Malawi Wire

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in an address on the nation’s Waitangi Day observance that the country has an obligation to make sure everyone has access to the health care they need, and that no one dies younger than everyone else in New Zealand because they are Maori.”

The commemorative day is named for the region on the North Island where representatives of the British Crown and more than 500 Indigenous Maori chiefs signed a founding treaty in 1840.

The Maori, however, lost most of their land during British colonization and have staged demonstrations on Waitangi Day to rally for their civil and social rights.

Last year New Zealand established the Maori Health Authority to ensure better health care access for the Maori who have been overwhelmed by COVID pandemic.

“We all have a duty to do everything we can to protect our communities with all the tools that science and medicine have given us,” Ardern said Sunday, as she called for a united battle against the coronavirus.

Turkey’s president is the latest world leader to reveal that he has contracted the coronavirus.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed on Twitter Saturday that he and his wife, Emine, have been infected with the omicron variant of the COVID virus and are experiencing mild symptoms.

The news came just two days after the Turkish leader’s visit to Kyiv, where he met with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart.

Two Miami men have each received a sentence of 41 months after stealing 192 ventilators worth approximately $3 million, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

The U.S. Agency for International Development shipment was in a tractor trailer headed for Miami International Airport. The shipment was stolen when the driver left the trailer on a parking lot overnight.

The ventilators “were part of an aid program to treat critically ill COVID-19 El Salvadorian patients,” according to the statement. Most of the ventilators were recovered.

The Johns Hopkins Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded more than 393 million global COVID infections and almost 6 million deaths. More than 10 billion vaccines have been administered, according to the center.

Source: Voice of America

Cyclone Batsirai weakened overnight but floods were still expected due to heavy rain after it hit eastern Madagascar with strong winds, the island’s meteorological office said Sunday.

“Batsirai has weakened,” Meteo Madagascar said, adding that the cyclone’s average wind speed had almost halved to 80 kph, while the strongest gusts had scaled back to 110 kph from the 235 kph recorded when it made landfall on Saturday evening.

The cyclone, the second storm to hit the large Indian Ocean island nation in just a few weeks, was moving westwards at a rate of 19 kph, the meteorological services said.

But “localized or generalized floods are still feared following the heavy rains,” it said, adding that Batsirai should emerge at sea in the Mozambique Channel later Sunday.

Batsirai made landfall in Mananjary district, more than 530 kilometers southeast of the capital Antananarivo, around 8 p.m. local time (1700 GMT) Saturday.

It reached the island as an “intense tropical cyclone”, packing winds of 165 kph, Faly Aritiana Fabien of the country’s disaster management agency told AFP.

The national meteorological office has said it fears “significant and widespread damage.”

Just an hour and a half after it first hit land, nearly 27,000 people had been counted as displaced from their homes, Fabien said.

He said his office has accommodation sites, food and medical care ready for victims, as well as search and rescue plans already in place.

‘Very serious threat’

The Meteo-France weather service had earlier predicted Batsirai would present “a very serious threat” to Madagascar, after passing Mauritius and drenching the French island of La Reunion with torrential rain for two days.

In the hours before the cyclone hit, residents hunkered down in the impoverished country, still recovering from the deadly Tropical Storm Ana late last month.

In the eastern coastal town of Vatomandry, more than 200 people were crammed in one room in a Chinese-owned concrete building.

Families slept on mats or mattresses.

Community leader Thierry Louison Leaby lamented the lack of clean water after the water utility company turned off supplies ahead of the cyclone.

“People are cooking with dirty water,” he said, amid fears of a diarrhea outbreak.

Outside plastic dishes and buckets were placed in a line to catch rainwater dripping from the corrugated roofing sheets.

“The government must absolutely help us. We have not been given anything,” he said.

Residents who chose to remain in their homes used sandbags and yellow jerrycans to buttress their roofs.

Cyclone still ‘dangerous’

Other residents of Vatomandry were stockpiling supplies in preparation for the storm.

“We have been stocking up for a week, rice but also grains because with the electricity cuts we cannot keep meat or fish,” said Odette Nirina, a 65-year-old hotelier in Vatomandry.

“I have also stocked up on coal. Here we are used to cyclones,” she told AFP.

Winds of more than 50 kph pummeled Vatomandry on Saturday morning, accompanied by intermittent rain.

The disaster agency said the cyclone was expected to remain “dangerous” as it swept across the large island overnight and in the morning.

Flooding is expected due to excessive rainfall in the east, southeast and central regions of the country, it warned.

The United Nations was ramping up its preparedness with aid agencies, placing rescue aircraft on standby and stockpiling humanitarian supplies.

At least 131,000 people were affected by Ana across Madagascar in late January. Close to 60 people were killed, mostly in the capital Antananarivo.

That storm also hit Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, causing dozens of deaths.

The U.N.’s World Food Program pointed to estimates from national authorities that some 595,000 people could be directly affected by Batsirai, and 150,000 more might be displaced due to new landslides and flooding.

The storm poses a risk to at least 4.4 million people in one way or another, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

Source: Voice of America

Pope Francis on Sunday decried the genital mutilation of millions of girls and the trafficking of women for sex, including openly on city streets, so others can make money off of them.

In remarks to the public in St. Peter’s Square, the pope noted that the day was dedicated worldwide to ending the ritual mutilation, and he told the crowd that some 3 million girls each year undergo the practice, “often in conditions very dangerous for the health.”

“This practice, unfortunately widespread in various regions of the world, humiliates the dignity of women and gravely attacks their physical integrity,” Francis said.

Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures that involve changing or injuring female genitalia for non-medical reasons and violates the human rights, health and the integrity of girls and women, the United Nations says in championing an end to the practice.

The practice can cause severe pain, shock, excessive bleeding, infections, and difficulty in passing urine, as well as consequences for sexual and reproductive health. While mainly concentrated in some 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, it is also a problem for girls and women living elsewhere, including among immigrant populations.

According to U.N. figures, at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone the practice.

The pope also told the faithful that on Tuesday, there will be a day of prayer and reflection worldwide against human trafficking.

“This is a deep wound, inflicted by the shameful search of economic interests, without respect for the human person,” Francis said. “So many girls — we see them on the streets — who aren’t free, they are slaves of the traffickers, who send them to work, and, if they don’t bring back money, they beat them,” the pope said. “This is happening today in our cities.”

“In the face of these plagues on humanity, I express my sorrow and I exhort all those who have responsibility to act in a decisive way to impede both the exploitation and the humiliating practices that afflict in particular women and girls,” Francis said.

Source: Voice of America

The Philippines has suspended a heavily criticized policy banning the unvaccinated from public transportation in Metro Manila as a COVID-19 surge, caused by omicron variant, has subsided.

Daily cases in the Philippines rose from 400 in December to more than 39,000 in just a matter of days. The positivity rate, or percentage of positive cases out of those tested, peaked at more than 47%, as the country’s testing capacity remained low.

Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed after a brief holiday lull, but the Health Department said 85% of those admitted to intensive care units had not been vaccinated. Health care workers are exhausted, and many of those testing positive for the virus had to return to work immediately after recovering. Despite the record-breaking COVID-19 cases, the government did not impose a lockdown.

The Transportation Department implemented the “no vaccination, no ride” policy in Metro Manila, covering anyone taking public transportation starting Jan. 17, after President Rodrigo Duterte himself ordered the arrest of unvaccinated individuals who leave their homes.

Under the policy, unvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals are barred from buses, jeepneys, trains and taxis, although unvaccinated people traveling for medical reasons, such as getting vaccinated, are exempt if they can show proof.

“Because it is a national emergency, it is my position that we can restrain [unvaccinated individuals],” Duterte said in a televised speech Jan. 6.

On the first day of the policy’s implementation, Jan. 17, police and transport officials apprehended hundreds of unvaccinated passengers and prevented them from riding buses, jeepneys and trains.

A TV interview of a partially vaccinated woman who had been prevented from boarding a bus went viral and sparked criticism of the policy.

“I’m so tired. What the government is doing is making me tired. I’m partially vaccinated. It’s not my fault that my second dose is scheduled for February,” she said.

After a barrage of criticism, the government was forced to temporarily walk back the policy on the second day of implementation, introducing exemptions, including for unvaccinated essential workers and those leaving their homes for medical reasons.

Following a trend around the world, the surge quickly subsided in February, as predicted by government and private experts, but the country is still reporting nearly 10,000 cases per day.

As the number of daily reported cases in Metro Manila dropped, the Department of Transportation has now temporarily suspended the policy as of Feb. 1. However, the ban will be reinstated once the city breaches a higher caseload.

Human rights, labor and mobility advocates have called on the government to revoke the ban, saying it restricts the exercise of fundamental rights, and calling it unnecessary, discriminatory and anti-poor, as most of the city’s 14 million people are commuters and cannot afford cars.

“Restricting mobility is not the answer to the gaps in the vaccination campaign, regardless of whether that’s availability or accessibility to vaccines, or for a mere addressing of the continued misinformation about vaccination,” Ira Cruz, director of AltMobility PH, a group advocating sustainable transport, told VOA.

There are more than 50 million fully vaccinated people in the Philippines, according to the government, but the country failed to meet its vaccination target last year.

Like many countries, the Philippines is battling vaccine misinformation, but resistance to vaccination is waning. The most recent poll showed that of Filipinos surveyed in December, only 8% are unwilling to be vaccinated, down from 18% in September 2021.

“Why people don’t want to get vaccinated, that remains to be the responsibility of the government to address. What this is sounding like is that the government is giving up on addressing the gaps of a vaccination campaign and closing its doors to certain people,” Cruz said.

He said it would be more useful for the government to provide a steady supply of buses, trains and jeepneys so there’s enough room to follow public health protocols, including physical distancing.

“We call on the government to revoke the ban altogether regardless of the number of cases in the country,” Cruz said.

Source: Voice of America