Former President Barack Obama harshly criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as an “absolute chaotic disaster” during a conversation with ex-members of his administration, according to a recording obtained by Yahoo News.

Obama also reacted to the Justice Department dropping its criminal case against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, saying he worried that the “basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

More than 78,400 people with COVID-19 have died in the United States and more than 1.3 million people have tested positive, according to the latest estimates from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Obama’s comments came during a Friday call with 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association, people who served in his administration. Obama urged his supporters to back his former vice president, Joe Biden, who is trying to unseat Trump in the Nov. 3 election.

“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama said, according to Yahoo News.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.

White House press secretary responds

Trump has consistently defended and boasted of his response to the virus, saying that travel restrictions from China and Europe as well as social distancing guidelines have prevented far greater damage. “I think we saved millions of lives,” he said earlier this week.

Trump has criticized the Obama administration in relation to his own administration’s response to the outbreak. Yet Trump’s contention that his administration inherited “a broken system and a broken test” from Obama’s is false; the novel coronavirus did not exist until late last year. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention struggled to develop its own test in January and then discovered problems in its kits in February.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not mention Obama directly in her response to his remarks.

“President Trump’s coronavirus response has been unprecedented and saved American lives,” she said. “While Democrats were pursuing a sham witch hunt against President Trump, President Trump was shutting down travel from China.”

She added: “While Democrats encouraged mass gatherings, President Trump was deploying PPE, ventilators, and testing across the country.”

Obama has generally kept a low profile on current political events, even when Trump would disparage him or his administration on Twitter. But Friday’s call indicates that he’ll be playing an active role in the coming election. He told supporters that he would be “spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden.”

Source: AP

The Cameroonian authorities must come clean on the reality of the spread of COVID-19 in the country’s prisons, provide detainees with adequate medical care and stop exacerbating overcrowding with arbitrary arrests, Amnesty International said today.

The organisation confirms that at least one prisoner has tested positive for the virus at the “Kondengui” central prison in Yaoundé and has been taken to a health facility outside the prison. While authorities have not confirmed or denied the presence of the virus in detention facilities, Amnesty International received information stating the number of current and former detainees tested positive could be much higher.

“As COVID-19 spreads in Cameroon, it is essential that detainees and their families have access to accurate information about the virus. The poor conditions in detention centres mean they risk becoming epicenters of the pandemic unless urgent action is taken,” said Fabien Offner, Amnesty International West and Central Africa researcher.

“Authorities must take all necessary measures to allow those in prison to enjoy standard health-care services free of charge and without discrimination, and to urgently reduce the overall number of people in detention.”

According to the National commission on human rights and freedoms, the occupancy rate was high in many prisons in Cameroon, reaching 432 % in ‘’Kondengui’’, 729% in Bertoua prison (East), 481% in Sangmelima (South) and 567% in Kumba Main Prison (South-West).

Following a 15 April presidential decree commuting and remitting sentences, hundreds of prisoners have been released in all the regions. For example, 831 prisoners, were released in the Far North region, and the number falling from 3,370 to 2,547 detainees, according to state media. An independent source also confirms to Amnesty International that 214 detainees were released in the Maroua prison (Far North).

While this is a first welcome step in reducing overcrowding in prisons, it remains far from sufficient. Measures to fight the spread of the virus in detention facilities should include the release of detainees who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 such as the elderly or those with underlying medical conditions.

‘’Many inmates are sick in the central prison of Yaoundé’’

Prison conditions are dire in the central prison of Yaoundé. An inmate told Amnesty International:

“Prisoners often die in this prison; no one can really say who is contaminated. Many inmates are sick and because of the congestion everyone is scared. Those who are sick also fear going to the prison health services because of rumours of COVID-19 patients being admitted there”.

Most inmates who present COVID-19 symptoms are treated using hot liquids mixed with ginger and garlic. Last month, five other deaths have been reported in a week, according to independent sources. A letter sent on 21 April to the Ministry of Justice on behalf of detainees highlighted the persistent overcrowding, describing the nursing station in prisons as “saturated with sick detainees” and the medical staff as “overwhelmed”.

On 23 April, authorities announced measures aimed at containing the virus inside the central prison in Yaoundé, including the suspension of outside chores, the establishment of observation cells for suspected COVID-19 cases, disinfection operations and the application of barrier gestures.

At least two sick detainees died shortly after their release

According to information received by Amnesty International, at least two sick detainees died shortly after their release. One was buried in conditions applied to COVID-19 deaths without the presence of his family, although no test was made to determine the cause of death.

Even if authorities recently released some detainees, they failed to positively respond to the National commission on human rights and freedoms’ call to release the elderly who are most vulnerable to the virus, and to the UN call to release sick detainees, and those jailed without legal basis, including prisoners of conscience.

Detained prisoners of conscience include Mamadou Mota, vice-president of opposition party MRC, jailed for participating in peaceful protests and for “rebellion in group”. Others include Anglophones detained for protesting peacefully either against the alleged irregularities during the 2018 presidential election or in demand for economic and social rights in English-speaking regions.

Mancho Bibixy Tse is one of them. He was arrested on 9 January 2017 and sentenced on 25 May 2018 by a military court to 15 years in prison for “terrorism”, simply for having peacefully protested the marginalization of English-speaking Cameroonians.
Sick detainees still jailed include Amadou Vamoulke, 70, former director of state TV, who suffers from a severe pathology certified by two neurologists. He was arrested in July 2016 and has been illegally detained after his pre-trial detention exceeded the legal limit.

Among those detained for speaking out, there is political activist Franck Boumadjieu. He was arbitrarily arrested on 16 April 2020 for having denounced the silence of President Paul Biya since the start of the COVID-19 crisis and was sentenced to three months in prison and fined.

“Keeping elderly or sick people in detention or releasing them just to blow their last breath outside is inhumane. Authorities must treat prisoners with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings,” Fabien Offner said.

“Continuing to fill prisons with people who have done nothing but exercising their right to freedom of expression is not only a violation of international law, but is also hampering efforts to contain the virus.”

Culled from Amnesty International

At least 3,566,201 people are now infected with the new coronavirus and some 248,285 others have succumbed to the respiratory illness COVID-19, data from Johns Hopkins University shows.

The United States still stands on the top of the list of countries affected by the virus, with 1,118,122 known cases and 68,598 deaths.

While many countries have brought the epidemic relatively under control and eased stay-at-home restrictions, some nations have just started to register what looks like a second wave of infections.

Second in population only to China, India reported 2,600 new infections on Sunday — the country’s highest single-day jump, yet.

The Indian Health Ministry has reported 40,263 confirmed cases of infection and 1,306 deaths as of Sunday evening.

The ministry said that the government was set to impose another two weeks of extended lockdown for a second time. The country’s population of 1.3 billion has already been under a three-week complete lockdown since late March.

This time, however, some restrictions would be eased in districts that have a low risk of spreading the virus.

In Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, a third of the 500 people selected in random testing came out positive for the new coronavirus.

The results of the random tests in Kabul are “concerning,” said Public Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Mayar on Sunday.

Afghanistan has reported 2,700 confirmed cases and 85 deaths.

The true figure of cases could be much higher as officials have so far tested only 12,000 people in the nation of 36.6 million.

China, the first ever country to report the virus, reported only three new cases and no additional deaths on Monday.

China’s death toll stands at 4,633, with a total number of 82,880 cases.

Source: Presstv

South Korea’s assessment is that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not have surgery, local news outlet Yonhap said, citing an unidentified senior official at presidential Blue House.

“There were speculative reports that Chairman Kim underwent a surgery citing some difference to his walk,” the official was cited as saying.

“We have reasons to believe that there was no surgery, but cannot disclose such details.”

Rumours about Kim’s health have been swirling since his conspicuous no-show at April 15 celebrations for the birthday of his grandfather, the North’s founder — the most important day in the country’s political calendar.

His absence triggered a series of fevered rumours and unconfirmed reports over his condition, while the United States and South Korea insisted they had no information to believe any of the conjecture was true.

North Korean state television showed Kim walking, smiling broadly and smoking a cigarette at what it said was the opening of a fertiliser factory on Friday.

 (FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AFP)

US Vice President Mike Pence did not wear a face mask during a Tuesday visit to the Mayo Clinic, violating the prestigious medical center’s policy despite his team being warned in advance.

Video showed Pence visiting staff and a patient in a crowded hospital room without wearing a mask.

The Minnesota-based center’s policy states: “Part of our protocol for ensuring your safety is to require all patients, visitors and staff to wear a face covering or mask while at Mayo Clinic to guard against transmission of COVID-19.”

The clinic said in a statement that it had “shared the masking policy with the VP’s office.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently updated its advice to recommend that people wear cloth face coverings in public settings where it is difficult to maintain adequate physical distance at all times, such as in grocery stores and pharmacies.

This is because a very high proportion of people infected with the coronavirus are believed to be asymptomatic and because recent research has shown that it may in certain circumstances be possible to infect others through normal speaking and breathing.

Pence, President Donald Trump, and other senior White House officials have pointedly ignored the advice, leading to speculation it is a coordinated decision to downplay the severity of the crisis.

The vice president said he did not wear a mask because the CDC guidelines suggest that masks help prevent the spread of the virus by those who are infected — and he is not.

“Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you,” he said.

Source: AFP

First there was Corona Kumar, then Covid Marie: parents have taken to naming newborns after the coronavirus, apparently unperturbed by the prospect of their children being forever associated with a deadly pandemic.

When Colline Tabesa gave birth to a healthy baby girl in the central Philippine city of Bacolod on April 13, she and the father John Tupas decided to mark the occasion with a show of gratitude.

“This COVID-19 has caused great suffering around the world,” said 23-year-old Tupas, expressing relief after the uneventful delivery.

“I wanted her name to remind us that COVID did not only bring us suffering. Despite all of this, a blessing came to us,” he added.

And so, Covid Marie it was.

Weeks earlier, two mothers in southeastern India had had similar ideas, apparently encouraged by a doctor in the hospital where their babies were delivered.

One was called Corona Kumar and the other Corona Kumari.

“I told them this would help create awareness about the disease and remove the stigma around it,” said S.F. Basha, the doctor.

“To my surprise, they agreed.”

Not to be outdone, a migrant-worker couple in India’s northeast stranded thousands of kilometres from their home in the desert state of Rajasthan decided to name their child Lockdown.

“We named him Lockdown remembering all the problems we had to face during this tough time,” local media reports quoted the father Sanjay Bauri as saying.

“She might experience bullying, but I’ll just teach my daughter to be a good person,” he said.

“We didn’t have second thoughts.”

Source: AFP

A New York emergency doctor who treated coronavirus patients has killed herself, with family, police and physicians linking her death to trauma faced by health care workers battling the outbreak.

Lorna Breen, 49, died on Sunday from self-inflicted injuries in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had been staying with her family, police said in a statement.

Breen ran the emergency department of New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Manhattan, a facility that has seen a huge influx of COVID-19 patients.

While it is not clear why she took her own life, her family, police and doctors suggested stress caused by the outbreak had contributed to her death.

“She tried to do her job and it killed her,” her father Philip Breen told The New York Times.

He said she had no history of mental illness and had contracted coronavirus herself before returning to work and then being sent home.

“Frontline healthcare professionals and first responders are not immune to the mental or physical effects of the current pandemic,” said Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney.

The president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, of which Breen was a member, said her death was a tragic reminder of the suffering that many health care workers are going through.

“The impossibility of the situation in many of our hospitals leaves us deeply wounded.

“I can only imagine for Dr. Breen it was more than she could bear — not out of weakness, but out of the strength of her compassion,” William Jaquis said in a statement on the group’s website.

The hospital where she worked described her as “a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department.”

More than 17,300 people have died from COVID-19 across New York state, the epicenter of America’s outbreak.

Source: AFP

US President Donald Trump has hinted that “disinfectant” can be used to cure people infected with the coronavirus after previously suggesting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatment, which the EU said could kill patients.

Speaking during his daily briefing on Thursday night, Trump suggested injecting disinfectant into the bodies of humans to cure covid-19 patients.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning,” the president said.

However, a senior health official later told reporters that federal laboratories are neither considering nor trying to develop such a treatment option.

Yet Trump, appearing to refer to the disinfectant idea, continued to say, “You see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number [on the] lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

“We’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it seems interesting to me.

This comes as his much touted drugs – chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – are said to have fatal side effects.

The European Medicines Agency, the EU’s drug regulator, repeated concerns on Thursday that the two drugs being prescribed in the US and some other countries as treatments for the covid-19, have yet to demonstrate any medical benefits and, therefore, should not be used outside trials or national emergency use programs.

“Recent studies have reported serious, in some cases fatal, heart rhythm problems with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, particularly when taken at high doses or in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin,” read a statement by the Amsterdam-based EMA.

The drugs could also cause low blood sugar, liver and kidney problems as well as nerve cell damage that can lead to seizures.

The statement came days after the largest study on drugs, commissioned by the US government, found that the two drugs had no effects on the virus and instead, hydroxychloroquine was associated with more deaths among the patients.

Trump also doubled down on his claim that sunlight kills the coronavirus, with his vice president Mike Pence saying there was “encouraging” news about how “heat and sunlight” affect the virus. However, such a claim has been rejected by experts, including, Deborah Birx, one of Trump’s coronavirus task force members.

So far, the coronavirus has affected more than 878,000 people in the US and killed over 49,700 across the country.

Source: Presstv

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that the coronavirus pandemic is “a human crisis that is fast becoming a human rights crisis.”

The U.N. chief said in a video message that there is discrimination in the delivery of public services to tackle COVID-19 and there are “structural inequalities that impede access to them.”

Guterres said the pandemic has also seen “disproportionate effects on certain communities, the rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and the risks of heavy-handed security responses undermining the health response.”

He warned that with “rising ethno-nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and a push back against human rights in some countries, the crisis can provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic.”

In February, Guterres issued a call to action to countries, businesses and people to help renew and revive human rights across the globe, laying out a seven-point plan amid concerns about climate change, conflict and repression.

“As I said then, human rights cannot be an afterthought in times of crisis — and we now face the biggest international crisis in generations,” he said.

The secretary-general said he was releasing a report Thursday on how human rights must guide the response to the virus and recovery from the pandemic. Neither he nor the report name any countries or parties responsible for human rights violations.

Guterres said governments must be “transparent, responsive and accountable,” and stressed that press freedom, civil society organizations, the private sector and “civic space” are essential.

The report said governments also need to take action to mitigate the worst impacts of COVID-19 on jobs, livelihoods, access to basic services and family life.

Guterres said any emergency measures — including states of emergency — must be “legal, proportionate, necessary and non-discriminatory, have a specific focus and duration, and take the least intrusive approach possible to protect public health.”

“Emergency powers may be needed but broad executive powers, swiftly granted with minimal oversight, carry risks,” the report warned. “Heavy-handed security responses undermine the health response and can exacerbate existing threats to peace and security or create new ones.”

The report said the best response is proportionate to the immediate threat and protects human rights.

“The message is clear: People — and their rights — must be front and center,” Guterres said.

Source: AP

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief on Thursday warned the US of a “decisive response” after President Donald Trump said he ordered the US Navy to destroy Iranian boats that harass American ships in the Gulf.

Iran and the United States have appeared to be on the brink of an all-out confrontation twice in the past year.

Decades-old acrimony between the two sides worsened in 2018 when Trump unilaterally withdrew from a deal that gave Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme.

Tensions escalated further in January when a US air strike killed Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian general who headed the Guards’ foreign arm, the Quds Force.

“We declare to the Americans that we are absolutely determined and serious… and that all action will be met with a decisive response that will be efficient and quick,” Major General Hossein Salami said.

“We have also ordered our naval units to target (US boats and forces) if they try to endanger the safety of our ships or boats of war.”

The latest confrontation between the arch-foes came after the United States accused Iran of harassing its ships in the Gulf last week.

Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday as the Guards said they had launched the Islamic republic’s first military satellite.

The US president said he had “instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea”.

In response, Iran on Thursday summoned the Swiss ambassador to Tehran that represents US interests in the Islamic republic, state media said.

Salami said last week’s maritime incident was the result of “unprofessional and dangerous behaviour by the Americans in the Persian Gulf”.

The Guards commander also indicated that US actions in the sensitive waterway had been affected by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

“In last week’s incident, there was operational turmoil and disorder among US naval units at sea,” said Salami.

This, he added, was an indication that the “command and control of their military units may have been weakened by… the coronavirus disease”.

Iran and the United States are among the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

– ‘Cruel’ US sanctions –

Tehran called Thursday for Washington to be held accountable for the sanctions that have hampered its efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

The Iranian health ministry said 90 new deaths in the past 24 hours took the country’s overall coronavirus death toll to 5,481.

“Today, the coronavirus has spread not only in Iran but in almost all countries, and it requires serious effort and collective action to deal with it,” said Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

“In addition to fighting the virus, Iran faces illegal and inhuman American sanctions, doubling the pressure on the Iranian people,” he said, quoted by his ministry.

“It is the right of the Iranian people to have access to their financial resources to fight the disease and to counter its economic consequences,” said Araghchi.

“The United States’ cruel and unilateral sanctions against Iran constitute a clear violation of Security Council Resolution 2231, and the United States must therefore be held accountable by the international community.”

Medicines and medical equipment are technically exempt from the US sanctions but purchases are frequently blocked by the unwillingness of banks to process purchases for fear of incurring heavy US penalties.

Iran’s coronavirus outbreak first emerged in the Shiite holy city of Qom on February 19.

Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour announced 1,030 new cases of coronavirus infection on Thursday, taking the country’s total to 87,026.

Source:  AFP