health
US: Big drop in migrant kids at largest emergency shelter
The number of migrant children housed at the Biden administration’s largest emergency shelter for those who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone has dropped by more than 40% since mid-June, a top U.S. official said Monday, touting progress at the facility that has been criticized by child welfare advocates.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters that 790 boys were housed at Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, and the last girl left Monday. All the girls were reunited either with relatives in the U.S. or a sponsor such as a family friend or sent to licensed facilities, which have a higher standard of care, according to the agency responsible for caring for migrant children.
In mid-June, the administration reported about 2,000 boys and girls were at the Fort Bliss facility amid child welfare advocates’ concerns about inadequate conditions. A high of 4,800 children were housed there in May.
Becerra said his agency was evaluating whether it can close some of the emergency shelters that the government opened in the spring as record numbers of unaccompanied children crossed the border. He declined to say whether Fort Bliss would be among them.
Read:Uprooted again: Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves
“Because we’ve been successful in managing the flow, we are prepared to begin the demobilization of several of our emergency intake sites,” Becerra said.
He made his second visit to Fort Bliss since it opened in March and said more services and staffing have been added, including case managers who have helped get children released to relatives in the U.S. or placed in licensed facilities more quickly.
In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys and filed in federal court in Los Angeles last week, migrant children described their desperation to get out of Fort Bliss and the other large shelters set up by the Biden administration.
The children were interviewed from March to June by attorneys monitoring a longstanding settlement governing custody conditions for migrant children.
Read:In post-pandemic Europe, migrants will face digital fortress
Some of the children said they did not know if anyone was working to reunite them with their families, giving them anxiety. Others did not have enough access to a mental health counselor, had trouble sleeping because lights were kept on at night and were avoiding meals because the food smelled foul. Several said they spent their days sleeping and had been in the facilities, like Fort Bliss, for more than a month.
Vice President Kamala Harris visited El Paso on Friday, and her spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, told reporters that President Joe Biden has instructed Becerra to “do a thorough investigation” and report back about the conditions at Fort Bliss, which advocates have called particularly troubling.
“The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,” Sanders said.
Shaw Drake, staff attorney and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, applauded the reduction in the number of children housed at Fort Bliss but questioned why it has taken this long to see real progress in releasing kids from the government’s unlicensed shelters.
Drake praised the Biden administration for helping get children out of overcrowded holding facilities for adult migrants by opening more than dozen emergency shelters quickly. But he said “immediately after that, the focus should have been to reunify children with sponsors, and it seemed like that languished and left kids in places like Fort Bliss far too long.”
Read:Migrant kids crowded into Texas facility as space runs low
A rise in the number of migrant children crossing the southwest border alone has challenged the Biden administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has more than 14,200 migrant children in its care, down from 22,000 two months ago.
Becerra said more children are in licensed shelters now than unlicensed facilities, a reversal from a government report in May. He said officials are working to get more beds made available at licensed facilities.
“We have continued to expand our capacity, and as a result, we’re able to discharge more of these children into the hands of a responsible, vetted custodian, which then frees up a bed for another child,” he said.
Despite the improvements, Becerra said the shelters are not a solution and urged Congress to fix what he called a broken immigration system.
Uprooted again: Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves
Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with her fellow migrants, a tearful respite after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing onto someone’s backyard lawn, where, seconds before, she stepped on American soil for the first time.
“I won’t say it again,” interrupts a U.S. Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a dozen others to get into an idling detention van. “Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else — earrings, chains, rings, watches — in your backpacks. Hats and shoelaces too.”
It’s a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren’t farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. They’re bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they’re arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.
Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and rushed to catch a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. Between phone calls to loved ones who didn’t know where she was, the 54-year-old recounted fleeing hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and once-solid career as an elementary school teacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.
Read:Rescuers stay hopeful about finding more survivors in rubble
But when the little work she found cleaning houses dried up, she decided to uproot again — this time without her children.
“It’s over, it’s all over,” she said into the phone recently, crying as her toddler grandson appeared shirtless on screen. “Everything was perfect. I didn’t stop moving for one second.”
Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border — more than all 14 years for which records exist.
The surprise increase has drawn comparisons to the midcentury influx of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist rule. It’s also a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.
Many of the nearly 17,306 Venezuelans who have crossed the southern border illegally since January had been living for years in other South American countries, part of an exodus of nearly 6 million Venezuelans since President Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013.
While some are government opponents fearing harassment and jailing, the vast majority are escaping long-running economic devastation marked by blackouts and shortages of food and medicine.
With the pandemic still raging in many parts of South America, they have had to relocate again. Increasingly, they’re being joined at the U.S. border by people from the countries they initially fled to — even larger numbers of Ecuadorians and Brazilians have arrived this year — as well as far-flung nations hit hard by the virus, like India and Uzbekistan.
U.S. government data shows that 42% of all families encountered along the border in May hailed from places other than Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the traditional drivers of migratory trends. That compares with just 8% during the last sharp increase in migration in 2019. The Border Patrol recorded more than 180,000 encounters in May, a two-decade high that includes migrants’ repeated attempts to cross.
Compared with other migrants, Venezuelans garner certain privileges — a reflection of their firmer financial standing, higher education levels and U.S. policies that have failed to remove Maduro but nonetheless made deportation all but impossible.
The vast majority enter the U.S. near Del Rio, a town of 35,000 people, and they don’t try to evade detention but rather turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents to seek asylum.
Like many of the dozens of Venezuelans The Associated Press spoke to this month in Del Rio, 27-year-old Lis Briceno had already migrated once before. After graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering, she couldn’t get hired in the oil fields near her hometown of Maracaibo without declaring her loyalty to Venezuela’s socialist leadership. So she moved to Chile a few years ago, finding work with a technology company.
But as anti-government unrest and the pandemic tanked Chile’s economy, sales plunged and her company shuttered.
Read:Disappearances rise on Mexico’s ‘highway of death’ to border
Briceno sold what she could — a refrigerator, a telephone, her bed — to raise the $4,000 needed for her journey to the U.S. She filled a backpack and set out with a heart lock amulet she got from a friend to ward off evil spirits.
“I always thought I’d come here on vacation, to visit the places you see in the movies,” Briceno said. “But doing this? Never.”
While Central Americans and others can spend months trekking through the jungle, stowing away on freight trains and sleeping in makeshift camps run by cartels on their way north, most Venezuelans reach the U.S. in as little as four days.
“This is a journey they’re definitely prepared for from a financial standpoint,” said Tiffany Burrow, who runs the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition’s shelter in Del Rio, where migrants can eat, clean up and buy bus tickets to Miami, Houston and other cities with large Venezuelan communities.
They first fly to Mexico City or Cancun, where foreign visitors are down sharply but nearly 45,000 Venezuelans arrived in the first four months of 2021. Smugglers promoting themselves as “travel agencies” have cropped up on Facebook, claiming to offer hassle-free transport to the U.S. in exchange for about $3,000.
“We’re doing things the way they do things here — under the table,” a smuggler said in a voice message a migrant shared with the AP. “You’ll never be alone. Someone will always be with you.”
The steep price includes a guided sendoff from Ciudad Acuna, where the bulk of Venezuelans cross the Rio Grande. The hardscrabble town a few hundred wet steps from Del Rio is attractive to both smugglers and migrants with deeper pockets because it had been largely spared the violence seen elsewhere on the border.
“If you’re a smuggler in the business of moving a commodity — because that’s how they view money, guns, people, drugs and everything they move, as a product — then you want to move it through the safest area possible charging the highest price,” said Austin L. Skero II, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector.
But the number of smugglers caught with weapons has recently increased in the area, and agents who normally hunt down criminals are tied up processing migrants.
The uptick in migrants crossing is “purely a diversion tactic used by the cartels” to carry out crime, Skero said as a group of Haitians carrying young children emerged from a thicket of tall carrizo cane on the riverbank.
Once in the U.S., Venezuelans tend to fare better than other groups. In March, Biden granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans. The designation allows people coming from countries ravaged by war or disaster to work legally in the U.S. and gives protection from deportation.
While new arrivals don’t qualify, Venezuelans requesting asylum — as almost all do — tend to succeed, partly because the U.S. government corroborates reports of political repression. Only 26% of asylum requests from Venezuelans have been denied this year, compared with an 80% rejection rate for asylum-seekers from poorer, violence-plagued countries in Central America, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“I can write their asylum requests almost by heart,” said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, who has represented over 100 Venezuelans. “These are higher-educated people who can advocate for themselves and tell their story in a chronological, clean way that judges are accustomed to thinking.”
Read: In post-pandemic Europe, migrants will face digital fortress
Even Venezuelans facing deportation have hope. The Trump administration broke diplomatic relations with Maduro when it recognized Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader in 2019. Air travel is suspended, even charter flights, making removal next to impossible.
Meanwhile, as the migrants leave Del Rio to reconnect with loved ones in the U.S., they are confident that with sacrifice and hard work, they’ll get an opportunity denied them back home.
Briceno said that if she had stayed in Venezuela, she would earn the equivalent of $50 a month — barely enough to scrape by.
“The truth is,” says Briceno, hustling to catch a bus to Houston where her boyfriend landed a well-paying oil industry job, “it’s better to wash toilets here than being an engineer over there.”
Australia battles several clusters in new pandemic phase
Australia was battling to contain several COVID-19 clusters around the country on Monday in what some experts have described as the nation’s most dangerous stage of the pandemic since the earliest days.
Sydney in the east and Darwin in the north were locked down on Monday. Perth in the west made masks compulsory for three days and warned a lockdown could follow after a resident tested positive after visiting Sydney more than a week ago.
Brisbane and Canberra have or will soon make wearing masks compulsory. South Australia state announced new statewide restrictions from Tuesday.
Australia has been relatively successful in containing clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases since the pandemic began. But the new clusters have highlighted the nation’s slow vaccine rollout with only 5% of the population fully vaccinated.
Read:Australian court upholds ban on most international travel
Most of the new cases stem from a Sydney limousine driver who tested positive on June 16 to the delta variant, which is thought to be more contagious. He was not vaccinated, reportedly did not wear a mask and is suspected to have been infected while transporting a foreign air crew from Sydney Airport.
New South Wales state on Monday reported 18 new cases in the latest 24-hour period. The tally was fewer than 30 cases recorded on Sunday and 29 on Saturday.
Authorities warned that a two-week Sydney lockdown that began on Friday would not reduce infection rates for another five days.
“We have to be prepared for the numbers to bounce around and we also have to be prepared for the numbers to go up considerably,” New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
Health policy adviser Bill Bowtell, who was the architect of Australia’s first AIDS response in the 1980s, said the government needed to consider hastening vaccinations by shortening the gap between AstraZeneca shots from 12 to 8 weeks.
“We really face the most serious crisis in the COVID pandemic since the early days in February-March last year,” Bowtell said.
The crisis has also highlighted the dangers posed by hotel quarantine, which is the source of most cases of community virus spread in Australia.
Read:Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
A mine worker is suspected to have become infected with the delta variant while in hotel quarantine in Brisbane in Queensland state before flying to a gold mine in the Northern Territory.
The miner infected at least six people at the mine. One of the infected miners had since traveled home to Queensland and another to New South Wales.
Authorities were attempting to track down 900 mine workers around the country who could have been infected by the initial case.
The Northern Territory capital Darwin, and neighboring Palmerston, on Sunday locked down for 48 hours after an infected miner returned home to Palmerston.
That lockdown would be extended to Friday after another miner tested positive after returning home to Darwin on Friday, officials said on Monday. The Northern Territory has never before experienced COVID-19 spreading in the community.
Queensland on Monday reported three new cases, including the miner. She is one of 170 potentially infected miners who live in the state and fly to an from work.
Read:Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
Masks will become compulsory from Tuesday for two weeks in Brisbane and several surrounding towns.
“The next 24-to-48 hours are going to be very crucial in Queensland about whether or not we see any spread of this delta strain,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczu said.
The Queensland government has called on the federal government to tighten already tough border restrictions to reduce the number of travelers arriving in Australia.
Western Australia state reported one new case in Perth linked to the Sydney cluster. The state is home to 177 of the potentially infected miners.
Medical Degrees (Repeal) Bill placed in JS
The Medical Degrees (Repeal) Bill, 2021 was placed in Parliament on Monday.
Health and Family Welfare Minister Zahid Maleque placed the Bill and it was sent to the respective Standing Committee for further examination.
Read:Medical College (Governing Bodies) (Repeal), Bill 2021 placed in parliament
The Committee was asked to submit its report within seven days.
The proposed law will abolish the Medical Degrees Act 1916 after its enactment as the law lost its necessity following the enactment of Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council (BMDC) Act 2010.
Read:Bill passed to ensure safe child daycare centres
The Medical Degrees Act 1916 actually used to determine everything regarding the medical degrees and their standards.
Read:BHBFC to have extended areas of services; Bill lands in JS
But all provisions of the act were incorporated in the BMDC Act 2010.
So, the Medical Degrees Act 1916 doesn’t have any necessity now.
Global Covid-19 case approaching 181 million
Amid countries’ struggle to contain the pandemic , the global Covid-19 caseload is fast approaching the grim milestone of 181 million.
The total caseload and fatalities from the virus stand at 180, 726,834 and 3,915,760 respectively as of Sunday morning, as per Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
So far, 2,850,928, 759 Covid vaccine doses have been administered across the globe, as per the university data.
Read: COVID-19: Daily caseload drops on back of reduced tests, as positivity keeps rising
The US has logged 33,621,391 cases and 603,885 deaths to date. The death toll in the United States is the highest in the world.
Brazil registered 1,593 more deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the national death toll to 512,735, the health ministry said Saturday.
A total of 64,134 new infections were detected, raising the total caseload to 18,386,894, the ministry said.
India's COVID-19 tally rose to 30,183,143 on Saturday, with 48,698 new cases registered during the past 24 hours, according to the health ministry.
Read: India’s covid curve could raise the world’s
The death toll increased to 394,493 as 1,183 deaths were recorded since Friday morning.
Situation in Bangladesh
The death toll from Covid-19 in Bangladesh crossed 14,000 on Saturday as health authorities reported 77 fresh deaths.
The latest deaths took the overall national tally to 14,053. The last one thousand deaths have been recorded in just 15 days, as the number of fatalities crossed 13,000 on June 11.
Read: 17 more Covid patients die at Rajshahi hospital
The deadly virus was reported to have killed 108 people on Friday, the 2nd highest number in daily deaths since the outbreak of Covid in Bangladesh in March, 2020.
The daily caseload also fell sharply, with 4,334 new cases pushing up the total caseload to 8,83,138. On Friday health authorities reported 5,869 new cases.
Meanwhile, the case fatality rate remained static at 1.59%.
Covid claims three more lives in Sylhet
Over 150 more people have tested positive for Covid in Sylhet division in the past 24 hours. Three more persons have also succumbed to the virus, health officials said Friday.
Of the 155 people, some 89 are from Sylhet district, five from Sunamganj, eight from Habiganj and 36 are from Moulvibazar, according to a report signed by Sultana Razia, Divisional Director of Health.
Read:Sinopharm doses reach Sylhet, Sherpur, Chattogram
Some 17 people have been admitted to different hospitals of Sylhet division in 24 hours till Friday morning. Of them, 15 are from Sylhet, and one each from Sunamganj and Moulavibazar, according to officials.
A total of 291 people are currently undergoing treatment at different hospitals of Sylhet division. Besides, 100 more have recovered from corona in the past 24 hours.
Read: Lockdown: Police barricades at 14 points in Sylhet
With the new numbers, the division's Covid caseload now stands at 24,807 and of them, 16,427 people have been infected in Sylhet district alone.
Some 23,141 have recovered from the virus to date. And 459 people have so far died of Covid in the division.
Witnesses say airstrike in Ethiopia’s Tigray kills dozens
An airstrike hit a busy market in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray village of Togoga on Tuesday, according to health workers who said soldiers blocked medical teams from traveling to the scene. Dozens of people were killed, they and a former resident said, citing witnesses.
Two doctors and a nurse in Tigray’s regional capital, Mekele, told The Associated Press they were unable to confirm how many people were killed, but one doctor said health workers at the scene reported “more than 80 civilian deaths.” The health workers spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The alleged airstrike comes amid some of the fiercest fighting in the Tigray region since the conflict began in November as Ethiopian forces supported by those from neighboring Eritrea pursue Tigray’s former leaders. A spokeswoman for Ethiopia’s prime minister did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wounded patients being treated at Mekele’s Ayder hospital told health workers that a plane dropped a bomb on Togoga’s marketplace. The six patients included a 2-year-old child with “abdominal trauma” and a 6-year-old, the nurse said. An ambulance carrying a wounded baby to Mekele was blocked for two hours and the baby died on the way, the nurse added.
Read:UN: Famine is imminent in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region
Hailu Kebede, foreign affairs head for the Salsay Woyane Tigray opposition party and who comes from Togoga, told the AP that one fleeing witness to the attack had counted more than 30 bodies and other witnesses were reporting more than 50 people killed.
“It was horrific,” said a staffer with an international aid group who told the AP he had spoken with a colleague and others at the scene. “We don’t know if the jets were coming from Ethiopia or Eritrea. They are still looking for bodies by hand. More than 50 people were killed, maybe more.”
On Tuesday afternoon, a convoy of ambulances attempting to reach Togoga, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) west of Mekele, was turned back by soldiers near Tukul, the health workers said. Several more ambulances were turned back later in the day and on Wednesday morning, but one group of medical workers reached the site on Tuesday evening via a different route.
Those medical workers were treating 40 wounded people but told colleagues in Mekele that the number of wounded is likely higher as some people fled after the attack. Five of the wounded patients were said to need emergency operations but the health workers were unable to evacuate them.
“We have been asking, but until now we didn’t get permission to go, so we don’t know how many people are dead,” said one of the doctors in Mekele.
Another doctor said the Red Cross ambulance he was traveling in on Tuesday while trying to reach the scene was shot at twice by Ethiopian soldiers, who held his team for 45 minutes before ordering them back to Mekele.
Read: 'People are starving': New exodus in Ethiopia's Tigray area
“We are not allowed to go,” he said. “They told us whoever goes, they are helping the troops of the TPLF.”
The TPLF refers to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed Tigray until it was ousted by a federal government offensive in November. The subsequent fighting has killed thousands and forced more than 2 million people from their homes.
While the United Nations has said all sides have been accused of abuses, Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers have been repeatedly accused by witnesses of looting and destroying health centers across the Tigray region and denying civilians access to care.
This month, humanitarian agencies warned that 350,00 people in Tigray are facing famine. Aid workers have said they have been repeatedly denied access to several parts of the region by soldiers.
The government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed says it has nearly defeated the rebels. But forces loyal to the TPLF recently announced an offensive in parts of Tigray and have claimed a string of victories.
A resident in Adigrat, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Mekele, said a group of Tigrayan fighters briefly entered the town on Tuesday, although he said it had since been retaken by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. He said federal police had since been seen beating people in the center of the town.
Read:Amnesty report describes Axum massacre in Ethiopia’s Tigray
“Everybody is staying at home, there is no movement in the town,” he said.
Renewed fighting was also reported in Edaga Hamus and Wukro, two towns that sit on the main road to Mekele.
The reports came as Ethiopia held federal and regional elections on Monday. The vote was peaceful in most parts of the country, although there was no voting in Tigray.
The vote was delayed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, heightening tensions between the federal government and the TPLF, which went ahead with its own regional election in September.
US hits encouraging milestones on virus deaths and shots
COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have dipped below 300 a day for the first time since the early days of the disaster in March 2020, while the drive to put shots in arms hit another encouraging milestone Monday: 150 million Americans fully vaccinated.
The coronavirus was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But now, as the outbreak loosens its grip, it has fallen down the list of the biggest killers.
Read: Global hunger levels rise as conflict, climate shocks and Covid collide
CDC data suggests that more Americans are dying every day from accidents, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes or Alzheimer’s disease than from COVID-19.
The U.S. death toll stands at more than 600,000, while the worldwide count is close to 3.9 million, though the real figures in both cases are believed to be markedly higher.
About 45% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Over 53% of Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine. But U.S. demand for shots has slumped, to the disappointment of public health experts.
Dr. Ana Diez Roux, dean of Drexel University’s school of public health, said the dropping rates of infections and deaths are cause for celebration. But she cautioned that the virus still has a chance to spread and mutate given the low vaccination rates in some states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Idaho.
“So far it looks like the vaccines we have are effective against the variants that are circulating,” Diez Roux said. “But the more time the virus is jumping from person to person, the more time there is for variants to develop, and some of those could be more dangerous.”
Read:Afghanistan running out of oxygen as COVID surge worsens
New cases are running at about 11,400 a day on average, down from over a quarter-million per day in early January. Average deaths per day are down to about 293, according to Johns Hopkins University, after topping out at over 3,400 in mid-January.
In New York, which suffered mightily in the spring of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted on Monday that the state had 10 new deaths. At the height of the outbreak in the state, nearly 800 people a day were dying from the coronavirus.
Some states are faring worse than others. Missouri leads the nation in per-capita COVID-19 cases and is fourth behind California, Florida and Texas in the number of new cases per day over the past week despite its significantly smaller population.
The surge is being driven by new cases in a farming region in the northern part of the state and in the southwest corner, which includes the towns of Branson and Springfield. COVID-19 hospitalizations in southwest Missouri have risen 72% since the beginning of the month as of Friday.
The fall will bring new waves of infection, but they will be less severe and concentrated more in places with low vaccination rates, said Amber D’Souza, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Read:To launch J&J Covid shot in India, Biological E begins talks with govt lab to test vaccine
“So much depends on what happens over the summer and what happens with children,” D’Souza said. “Anyone who is not vaccinated can become infected and transmit the virus.”
Meanwhile, because of regulatory hurdles and other factors, President Joe Biden is expected to fall short of his commitment to share 80 million vaccine doses with the rest of the world by the end of June, officials said Monday.
US envoy hopes N. Korea responds positively on offered talks
President Joe Biden’s special envoy for North Korea said Monday he hopes to see a positive reaction from the North soon on U.S. offers for talks after the North Korean leader ordered officials to prepare for both dialogue and confrontation.
Read:North Korea's Kim vows to be ready for confrontation with US
Sung Kim, Biden’s special representative for North Korea, is in Seoul to speak with South Korean and Japanese officials about the U.S.’s stalled diplomacy with the North over its nuclear program and U.S.-led sanctions.
The trilateral talks followed a North Korean political conference last week where leader Kim Jong Un called for stronger efforts to improve his nation’s economy, further battered last year by pandemic border closures and now facing worsening food shortages.
After his meeting with senior South Korean diplomat Noh Kyu-duk, the U.S. envoy Sung Kim said the allies took note of the North Korean leader’s comments and are hoping the North will give a “positive response to our proposal for a meeting soon.”
Read:State media: Kim has plans to stabilize N. Korean economy
Sung Kim spoke later with Noh and Japanese nuclear envoy Takehiro Funakoshi over the stalled push to resolve the nuclear standoff with North Korea. “South Korea and the U.S will maintain close cooperation to keep the situation in the Korean Peninsula stable and find a way to resume the dialogue with North Korea as soon as possible,” Sung Kim told reporters.
North Korea’s economic setbacks followed the collapse of Kim Jong Un’s ambitious summitry with then-President Donald Trump in 2019, when the Americans rejected the North Koreans’ demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of their nuclear capabilities.
Kim Jong Un in recent political speeches has threatened to bolster his nuclear deterrent and claimed that the fate of diplomacy and bilateral relations depends on whether Washington abandons what he calls hostile policies.
Read: NKorean leader calls for meeting to review battered economy
U.S. officials have suggested Biden would take the middle ground between Trump’s direct dealings with Kim and President Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic patience.” But some experts say the North likely must take concrete steps toward denuclearization before the Biden administration would ease any sanctions.
Companies give vaccines to workers, boosting Japan’s rollout
Thousands of Japanese companies began distributing COVID-19 vaccines to workers and their families Monday in an employer-led drive reaching more than 13 million people that aims to rev up the nation’s slow vaccine rollout.
Yuka Daimaru, among the Suntory workers getting the shot on a sprawling office floor, was visibly relieved after spending more than a year worrying about the coronavirus.
“I was nervous, but it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would,” she said. “Now I don’t have to worry as much on commuter trains or at meetings.”
Read: China's comical picture 'The Last G-7' raps Japan's Fukushima water
The Tokyo-based beverage maker plans to inoculate 51,500 people, including part-time workers and employees’ families, with the Moderna vaccine.
About 3,500 companies have signed up for the free vaccines, and that number is growing. The companies must present a plan to inoculate at least 1,000 people per site. But they decide whom to include, such as families, affiliate companies and suppliers.
Universities are also eligible. Smaller companies can apply through organizations, such as the local merchant association, so ideally no one falls through the cracks, according to the health ministry.
Among those taking part are major automaker Toyota Motor Corp., planning to vaccinate 80,000 people at its plants and offices.
Read:Japan’s vaccine push ahead of Olympics looks to be too late
Fast Retailing, behind the Uniqlo clothing chain, is inoculating 18,500 people, including part-timers and cleaning and cafeteria staff, starting July 1.
Online retailer Rakuten said it’s vaccinating 60,000 workers and their families.
Company applications for the vaccines are accepted through February 2022.
Japan is relying totally on imported vaccines for a campaign that started in February with medical professionals. Only about 6% of Japanese are fully vaccinated. Japan has had more than 14,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Local governments and Japan’s self-defense forces are also leading the vaccination campaign, but the employer-led efforts are helping accelerate the pace.
Read:Japan opens mass vaccination centers 2 months before Games
Daisuke Sen, a human resources senior general manager at Suntory Holdings, said the vaccinations at his company will be completed by the end of August.
The first day for the vaccinations came after weeks of work, especially scrambling to find doctors and nurses to carry out the shots, he said.
“Getting here means so much for me,” he said.