LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) — The cost of life-saving treatment for the most severely malnourished children is set to jump by up to 16% due to the pandemic’s invasion of Ukraine and disruptions, according to the United Nations’ children’s agency.
The raw ingredients of the ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) have leapt in price amid the global food crisis sparked by the war and pandemic, UNICEF said.
Without further funding in the next six months, 600,000 more children may miss out on the essential treatment, which is a high-energy paste made of ingredients including peanuts, oil, sugar and added nutrients.
UNICEF said a carton of the specialized nutrition containing 150 packets – enough for 6 to 8 weeks to bring a severely malnourished child back to health – cost about $41 on average before the up to 16% price rise. It will need about $25 million to cover the added cost, the agency said.
Alongside the wider pressure on food security, including climate change, the price rise could lead to “catastrophic” levels of severe malnutrition, the children’s agency warning in a statement.
“The world is rapidly becoming a virtual tinderbox of preventable child deaths and child suffering from wasting,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
Severe wasting, when children are too thin for their height, affects 13.6 million children under 5 years old, and results in 1-in-5 deaths among this age group.
Even before the war and pandemic, 2-in-3 did not have access to the therapeutic food needed to save their lives, UNICEF said. (Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Christopher Cushing)
North Korea has reported another large jump in illnesses believed to be COVID-19 as the government mobilized a “powerful force” of to distribute drugs soldiers and thousands of health workers to help trace new infections.
The North’s anti-virus headquarters said on Tuesday that another 269,510 people were found with fevers and six people died, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
That raises North Korea’s total tally of people who became ill with fever since late April to 1,483,060 and its deaths to 56.
North Korea, which confirmed its first coronavirus outbreak last week, lacks testing supplies to confirm coronavirus infections in large numbers, and the report did not say how many of the fever cases were COVID-19.
The outbreak is almost certainly greater than the fever tally, considering the lack of tests and resources to monitor and treat the people who are sick. North Korea’s virus response is mostly isolating people with symptoms at shelters, and as of Tuesday, at least 663,910 people were in quarantine.
In addition to lacking vaccines for its 26 million people, North Korea also grapples with malnourishment and other conditions of poverty and lacks public health tools, including antiviral drugs or intensive care units, which suppressed hospitalisations and deaths in other countries.
The North’s number of deaths may surge in the coming weeks as those who develop symptoms later succumb to the illness.
KCNA said on Tuesday that a “powerful force” of the army’s medical corps has been to improve the supply of medicines in the capital, Pyongyang, the center of the epidemic, following an order by Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
The team’s mission was aimed at “defusing the public health crisis” in Pyongyang, it said.
The types of medicine being given to sick people were unclear, however.
‘Intensive medical examination’
Some senior members of the ruling workers’ Party’s powerful politburo visited pharmacies and medicine management offices to check supply and demand, KCNA said in another dispatch, after Kim criticized the ineffective distribution of drugs.
“They are called for establishing a more strict order in keeping and handling the medical supplies, maintaining the principle of prioritising the demand and convenience of the people in the supply,” KCNA said.
Tracing efforts were also intensified, with some 11,000 health officials, teachers and medical students joining an “intensive medical examination of all inhabitants” across the country to locate and treat people with fever.
Still, various sectors of the national economy are maintaining production and construction, while taking thorough anti-virus measures, KCNA added. Kim had ordered that limited activity be allowed in each city and county.
South Korea has publicly offered to send vaccines, medicine and health personnel, but North Korea has so far ignored the proposal amid icy relations between the rivals over a deadlock in larger nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.
Some experts say Kim’s praise of China’s pandemic response during a virus meeting last week indicates that the North would be more willing to receive help from its main ally.
North Korea’s Premier Kim Tok Hun inspects a pharmacy during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this undated photo released on May 17, 2022 [KCNA via Reuters]
Experts say the only realistic outside help would be offering limited supplies of vaccines to reduce deaths among high-risk groups, including the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions, as it is too late to stop the broad spread of the virus across the North’s population.
“With the country yet to initiate COVID-19 vaccination, there is a risk that the virus may spread rapidly among the masses unless curtailed with immediate and appropriate measures,” Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Southeast Asia, said in a statement.
Shee said WHO is ready to provide North Korea with technical support to increase testing and with essential medicines and medical supplies.
The United States also said it was concerned about the outbreak’s potential impact on North Koreans, and supports vaccine aid to the country.
“To this end, we strongly support and encourage the efforts of the US and international aid and health organizations in seeking to prevent and contain the spread of COVID-19 … and to provide other forms of humanitarian assistance to vulnerable groups in the country,” said a spokesperson for the US Department of State.
Chinese shipyards that are at the heart of Beijing’s drive to modernise its navy are also seeing orders and technology transfer worth billions of dollars from commercial shipping companies in dealings that researchers say could inadvertently help the Chinese military’s modernization plans.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says the evidence suggests profits from foreign orders are probably helping “lower the costs of upgrading China’s navy”.
China is the largest builder of large ocean-going vessels in the world and its top shipyard – China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) – controls 21.5 percent of the global commercial shipbuilding market.
It also produces warships for the Chinese navy, and CSIS says that is a risk, especially given the lack of transparency about shipbuilding companies and their work with the military.
“CSSC is a linchpin in Beijing’s military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy, which aims to upgrade the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and level up China’s military science and technology industries while simultaneously strengthening instruments of national power across the board,” the think tank said in a paper published last month.
A satellite image obtained by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Transnational Threats Project shows an Evergreen hull under construction near three Chinese military ships [Courtesy of CSIS/Maxar 2022]
China has emerged as the world leader in ship-building since merging its commercial and military yards to make them more competitive against rivals in Japan and South Korea. It now produces more merchant ships in terms of tonnage than any other country, according to CSIS.
“A lot of the entanglement we wrestle with now in terms of the security perspective is very much because of where we have gotten because of market forces,” Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow with CSIS’s China Power Project and one of the author’s of the report , told Al Jazeera. “We are at the point now where we need to work out how to structure that relationship.”
CSSC is among a number of firms subject to US sanctions over military links, but CSIS said satellite imagery showed its four shipyard units were continuing to build vessels for shipping lines outside China and Hong Kong even as they worked on ships for the navy.
Between 2019 and 2021, the four CSSC-controlled shipyards received orders for at least 211 commercial vessels, according to CSIS data, with foreign companies placing 64 percent of the orders.
New approach needed
Among its customers, according to the think tank, is Taiwan’s Evergreen Marine, one of the world’s biggest shipping firms.
CSIS says nearly all Evergreen’s orders are with shipyards known to produce surface combatants for the Chinese navy.
Commercial satellite imagery of Jiangnan, a CSSC yard located at the mouth of the Yangtze near Shanghai, in February showed at least three ships for Evergreen under construction near the berth where China’s third aircraft carrier, the Type 003, is being built, CSIS said.
Satellite images from January 2021, showed a separate Evergreen ship docked alongside two Type 055 cruisers and a Type 052D destroyer.
Evergreen told Al Jazeera that all its shipbuilding projects were subject to competitive international bidding with firms in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan also securing contracts for its commercial fleet.
A satellite image obtained by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Transnational Threats Project shows the Type 003 aircraft carrier being built at Jiangnan near to two Evergreen ships [Courtesy of CSIS/Maxar 2022]
It said it had orders to date for 35 containerships with capacity of about 240,000 TEUs from Chinese builders, but did not elaborate on the yards where they were under construction. It noted that its orders with Korean firms were much higher – 58 container ships with a combined capacity of more than 730,000 TEUs.
“The Chinese contractor that is currently building some of our vessels is China State Shipbuilding Corporation’s commercial shipbuilding department, which is completely different, and separate from its military department,” Evergreen said in a statement in response to Al Jazeera. “It is a common practice that international shipyards in many countries have both commercial departments and military departments.”
Foreign shipping companies including French shipping giant CMA CGM, Switzerland’s Mediterranean Shipping Company, the largest container shipping company in the world in terms of cargo capacity, Japan’s Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha (K-Line) and Mitsui OSK Lines from Japan have also ordered dozens of vessels from Chinese yards in the past five years, CSIS said.
French naval engineering company Gaztransport & Technigaz SA (GTT), which has close ties with CMA CGM, has also signed agreements to make its technology available to Chinese shipbuilders.
Funaiole says while it is not a question of ending commercial relationships with Chinese yards, companies need to be more mindful of the potential security risks with an industry that is a crucial part of Beijing’s military modernisation strategy.
“We’re not going to stop doing business with China, but we have to figure out a new mechanism for this kind of exchange and where the boundaries are,” he said.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — As she lay buried under the rubble, her broken legs and eyes blinded by blood and thick clouds of dust, all Inna Levchenko could hear were screams. It was 12:15 pm on March 3, and moments earlier a blast had pulverized the school where she’d taught for 30 years.
Amid relentless bombing, she’d opened School 21 in Chernihiv as a shelter to frightened families. They painted the word “children” in big, bold letters on the windows, hoping that Russian forces would see it and spare them. The bombs fell anyway.
Though she didn’t know it yet, 70 children she’d ordered to shelter in the basement would survive the blast. But at least nine people, including one of her students — a 13-year-old boy — would not.
“Why schools? I cannot comprehend their motivation,” she said. “It is painful to realize how many friends of mine died … and how many children who remained alone without parents, got traumatized. They will remember it all their life and will pass their stories to the next generation.”
___
This story is part of an ongoing investigation from The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and an upcoming documentary.
___
The Ukrainian government says Russia has shelled more than 1,000 schools, destroying 95. On May 8, a bomb flattened a school in Zaporizhzhia which, like School No. 21 in Chernihiv, was being used a shelter. As many as 60 people were feared dead.
Intentionally attacking schools and other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Experts say wide-scale wreckage can be used as evidence of Russian intent, and to refute claims that schools were simply collateral damage.
But the destruction of hundreds of schools is about more than toppling buildings and maiming bodies, according to experts, to teachers and to others who have survived conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, in Syria and beyond. It hinders a nation’s ability to rebound after the fighting stops, injuring entire generations and dashing a country’s hope for the future.
In the nearly three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” have independently verified 57 schools that were destroyed or damaged in a manner that indicates a possible war crime. The accounting likely represents just a fraction of potential war crimes committed during the conflict and the list is updated daily.
In Chernihiv alone, the city council said only seven of the city’s 35 schools were unscathed. Three were reduced to rubble.
The International Criminal Court, prosecutors from across the globe and Ukraine’s prosecutor general are investigating more than 8,000 reports of potential war crimes in Ukraine involving 500 suspects. Many are accused of deliberately aiming at civilian structures like hospitals, shelters and residential neighborhoods.
Targeting schools — spaces designed as havens for children to grow, learn and make friends — is particularly harmful, transforming the architecture of childhood into something violent and dangerous: a place that inspires fear.
A geography teacher, Elena Kudrik, lay dead on the floor of School 50 in the eastern Ukrainian town of Gorlovka. Amid the wreckage surrounding her were books and papers, smeared in blood. In the corner, another lifeless body — Elena Ivanova, the assistant headmaster— slumped over in an office chair, a gaping wound torn into her side.
“It’s a tragedy for us… It’s a tragedy for the children,” said school director Sergey But, standing outside the brick building shortly after the attack. Shards of broken glass and rubble were sprayed across the concrete, where smiling children once flew kites and posed for photos with friends.
A few kilometers away, at the Sonechko pre-school in the city of Okhtyrka, a cluster bomb destroyed a kindergarten, killing a child. Outside the entrance, two more bodies lay in pools of blood.
Valentina Grusha teaches in Kyiv province, where she has worked for 35 years, most recently as a district administrator and foreign literature instructor. Russian troops invaded her village of Ivankiv just as school officials had begun preparations for war. On Feb. 24, Russian forces driving toward Kyiv fatally shot a child and his father there, she said.
“There was no more schooling,” she said. “We called all the leaders and stopped instruction because the war started. And then there were 36 days of occupation.”
They also shelled and destroyed schools in many nearby villages, she said. Kindergarten buildings were shattered by shrapnel and machine-gun fire.
Despite the widespread damage and destruction of educational infrastructure, war crimes experts say proving an attacking military’s intent to target individual schools is difficult. Russian officials deny targeting civilian structures, and local media reports in Russian-held Gorlovka alleged Ukrainian forces trying to recapture the area were to blame for the blast that the two teachers there.
But the effects of the destruction are indisputable.
“When I start talking to the directors of destroyed and robbed institutions, they are very worried, crying, telling with pain and regret,” Grosha said. “It’s part of their lives.” And now the school is a ruin that stands in the center of the village and reminds of those terrible air raids and bombings.”
UNICEF communications director Toby Fricker, who is currently in Ukraine, agreed. “School is often the heart of the community in many places, and that is so central to everyday life.”
Teachers and students who have lived through other conflicts say the destruction of schools in their countries damaged an entire generation.
Syrian teacher Abdulkafi Alhambdo still thinks about the children’s drawings soaked in blood, littered across the floor of a schoolhouse in Aleppo. It had been attacked during the Civil War there in 2014. The teachers and children had been preparing for an art exhibit featuring student work depicting life during wartime.
The blast killed 19 people, including at least 10 children, the AP reported at the time. But it’s the survivors who linger in Alhambdo’s memory.
“I understood in (their) eyes that they wouldn’t go to school anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t only affect the kids who were running away, with shock and trauma. It affects all kids who heard about the massacre. How can they go back to school? You are not only targeting a school, you’re targeting a generation.”
Jasminko Halilovic was only 6 years old when Sarajevo, in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, was besieged. Now, 30 years after the Bosnian war ended, he and his peers are the ones still picking up the pieces.
Halilovic went to school in a cellar, as many Ukrainian children have done. Desperately chasing safety, the teachers and students moved from basement to basement, leaning chalkboards on chairs instead of hanging them walls.
Halilovic, now 34, founded the War Childhood Museum, which catalogs the stories and objects of children in conflict around the world. He was working in Ukraine with children displaced by Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas region when the current war began. He had to evacuate his staff and leave the country.
“Once the fighting ends, the new fight will start. To rebuild cities. To rebuild schools and infrastructure, and to rebuild society. And to heal. And to heal is the most difficult,” he said.
Alhambdo said he saw firsthand how the trauma of war influenced the development of children growing up in Aleppo. Instilling fear, anger and a sense of hopelessness is part of the enemy strategy, he said. Some became withdrawn, he said, and others violent.
“When they see their school destroyed, do you know how many dreams have been destroyed? Do you think anybody would believe in peace and love and beauty when the place that taught them about these things has been destroyed?” he said.
Alhambdo stayed in Aleppo and taught children in basements, apartments, anywhere he could, for nearly 10 years. Continuing to teach in spite of war, he said, is an act of defiance.
“I’m not fighting on the front lines,” he said. “I’m fighting with my kids.”
After the attack on School 50 in Gorlovka, shattered glass from blown-out windows littered the classrooms and hallways and the street outside. The floors were covered in dust and debris: cracked ceiling beams, slabs of drywall, a television that crashed down from the wall. A cell phone sat on the desk next to where one of the teachers was killed.
In Ukraine, some schools still standing have become makeshift shelters for people whose homes were destroyed by shelling and mortar fire.
What often complicates war crimes prosecutions for attacks on civilian buildings is that large facilities like schools are sometimes repurposed for military use during war. If a civilian building is being used militarily, it is a legitimate wartime target, said David Bosco, a professor of international relations at Indiana University whose research focuses on war crimes and the International Criminal Court.
The key for prosecutors, then, will be to show that there was a pattern by the Russians of targeting schools and other civilian buildings nationwide as a concerted military strategy, Bosco said.
“The more you can show a pattern, then the stronger the case becomes that this was really a policy of not discriminating between military and civilian facilities,” Bosco said. “(Schools are) a place where children are supposed to feel safe, a second home. Obviously shattering that and in essence attacking the next generation. That’s very real. It has a huge impact.”
As the war grinds on, more than half of Ukraine’s children have been displaced.
In Kharkiv, which has undergone relentless shelling, children’s drawings are taped to the walls of an underground subway station that has become not only a family shelter but also a makeshift school. Primary school-age children gather around a table for history and art lessons.
“It helps to support them mentally,” said teacher Valeriy Leiko. In part thanks to the lessons, he said, “They feel that someone loves them.”
Millions of kids are continuing to go to school online. The international aid group Save the Children said it is working with the government to establish remote learning programs for students at 50 schools. UNICEF is also trying to help with online instruction.
“Educating every child is essential to preventing grave violations of their rights,” the group said in a statement to the AP.
On April 2, Grosha’s community outside Kyiv began a slow reemergence. They are still raking and sweeping debris from schools and kindergartens that were damaged but not destroyed, she said, and taking stock of what’s left. They started a distance learning classes, and planned to relocate children whose schools were destroyed to others close by.
Even with war still raging, there is a return to normal life including schooling, she said.
But Levchenko, who was in Kyiv in early May to undergo surgery for her injuries, said the emotional damage done to so many children who have experienced and witness such massive suffering may never be fully repaired.
“It will take so much time for people and kids to recover from what they have lived,” she said. The kids, she said, are “staying underground without sun, shivering from siren sounds and anxiety.”
“It has a tremendously negative impact. Kids will remember this all their life.”
___
Stashevskyi reported from Kyiv, Deren from New York and Linderman from Washington. Associated Press reporters Erika Kinetz in Chernihiv and Michael Biesecker in Washington contributed to this report.
Britain will detail Tuesday how it plans to overhaul post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland which have sparked a political crisis in the province, amid fears it is risking a UK-EU trade war.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will “set out the rationale for our approach” in a statement to MPs in parliament, according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman.
The UK government is yet to confirm what that entails, but media reports have said it is planning legislation allowing London to unilaterally override some of the rules around Northern Irish trade.
London wants to rewrite the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, which it agreed as part of its 2019 divorce deal with the European Union, amid trading frictions since it came into force last year.
The arrangements, which mandate checks on goods arriving into Northern Ireland from England, Scotland and Wales, have angered the province’s unionists who claim they put its place within the UK.
The largest pro-British party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), is currently refusing to resume power-sharing in Belfast with pro-Irish rivals Sinn Fein until the protocol is reworked.
Its stance comes nearly two weeks after Sinn Fein won a historic first victory in elections for the devolved Stormont assembly, which entitle the party to the role of first minister in a joint executive with the DUP.
– ‘Legislative solution’ –
The impasse threatens to leave Northern Ireland, which suffered three decades of sectarian conflict until a 1997 accord largely ended the violence, without a government.
Johnson is adamant the current situation risks peace and stability in Northern Ireland and that his government has the right to act if the EU refuses to meet its demands.
“We don’t want to scrap it, but we think it can be fixed,” he told reporters during a visit Monday to Northern Ireland to meet its political leaders.
“We would love this to be done in a consensual way with our friends and partners, ironing out the problems… but to get that done, to have the insurance, we need to proceed with a solution at the same time,” he added, referring to the planned legislation.
Reports say the mooted draft law, which will allow UK ministers to selectively disapply parts of the protocol, may not be tabled yet and would in any case take months to progress through Parliament.
That could prove insufficient to persuade unionists to resume power-sharing in Northern Ireland, with the DUP saying Monday it needed “decisive action” not “the tabling of legislation”.
– ‘Keep their word’ –
The EU, which has been in discussions for months with the UK over improving the implementation of the protocol, has insisted it cannot be renegotiated.
European leaders have warned London against taking unilateral steps, and suggested it could jeopardise their entire Brexit deal, resulting in punitive tariffs and an effective trade war.
“This is an international treaty, it’s international law, we can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist,” Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said on Monday in Brussels.
“Countries need to keep their word when they sign treaties,” he added.
Johnson’s government says that checks on goods heading to Northern Ireland from violent England, Scotland and Wales are undermining peace in the province, with unionist protesters already turning in the past 18 months.
The separate trading arrangements, which bind the province to many European rules, were agreed because it has the UK’s only land border with the EU.
Keeping the border open with neighbor Ireland, an EU member, was mandated in the Good Friday Agreement, given the frontier was a frequent flashpoint for violence.
But it means checks have to be done elsewhere, to prevent goods getting into the EU single market and customs union by the back door via Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile the United States, which was a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement, is said to be watching the situation closely.
It has expressed alarm at suggestions the UK could scrap the protocol, with a delegation from Congress also visiting Northern Ireland on Monday.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
SEOUL—The spread of COVID-19 in North Korea is not all bad news for leader Kim Jong Un. By locking down the entire country, he can assert the power of his regime as never before. He has the authority to arrest anyone perceived to have broken the rules for any reason, whether in quest of food or the need to see a friend or to look for medicine.
He can also blame the scourge on a network of health officials. Their survival is now in jeopardy. Some of them, having been in contact with victims of the disease, may be ill, but all have to fear for their lives while Kim investigates how the disease broke out on a mass level. He’s calling for “correcting deviations revealed in the supply of medicines” when it’s well known North Korean medical facilities are largely bereft of medicine of any kind, much less any capable of curing COVID-19.
To show he means business, Kim fell back on a familiar wellspring of support, his 1.2-million-man armed forces over which he is the supreme commander. Pyongyang’s Korea Central News agency said he had issued an order for “immediately stabilizing the supply of medicines in Pyongyang City by involving the powerful forces of the military medical field of the People’s Army.”
Military people faced draconian punishment if they didn’t do something fast to stem a crisis over which they have no real control.
“If all leading officials do not exert themselves and display their strenuous and fighting spirit,” Kim was quoted as saying, “they cannot take the strategic initiative in the ongoing anti-epidemic war.” They “should not allow any slightest imperfection and vulnerable points by maintaining high tension and vigilance in the acute anti-epidemic war.”
Desperate Kim Jong Un Pleads With Citizens to Make More Poop
The call for marshaling the armed forces behind the campaign showed the frustration in a struggle in which they have no expertise and no authority other than the ability to carry out a purge on Kim’s behalf. KCNA put out the dispatch in English as well as Korean, indicating the need to prove Kim’s fully in charge before an international audience.
Kim Jong Un inspects a pharmacy in Pyongyang, in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 15, 2022.
Kim Jong Un inspects a pharmacy in Pyongyang, in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 15, 2022.
KCNA via Reuters
It’s a simple blame game and Kim—who is known for ordering the executions of anyone he suspects of working against him or his interests—will not hesitate to imprison or kill those accused of failing to wipe out the disease. He’s not saying a word about vaccinations, which he has refused from potential foreign aid-givers throughout the pandemic, and he’s certainly not accepting offered by South Korea’s newly inaugurated President Yoon Suk-yeol.
Never mind that the conservative Yoon is not tying medical aid to his demand for the North’s “complete denuclearization.” Kim also refused offers of vaccines, well before acknowledging the pandemic in his own country, from Yoon’s liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in, who beseeched him for dialogue and reconciliation.
“Kim cannot accept any blame because he is a party of a ‘deity,’ the Kim family regime, that is infallible,” said David Maxwell, with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “His deliberate policy decision-making has made the tragedy worse than it should be. He has prioritized the development of the nuclear and missile programs over the welfare of the Korean people living in the north.”
By passing on the blame, Kim avoids all responsibility for having failed to take basic steps needed to halt the spread of the disease. He holds himself and his innermost circle above reproach while lower-ranking bureaucrats are guilty of betraying the country through their inability to prevent a disease that his regime had been claiming had not broken out anywhere within its borders.
That claim, of course, has never been credible. It’s always been impossible to imagine that Kim, by shutting down the border with China soon after the virus was reported in Wuhan in December 2019, had actually managed to keep it from getting into North Korea. He had been either in denial, refusing to believe what was happening all around him, or was carrying on a campaign of deliberate fabrication and disinformation.
Nor is it possible to believe the seemingly factual reports published by his propaganda machine, notably the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun and KCNA, that purport to state the number of deaths from the disease, the numbers stricken and the numbers cured.
Employees spray disinfectant and wipe surfaces as part of preventative measures against the Covid-19 coronavirus at the Pyongyang Children’s Department Store in Pyongyang on March 18, 2022.
Employees spray disinfectant and wipe surfaces as part of preventative measures against the Covid-19 coronavirus at the Pyongyang Children’s Department Store in Pyongyang on March 18, 2022.
Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images
There is no way to verify these figures, but we may assume that they are far higher than the 1.2 million who had suffered from “fever” and the 50 deaths reported by the North Korean media. NK News, a website in Seoul, said “fever” was “a likely euphemism for the testing virus that reflects a probable inability for North Korea to clinically diagnose all positive COVID-19 infections due to limited capacity.”
What’s certain is that North Korea is in the midst of a serious emergency that provides a terrific opportunity for Kim to crack down more harshly than ever before on his own people. The emergency, however, confronts him with enormous risks. It is possible that he will be unable to stifle widespread dissatisfaction with his rule and may have to combat open opposition. He may wind up finding his grip weakened or compromised.
While “pointing out that the medicines provided by the state have not been supplied to inhabitants through pharmacies correctly in time,” said KCNA, Kim said “officials of the Cabinet and public health sector in charge of the supply have not rolled up their sleeves, not recognizing the present crisis but only talking about the spirit of devotedly serving the people.”
Kim even “censured the director of the Central Public Prosecutors Office for the idleness and negligence of his duty not feeling any responsibility and compunction and playing any role.”
Such talk is a palpable cover-up for the simple fact that pharmacy shelves are virtually bare, there is no simple cure for COVID anywhere on earth, and the North’s hospitals have none of the facilities needed for extreme cases.
The reason for this propaganda blitz is that Kim himself is to blame for diverting enormous funds to a nuclear-and-missile program that showcases his own power while his health system is known to be supremely inadequate.
Presumably a small elite within Pyongyang has access to all the medical assistance they need, but the vast majority of North Korea’s 26 million people are without access to care. The reports published by the North Korean media give an optimism, thoroughly false image of Kim’s concern for his people.
Now Kim faces the risk, much as he hates the idea, of having to accept foreign assistance in the form of vaccines and medical equipment needed to combat the disease. While saying not a word about vaccines, he may be forced to accept them on a mass scale. If that happens, foreign donors would insist on knowing who was getting the vaccines, where and how they were being administered.
“He fears the outbreak and implemented measures to try to prevent or contain it for the last two years,” said Maxwell, a retired army colonel who served five tours in South Korea with the special forces. “He implemented more draconian population and resources control measures in the name of COVID to further subjugate the Korean people.”
Kim Jong Un’s Latest Missile Test Officially Puts America ‘At Risk’
Under the circumstances, however, Kim might have no choice but to permit the entry of foreign experts who, after they go home, would be telling the world just how badly North Korea is suffering under his rule.
For now Kim is doing everything possible to prevent exposure of what’s going on and the full extent of the disease. While squandering enormous sums on nuclear warheads and the missiles to carry them to distant targets, Kim has ruthlessly deprived his people of what’s needed in terms of medicine, food and much else for survival.
“Kim is always profoundly worried about his grip on power because the real threat to him comes not from the United States, as he claims, but from his own people,” said David Straub, a retired senior US diplomat in Seoul. “He has conducted purges of the leadership beneath him, his uncle and half-brother and used COVID were murdered as an excuse to close the entire country off from the rest of the world for more than two years. COVID only adds to the domestic threat against him.”
By controlling “the flow of information,” said Straub, Kim “can accept international vaccines or not, all the while blaming others, inside and outside North Korea, for everything that goes wrong in the country.”
Right now, he’s fighting for his own life as North Korea’s leader. He knows, if he is unable to curb the disease, he and his regime may not survive.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Congresswoman says measure aims to recognise forced displacement of Palestinians during the establishment of Israeli state.
Washington, DC – US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has said she introduced a resolution to recognise the Palestinian Nakba, a term used to describe the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the lead-up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Tlaib said she introduced the resolution in the US House of Representatives on Monday, a day after Palestinians marked the Nakba’s 74th anniversary.
“The Nakba is well-documented and continues to play out today,” Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, wrote on Twitter. “We must acknowledge that the humanity of Palestinians is being denied when folks refuse to acknowledge the war crimes and human rights violations in apartheid Israel.”
The Democratic congresswoman said the resolution is cosponsored by her fellow progressives Betty McCollum, Marie Newman, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Although it is unlikely to pass in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel House, Palestinian rights advocates were quick to hail the measure as “historic”.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), a think tank that supports Palestinian rights, thanked Tlaib for “giving voice to this reality, and highlighting the pain and Palestinian Palestinians have suffered”.
BREAKING: @KeepRashida has introduced a historic House resolution recognizing the Nakba, the catastrophe that took place 74 years ago and resulted in the murder of thousands of Palestinians, forcing the expulsion of over 700,000 from their homes.
“During Israel’s creation, nearly 75% of the Palestinian population was ethnically cleansed from Palestine and more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed,” IMEU said in a series of tweets. “These actions were deliberately planned and carried out by Zionist militias in order to steal Palestinian land.”
Millions of survivors of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – and their descendants continue to live in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in neighboring Arab countries.
The Nakba is rarely ever discussed in mainstream US politics, as Israel has enjoyed widespread support from legislators and successive presidents from both major parties for decades.
Israel receives $3.8bn in US military aid annually, and this year Washington added another $1bn in assistance to “replenish” Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system after a May 2021 Gaza conflict.
Still, late in 2016, in the days of Barack Obama’s final presidency, then-Secretary State John Kerry acknowledged the Nakba in remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“When Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, the Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe,” he said at the time.
Palestinians across the world commemorated Nakba Day on Sunday with rallies that emphasized the right of return for Palestinian refugees. They also demanded justice for Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank last week.
On Monday, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an advocacy group, called Tlaib’s resolution a “historic moment”.
“For far too long, the Palestinian experience has been ignored by Washington, and Palestinians have been gaslit for trying to tell their story. Thank you [Tlaib] for giving voice to this reality, and highlighting the pain and wrote Palestinians have suffered,” the group on Twitter.
“We must shift US foreign policy away from enabling Israel’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians with military funding—and toward accountability,” it added.
A historic moment: Today @KeepRashida has introduced a House resolution recognizing the Palestinian Nakba in commemoration of the 74th anniversary of this catastrophic crime against the Palestinian people that still continues & shapes their experience today. #Nakba74pic.twitter.com/QJmpqIfpdp
US says measures, including loosening curbs on family remittances and travel, aim to ‘support Cuban people’.
The administration of United States President Joe Biden is easing some restrictions on Cuba, the US State Department has announced, including curbs on family remittances and travel to the Caribbean island nation.
In a statement on Monday, the State Department said the US would reinstate a family reunification program known as the Cuban Family Reunification Parole and continue to boost the capacity of its consular services.
It will also expand authorised travel, increase support for Cuban entrepreneurs, and “ensure that remittances flow more freely to the Cuban people while not enriching those who perpetrate human rights abuses”.
The changes aim to “support the Cuban people, providing them additional tools to pursue a life free from Cuban government oppression and to seek greater economic opportunities”, said State Department Spokesperson Ned Price.
The measures, which come after a lengthy US government review, mark the most significant changes in Washington’s approach to Havana since Biden took office in January of last year.
But the announcement stopped short of returning US-Cuba relations to the historic rapprochement engineered by former President Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president. That included less crimped flow of remittances, fewer travel curbs and faster visa services.
There were few details on Monday on how the new US policy would be implemented.
The Cuban embassy in Washington, DC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Reuters news agency.
The announcement comes just weeks after the US embassy in Cuba in early May began issuing visas for the first time in four years.
That came shortly after senior US and Cuban officials held their highest-level diplomatic talks after a severe disruption in ties during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
The discussions in Washington, DC, in April between senior Department of State officials and Cuba’s deputy foreign minister focused on migration, with the US side eager to rein in a growing number of Cubans trying to enter the country.
But tensions between the two nations persist, including over the Cuban government’s crackdown on protests last year and continuing US sanctions against the country.
Cuba’s foreign minister also recently accused the Biden administration of exerting pressure on countries in the region to try to exclude Havana from the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, California.
“There is no justification for excluding Cuba or any other country from this event that we have attended the last two editions,” Bruno Rodriguez said on Twitter last month.
A US delegation is traveling to Mexico later this week to discuss the June summit, after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador last week warning that if Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are excluded, he would skip it and send a representative instead.
In its statement on Monday, the State Department said the US would lift the cap on family remittances, previously set to $1,000 per quarter, and authorise donative remittances to non-family members.
But it made clear that the US would not remove entities from the Cuba Restricted List, a State Department list of Cuban government- and military-aligned companies with whom US firms and citizens are barred from doing business.
“We are going to ensure that remittances flow more freely to the Cuban people, while not enriching those who perpetrate human rights abuses,” an administration official said earlier in the day.
The US will use civilian “electronic payment processors” for remittances to avoid funds going directly to the Cuban government, the official said, adding that the US had already engaged with the Cuban government “about establishing a civilian processor for this”.
The war in Ukraine’s interruption to wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other staples has already raised high global food prices.
United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday met with Ukrainian refugees and stressed the need to confront Russian brutality as she Poland visited ahead of a meeting of finance ministers for the Group of Seven leading importers.
Yellen applauded Poland for helping refugees fleeing the fighting and for working with neighbor countries to find ways to get Ukraine’s wheat and other critical food supplies to the world. She thanked the Polish for responding to “rising food insecurity” exacerbated by the war.
“The devastation in Ukraine in the past months reminds us not to take our next meal for granted, and how quickly events can take a turn for the worse,” Yellen said at a visit to the World Central Kitchen site in Warsaw.
She met with refugees from Ukraine who are running the kitchen and said she will release an action plan later this week to address the global food crisis threatening parts of the developing world.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has interrupted wheat, barley, sunflower oil and other staples that normally flow from Ukraine and Russia, and has further raised already high food prices worldwide. Countries in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia that rely on those affordable supplies face the risks of food insecurity and unrest.
Yellen also met with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to discuss tougher sanctions on Russia and strengthening NATO, which Sweden and Finland are now seeking to join.
“Poland is of an opinion that Russia should be made responsible for all damage incurred on Ukrainian territory,” Morawiecki’s office said in a statement.
Yellen also vowed to work with Poland on pressing forward with a global minimum tax of 15 percent on multinational corporations, which is meant to target tax havens, the US Department of the Treasury said.
“This is our common denominator, that we have with the US, meaning to put limits on the functioning of such places where business people run and don’t pay tax in the European Union or in other countries in the world,” Polish government Spokesman Piotr Mueller said.
Poland has blocked the tax meant to deter global companies from stashing profits in countries where they pay little or no taxes. It got final approval from more than 130 countries at a meeting of the Group of 20 harvest last October, but Polish officials have questioned whether the tax will actually apply to online giants.
Yellen also will stop in Brussels before attending the Group of Seven finance ministers’ summit in Bonn, Germany this week.
In Warsaw, she spoke at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews at the site of the World War II-era Warsaw ghetto, mentioning her father’s family left a town not far away for the US.
“We must use the tools at our disposal to fight oppression. And that lesson must be applied today,” she said, noting that Russian President Vladimir “Putin’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine require that we think about what we can do to confront brutality.”
She cited the sanctions that the US and its partners have imposed, even as the European Union struggles to pass its sixth round of penalties. Landlocked countries heavily reliant on Russian oil haven’t signed on to a phaseout of the fuel.
In addressing food insecurity, Yellen said she will release an action plan this week by international financial institutions.
The US Treasury said the details will focus on how the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the other global financial institutions are “stepping up, surging, and scaling their work on food security and agriculture”.
World Bank President David Malpass said last month that his organization will provide $17bn per year to strengthen food security worldwide.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development last week committed one billion euros ($1.04bn) this year for the Ukrainian economy, set to be a mix of donor funds and bank funding.
Looking to more funding sources, within US President Joe Biden’s supplemental appropriations request for assistance to Ukraine, the US Treasury wants $500m for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. That will include money for food security and $150m for the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, which channels funding to agricultural projects in impoverished countries.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police fired tear gas and rubber bullets Monday as they tried to disperse crowds of stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators following the funeral of a young Palestinian man who died from injuries sustained during confrontations with police last month. Dozens of people were reported wounded.
Hundreds of mourners joined the funeral process for Waleed Shareef, who was pronounced dead Saturday. Shareef suffered a serious head injury April 22 as Israeli police fired rubber bullets at stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site.
Mourners took Shareef’s body for prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque before proceeding to a cemetery outside the Old City. “With our souls and blood, we will redeem you, martyr,” the crowd chanted. Some people held Palestinian flags.
Israeli police said throw stones, sticks and fireworks toward security forces. They released videos showing the protesters throwing objects toward police near the cemetery and another video of stones pelting a nearby street.
The police vowed to use a “firm hand” to stop violence that “turned a funeral into an out-of-control demonstration of violence.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said 71 Palestinians were wounded from rubber bullets, stun grenades and beatings. Thirteen people required hospitalization, including two with eye injuries, it said.
Police said six officers were hurt. They said 20 Palestinians were arrested, including five people suspected in an attempted hit and run.
Monday’s violence came just days after police pushed and beat mourners at the Jerusalem funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known Al Jazeera journalist who was killed Wednesday while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.
Shareef, 21, was injured during violence April 22 at a contested compound that is home to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, and revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, home to the biblical Temples and the holiest site in Judaism. The competing claims to the site lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The compound has been the site of repeated confrontations between Israeli police and Palestinian in recent weeks.
Palestinian witnesses and Shareef’s family say he was shot in the head with a rubber bullet, while Israeli authorities have suggested he died from sustained injuries when he fell on the ground. Israeli hospital officials did not give a precise cause of death, and the family refused to conduct an autopsy.
captured Israel east Jerusalem, home to the Old City and its sensitive religious sites, in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel claims all of the city as its capital and annexed east Jerusalem in a move that is not internationally recognized. The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state that includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip — also captured by Israel in 1967.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ office accused the Jerusalem police of a “cruel and barbaric act.” It said there will be no peace and stability in the region until the creation of a Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital.
