Beijing cancels flights, shuts schools over new virus outbreak

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Customers wearing face masks shop live seafood at a Carrefour supermarket, following new cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infections in Beijing, China June 17, 2020. (Reuters)
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People wearing face masks wait for the delivery of goods they ordered online in a residential area in Xicheng district which is under lockdown after a new COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak near the closed Xinfadi Market in Beijing on June 17, 2020. (AFP)
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Medical workers stand on the roadside watching people who had their car number plates recorded in the area of the Xinfadi market where a new COVID-19 coronavirus cluster emerged last week, walk to do swab tests for the coronavirus at a testing centre in Beijing on June 17, 2020. (AFP)
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Updated 17 June 2020
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Beijing cancels flights, shuts schools over new virus outbreak

  • All schools have been ordered to close again and return to online classes
  • Officials have closed 11 markets and disinfected thousands of food and beverage businesses in Beijing

BEIJING: Beijing’s airports canceled two-thirds of all flights on Wednesday and schools in the Chinese capital were closed again as authorities rushed to contain a new coronavirus outbreak and warned infections may rise.
The city reported 31 new cases while officials urged residents not to leave Beijing, with fears growing about a second wave of infections in China, which had largely brought the contagion under control since its emergence in Wuhan late last year.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been tested so far following the fresh outbreak, which is believed to have started in the sprawling Xinfadi wholesale food market.
Almost 30 residential compounds in the city are now under lockdown.
“Because the Xinfadi market is the largest marketplace selling daily necessities, with thousands of migrant workers and a large number of visitors, it is hard to control the spread,” said Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We may see a rise in confirmed cases in the coming days,” Pang told a regular press briefing.
Beijing has reported 137 infections over the past six days and 95 percent of them were “mild cases,” Pang said.
The city has ramped up its testing capacity and is gathering about 400,000 samples a day, said Zhang Qiang, an official from Beijing’s epidemic prevention task force.
Since June 13, 356,000 samples have been tested. That includes swabs from workers and visitors to different markets in Beijing and communities near to spots where outbreaks have been registered.
A shortage of expensive testing machines has led to delays in processing.
At least 1,255 scheduled flights were canceled Wednesday, state-run People’s Daily reported — nearly 70 percent of all trips to and from Beijing’s main airports.
The outbreak had already forced authorities to announce a travel ban for residents of “medium- or high-risk” areas of the city, while requiring all other residents to take nucleic acid tests in order to leave Beijing.
Several provinces were quarantining travelers from Beijing, where all schools — which had mostly reopened — have been ordered to close again and return to online classes.
Officials have closed 11 markets and disinfected thousands of food and beverage businesses in Beijing after the outbreak was detected.
In addition to the cluster in Beijing, two domestic cases — one in neighboring Hebei province and another in the eastern province of Zhejiang — were reported Wednesday, while there were 11 imported cases.
A local case was also reported in Tianjin, a large city located just outside Beijing to the southeast, state television announced late in the day.
The 22-year-old man, a hotel restaurant worker, reportedly had not left Tianjin in the two weeks before displaying symptoms — fueling speculation about another possible cluster.
Authorities have so far banned group sports, ordered people to wear masks in crowded enclosed spaces, and suspended inter-provincial group tours in response to the outbreak.
Bars in Beijing’s trendy Sanlitun area were ordered to shut down, while shops were seeing lighter foot traffic.
Officials said that since May 30, more than 200,000 people had visited Xinfadi market, which supplies more than 70 percent of Beijing’s fruit and vegetables.
Until the new outbreak, most of China’s recent cases were nationals returning from abroad as COVID-19 spread globally, and the government had all but declared victory against the disease.
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that the virus type found in the Beijing outbreak was a “major epidemic strain” in Europe.


Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

Updated 52 min 29 sec ago
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Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

  • A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010

JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.


Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

Updated 26 November 2024
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Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.


The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.


Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.


Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

Updated 26 November 2024
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Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.


China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

Updated 26 November 2024
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China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

  • The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait

BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)


Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

Updated 26 November 2024
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Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.