“He was a true friend of Bangladesh since our 1971 Liberation War,” Hasina told the maiden session of Parliament called for the second time since the outbreak of pandemic.

NEW DELHI:  Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Sunday paid rich tributes to former president Pranab Mukherjee and said he was a true friend of Bangladesh, as the country’s Parliament adopted a condolence motion over his death. 

“He was a true friend of Bangladesh since our 1971 Liberation War,” Hasina told the maiden session of Parliament called for the second time since the outbreak of pandemic.

Mukherjee died on Monday in New Delhi. The Bangladesh government on Tuesday announced that it will observe a one-day state mourning at the death of the country’s ‘real friend’.

Hasina recalled Mukherjee’s personal support for her and her family particularly during her life in exile in India after the August 15, 1975 coup in Bangladesh.

The putsch killed her father and Bangladesh’s founder Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman along with most of his family members and toppled his post-independence government.

Sharif’s younger brother and Leader of the Opposition Shahbaz Sharif has also made it clear that Nawaz cannot return till he is medically fit.

LAHORE:Nawaz Sharif will return to Pakistan “only after getting well’, his party announced on Friday, indicating that the former prime minister may not meet the judicial deadline of September 10 to appear for a hearing in a corruption case against him.

The Islamabad High Court (IHC) early this week had directed the three-time prime minister and the supremo of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), currently in London, to appear before it and surrender to the authorities by September 10 or face legal proceedings for absconsion.

A division bench of the high court — comprising Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani and Justice Aamer Farooq — had also directed the Deputy Attorney General to verify the medical condition of 70-year-old Sharif through the Pakistani High Commission in London.

The bench had issued the directives while hearing appeals filed by Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Captain (retd) Mohammad Safdar against conviction in the Avenfield and Al-Azizia Steel Mills cases.

“It is not possible that Nawaz Sharif returns to Pakistan by September 10 and faces cases against him, before getting well.

“His heart- related surgery is scheduled in London in a couple of weeks and he has to undergo the treatment,” a senior PML-N leader told PTI on Friday.

“Today we also had a conference call of the main party leadership that was unanimous on one point that ‘Mian Sahib’ should not return to the country till he gets well,” the leader said, adding that on the next hearing of the case in IHC on September 10 the court will be apprised of Sharif’s ‘serious condition’ with his fresh reports from London doctors and his treatment schedule.

He said Sharif was keen to return but his family and party leaders were against it.

The PML-N leader further said it will be difficult for Prime Minister Imran Khan to face Sharif in Pakistan.

(Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) government is only doing politics on the health of Nawaz Sharif, otherwise it is not interested in bringing him back because of his ‘massive political clout’ in the country,” he said.

Sharif’s younger brother and Leader of the Opposition Shahbaz Sharif has also made it clear that Nawaz cannot return till he is medically fit.

“Nawaz Sharif will return to the country if doctors in London allow him. Nawaz Sharif’s health is serious and once he gets well he will appear before courts,” Shahbaz said, who now holds the position of PML-N president.

Shahbaz asked Imran Khan and the PTI leaders to stop doing politics on someone’s health.

“His condition is serious and his treatment is scheduled in London shortly,” he added.

The last time the Sharif family had submitted Nawaz’s medical report to the Lahore High Court was over a month ago.

Signed by Dr David Lawrence, a London-based consultant cardiothoracic surgeon, the report said medical investigations and opinions are indicative of significantly reduced blood supply to Nawaz’s heart and its impaired functionality.

“Nawaz must undergo coronary catheterisation as a significant part of his heart is at risk.

A multidisciplinary approach was warranted for his safety while undergoing an invasive procedure due to underlying ITP (unstable platelet count) and co-morbidities (hypertension, diabetes and kidney disease) which carry a significant risk of bleeding and possibility of a procedural or peri-procedural adverse cardiac event,” the report said.

The report said Nawaz will be scheduled for an invasive cardiac procedure once the hospital starts planning elective procedures amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further, at the time of the procedure Nawaz must be in stable condition as he is in the high-risk category.

Sharif has been in London since November last year after the Lahore High Court granted him permission to go abroad for four weeks for treating the heart disease and an immune system disorder.

The three-time premier was sentenced to seven years in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills case.

In fact, Prude’s death has raised questions about how authorities respond to mental health emergencies.

NEW YORK: Not five minutes after police slipped a “spit hood” over Daniel Prude’s head, the 41-year-old Black man went limp. A week later, he was taken off life support.

Prude’s suffocation in Rochester, New York, in March has drawn new attention to the hoods — mesh bags that have been linked to other deaths — and the frequent reliance on police to respond to mental health emergencies.

His death has underscored one of the top demands of the police reform movement: that certain duties should not be handled by law enforcement but by social workers or mental health experts. Seven officers involved in the encounter were suspended with pay Thursday.

While many in law enforcement defend the hoods as vital to prevent officers from being spit on or even bitten — a concern that has taken on new importance during the coronavirus pandemic — critics have denounced them as dangerous and inhumane. For some, they evoke hoods used on prisoners at U.S. government overseas detention sites or “black sites.”

Amnesty International condemned the use of spit hoods Thursday, a day after Prude’s family made public body camera video, and police reports it obtained from the Rochester department. The organization said the hoods are particularly dangerous when a person is already in distress, as Prude appeared to be.

Police use of spit hoods often “looks like something out of Abu Ghraib,” said Adanté Pointer, an Oakland civil rights lawyer who has handled several cases involving the devices. “They’re often used in a punitive way.”

Prude, in Rochester to visit his brother, was taken by police for a mental health evaluation just hours before the fatal encounter after he was said to have expressed suicidal thoughts. Prude’s brother told police he was calm when he returned to his house but later got high on PCP and ran away, prompting the brother to call 911.

Police found Prude wandering the street naked after allegedly smashing a storefront window, and he could be seen on body camera footage spitting in the direction of officers and heard claiming to be infected with coronavirus. Officers said that led them to employ the hood.

Prude, handcuffed by this point, can be seen continuing to spit through the mesh and saying that he wanted an officer’s gun. The officers then pinned him to the ground, one of them keeping a knee on his back and another pressing his face into the pavement for two minutes. Both appeared white.

Minutes later, an officer could be heard saying, “Ugh, he’s puking.” After realizing Prude had stopped breathing, paramedics who had arrived at some point, began CPR.

“They put a bag over his head, and they squeezed the air out of him,” said Nicolette Ward, a lawyer for one of Prude’s daughters. “He spent the last moments of his life breathing in his own vomit.”

At a news conference Thursday announcing the officers’ suspensions, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said: “Mr. Daniel Prude was failed by the police department, our mental healthcare system, our society and he was failed by me.”

In fact, Prude’s death has raised questions about how authorities respond to mental health emergencies. Many other deaths at the hands of police have resulted from an encounter that began with a call about someone’s mental health and then devolved.

In many departments — New York City for example — there has been a push to better train police on how to manage the mentally ill or to bring in experts who do, but it remains a major issue.

Spit hoods vary in design, but Park City, Utah, police chief Wade Carpenter said the ones he’s seen are made to be breathable and held in place with an elastic around the neck that can easily be broken.

“It wouldn’t put any pressure on the carotid arteries in the neck. It wouldn’t restrict blood flow to the brain and certainly wouldn’t block the mouth or nose,” said Carpenter, adding that officers in the ski town have used the devices for years without issues.

University of South Carolina criminal justice professor Geoffrey Alpert said the hoods have reduced the risk of officers and bystanders getting spit on for decades.

“Take away COVID, it’s just a nasty thing anyway,” Alpert said.

But Prude’s death is the second one involving spit hoods to surface since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked a national reckoning on racism and policing. Floyd’s death did not involve a spit hood.

Just three weeks after Prude’s deadly encounter, a similar one happened in Tucson, Arizona. Police handcuffed and placed a spit hood on the head of a naked man also in distress. Carlos Ingram Lopez died after gasping for air and pleading for water.

In both cases, details about that death didn’t emerge until weeks after.

In another similar episode, a 45-year-old man died in 2015 after police in Bernalillo, New Mexico, placed him in a spit hood, possibly incorrectly.

A responding sergeant from a neighboring community told investigators a thick cotton part of the hood was covering Ben C de Baca’s face, nose and mouth and that he hadn’t seen the device “used in that fashion before.”

A medical investigator’s report concluded that improperly placed spit hoods have the potential to cause suffocation and that in this case, the possibility of asphyxia from use of the hood could not be ruled out. Bernalillo settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the man’s family for an undisclosed sum.

Prison guards have also used spit hoods, sometimes to deadly effect. Their use varies by jurisdiction — police in Minneapolis deploy them but those in New York City don’t. The NYPD, the nation’s largest police force, said a team of police EMTs has only recently started testing their effectiveness in the wake of the pandemic.

When British police started using the hoods in recent years, civil liberties advocate Martha Spurrier slammed them as “primitive, cruel and degrading.” Even some senior police officers have agreed.

Colombo: The Sri Lankan Navy with assistance from Indian ships was battling for a second day on Friday to douse a major fire raging on an oil tanker carrying crude from Kuwait to India that left one of its 23 crew members dead.

The Sri Lankan Navy on Friday confirmed that a Filipino sailor died in a boiler explosion in the engine room of the Panama registered tanker MT New Diamond that caught fire on Thursday.

The Navy said that 22 of the 23 member crew had been safely rescued off the tanker.

The tanker was carrying 270,000 metric tonnes of crude oil from Kuwait to India when its engine room caught fire off the coast of Sangamankanda in the eastern district of Ampara.

The Navy said that so far the 270,000 metric tonnes of crude oil it was carrying had not been affected by the fire. Steps are currently being taken to stop the spread of fire to the cargo,” it said in a statement.

The Sri Lankan Navy is also taking steps to ensure that there will be no seepage of oil to the sea from the tanker.

The distressed vessel is in the waters 23 nautical miles off the eastern coast where the sea depth is measured at 3100 metres. The operation to douse the fire resumed early this morning under the supervision of the Greek national captain of the tanker.

The Indian Naval Frigate INS Sahyadri joined the operations by 0200 hours on Friday. The Navy said two more Indian Coast guard vessels are to join the rescue operations.

The Indian Coast Guard on Thursday said that it pressed into action three of its ships and a Dornier aircraft after the Sri Lankan Navy sought assistance to control the fire onboard the oil tanker.

In a swift sea and air coordinated Search and Rescue (SAR) operation, the Coast Guard said it immediately diverted ICG Ships Shaurya, Sarang and Samudra Paheredar, besides a Dornier aircraft for the firefight on the oil tanker.

The Sri Lankan Navy said that the two Russian vessels which were docked at the Hambantota port since August 31 and dispatched to the area to join the rescue operations departed Sri Lankan waters this morning.

On Thursday night, MV Helen, a vessel sailing in the area, rescued 3 Greeks and 16 Filipino crew members from the distressed vessel.

The Navy spokesman said that at least four ships had been dispatched to carry out the rescue operation. The naval ships were dispatched from the eastern port of Trincomalee and the southern port of Hambantota.

At the time the fire broke out, the Panamanian-registered ship was about 38 nautical miles (70 kilometres) east of Sri Lanka.

Washington: Bracing for a contentious election with no immediate results and possible civil unrest, Facebook is enacting a host of measures to ensure its platform is not used to sow chaos and spread misinformation before, during and after the U.S. presidential election.

But it’s not clear the changes are enough.

The company said Thursday it will restrict new political ads in the week before the election and remove posts that convey misinformation about COVID-19 and voting. It will also attach links with official results to posts by candidates and campaigns that prematurely declare victory.

This election is not going to be business as usual. We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Thursday.

That means helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest. Some activists hailed the new policies but said the onus will be on Facebook to enforce them. And others were skeptical that they’ll really make a difference.

Voting starts in North Carolina tomorrow. Election Day isn’t in two months, it’s tomorrow and every day after. Which means voters in that state and many others that vote early will be subject to months of dishonest ads on Facebook’s platform,” said Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of UltraViolet, a women’s organization critical of Facebook.

She called the announcement a PR stunt designed to distract from the fact that Facebook is the single biggest vector of dangerous misinformation and voter suppression campaigns in the United States.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a Facebook expert at the University of Virginia, said the company again proved itself incapable of effectively snuffing out dangerous misinformation last week when it failed to remove postings by right-wing militia organizers urging supporters with rifles to converge on Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Facebook’s biggest problem has always been enforcement, he said. Even when it creates reasonable policies that seem well-meaning, it gets defeated by its own scale. So I am not optimistic that this will be terribly effective. Facebook and other social media companies are being scrutinized over how they handle misinformation, given problems with President Donald Trump and other candidates posting false information and Russia’s ongoing attempts to interfere in U.S. politics.

Facebook has long been criticized for not fact-checking political ads or limiting how they can be targeted at small groups of people.

With the nation divided, and election results potentially taking days or weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country,” Zuckerberg said.

Civil rights groups said they directly pitched Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives to make many of the changes announced Thursday.

These are really significant steps but everything is going to depend on the enforcement, said Vanita Gupta, who was head of the Obama Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and now leads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

I think they’re going to be tested on it pretty soon.” In July, Trump refused to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election as he scoffed at polls that showed him lagging behind Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Trump also has made false claims that the increased use of mail-in voting because of the coronavirus pandemic allows for voter fraud. That has raised concern over the willingness of Trump and his supporters to abide by election results.

Under the new measures, Facebook says it will prohibit politicians and campaigns from running new election ads in the week before the election. However, they can still run existing ads and change how they are targeted. Many voters, however, are expected to vote by mail well ahead of Election Day.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager criticized the ban on new political ads, saying it would prevent Trump from defending himself on the platform in the last seven days of the presidential campaign.

Posts with obvious misinformation on voting policies and the coronavirus pandemic will also be removed. Users can only forward articles to a maximum of five others on Messenger, Facebook’s messaging app. The company also will work with Reuters to provide official election results and make the information available both on its platform and with push notifications.

After being caught off-guard by Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other companies put safeguards in place to prevent it from happening again. That includes taking down posts, groups and accounts that engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior” and strengthening verification procedures for political ads. Last year, Twitter banned political ads altogether.

Zuckerberg said Facebook had removed more than 100 networks worldwide engaging in such interference over the last few years.

Just this week, we took down a network of 13 accounts and two pages that were trying to mislead Americans and amplify division, he said.

But experts and Facebook’s own employees have said the measures have not been enough to stop the spread of misinformation, including from politicians. Internal dissent among Facebook employees might have helped influence Zuckerberg’s decision to do something, said Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher at Harvard University.

The UK-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is leading the trial as regulatory sponsor.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has announced that the vaccine for coronavirus being developed by AstraZeneca has reached phase three clinical trials in the country and is very close to being finalised for approval.

The phase 3 trial is being implemented as part of Operation Warp Speed, a multi-agency collaboration led by the US Health and Human Services, which aims at accelerating the development and manufacturing of medical countermeasures for COVID-19 and delivering 300 million doses of an effective vaccine by January 2021.

“I am pleased to announce that AstraZeneca vaccine has reached phase three clinical trials,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday.

“That’s joining another group of vaccines that are very close to the end, and hopefully, approval,” he added.

AstraZeneca is one of the leaders in the race to develop COVID-19 vaccine.

Other companies that have COVID-19 vaccines in phase 3 trials include Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc.

“In the United States, we’re doing things that nobody thought would have been even possible. This is a process that would have taken, in some cases, years, and we did it in a matter of months,” Trump said.

The National Institute of Health separately announced that Phase 3 clinical trial evaluating an investigational COVID-19 vaccine known as AZD1222 will enroll approximately 30,000 adult volunteers at 80 sites in the US to evaluate if the candidate vaccine can prevent symptomatic COVID-19.

The UK-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is leading the trial as regulatory sponsor.

“Safe and effective vaccines will be essential to meet the global need for widespread protection against COVID-19,” said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony S Fauci.

“Positive results from preclinical research led by NIH scientists supported the rapid development of this vaccine candidate, which has also showed promise in early-stage clinical trials,” he said.

Oxford University’s Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group have developed AZD1222.

The candidate vaccine was licensed to AstraZeneca for further development.

Trump told reporters that the US remains on track to deliver a vaccine very rapidly in record time.

“Over the last month, new cases in the United States have declined by 38 per cent. Last week, we announced a breakthrough in testing that will allow us to have over 150 million rapid, point-of-care tests.

“These tests return results in less than 15 minutes, and many will be deployed to nursing homes,” he said.

“We’re focusing very strongly on nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other locations that serve high-risk populations.

“So we’re going to have the 15-minute, and less, tests, and we will have 150 million rapid point-of-care tests,” Trump said.

The US has so far recorded 6,030,782 coronavirus cases and 183,596 fatalities — both the numbers highest in the world.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe

Tokyo: Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has expressed his intention to step down due to his declining health, according to reports on Friday by NHK and other Japanese media.

The Prime Minister’s Office said the report could not be immediately confirmed, but that Abe was believed to be meeting top ruling officials at the party headquarters. The Liberal Democratic Party spokesman did not answer the phone.

Concerns about Abe’s chronic health issues, simmering since earlier this summer, intensified this month when he visited a Tokyo hospital two weeks in a row for unspecified health checkups.

Abe, whose term ends in September 2021, is expected to stay on until a new party leader is elected and formally approved by the parliament.

He had abruptly resigned from his first stint in office in 2007 due to his health, which was fueling concerns about his recent condition.

Abe on Monday became Japan’s longest serving prime minister by consecutive days in office, eclipsing the record of Eisaku Sato, his great-uncle, who served 2,798 days from 1964 to 1972.

But his second hospital visit on Monday eclipsed festivity for his record and has accelerated speculation and political maneuvering toward a post-Abe regime.

Abe has acknowledged having ulcerative colitis since he was a teenager and has said the condition was controlled with treatment. He has not made clear if it is related to his recent health issues or hospital visits.

After his recent hospital visits were reported, top officials from Abe’s Cabinet and the ruling party said Abe was overworked and badly needed rest.

His health concerns added to speculation that Abe’s days in office are numbered, when his support ratings are already at their lowest levels due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and its severe impact on the economy, on top of a slew of political scandals.

Shigeru Ishiba, a 63-year-old hawkish former defence minister and Abe’s archrival, is a favorite next leader in media surveys, though he is less popular within the ruling party.

A low-key former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, Defence Minister Taro Kono, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, and economic revitalisation minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who is in charge of coronavirus measures, are widely speculated in Japanese media as his potential successors.

The end of his scandal-laden first stint as prime minister was the beginning of six years of annual leadership change, remembered as an era of revolving door politics that lacked stability and long-term policies.

When he returned to office in 2012, Abe vowed to revitalise the nation and get its economy out of its deflationary doldrums with his Abenomics formula, which combines fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reforms.

Of the 818 new cases, Kathmandu valley alone accounted for 166 of them, Gautam said.

KATHMANDU: Nepal on Sunday recorded 818 new coronavirus cases, taking the country’s COVID-19 tally to 31,935, the health ministry said.

Health Ministry spokesperson Dr Jageshwor Gautam said three more people have died due to coronavirus in the last 24 hours.

Now the death toll stands at 149.

Of the 818 new cases, Kathmandu valley alone accounted for 166 of them, Gautam said.

“Two-eighty-one people, who had earlier tested positive for the virus, have been discharged after recovery from various health facilities across the country,” Gautam said.

The total number of recovered cases is 18,631, which is 58 per cent of total cases.

Gautam said so far 6,00,444 PCR tests have been conducted in the country, including 8,026 in the last 24 hours.

There are 13,155 active coronavirus cases in the country.