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Kabul: An Afghan official says forces at Bagram air base, home to a prison housing 5,000 inmates, have surrendered to the Taliban.
Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi said Sunday that the surrender handed the one-time American base over to the insurgents.
The prison housed both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters. It came as the Taliban entered the outskirts of Kabul.
ANKARA: Turkish authorities said Thursday the death toll from the severe floods and mudslides that struck the north of the country has risen to 17.
One other person is reported missing.
The floods battered the Black Sea coastal provinces of Bartin, Kastamonu, Sinop and Samsun on Wednesday, demolishing homes and bridges and sweeping away cars.
Helicopters scrambled to rescue people stranded on rooftops.
As floodwaters began to recede across the affected regions in Turkey’s north, a statement from the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD, said rescuers had recovered six bodies in Kastamonu.
An 80-year-old woman was reported missing in Bartin province.
The disaster struck as firefighters in southwest Turkey worked to extinguish a wildfire in Mugla province, an area popular with tourists that runs along the Aegean Sea.
The blaze, which was brought under control on Thursday, was one of more than 200 wildfires in Turkey since July 28.
At least eight people and countless animals died and thousands of residents have had to flee fierce blazes.
Climate scientists say there is little doubt that climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving more extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and storms.
Such calamities are expected to happen more frequently on our warming planet.
Flooding inundated much of Bozkurt.
One building collapsed and a second building was damaged in the town, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
In Bartin province, at least 13 people were injured when a section of a bridge caved in.
The military said its helicopters airlifted 80 people to safety in the region.
Many of the affected areas were left without power and village roads were blocked.
Turkey’s Black Sea region is frequently struck by severe rains and flash flooding.
At least six people were killed in floods that hit the eastern Black Sea coastal province of Rize last month.
Beijing: China on Monday reported an anthrax pneumonia patient from northern Hebei Province’s Chengde city, who had contact history with cattle, sheep and products that come from these animals.
The patient was transported to Beijing by an ambulance four days ago after showing symptoms and the person was later quarantined and put under treatment, state-run Global Times reported, quoting the Beijing Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Beijing CDC).
Anthrax is prevalent among cattle and sheep. Human beings usually get infected after coming in contact with sick animals or contaminated products. The most common way of infection — 95 per cent of reported cases — are caused by skin contact which lead to blisters and skin necrosis, the Beijing CDC said.
The most dangerous infection is anthrax pneumonia, which happens when a patient inhales dust containing bacillus anthracis and gets infected.
People can get intestinal anthrax after eating contaminated food, usually meat, and will develop symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.
Anthrax can be transmitted directly between human beings but it is not as infectious as flu or COVID-19.
Bacillus anthracis is a bacterium and multiple antibiotics are effective for treatment, the report said.
Since Sunday, Beijing has stepped up measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus cases by virtually banning people from travelling to the Chinese capital from provinces with COVID-19 cases in the country.
Beijing has rolled out a range of measures to strengthen the management of people returning from regions with relatively high virus transmission rates, including imposing restrictions on their purchase of railway tickets and air services.
So far, the coronavirus has claimed 4,848 lives, along with 105,904 confirmed infections, in China, according to Johns Hopkins University.
TEHRAN: Iran, grappling with its most severe surge of the coronavirus to date, reported more new infections and deaths across the country on Sunday than any other single day since the pandemic began.
The crush of new cases, fueled by the fast-spreading delta variant, have overwhelmed hospitals with patients too numerous to handle. The country has never seen so many COVID-19 patients in critical condition, with 6,462 more severe cases reported Sunday.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, last week ordered officials to discuss the possibility of a total national shutdown. The government has been loath to enforce such a lockdown, fearing the damage it would do to an economy reeling from years of American sanctions.
Iran’s sputtering vaccination campaign hasn’t helped matters. Only 3.3% of the total population of some 80 million has been fully vaccinated, according to data compiled from government sources by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
TEL AVIV: Israel’s defence minister warned Thursday that his country is prepared to strike Iran, issuing the threat against the Islamic Republic after a fatal drone strike on an oil tanker at sea that his nation blamed on Tehran.
The comments by Benny Gantz come as Israel meanwhile lobbies countries for action at the United Nations over last week’s attack on the oil tanker Mercer Street that killed two people.
The tanker struck off Oman in the Arabian Sea, is managed by a firm owned by an Israeli billionaire.
The US and the United Kingdom similarly blamed Iran for the attack, but no country has offered evidence or intelligence to support their claims.
Iran, which along with its regional militia allies has launched similar drone attacks, has denied being involved.
” “We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran,” Gantz said.
“The world needs to take action against Iran now.”
Iran did not immediately respond to Gantz’s comments.
However, in a letter Wednesday to the UN Security Council, its chargé d’affaires in New York described Israel as “the main source of instability and insecurity in the Middle East and beyond for more than seven decades.
””This regime has a long dark record in attacking commercial navigation and civilian ships,” Zahra Ershadi wrote.
“”In less than two years, this regime has attacked over 10 commercial vessels carrying oil and humanitarian goods destined to Syria.”
”Ershadi’s comments refer to an ongoing shadow war being waged on Mideast waterways since 2019 that has seen both Iranian and Western-linked ships attacked.
Last week’s attack killed the vessel’s Romanian captain as well as a British crew member who worked for Ambrey, a maritime security firm.
In a statement Thursday, Ambrey identified the victim as Adrian Underwood, a former soldier in the British Army who started at the firm as a maritime security officer in 2020 before becoming a team leader.
“We continue to be in contact with Adrian’s family to offer support at this sad and difficult time,” said John Thompson, Ambrey’s management director.
The attacks began a year after then US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
US President Joe Biden has said he’s willing to rejoin the accord, but talks over salvaging the deal have stalled in Vienna.
WASHINGTON: A Republican lawmaker’s report investigating the origins of COVID-19 released on Monday has concluded that the pandemic outbreak stemmed from a genetically modified virus that leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, first detected in December 2019.
McCaul, in statements alongside the release of the report, has called for Congress to pass legislation sanctioning scientists at the Wuhan lab and Chinese Communist Party officials who were determined to have obstructed efforts to respond to the pandemic quickly and effectively.
The GOP investigation parallels efforts by the Biden administration and the international community to determine the origins of the pandemic outbreak, which has killed more than 4.2 million people across the world, infected nearly 200 million and upended global stability.
The Republican report is based on open-source material and draws conclusions from circumstantial reporting, also raises concern that the lab was conducting “gain of function” research, controversial medical research where scientists genetically modify a bacteria or virus to make it more infectious in an effort to study better preventative measures, in an unsafe environment, reported The Hill.
“We know gain-of-function research was happening at the WIV and we know it was being done in unsafe conditions,” McCaul said.
National security experts also raised the concern that the US must discipline China for failing to quickly and cooperatively alert the international community to the virus outbreak and its ongoing obstruction into the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, reported The Hill.
“The Biden administration has already — working through the World Health Organisation (WHO) and with the G-7 and with other countries — used diplomacy and tried to urge the Chinese to cooperate. They’ve given us their answer, their answer is no,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
McCaul also called on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to subpoena Peter Daszak, an American scientist who has come under scrutiny for his connection with the Wuhan lab and involvement in publishing an open letter in February 2020 that rejected the lab theory as a xenophobic distraction from the pandemic response.
The letter, which was published in the Lancet medical journal, has since come under criticism as an attempt to divert attention from China’s responsibility for the virus outbreak.”Now is the time to use all of the tools the US government has to continue to root out the full truth of how this virus came to be,” McCaul said.
“That includes subpoenaing Peter Daszak to appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to answer the many questions his inconsistent — and in some instances outright and knowingly inaccurate — statements have raised. It also includes Congress passing legislation to sanction scientists at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] officials who participated in this coverup. This was the greatest coverup of all time and has caused the deaths of more than four million people around the world, and people must be held responsible.”
The Republican report doubles down on the idea that the virus likely emerged from the Wuhan laboratory, a theory that has gained increasing legitimacy, reported The Hill.
The lab leak theory is the idea that the virus emerged from the Wuhan scientific lab either due to a series of missteps and lax safety procedures or Chinese government and military tampering.
The Chinese government and Wuhan lab scientists have dismissed these allegations and maintain that the first cases likely emerged from animal-to-human transmission at a wet market in the city of Wuhan.
Leaked State Department cables from 2018 documented that American diplomats raised concern about safety and management procedures at the Wuhan lab that did not raise the level of need for the lab’s status as a BSL-4, the highest level of international bioresearch safety. The cables were first reported by The Washington Post in April 2020, reported The Hill.
The Republican report adds to this by raising concern over maintenance and renovation taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the adjacent lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, related to its hazardous waste treatment system and air conditioning systems while carrying out research on coronaviruses. Such instances were taking place in the months preceding the first known cases of COVID-19, the report stated.
WASHINGTON: The Biden administration on Monday expanded its efforts to evacuate at-risk Afghan citizens from Afghanistan as Taliban violence increases ahead there of the US military pullout at the end of the month.
Current and former employees of the U.S. government and the NATO military operation who don’t meet the criteria for a dedicated program for such workers are also covered.
However, the move comes with a major caveat: applicants must leave Afghanistan to begin the adjudication process that may take 12-14 months in a third country, and the U.S. does not intend to support their departures or stays there.
Nevertheless, the State Department said the move will mean that “many thousands” of Afghans and their immediate families will now have the opportunity to be permanently resettled in the US as refugees.
It did not offer a more specific number of those who might be eligible for the programme.
“The US objective remains a peaceful, secure Afghanistan,” it said in a statement.
“However, in light of increased levels of Taliban violence, the US government is working to provide certain Afghans, including those who worked with the United States, the opportunity for refugee resettlement to the United States.”
The creation of a “Priority 2” category for Afghans within the US Refugee Admissions Program is intended for Afghans and their immediate families who “may be at risk due to their US affiliation” but aren’t able to get a Special Immigrant Visa because they did not work directly for the US government or didn’t hold their government jobs long enough.
To qualify for the Priority 2 category, Afghans must be nominated by a US government agency or by the most senior civilian US citizen employee of a US-based media outlet or nongovernmental organization.
The first group of Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants, most of whom served as translators or did other work for U.S. troops or diplomats, who have cleared security vetting arrived in the US on Friday.
That group of 221 people are among 2,500 who will be brought to the US in the coming days.
Another 4,000 SIV applicants, plus their families, who have not yet cleared the security screening are expected to be relocated to third countries ahead of the completion of the US withdrawal.
Roughly 20,000 Afghans have expressed interest in the programme.
WORLD: Germany will start offering Covid booster shots from September and make it easier for 12-to-17 year olds to get a jab, the health ministry said Monday, amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant.
Mobile vaccination teams should be sent into care and nursing homes, the text says, to offer Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna booster shots to residents, regardless of which vaccine they had originally.
Doctors will also be able to administer booster jabs to those who qualify, including people with weakened immune systems.
A booster shot will also be offered to anyone who received the two-dose AstraZeneca or single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the document released by Spahn’s ministry said, “in the interests of preventative healthcare”.
Both AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are viral vector vaccines, whereas the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use novel mRNA technology that has shown high efficacy in studies.
The ministers also agreed to make the coronavirus vaccine more widely available to over-12s, going a step further than the country’s STIKO vaccines regulator.
The regulator currently only recommends the coronavirus vaccine for 12-17 year olds if they have pre-existing conditions or live with people at high risk from Covid.
Although adolescents who do not fall into those categories are still allowed to get vaccinated, in consultation with their parents and doctors, the cautious STIKO guidance has slowed take-up.
Germany’s health ministers agreed on Monday to encourage vaccination among teens by opening all the country’s vaccination centres to 12-17 year olds, alongside the possibility to get vaccinated at regular clinics.
The ministers stressed that the jab was voluntary but said getting children and teenagers vaccinated could “contribute significantly to a safe return to classrooms after the summer holidays”.
Although Germany is currently enjoying relatively low infection rates compared with neighbouring countries, case numbers have been creeping up in recent weeks mainly because of the more contagious Delta variant.
There are also concerns about a slowdown in the country’s vaccination rate, with just over 52 percent of the population fully inoculated.
Within the European Union, the European Medicines Agency has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots for all over-12s.
STIKO head Thomas Mertens told public radio MDR that the body was still waiting for data from longer-term studies before deciding on issuing a more general vaccine recommendation for over-12s.
The problem, he added, “is not so much the children’s vaccinations”.
What is needed to help suppress a fourth Covid wave in Germany “is a high vaccination rate among 18-to-59 year olds”.
LONDON: Star England all-rounder Ben Stokes has taken an indefinite break from the game to “prioritise his mental wellbeing” and withdrawn from the home Test series against India beginning August 4.
In a statement, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has also said that Stokes has taken the break to also rest his left index finger, “which has not fully healed since his return to competitive cricket earlier this month”.
Mental health of cricketers in COVID times has become a topic of constant discussion with the players having to play in bio-bubbles for months.
Managing Director of England men’s cricket, Ashley Giles, said the ECB supports Stokes’ decision.
“Ben has shown tremendous courage to open up about his feelings and wellbeing. Our primary focus has always been and will continue to be the mental health and welfare of all of our people,” said Giles, also a former England spinner.
“The demands on our athletes to prepare and play elite sport are relentless in a typical environment, but the ongoing pandemic has acutely compounded this.”
“Spending significant amounts of time away from family, with minimal freedoms, is extremely challenging.
“The cumulative effect of operating almost continuously in these environments over the last 16 months has had a major impact on everyone’s wellbeing.”
Giles added that Stokes will be given all the time he needs to get back to his best shape both physically and mentally.
“Ben will be given as long as he needs, and we look forward to seeing him playing cricket for England in the future,” he said.
Craig Overton has replaced Stokes in the England squad for the India series.
WASHINGTON: The first flight evacuating Afghan interpreters and others who worked alongside Americans in Afghanistan landed early Friday at Washington Dulles International Airport, according to an internal US government document and a commercial flight tracking service.
An airliner carrying the 221 Afghans, including 57 children and 15 babies, according to the internal document obtained by The Associated Press, touched down at Washington Dulles International Airport in the early morning hours, according to tracking of the flight by FlightAware.
The evacuation flights, resettling former translators and others who fear retaliation from Afghanistan’s Taliban for having worked with American service members and civilians, are highlighting American uncertainty about how Afghanistan’s government and military will fare after the last US combat forces leave that country in coming weeks.
Family members are accompanying the interpreters and others on the flights out.
They were expected to stay at Fort Lee, Virginia for several days, U.S.officials said earlier this month.
Subsequent flights are due to bring more of the applicants who are farthest along in the process of getting visas, having already won approval and cleared security screening.