asia
Major jolt for BJP as top leader joins Mamata's party in Bengal
In a major jolt to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal, a senior leader of the saffron outfit quit on Friday only to return to the eastern state's ruling Trinamool Congress that he co-founded with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in 1998.
Mukul Roy, the BJP's first import from Mamata's Trinamool Congress in Bengal, was re-inducted into the regional party, along with son Shubhranshu, in the presence of Mamata at a ceremony in state capital Kolkata. "Mukul has returned home. He was never a traitor like the others. More will come back," Mamata said, welcoming back her former party colleague.
Read: Bengal's ruling party makes Mamata's nephew second-in-command
Addressing the media at the Trinamool Congress headquarters, 67-year-old Mukul said, "I feel great at seeing my old colleagues, after leaving the BJP. I can't be in the BJP. Mamata is the only leader of Bengal and India."In fact, speculation was rife about Mukul's possible return to the Trinamool Congress after Mamata's nephew and the party's second-in-command Abhishek Banerjee last week visited the politician at the hospital where his wife was undergoing treatment. The very next day, Prime Minister Modi called Mukul up and enquired about his wife's health.
Mukul briefly served as India's Railway Minister in 2012, when Mamata's Trinamool Congress was part of then Congress-led ruling United Progressive Alliance government, which was decimated by Modi's BJP two years later. He left the Trinamool Congress and joined the BJP in 2017.
Read: India: Mamata inducts 43 Ministers into her Cabinet
Mukul's departure from the BJP is a huge setback for the saffron outfit after its humiliating defeat in April-May's assembly polls in West Bengal. Mamata single handedly pulled off an astounding victory in the election, defying anti-incumbency and staving off a huge challenge from the BJP.
Though her party swept back to power with a resounding majority of 213 seats in the 292-member assembly, the 66-year-old lost her own seat in Nandigram to her former protege-turned-rival Suvendu Adhikari by a thin margin of around 2,000 votes. "This win has saved Bengal, it has saved our culture and tradition," she said on the counting day.
Read: Game over: How an injured Mamata won against a fully fit saffron squad
The BJP though has made major gains in Bengal, winning some 77 seats. In 2016, the party had just three legislators in the state. However, the Left Front has failed to grab a single seat this time. The Left Front ruled Bengal for 34 years -- from 1977 to 2011.
Bengal witnessed the most high-profile contest in India's recently held state elections. While Mamata harped on being Bengal’s daughter, the BJP asked people to vote for "change and socio-economic development" after 50 years of Communist and Trinamool Congress rule. Top BJP leaders, including PM Modi, spearheaded the election campaign in Bengal.
China’s children may be next in line for COVID-19 vaccines
If China is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80% of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of children may have to start rolling up their sleeves.
Regulators took the first step last week by approving the use of the country’s Sinovac vaccine for children aged 3 to 17, and on Friday announced the same for the Sinopharm vaccine. No date has been set for the shots to start.
Children have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do catch the virus. But experts say children can still transmit the virus to others and some note that if countries are going to achieve herd immunity through their vaccination campaigns, inoculating children should be part of the plan.
“Vaccinating children is an important step forward,” said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong’s medical school.
Read: Senators say US donating vaccines to Taiwan amid China row
Doing so, however, may be easier said than done for reasons ranging from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine availability.
Even in countries with enough vaccines to go around, some governments are having problems convincing adults that the shots are safe and necessary despite studies demonstrating they are. Such concerns can be amplified when dealing with society’s youngest.
There’s also the issue of approval. Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids, with the majority of shots approved only for adults right now. But the approvals are starting. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are all allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.
The Sinovac and Sinopharm announcements could open the way for the vaccines, already in use in dozens of countries from Brazil to Indonesia, to be given to children across the world.
In Thailand, where Sinovac makes much of the country’s vaccine supply, Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul welcomed the news that China had approved emergency use for children.
“Once it gets approved, we are ready to provide the vaccine to cover all ages,” Anutin said Monday.
Read:Asia welcomes US vaccine donations amid cold storage worries
Other vaccine makers are also working to expand access to younger people. Moderna is seeking permission to use its shot in children as young as 12, like Pfizer. Both companies have studies underway in even younger children, down to age 6 months.
Another obstacle to vaccinating children is that many countries are still struggling to get enough doses to inoculate their higher-risk adult populations. Thailand, for example, has vaccinated only 4% of its population so far and adult demand for vaccines far outweighs supply.
“Right now given the shortages of vaccines, any available vaccine should be placed in age-based prioritization and risk-based prioritization,” said Jerome Kim, head of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul. “It’s really important to get this vaccine out in the places it’s needed now.”
In many places there are also concerns among the public about the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines versus Western rivals. While efficacy rates cannot be compared directly, owing to the trials being conducted under different conditions, the Western vaccines have shown to be very effective in preventing infection in real world tests. Sinovac’s shot has been shown to be effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization. Sinopharm’s shot has revealed comparatively less data.
The World Health Organization have approved both vaccines for emergency use in adults aged 18 and older, paving the way for its use in global programs aiming to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. The WHO has given no indication of when it might approve it for those younger.
Vaccines are often approved separately for adults and children because younger immune systems may react differently to the doses. Experts say inactivated vaccines are generally considered safe for children, as the technology has been in use for a long time, such as in mandatory childhood immunization programs, and have shown low risk.
Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine expert at Flinders University in Australia, said that while it is reasonable to assume the vaccines would safe for children, he questioned the necessity of vaccinating them against a virus they are relatively protected from using a vaccine that has yet to show it blocks transmission.
Read:Asia-Pacific trade ministers mull vaccine access, supply
“As far as I am aware there is no data to suggest the Sinovac vaccine will block transmission in children,” he wrote in an email. “Without such evidence we need to ask why we are immunising the children.”
China has a population of 1.4 billion, meaning it needs to inoculate 560 million people to reach its goal of 40% vaccination by June and 1.12 billion people to get to the 80% goal. It will be hard to do the latter without vaccinating many of its 254 million children who are younger than 14.
When China starts inoculating children will be determined by the government’s National Health Commission in accordance with the epidemic situation, Sinovac CEO Yin Weidong told state broadcaster CCTV last week.
A spokesperson for Sinovac did not respond to a call requesting comment. China’s National Health Commission directed the AP to a news report that summarized Yin’s comments.
Indian state revises death counts up by 70%
The Indian state of Bihar has increased its COVID-19 death toll after the discovery of thousands of unreported cases, raising concerns that many more fatalities were not officially recorded.
The health department in Bihar, one of the poorest states, on Thursday revised its COVID-19 fatality count to more than 9,429 from 5,424 — a jump of more than 70%.
Officials said the 3,951 unreported fatalities had occurred in May and reflect “deaths reported at private hospitals, in transit to health facilities, under home isolation and those dying of post COVID-19 complications.”
READ: India's cumulative Covid-19 vaccine coverage crosses 240 million-mark
Health experts say many COVID-19 fatalities remain unrecorded in India, more so during the latest surge in April and May, when hospitals ran unbearably full and oxygen supplies were low.
India’s federal ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have dismissed reports of undercounting as exaggerated and misleading. In the past, states like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have also recalibrated death numbers.
Overall, India’s cases and deaths have fallen steadily in the past weeks.
READ: India reports record high of 6,148 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours
The 91,702 cases added in the past 24 hours pushed India’s total to more than 29.3 million on Friday, second only to the United States. The Health Ministry also reported 3,403 fatalities in the past 24 hours, raising the overall death toll to 363,079.
G-7 to put off agreement on when to end coal-fired power generation
The Group of Seven leaders are making final arrangements to put off an agreement on the timing for ending coal-fired power generation despite a strong push from Britain, which will host their meeting this weekend, diplomatic sources said Thursday.
Britain has sounded out to its G-7 peers -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States plus the European Union -- about expressing deeper commitment to abandoning coal-fired power when the leaders gather for a three-day meeting from Friday in Cornwall, but it has faced opposition from some members, including Japan, the sources said.
Japan agrees on the need to enhance efforts to realize decarbonization and set the path to exit from coal-fired power generation in the future.
But it currently relies heavily on coal for electricity generation as most of the country's nuclear plants have remained halted for safety checks following the 2011 Fukushima crisis.
Also read: G-7 finance ministers agree on 15% int'l minimum corporate tax rate
Japan has told Britain of the situation, according to the sources.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga will attend a G-7 summit for the first time since he took office last year.
The leaders are also expected to express concern about China in a post-summit statement, the sources said, over its heightened military activities in the South and East China seas and alleged human right abuses.
They will reaffirm the position held by their foreign ministers, who met last month and agreed that China's practices are undermining a free and fair economy, while also warning over the human rights issues in Tibet and the Xinjiang autonomous region.
Japan and the United States have pushed to include in the G-7 leaders' statement the importance of peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait but some other G-7 members are reluctant as they want to maintain friendly economic relations with China, said the sources.
Also read: G-7 vows ‘equitable’ world vaccine access, but details scant
China has raised military pressure on Taiwan, regarding the democratic, self-ruled island as a renegade province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary.
Beijing expressed opposition when Taiwan was mentioned in the statements released after Japan recently held respective summit talks with the United States and the European Union.
At requests from Japan, the G-7 will also make clear its support for Tokyo to host this summer's Olympics and Paralympics, which have been postponed from last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the sources said.
The move comes as Suga has been struggling to turn public opinion in favor of the games. Media polls have shown that a large majority of Japanese people are concerned about the further spread of the virus and are opposed to going ahead with the events.
Asia welcomes US vaccine donations amid cold storage worries
Health officials and experts in Asia have welcomed U.S. plans to share 500 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine with the developing world, but some say it would take more than donations alone to address huge vaccination gaps that threaten to prolong the pandemic.
President Joe Biden was set to make the announcement Thursday in a speech before the start of the Group of Seven summit in Britain. Two hundred million doses — enough to fully protect 100 million people — would be shared this year, with the balance to be donated in the first half of 2022, according to a source familiar with the matter who confirmed the news of the Pfizer sharing plan.
Jaehun Jung, a professor of preventive medicine at South Korea’s Gachon University College of Medicine, said the U.S. donations may proveto be a “huge turning point” in the global fight against COVID-19, but also lamented that the help couldn’t come earlier.
He said the extremely cold storage temperatures required for Pfizer shots would present challenges for countries with poor health systems and called for U.S. officials and the New York-based drug maker to explore the possibility of easing the requirements.
Read:AP source: US to buy 500M Pfizer vaccines to share globally
He said the delay in U.S. help was “understandable, because the United States initially had its own troubles with supplies while inoculating its own population. But for now, it’s critical to move up the timing of the vaccine provisions to the earliest possible point.”
According to the person who spoke to the AP, the Biden administration plans to provide the 500 million shots it purchases from Pfizer to 92 lower income countries and the African Union over the next year through the U.N.-backed COVAX program.
The United States has faced increasing pressure to outline its global vaccine sharing plan. Inequities in supplies around the world have become more pronounced while there’s increasing concern over newer virus variants emerging from areas with consistently high COVID-19 circulation.
The White House had earlier announced plans to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June, most through COVAX.
The additional donation of the Pfizer shots is crucial because the global disparity in vaccination has become a multidimensional threat: a human catastrophe, a $5 trillion economic loss for advanced economies, and a contributor to the generation of mutant viruses, said Jerome Kim, the head of the International Vaccine Institute, a non-profit dedicated to making vaccines available to developing countries.
Read: G7 must ensure vaccine access in developing countries: UN experts
Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said the success of Biden’s vaccine-sharing plan would depend mainly on how fast the shots could be manufactured and sent to countries in need amid global shortages.
She also echoed Jung’s concerns about Pfizer’s cold chain requirements and said the U.S. donations should be accompanied with efforts to improve infrastructure and educate health workers in receiving countries.
“It’s very important to manage international cooperation so that the whole world can be vaccinated quickly,” she said during a briefing.
The United States has yet to confirm the 92 lower-income countries that would be receiving the Pfizer shots.
In Asia, Jung said that India and Southeast Asia are in desperate need of donations. Vaccinating isolated North Korea could also prove to be a difficult challenge.
Some experts say donations alone wouldn’t be enough to close the huge gaps in supplies and call for a transition toward a distributed system of vaccine manufacturing where qualified companies around the world would produce their own shots without intellectual property constraints.
Read: WTO panel considers easing protections on COVID-19 vaccines
But Jung said many developing countries depending on COVAX donations don’t have the industrial resources to manufacture advanced vaccines like Pfizer’s mRNA shots.
As countries around the world struggled to access vaccines, unable to secure bilateral deals with companies like Pfizer, many have turned to China. China has exported 350 million doses of its vaccines to dozens of countries, according to its Foreign Ministry.
China has pledged 10 million doses to COVAX, and the Chinese drug maker Sinopharm said last week it had just finished a batch of vaccines for sharing with COVAX. The WHO had approved the vaccine for emergency use last month.
While Chinese vaccines have faced scrutiny because of a lack of transparency in sharing clinical trial data, many countries were desperate to take what was available and found the shots easier to use as they could be stored in normal refrigerators.
Building collapse kills 11 after monsoon flooding in Mumbai
A dilapidated building collapsed following heavy rains in the western Indian city of Mumbai, killing at least 11 people and injuring seven others, police said Thursday.
Heavy monsoon rains during the day Wednesday had flooded several parts of the city that is India’s financial and entertainment capital.
Read: India reports record high of 6,148 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours
The three-story building collapsed late Wednesday night, and police officer Ravindra Kadam said dozens of rescuers were clearing the debris to find any residents possibly still trapped.
The New Delhi Television channel said the building collapsed onto another structure in a slum in the Malad West area of Mumbai.
Read: 17 killed in India road crash
Residents joined the fire and police officers in rescuing people and they took the seven injured to a hospital in the suburban Kandivali area.
Mumbai recorded 222 millimeters (8 inches) of rain in 12 hours Wednesday. Tidal waves that reached up to 4. 6 meters (13 feet) prevented the rainfall from being drained, and roads, rail tracks and neighborhoods were left waterlogged.
Read:18 die in India chemical factory fire
Building collapses are common in India during the June-September monsoon season when heavy rains weaken the foundations of structures that are poorly built.
In 2019, a three-story building collapsed in a hilly area in the northern Indian town of Solan following heavy rains, killing 14 people. A four-story building collapsed in Mumbai the same year and killed 10 people.
India reports record high of 6,148 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours
India reported a record high of 6,148 COVID-19 deaths during the past 24 hours, taking the total death toll in the country to 359,676, said the federal health ministry on Thursday.
Read:17 killed in India road crash
Meanwhile, 94,052 new cases were recorded in the period, the third consecutive day when less than 100,000 cases were reported in a single day. The total caseload stands at 29,183,121.
There are still 1,167,952 active cases in the country, a decrease of 63,463 since Wednesday. As many as 27,655,493 people have recovered and been discharged from hospitals so far.
Read: India's COVID-19 death toll crosses 350,000
‘Relations with China at a crossroads’: S Jaishankar
At the second event of the series ‘India’s Place in the World’, a collaboration between The Indian Express and Financial Times, senior policy leaders spoke on India’s diplomatic position in the new world order, and its evolving ties with the United States and China, reports The Indian Express.
On US-China relations
When one contemplates the world today, it’s important to first understand what it is not. It is not cold war 2.0 because you don’t have that kind of sharp military confrontation that the Cold War did. The systems are not as firewalled as they were in that era. A lot of things have become so much clearer in the last one year, in terms of the behaviour of states. The West isn’t cohesive, and the non-West is so differentiated. There’s nothing like the Covid-19 challenge to remind us of how interconnected and interdependent the world has become. Climate change is another example. When we speak about the US and China, there is a uniqueness to the relationship. But the point which Secretary Antony Blinken made early in the Biden administration — that the US has to have the ability to compete and collaborate at the same time — is true of all major relationships. The US-China relation is a key element of the global situation.
On the future of India-China relations
I don’t have a clear answer at this point of time. We had the border conflict of 1962 and it took us 26 years to have a prime minister visit China, when Rajiv Gandhi went there in 1988. And there was a 1988 consensus, which is stabilising the border. So if you look at the first decade of the relationship, it was focussed on that. There were two very important agreements in 1993 and 1996, which have led to another 30 years of peace and tranquillity in the border areas. Those agreements stipulated that you would not bring on large armed forces to the border and that the Line of Actual Control (LAC) will be respected. Now, what we saw last year was, frankly, China departing from the 1988 consensus. Now, if you disturb peace and tranquillity, if there is intimidation and friction at the border, obviously it’s going to tell on the relationship. So, my honest answer to you is that I think the relationship is at a crossroads. The border tensions cannot continue with cooperation in other areas.
On the expanding agenda of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
With the passage of time, any initiative will mature. As someone who was there when the first meeting of the Quad started, when I was still foreign secretary, I’ve seen it grow, and that the agenda has expanded. Today, you have multiple countries that have a growing degree of comfort with each other, who find that they have a shared interest in key global and regional challenges like connectivity, maritime security, technology, vaccines, resilient supply chains and climate change. The Americans are much more willing to work with other partners now. To a great degree, Japan has started to have clearer positions in terms of its own interests in the world, so has Australia. And as far as India is concerned, more than 50 per cent of my economic interests today live east of India. So, the Quad fills a gap that cannot be addressed simply by four bilateral relationships aggregated.
On relations with Europe
If I give you the Indian perspective, look at the change in our relationship with the US. It’s natural that the very same logic also makes a stronger case for a better relationship with Europe, including the United Kingdom, which is now out of the European Union. So you can see the broad strategic calculations that are unfolded with a different set of partners. We had, at one time, fairly close political relations with Europe, and then for a variety of reasons that kind of trailed off. People don’t readily figure out that the EU is our biggest trade and investment partner. From their perspective, they see the rise of India and the gains from a stronger partnership. The Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) has invested more diplomatic energy in Europe than probably any of his predecessors.
State media: Kim has plans to stabilize N. Korean economy
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presented economic plans to senior ruling party officials before an upcoming meeting to review efforts to overcome hardships brought about by the pandemic, state media said Tuesday.
The Korean Central News Agency said Kim held his consultations Monday in preparation for a meeting of the Workers’ Party’s powerful Central Committee at which they will discuss state affairs for the first half of 2021. The meeting was set for early June and could take place as early as this week.
Read:After Trump setbacks, Kim Jong Un starts over with Biden
Kim’s plans were not specified but were described as intending to bring “tangible change” to stabilizing the economy and people’s living conditions.
The North Korean economy has been crippled by decades of mismanagement, U.S.-led sanctions over Kim’s nuclear weapons program and the coronavirus pandemic. South Korean officials say there are no signs North Korea is easing the border controls it imposed at the start of the pandemic or importing more industrial and agricultural materials to boost production.
The Workers’ Party last held a plenary meeting of Central Committee members in February, when Kim ripped into state economic agencies for their “passive and self-protecting tendencies” in setting their annual goals.
Earlier in the year, at the party’s first congress since 2016, Kim urged his people to be resilient in the struggle for economic self-reliance and called for reasserting greater state control over the economy, boosting agricultural production and prioritizing the development of chemicals and metal industries. Those sectors have been critically depleted by sanctions and halted imports of factory materials amid the pandemic.
Read:North Korea holds huge military parade as Kim vows nuclear might
Kim has shown unusual candor in addressing the North’s economic problems in recent political speeches, saying that the country was facing its “worst ever” situation due to COVID-19, sanctions and heavy flooding last summer that decimated crops. He even called for his people to brace for another “arduous march,” a term that had been used to describe a 1990s famine that killed hundreds of thousands.
In a meeting of the Workers’ Party’s political bureau last week, Kim expressed appreciation that a lot of economic works were being sped up thanks to the “ideological enthusiasm and fighting spirit of self-reliance” demonstrated by the party and his people. But he also said there was a need to correct unspecified “deflective matters,” which he said would be discussed at Central Committee’s plenary meeting.
While North Korea monitoring groups have yet to detect signs of mass starvation or major instability, some analysts say conditions could be aligning for a perfect storm that undercuts food and exchange markets and triggers public panic.
The Geneva-based Assessment Capacities Project, a nonprofit that specializes in humanitarian needs assessment, said in May that it considers North Korea to be at high risk of a humanitarian crisis. It said poor economic governance, repressive political measures and an increasing dependence on internal production amid a cutback in imports have negatively impacted the country’s population.
“Chronic food insecurity and limited access to basic services, such as health care and clean water, have left more than 10 million people in need of humanitarian assistance,” the group said.
Read:North Korea’s Kim adds title: General secretary of ruling party
The economic setbacks have left Kim with nothing to show for his ambitious diplomacy with former President Donald Trump, which failed to bring the North sanctions relief, and the North has so far ignored the Biden administration’s calls to resume dialogue.
Some experts say Kim could use the upcoming Central Committee meeting to address the stalled diplomatic efforts.
India's COVID-19 death toll crosses 350,000
India's COVID-19 death toll surpassed the 350,000-mark, reaching 351,309 on Tuesday, confirmed the country's health ministry.
As many as 2,123 people died due to the pandemic during the past 24 hours.
Read: 18 die in India chemical factory fire
Besides, as many as 86,498 new COVID-19 cases were registered since Monday morning, taking the total tally to 28,996,473.
This is the lowest single-day spike in more than two months.
There are still 1,303,702 active cases in the country, as there was a decrease of 97,907 cases in the past 24 hours. The number of daily active cases has been on the decline over the past several days, after a continuous surge since mid-April.
Read: As India’s surge wanes, families deal with the devastation
A total of 27,341,462 people have been cured and discharged from hospitals so far across the country, showed the latest data from the federal health ministry.