Landslide Kills Dozens in Ecuador’s Capital, 12 Still Missing
World
Asharq Al-Awsat
Residents are seen in an area of a landslide as firefighter rescue crews continue searching homes and streets covered by mud in Quito, Ecuador, on February 1, 2022. (Reuters)
At least 24 people perished in a landslide in Ecuador's capital Quito, and 12 others were missing, Mayor Santiago Guarderas said on Tuesday, as rescue teams searched homes and streets covered by mud following the worst deluge in nearly two decades. The torrential rains on Monday night caused a build-up of water in a gorge near the working class neighborhoods of La Gasca and La Comuna, sending mud and rocks down on residences and affecting electricity provision. The country's disaster management agency said 48 people were injured. "We saw this immense black river that was dragging along everything, we had to climb the walls to escape," said resident Alba Cotacachi, who evacuated her two young daughters from their home. "We are looking for the disappeared." Footage obtained by Reuters showed a man struggling to free himself from the muddy waters rushing down a residential street. Reuters witnesses said the man was swept away as residents screamed for help. Other videos showed a torrent sweeping away trees, vehicles, dumpsters and even electricity poles, while some people were rescued from the muddy water by neighbors. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility of further landslides. The mayor's office has set up shelters for affected families and has started clearing streets in the city. Ecuador is facing heavy rains in several areas, which have caused rivers to overflow and affected hundreds of homes and roads. Rains in Quito on Monday were equivalent to 75 liters per square meter, the highest in nearly two decades.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3450956/landslide-kills-dozens-ecuador%E2%80%99s-capital-12-still-missing
What We Can Learn From How the 1918 Pandemic Ended
Opinion
John M. Barry
John M. Barry - John M. Barry is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Most histories of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide say it ended in the summer of 1919 when a third wave of the respiratory contagion finally subsided. Yet the virus continued to kill. A variant that emerged in 1920 was lethal enough that it should have counted as a fourth wave. In some cities, among them Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Kansas City, Mo., deaths exceeded even those in the second wave, responsible for most of the pandemic’s deaths in the United States. This occurred despite the fact that the US population had plenty of natural immunity from the influenza virus after two years of several waves of infection and after viral lethality in the third wave had already decreased. Nearly all cities in the United States imposed restrictions during the pandemic’s virulent second wave, which peaked in the fall of 1918. That winter, some cities reimposed controls when a third, though less deadly wave struck. But virtually no city responded in 1920. People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared. People at the time ignored this fourth wave; so did historians. The virus mutated into ordinary seasonal influenza in 1921, but the world had moved on well before. We should not repeat that mistake. True, right now we have every reason for optimism. First, Omicron cases are declining in parts of the country. Second, nearly the entire US population will soon have been either infected or vaccinated, strengthening their immune systems against the virus as we know it now. Third, although Omicron is extraordinarily good at infecting the upper respiratory tract, which makes it so transmissible, it seems less able to infect the lungs than earlier variants so it is less virulent. It is entirely possible and perhaps even likely that, spurred by a better immune response, the virus will continue to decrease in lethality; indeed, there is a theory that the 1889-92 influenza pandemic was actually caused by a coronavirus called OC43, which today causes the common cold. All of which makes overconfidence, indifference or weariness, after two years of battling the virus — and one another — a danger now. Signs of weariness — or misguided hope — are everywhere. Although more than 70 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated, progress has stagnated, and as of Jan. 27, only 44 percent had received boosters, which provide vital protection against severe illness. Although most of us, especially parents, want schools to stay open, parents have gotten only about 20 percent of children ages 5 to 11 fully vaccinated. As in 1920, people are tired of taking precautions. This is ceding control to the virus. The result has been that even though Omicron appears to be less virulent, the seven-day average for daily Covid-19 deaths in the United States has now surpassed the Delta peak in late September. Worse, the virus may not be finished with us. Although there’s a reasonable likelihood that future variants will be less dangerous, mutations are random. The only thing certain is that future variants, if they are to be successful, will elude immune protection. They could become more dangerous. That was the case not only in 1920 with the last gasp of the 1918 virus, but also in the 1957, 1968 and 2009 influenza pandemics. In 1960 in the United States, after much of the population had achieved protection from infection and a vaccine, a variant caused peak mortality to exceed the pandemic levels in 1957 and 1958. In the 1968 outbreak, a variant in Europe caused more deaths the second year, even though, once again, a vaccine was available and many people had been infected. In the 2009 pandemic, variants also emerged that caused breakthrough infections; one study in Britain found “greater burden of severe illness in the year after the pandemic” but “much less public interest in influenza.” Researchers blamed the government’s approach for that. In the first year, the public health response was “highly assertive,” chiefly in providing information; there were no lockdowns. In the second year, they found, “the approach was laissez-faire.” As a result, “a large number of deaths, critical care and hospital admissions occurred, many of these in otherwise healthy people of working age.” Such precedents should make us wary. Vaccines, the new antiviral drug Paxlovid and others could end the pandemic, once billions of doses become widely available globally and if the virus does not develop resistance. But the end is not going to arrive anytime soon. The immediate future still depends on the virus and how we wield our current arsenal: vaccines, masks, ventilation, the antiviral drug remdesivir and steroids and the one monoclonal treatment that still works against Omicron, social distancing and avoiding crowds. As a society, we have largely abandoned the public health measures on that list. As individuals, we can still act. The New York Times
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3450836/john-m-barry/what-we-can-learn-how-1918-pandemic-ended
Turkish Warplanes Hit Kurdish Militant Targets in Iraq, Syria
Arab World
Asharq Al-Awsat
A file photo of a missile-loaded Turkish warplane during an operation against the PKK. (AP)
Turkish warplanes hit Kurdish militants targets, including training camps, shelters and ammunition storage areas in Iraq and northern Syria, the Turkish Defense Ministry said on Wednesday. All the planes taking part in the operation, which it said targeted the areas of Derik, Sincar and Karacak, subsequently returned to their bases. It did not provide any information on casualties resulting from the strikes. "Terrorists' shelters, caves, tunnels, ammunition depots and so-called headquarters and training camps were targeted," the ministry statement said, without specifying exactly when the strikes occurred. It said the air operation targeted militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has bases in Iraq, as well as the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), both of which Turkey regards as terrorist groups. Turkish warplanes have carried out similar air strikes in the past. The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which in the past was mainly focused in southeast Turkey.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3450831/turkish-warplanes-hit-kurdish-militant-targets-iraq-syria
Japan Proposes Controversial Mine in World Heritage Bid
Varieties
Asharq Al-Awsat
General view shows Kitazawa Flotation Plant at ruins of Aikawa Gold and Silver mine in Sado on Sado Island, Japan. Kyodo via Reuters.
Japan will seek UNESCO World Heritage recognition for a centuries-old network of mines on Tuesday, the government said, risking renewed diplomatic tensions with South Korea over forced wartime labor. The controversial gold and silver mine complex on central Japan's Sado Island dates back 400 years and was once one of the largest of its kind in the world, according to authorities in the coastal region where it is located, AFP said. But more than a thousand Koreans were forced into hard labor at the mine during Japan's 1910-45 colonization of the Korean peninsula, according to Seoul, which has expressed "strong regret" at the plan to seek UNESCO recognition. Japanese cabinet members agreed Tuesday to propose the site to the UN cultural body before the end of the day, the deadline for recommendations for the 2023 list. The well-preserved mining complex, which began operation in the 17th century and closed three decades ago, "is highly valued as a rare example of industrial heritage," top government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters. "However, we are aware that despite this high value, there are various discussions and opinions" regarding the bid, he added. "We will hold cool-headed and careful discussions with the countries concerned, including South Korea, to ensure that the great value of Sado's gold mine as a cultural heritage site is appreciated." On Friday, after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans for the UNESCO bid, the South Korean government expressed "strong regret" and summoned the Japanese ambassador in protest. Japan and South Korea are both democracies, market economies and US allies, but their relationship has been strained for decades over Tokyo's brutal 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula. About 780,000 Koreans were conscripted into forced labor by Japan during the 35-year occupation, according to data from Seoul, not including women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops. It is not the first time Japan's choice of UNESCO World Heritage proposal has irked its neighbor. In 2015, more than 20 Meiji-era industrial sites were added to the list, despite initial opposition from Seoul over the issue of forced Korean laborers in the early 20th century.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3449036/japan-proposes-controversial-mine-world-heritage-bid
Myanmar Shuts Shop to Defy Junta on Coup Anniversary
World
Asharq Al-Awsat
Myanmar's junta is struggling to contain the backlash from the coup, with daily clashes and swathes of the country outside of its control. STR AFP/File
Streets emptied and shops shuttered across Myanmar on Tuesday as people defied junta orders to go about their business with a silent strike on the first anniversary of the military coup. The junta that ended the Southeast Asian country's brief democratic interlude and toppled civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has triggered mass protests and a crackdown on dissent. Struggling to contain the backlash and contending with daily clashes, the military has killed more than 1,500 civilians, according to a local monitoring group. Swathes of the country are under the control of anti-coup fighters. The junta had ordered shops to stay open Tuesday, following activist calls for a "silent strike" on the anniversary. But the streets of commercial hub Yangon began emptying at 10 am, AFP correspondents said, a scene that repeated in second city Mandalay and southern Tanintharyi region. Mandalay's famous jade market opened, but saw little traffic, a resident told AFP. "No one is going out on the streets around my area and security forces are patrolling. "I'm staying at home playing online games to participate in the silent strike." A similar strike in December emptied the streets of cities and towns across the country. But on Tuesday morning, local media did show isolated flashmobs in Yangon and Mandalay, where protesters unfurled pro-democracy banners and set off flares. Ahead of the anniversary, the junta had threatened to seize businesses that shutter and warned that noisy rallies or sharing anti-military "propaganda" could lead to treason or terrorism charges. In comments published Tuesday, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing repeated the military's claim that it had been forced to take power following election fraud by Aung San Suu Kyi's party in 2020 elections that international observers said were largely free and fair. Fresh polls will be called once stability is restored, Min Aung Hlaing told the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper. - Sanctions - The United States, Britain and Canada unveiled coordinated sanctions on Myanmar officials Monday, including those involved in Suu Kyi's trial. Washington sanctioned Attorney General Thida Oo, Supreme Court Chief Justice Tun Tun Oo and Anti-Corruption Commission chairman Tin Oo, all of whom it said were closely involved in the "politically motivated" prosecution of Suu Kyi. "We are coordinating these actions with the United Kingdom and Canada... to further promote accountability for the coup and the violence perpetrated by the regime," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. Citing "unspeakable violence against civilians," the undermining of regional stability and "rampant" corruption, President Joe Biden said he was working with allies to "hold accountable" those responsible. - Another trial for Suu Kyi - Suu Kyi has already been sentenced to six years in prison for illegally importing and owning walkie talkies, incitement against the military and breaking Covid-19 rules. The Nobel laureate faces a further trial on charges of influencing the country's election commission during the 2020 polls that saw her National League for Democracy (NLD) party defeat a military-aligned rival. The case is expected to wrap up within six months. Former president and NLD stalwart Win Myint faces the same charge. On Monday, ousted Myanmar lawmakers from a shadow "National Unity Government" addressed the media in Paris. Human rights spokesman Aung Myo Min urged the international community to implement an arms embargo and tighten economic sanctions to cut off all trade with the regime. UN special envoy Noeleen Heyzer called for a "humanitarian pause" in violence to allow for the delivery of aid, warning that hundreds of thousands had been displaced by conflict. Following Washington's lead, Britain imposed sanctions against Thida Oo, Tin Oo and chair of the election commission Thein Soe. "The Burmese military are using ever more brutal and desperate tactics to try to cling on to power," said Anna Roberts, head of activist group Burma Campaign UK, welcoming the fresh sanctions. "The British government is doing exactly the right thing... however, they need to speed up the pace of new sanctions. It is vital to maximise pressure now while the military are more vulnerable."
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3448891/myanmar-shuts-shop-defy-junta-coup-anniversary
Israeli Army Dismisses Two Officers over Death of Elderly Palestinian
Arab World
Asharq Al-Awsat
Israeli soldiers walk during clashes with Palestinians in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank December 10, 2018. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Israel's military said on Monday it was dismissing two officers and would reprimand a battalion commander over the death of an elderly Palestinian earlier this month that it said resulted from "a moral failure and poor decision-making." Omar Abdalmajeed As'ad, 78, who was also a US national, was found dead after being detained by Israeli troops in Jiljilya village in the occupied West Bank on Jan. 12. A Palestinian autopsy found As'ad, who had pre-existing heart conditions, had suffered sudden cardiac arrest caused by the stress of being manhandled. The military at the time said As'ad was alive when the soldiers left him, Reuters reported. In a summary of its investigation on Monday, the military said it found that As'ad had refused to cooperate with troops operating in the area and that "his hands were tied and he was gagged for a short time." After being detained for half an hour, As'ad and three others were released. "The soldiers did not identify signs of distress or other suspicious signs concerning As'ad’s health. The soldiers assessed that As'ad was asleep and did not try to wake him," according the military statement. "The investigation concluded that the incident was a grave and unfortunate event, resulting from a moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers," it said. A core value of the Israeli military - to protect human life - had been violated, it said. "It was further determined that there was no use of violence during the incident apart from when Assad was apprehended after refusing to cooperate," it said. "The soldiers failed in their obligations by leaving Assad lying on the floor without the required treatment and without reporting the incident back to their commanders." After the autopsy, a US embassy spokesman in Jerusalem said it was "deeply saddened" by As'ad's death and it supported "a thorough investigation into the circumstances of the incident." Palestinian leaders have called for the soldiers involved to be prosecuted in an international court. As'ad was a former Milwaukee, Wisconsin, resident who lived in the United States for decades and returned to the West Bank 10 years ago, his brother told Reuters. Israeli military police were carrying out their own criminal investigation, whose findings will be submitted to the Military Advocate Corps for a legal review and determinations, the military said.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3448661/israeli-army-dismisses-two-officers-over-death-elderly-palestinian
This Poll Shows Just How Much Trouble Democrats Are In
Opinion
Christopher Caldwell
Christopher Caldwell -
According to the Gallup organization, 47 percent of Americans now identify with the Republican Party and 42 percent with the Democrats. That sounds ho-hum: one party doing a tad better than the other. But the Gallup numbers may portend a political earthquake. Republicans seldom lead on measures of party identification, even when they are doing spectacularly well in other respects. Since Gallup began tallying party identification in 1991, Democrats have averaged a four-point lead. Republicans did lead in the first year the poll was taken — the year of the first Iraq war. But since then, even when Republicans rack up midterm wins at the voting booth — the year after 9/11, for instance, or in the aftermath of the unpopular Obamacare bill eight years later — they tend to run roughly even with or behind Democrats. Between 2016 and 2020 the Democratic advantage swelled to between five and six points. When Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump a year ago, Democrats held a 49-to-40 advantage. From nine points up to five points down in less than a year — it is one of the most drastic reversals of party fortune that Gallup has ever recorded. The data analysis site FiveThirtyEight shows a parallel collapse in Mr. Biden’s own popularity. He entered office with higher approval (55 percent) than Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush did, but has since tumbled to 42 percent, lower than any president at this stage in his tenure except his immediate predecessor, according to data that go back to World War II. How did Democrats get into so much trouble so quick? Inherited trends, including Covid-19, deficits and geostrategic overreach, are partly to blame. So is poor policymaking on issues like the economic stimulus. But the heart of the problem lies elsewhere. Democrats are telling a story about America — about the depth and pervasiveness of racism, and about the existential dangers of Mr. Trump — that a great many Americans, even a great many would-be Democrats, do not buy. From the start Mr. Biden faced complex managerial challenges. He has always had a weak hold on the coalition of Democratic interest groups that won him the election, and he has had to acquiesce in some of their policy preferences. He has liberalized many of the immigration rules he inherited from Mr. Trump, suspending construction on a border wall and opening asylum procedures to victims of domestic violence. The result abroad has been hope: In September, a wave of mostly Haitian migrants large enough to fill a medium-size American town — about 14,000 people — arrived at the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas. American voters have been less pleased. Mr. Biden’s approval on immigration, according to a recent CBS News poll, is 36 percent. Mr. Biden has also done little to counter the skepticism toward police forces that simmers in some Democratic circles. In light of high and rising murder rates, this is poorly viewed. Philadelphia, Austin, Milwaukee, Columbus and St. Paul all set homicide records last year. The president’s approval on crime is 39 percent. And while Americans may be largely happy to have left the Afghanistan war behind, the shambolic retreat of the nation’s armed forces last summer is another story. Mr. Biden’s Afghanistan approval: 38 percent. Mr. Biden insisted that the country “go big” on a new $1.9 trillion “rescue” package in the spring, even after Larry Summers, Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, warned that such a stimulus could produce inflation. Now inflation is at 7 percent, the highest since early in the Reagan administration. Mr. Biden’s approval on the economy is at 38 percent. But even more harmful to Democrats has been the fallout from pandemic lockdowns. Mr. Biden didn’t invent them, but he is suffering from them more than Mr. Trump did. That is because Covid-19 has opened a window on schools — and exposed Democrats as being on the wrong side of issues that many voters are passionate and even emotional about. Democrats are the party of teachers’ unions, whose interest in school closures has clashed with that of working parents throughout the Covid-19 crisis. They are the party that backs the teaching of contentious race dogmas (sometimes called critical race theory, whether rightly or wrongly) to impressionable children. And they are the party that has overhauled or abolished competitive public school examinations in New York City, San Francisco, Boston and Northern Virginia because of the racial composition (usually disproportionately Asian) of the resulting student bodies. These issues are especially salient because they concern the heart of Democrats’ public philosophy. Roughly since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Democrats have been telling a story about the country that focuses way too much on race and way too much on Donald Trump. The various iterations of the voting-rights bill known as the For the People Act are a case in point. Holding the presidency, both houses of Congress and the most influential parts of the media, Democrats have monopolized the political argument for a year now. If there were a solid case that the bill really was an emergency project to protect democracy, rather than the partisan wish list that its opponents claimed, it would have triumphed by now. When Mr. Biden told an Atlanta crowd this month that those who opposed this bill were on the same side as Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace and the Confederacy’s President Jefferson Davis, he was arguably combining the condescension of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” remark with a kind of anti-white race-baiting. That is electorally dangerous. Democrats lost white non-college-educated voters by 25 points in the last election, and there is no guarantee that the margin will not get wider. But this may not even be the party’s biggest miscalculation when it comes to demographics. Minorities do not seem to like the Democrats’ racialized approach any more than whites do. The political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who has written extensively about Hispanic abandonment of Democrats, notes that 84 percent of nonwhites support the photo-ID requirements for voting that the Democrats’ voting-rights reforms would ban. In a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 election, a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Mr. Biden would beat Mr. Trump among Hispanics — but only by a point (44-to-43), not by the nearly 30-point margin he enjoyed back then. This is not the triumph for false consciousness that it might appear to disappointed activists. Democrats have been led astray by their Trump obsession. They have misunderstood what the former president represented to voting Americans. Mr. Trump tapped into smoldering grievances against various information-economy elites and managers. There is no reason that ethnic-minority voters wouldn’t share some of those grievances. Voters of any background might, for instance, be appalled by Mr. Trump’s whipping up of his followers on Jan. 6, 2021. But they might consider the intervention of info-tech billionaires in the 2020 election to be a larger potential threat to our democracy. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave upward of $400 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life to help local governments organize elections under Covid-19 conditions. Their gift roughly equaled the amount of federal funding designated for that purpose in the 2020 CARES Act. It is hard to imagine that anyone worried about the role of private wealth in prisons or military logistics or public schools would welcome such a role in elections. Whether this says anything about the presidential election of 2024 is unclear. For the time being, the Republican product against which the Democratic product is being measured does not include Mr. Trump. That could be a sign that, should he return to a position of prominence, the country’s party preferences will revert to their traditional pattern of Democratic advantage. On the other hand, it could be a warning to all parties. Perhaps sympathy with populist discontent was actually tamped down by the public’s repugnance for Mr. Trump as a person. We may yet underestimate the discontent itself. The New York Times
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3448656/christopher-caldwell/poll-shows-just-how-much-trouble-democrats-are
