message about the strength of the opposition to the actions” by Putin, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. On a day when explosions and gunfire were sounding in Kyiv’s capital, and Pope Francis went to Russia’s embassy in Rome to personally appeal for an end, the sanctions were part of growing global condemnation of the offensive.
Asked by reporters if U.S. President Joe Biden has planned any more direct diplomatic overtures toward Putin, whose ground and air forces are pushing an offensive on Ukraine’s key cities, Psaki said no.
“I would say that a moment where a leader is ... in the middle of invading a sovereign country is not the moment where diplomacy feels appropriate,” Psaki told reporters at a White House briefing. “It does not mean we have ruled out diplomacy forever.”
Psaki said the U.S. was preparing individual sanctions on Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, likely to include travel bans. The announcement came hours after the European Union announced it intended to freeze Putin’s assets, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told NATO leaders his country would also sanction Putin and Lavrov.
Read:Explosions heard in Kyiv early Friday as Russia presses Ukraine assault
Psaki said the U.S. would also newly sanction the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which functions as a sovereign wealth fund meant to draw capital into the Russian economy.
The U.S. and European allies announced sweeping asset freezes and other penalties Thursday against Russia’s banks, state-owned enterprises and elites, but they spared Russia’s leader and foreign minister in that round.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Biden administration’s talks internally on the matter, said there was debate among administration officials about whether to include Lavrov in the sanctions, as some wanted to ensure a path for diplomatic contact remained open.
While the sanctions to be imposed would not ban contact between, for example, Putin and Biden, or U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lavrov, they put a new chill on what had been weeks of repeated diplomatic efforts with Russia as Putin built up forces on Ukraine’s borders. The debate on including Lavrov went back and forth, and was one of the reasons the individual sanctions were not announced with Thursday’s other measures.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, called the allies’ decision to freeze the assets of Putin himself the right one.
“It was President Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine. ... And he is the one responsible for the war that the Russian Federation is now waging on us,” Markarova told reporters at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington.
Read: Biden and Europe waiting on one key sanction against Russia
Friday’s U.S. measures block Putin and Lavrov, whom the Treasury Department’s formal announcement of the sanctions described as Putin’s “chief propagandist,” from access to any assets within reach of U.S. officials, and bar anyone in the United States from doing business with them. Members of Russia’s security council also were sanctioned.
It was unclear what the practical impact on the two men would be and how important their assets in Europe were.
“I can assure you that if you got major assets and all of a sudden you can’t get hold of them, it will cost you,” said EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell.
EU ministers have said that even further sanctions were still possible, including booting Russia out of SWIFT, the dominant system for global financial transactions.
“The debate about SWIFT is not off the table, it will continue,” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said.
Admonishing Russia further, the Council of Europe suspended Russia from the continent’s foremost human rights organization. The 47-nation council said Russia remained a member and continued to be bound by the relevant human rights conventions.
Undeterred in the game of punitive sanctions, Russia started its own tit-for-tat measures, banning British flights to and over its territory in retaliation to a similar U.K. ban on Aeroflot flights.
Russian authorities also announced the “partial restriction” of access to Facebook after the social media network limited the accounts of several Kremlin-backed media.
Yet with the Kremlin’s eyes fully targeted on expanding the attacks on Ukraine, almost all the action was still going one way.
In terms unheard since the Cold War, threats were flying from all sides and ran through society.
In a sign of papal anger, Pope Francis went to the Russian Embassy to “express his concern about the war,” the Vatican said. It was an extraordinary, hands-on gesture, since usually popes receive ambassadors and heads of state in the Vatican.
The May 28 UEFA Champions League final, the Super Bowl of European soccer, was stripped from St. Petersburg and will move Paris. Formula One dropped this season’s Russian Grand Prix at Sochi in protest.
And in pop culture, the wildly popular Eurovision song contest banned Russia from the May finals in Turin, Italy.
Countries in Asia and the Pacific have joined the U.S., the EU and others in the West in piling on punitive measures against Russian banks and leading companies. The nations have also set up export controls aimed at starving Russia’s industries and military of semiconductors and other high-tech products.
“Japan must clearly show its position that we will never tolerate any attempt to change the status quo by force,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters Friday.
Taiwan announced Friday that it would join in economic sanctions, although it did not specify what those would be. They could potentially be focused on export control of semiconductor chips, of which Taiwan is the dominant producer.
While most nations in Asia rallied to support Ukraine, China has continued to denounce sanctions against Russia and blamed the U.S. and its allies for provoking Moscow. Beijing, worried about American power in Asia, has increasingly aligned its foreign policy with Russia to challenge the West.
“The Chinese government is following through on easing trade restrictions with Russia and that is simply unacceptable,” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison complained. “You don’t go and throw a lifeline to Russia in the middle of a period when they’re invading another country.”
It’s US that trained RAB: FM Momen
Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen on Friday said here that it is the United States that trained RAB on their rules of engagement on how to behave with people and how to interrogate.
“They’ve been trained by the USA. The US has taught them the rules of engagement, how to behave with people and how to interrogate,” he told reporters here after attending a number of programmes, recalling the role of the USA and the UK in training the RAB.
Dr Momen said RAB is very efficient in its work and they are very effective. “They’re very efficient and they’re not corrupt. That's why they've been able to gain the trust of people.”
Read: It’s unfair to put all the blame of crossfires on RAB: Home Minister
The Foreign Minister said the government will definitely encourage RAB to go and take training afresh if they (RAB) have any weaknesses in the rules of engagement and if there are any human rights violations in these rules of engagement.
But the sections that have been imposed on individuals suddenly are not very justified, said the Foreign Minister, adding that the US got one-sided information.
The government remains open to sharing experience, revisiting some aspects of the US and UK trained RAB's rules of engagement and their training on human rights in handling the crimes.
Dr Momen said terrorist activities in the country have decreased because of RAB and in the last few years, there has been no more terrorist activity in the country after the Holey Artisan incident.
“This has been possible because of RAB. The US Department of State itself has acknowledged it. There’re some people who don’t like the law and order in the country. Those who like terrorism or drugs don't like RAB because RAB also acts against them. It’s very sad,” he added.
Earlier, the Foreign Minister wrote to his US counterpart Antony J. Blinken on a number of issues, including a call to "waive sanctions" on RAB and its current and former senior officials.
Bangladesh had already updated Secretary Blinken sharing Bangladesh's position on democracy, freedom of speech and human rights, minority and labour rights issues in his letter apart from touching upon sanctions issue broadly.
Read: UN Peacekeeping: 12 global HR bodies seek ban on RAB
Bangladesh believes that the continuation of "sincere and candid" dialogues between the two friendly countries would help advance the bilateral relations on the basis of mutual respect and benefits.
Over the years, Dr Momen said, RAB has emerged as the most efficient law enforcement agency of the government that has been at the forefront of combating terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking and other transnational crimes.
“RAB's crucial role in dealing with crimes has generated much confidence among citizens," he said.
RAB has achieved public confidence as it delivers and is not corrupt, and at the same time, as excesses of abuse have dramatically reduced over the last decade, says the government.
N. Korea fires 2 suspected missiles in 4th launch this year
North Korea on Monday fired two suspected ballistic missiles into the sea in its fourth weapons launch this month, South Korea's military said, with the apparent goal of demonstrating its military might amid paused diplomacy with the United States and pandemic border closures.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the North likely fired two ballistic missiles from an area in Sunan, the location of Pyongyang's international airport, but didn't immediately say how far they flew.
Japan’s Prime Minister’s Office also said it detected a possible ballistic missile launch from North Korea, but didn’t immediately provide more details.
Read: US hits NKorean officials with sanctions after missile test
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida instructed his government to do its utmost to gather information about the launch and ensure the safety of vessels and aircraft. Japan’s Coast Guard issued a warning for vessels traveling around Japanese waters to watch out for falling objects, but no immediate damage was reported. The Coast Guard later said that the North Korean projectile is believed to have already landed but didn’t specify where.
The launch came after the North conducted a pair of flight tests of a purported hypersonic missile on Jan. 5 and Jan. 11 and also test-fired ballistic missiles from a train Friday in an apparent reprisal over fresh sanctions imposed by the Biden administration last week for its continuing test launches.
North Korea has been ramping up tests in recent months of new missiles designed to overwhelm missile defenses in the region.
Some experts say North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is going back to a tried-and-true technique of pressuring the U.S. and regional neighbors with missile launches and outrageous threats before offering negotiations meant to extract concessions.
A U.S.-led diplomatic push aimed at convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program collapsed in 2019 after the Trump administration rejected the North’s demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capabilities.
Kim has since pledged to further expand a nuclear arsenal he clearly sees as his strongest guarantee of survival, despite the country’s economy suffering major setbacks amid pandemic-related border closures and persistent U.S.-led sanctions.
His government has so far rejected the Biden administration’s call to resume dialogue without preconditions, saying that Washington must first abandon its “hostile policy,” a term Pyongyang mainly uses to describe sanctions and combined U.S.-South Korea military exercises.
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on five North Koreans over their roles in obtaining equipment and technology for the North’s missile programs in its response to the North’s earlier tests this month.
Read: North Korea claims successful test of hypersonic missile
The State Department ordered sanctions against another North Korean, a Russian man and a Russian company for their broader support of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction activities, and the Biden administration also said it would pursue additional U.N. sanctions over the North’s continued tests.
The announcement of the sanctions just came hours after North Korean state media said Kim oversaw a successful test of a hypersonic missile on Tuesday, which was the country’s second test of the system in a week, and claimed that the weapon would greatly increase the country’s “war deterrent.”
The North also on Friday fired two short-range ballistic missiles from a train in an apparent retaliation against the fresh U.S. sanctions tied to the hypersonic tests. Friday’s test came hours after the North’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement berating the Biden administration over the new sanctions and warned of stronger action if Washington maintains its “confrontational stance.”
CDC mulling COVID test requirement for asymptomatic: Fauci
As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges across the United States, top federal health officials are looking to add a negative test along with its five-day isolation restrictions for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus, the White House’s top medical adviser said Sunday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now considering including the negative test as part of its guidance after getting significant “pushback” on its updated recommendations last week.
Under that Dec. 27 guidance, isolation restrictions for people infected with COVID-19 were shortened from 10 days to five days if they are no longer feeling symptoms or running a fever. After that period, they are asked to spend the following five days wearing a mask when around others.
Read: US should consider vaccine mandate for US air travel: Fauci
The guidelines have since received criticism from many health professionals for not specifying a negative antigen test as a requirement for leaving isolation.
“There has been some concern about why we don’t ask people at that five-day period to get tested,” Fauci said. “Looking at it again, there may be an option in that, that testing could be a part of that, and I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.”
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. has been seeing almost a “vertical increase” of new cases, now averaging 400,000 cases a day, with hospitalizations also up.
“We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” he said. “The acceleration of cases that we’ve seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before.”
Fauci said he’s concerned that the omicron variant is overwhelming the health care system and causing a “major disruption” on other essential services.
“When I say major disruptions, you’re certainly going to see stresses on the system and the system being people with any kind of jobs ... particularly with critical jobs to keep society functioning normally,” Fauci said. “We already know that there are reports from fire departments, from police departments in different cities that 10, 20, 25 and sometimes 30% of the people are ill. That’s something that we need to be concerned about, because we want to make sure that we don’t have such an impact on society that there really is a disruption. I hope that doesn’t happen.”
While there is “accumulating evidence” that omicron might lead to less severe illness, he cautioned that the data remains early. Fauci said he worries in particular about the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans because “a fair number of them are going to get severe disease."
He urged Americans who have not yet gotten vaccinated and boosted to do so and to mask up indoors to protect themselves and blunt the current surge of U.S. cases.
The Food and Drug Administration last week said preliminary research indicates at-home rapid tests detect omicron, but may have reduced sensitivity. The agency noted it’s still studying how the tests perform with the variant, which was first detected in late November.
Read: Fauci says omicron variant is 'just raging around the world'
Fauci said Americans “should not get the impression that those tests are not valuable.”
“I think the confusion is that rapid antigen tests have never been as sensitive as the PCR test,” Fauci said. “They’re very good when they are given sequentially. So if you do them like maybe two or three times over a few-day period, at the end of the day, they are as good as the PCR. But as a single test, they are not as sensitive.”
A PCR test usually needs to be processed in a laboratory. The test looks for the virus’s genetic material and then reproduces it millions of times until it’s detectable with a computer.
Fauci said if Americans take the necessary precautions, the U.S. might see some semblance of more normal life returning soon.
“One of the things that we hope for is that this thing will peak after a period of a few weeks and turn around," Fauci said. He expressed hope that by February or March, omicron could fall to a low enough level “that it doesn’t disrupt our society, our economy, our way of life.”
Fauci spoke on ABC's “This Week” and CNN's “State of the Union.”
North Korea holds key meeting as Kim marks 10 years in power
North Korea opened a key political conference Monday to review past projects and discuss new policies amid the pandemic and a diplomatic deadlock with the United States.
The official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday that leader Kim Jong Un presided over a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party. The report did not carry any remarks by Kim.
The meeting approved unspecified agenda items and went into the discussions of them, KCNA said.
The report said the meeting would review major polices this year and decide on “the strategic and tactical policies and practical tasks for dynamically guiding the struggle of our party and people to usher in a new period of the development of socialist construction to the next stage of victory.”
Read: China releases shortened negative lists for foreign investment
The plenary meeting is one of the highest-level decision-making bodies in North Korea. Kim has previously used plenary meetings to announce his positions on relations with the United States and South Korea or his country’s nuclear program.
It’s not known how long this week’s meeting may last. In 2019, a plenary meeting was held for four days.
The meeting comes as Kim is marking 10 years in power. Since his father and longtime ruler Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011, Kim Jong Un has established absolute power at home and fortified North Korea’s nuclear and missile arsenals. The economy has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, U.N. sanctions and mismanagement, but few experts still question his grip on power.
After a torrid run of nuclear and missile tests in 2016-17, Kim Jong Un participated in a series of landmark summit talks with then-President Donald Trump to discuss the future of his weapons arsenals. Those talks collapsed in 2019 over disputes about how much sanctions relief North Korea would get in return for steps toward partial denuclearization.
Bangladesh saw a decline in terrorist activity in 2020: US report
Bangladesh experienced a decrease in terrorist activity in 2020, accompanied by an increase in terrorism-related investigations and arrests, says a new US report shared by the US Department of State on its website on Thursday.
In 2020, there were three specific terrorist incidents, resulting in no deaths, according to the “Country Reports on Terrorism 2020”. The “Country Reports on Terrorism 2019” was published on June 24, 2020.
The Bangladesh government continued to articulate a zero-tolerance policy towards terrorism and the use of its territory as a terrorist safe haven, according to the report.
In January, the government’s new national Antiterrorism Unit began standing up operations, to eventually assume a role as a lead counterterrorism agency.
Bangladesh cooperated with the United States to strengthen control over its borders and ports of entry, says the US report.
The United States and Bangladesh continue to work on building Bangladesh’s technical capacity to develop a national-level “Alert List” of known or suspected terrorists, it says.
Read: Effective counter-terrorism efforts must be complemented by genuine political will: Dhaka
US Secretary of State Antony J Blinken in a press statement on Thursday said the Department of State issued the 2020 Country Reports on Terrorism (CRT), which provides a detailed look at the counterterrorism environment last year, fulfilling an important Congressional mandate.
Each year, the CRT provides insight on important issues in the fight against terrorism and helps the United States make informed decisions about policies, programmes, and resource allocations as we seek to build counterterrorism capacity and resilience around the globe, the statement reads.
Read: People did neither accept nor like sanctions on RAB: Momen to Blinken
Number of Bangladeshi students on the rise in US
Some 8,598 Bangladeshi students chose to study in the United States during the 2020/2021 academic year, according to the 2021 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
In celebrating International Education Week (IEW) on November 15-19, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Institute of International Education released the 2021 Open Doors® Report on International Educational Exchange.
Read:US offers Bangladeshi students to study at American high school
Bangladesh advanced three places from 17th to 14th in the list of countries sending students to the United States, said the US Embassy in Dhaka on Tuesday.
During an unprecedented pandemic with a global decrease in international students, Bangladesh only had a 2.7% decrease from 2020.
Promoting educational exchanges between Bangladesh and the United States is a strategic priority because international education exchanges benefit both nations, peoples, and professional networks.
Speaking last night at a virtual seminar on U.S. women’s higher education institutions to open IEW 2021 in Bangladesh, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Helen LaFave said, “While COVID-19 has caused global challenges, it is heartening and exciting to see Bangladeshi students from across the country pursuing higher education in the United States.”
LaFave said she hoped the event would help Bangladeshi students find their path to study in the United States.
She urged the audience to engage EducationUSA advisers located in the four American Spaces in Dhaka, Chittagong, and Khulna for information on higher education opportunities.
The U.S. Embassy, through EducationUSA Bangladesh, is celebrating IEW 2021 by offering several virtual programs for Bangladeshi students and scholars.
Read: Bangladeshi secondary students invited to apply for study prog in US
EducationUSA advising centers in Bangladesh will host webinars on topics including sessions on women’s colleges, liberal arts education, a conversation with Bangladeshi student associations at U.S. universities, and other topics related to both undergraduate and graduate studies in the United States.
Speakers include U.S. Embassy officials, U.S. university alumni and admission officials, who will cover application preparation, scholarships and financial aid, and share perspectives with prospective Bangladeshi students.