SEOUL: Leader Kim Jong Un says a Covid outbreak is causing ‘great upheaval’ in North Korea, which announced 21 new “fever” deaths Saturday.
Two days after confirming its first cases of Covid-19, the government said more than half a million people had been sickened nationwide.
Despite activating its “maximum emergency quarantine system” to slow the spread of disease through its unvaccinated population, North Korea is now reporting tens of thousands of new cases daily.
On Friday, “over 174,440 persons had fever, at least 81,430 were fully recovered and 21 died in the country,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
North Korea confirmed Thursday that the highly contagious omicron variant had been detected in the capital Pyongyang, with Kim ordering nationwide lockdowns.
It was the government’s first official admission of Covid cases and marked the failure of a two-year coronavirus blockade maintained at great economic cost since the start of the pandemic.
From late April to May 13, more than 524,440 people have fallen sick with fever, KCNA said, with 27 deaths in total.
The report did not specify whether the new cases and deaths had tested positive for Covid-19, but experts say the country will be struggling to test and diagnose on this scale.
North Korea has said only that one of the first six deaths it announced Friday had tested positive for Covid-19.
“It’s not a stretch to consider these ‘fever’ cases to all be Covid-19, given the North’s lack of testing capacity,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute.
“The actual number of Covid cases could be higher than the fever figures due to many asymptomatic cases,” he said, adding that the pace of infection was growing “very fast.”
Kim said Saturday the “crisis” was causing “great upheaval,” as he oversaw a second Politburo meeting in three days to discuss the situation, KCNA reported.
“The spread of malignant disease comes to be a great upheaval in our country since the founding of the DPRK,” he said, referring to North Korea by its official name.
Kim is putting himself “front and center” of the country’s Covid response, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
“The language he’s used suggests the situation in North Korea is going to get worse before it gets better,” he told AFP.
“Engagers see this rhetoric preparing the way for international assistance, but Kim may be rallying a population on the verge of further sacrifice,” he added.
The meeting of the nation’s top officials discussed medicine distribution and other ways of “minimizing the losses in human lives,” KCNA said.
North Korea has a crumbling health system — one of the worst in the world — and no Covid vaccines, antiviral treatment drugs or mass testing capacity, experts say.
But the country will “actively learn” from China’s pandemic management strategy, Kim said, according to KCNA.
China, the world’s only major economy to still maintain a zero-Covid policy, is battling multiple omicron outbreaks — with some major cities, including financial hub Shanghai, under stay-at-home orders.
North Korea has previously turned down offers of Covid vaccines from China and the World Health Organization’s Covax scheme, but both Beijing and Seoul issued fresh offers of aid and vaccines this week.
Kim’s comments indicate North Korea “will try getting supplies from China,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.
It also looks likely Pyongyang “will adopt a Chinese-style anti-virus response of regional lockdowns,” Yang added.
So far, Kim said Saturday, North Korea’s outbreak was not “an uncontrollable spread among regions” but transmission within areas that had been locked down, KCNA said.
Despite its Covid outbreak, new satellite imagery indicates that North Korea has resumed construction at a long-dormant nuclear reactor.
“I can’t tell you when the reactor will be ready to go, but it is about 10x larger than the existing reactor at Yongbyon,” Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies wrote in a Twitter thread Saturday.
It would produce 10 times more plutonium for nuclear weapons, he said, adding: “This would make good on Kim’s pledge to increase the number of nuclear weapons.”
The United States and South Korea have warned that Kim is preparing to conduct another nuclear test — which would be the regime’s seventh — and that it could come any day now.
Analysts have warned Kim could speed up his nuclear test plans in a bid to “distract” North Korea’s population from a disastrous Covid-19 outbreak.
Kim says outbreak causing ‘great upheaval’ in North Korea
https://arab.news/cjv37
Kim says outbreak causing ‘great upheaval’ in North Korea
- Two days after confirming its first cases of Covid-19, the government said more than half a million people had been sickened nationwide
- On Friday, "over 174,440 persons had fever, at least 81,430 were fully recovered and 21 died in the country"
Russia says captured key town in eastern Ukraine
MOSCOW: Russian forces have captured the town of Kurakhove in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry said on Monday, in a key advance after months of steady gains in the area.
Russian units “have fully liberated the town of Kurakhove — the biggest settlement in southwestern Donbas,” the ministry said on Telegram.
Canada PM Trudeau to announce resignation as early as Monday – reports
- Unclear whether Trudeau will leave immediately or stay on as PM until new leader is selected, says report
- Polls show Liberals will badly lose to the Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to announce as early as Monday that he will resign as Liberal Party Leader, The Globe and Mail reported on Sunday, citing three sources.
The sources told the Globe and Mail that they don’t know definitely when Trudeau will announce his plans to leave but said they expect it will happen before a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday.
The Canadian prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
It remains unclear whether Trudeau will leave immediately or stay on as prime minister until a new leader is selected, the report added.
Trudeau took over as Liberal leader in 2013 when the party was in deep trouble and had been reduced to third place in the House of Commons for the first time.
Trudeau’s departure would leave the party without a permanent head at a time when polls show the Liberals will badly lose to the Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October.
His resignation is likely to spur fresh calls for a quick election to put in place a government able to deal with the administration of President-elect Donald Trump for the next four years.
The prime minister has discussed with Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc whether he would be willing to step in as interim leader and prime minister, one source told the newspaper, adding that this would be unworkable if LeBlanc plans to run for the leadership.
South Korea’s military says North Korea fired missile into eastern sea
- The South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile was fired from an area near Pyongyang
- Seoul denounces the launch as a provocation that poses a serious threat on the Korean Peninsula
SEOUL: North Korea on Monday fired a ballistic missile that flew 1,100 kilometers before landing in waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, South Korea’s military said, extending its heightened weapons testing activities into 2025 weeks before Donald Trump returns as US president.
The South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile was fired from an area near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and that the launch preparations were detected in advance by the US and South Korean militaries. It denounced the launch as a provocation that poses a serious threat to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
The joint chiefs said the military was strengthening its surveillance and defense posture in preparation for possible additional launches and sharing information on the missile with the United States and Japan.
The launch came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visiting Seoul for talks with South Korean allies over the North Korean nuclear threat and other issues.
Blinken’s visit comes amid political turmoil in South Korea following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived martial law decree and subsequent impeachment by parliament last month, which experts say puts the country at a disadvantage in getting a steady footing with Trump ahead of his return to the White House.
In a year-end political conference, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to implement the “toughest” anti-US policy and criticized the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen security cooperation with Seoul and Tokyo, which he described as a “nuclear military bloc for aggression.”
North Korean state media did not specify Kim’s policy plans or mention any specific comments about Trump. During his first term, Trump met Kim three times for talks on the North’s nuclear program.
Many experts, however, say a quick resumption of Kim-Trump summitry is unlikely as Trump would first focus on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. North Korea’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine also poses a challenge to efforts to revive diplomacy, experts say.
Before his presidency faltered over the ill-conceived power grab, Yoon worked closely with US President Joe Biden to expand joint military exercises, update nuclear deterrence strategies and strengthen trilateral security cooperation with Tokyo.
Indonesia launches free meals program to feed children and pregnant women to fight stunting
- Many children are malnourished and promise is to provide free school lunches and milk as part of a longer-term strategy to achieve a “Golden Indonesia” generati
JAKARTA: Indonesia’s new government started an ambitious $28 million project Monday to feed nearly 90 million children and pregnant women to fight malnutrition and stunting although critics question whether the nationwide program is affordable.
The Free Nutritious Meal program delivers on a campaign promise by President Prabowo Subianto, who was elected last year to lead the nation of more than 282 million people and Southeast Asia’s largest economy. He said the program aimed to fight the stunting of growth that afflicts of 21.5 percent of Indonesian children younger than 5 and would raise the earnings of farmers and the value of their harvest.
Subianto has pledged to accelerate GDP growth to 8 percent from 5 percent now.
In his inauguration speech in October, Subianto said many children are malnourished and his promise to provide free school lunches and milk to 83 million students at more than 400,000 schools across the country is part of a longer-term strategy to develop the nation’s human resources to achieve a “Golden Indonesia” generation by 2045.
“Too many of our brothers and sisters are below the poverty line, too many of our children go to school without breakfast and do not have clothes for school,” Subianto said.
Subianto’s signature program, which had included free milk, could cost upward of 450 trillion rupiah ($28 billion). He said his team had made the calculations to run such a program, and “We are capable,” he asserted.
The government’s target is to reach 19.47 million schoolchildren and pregnant women in 2025 with a budget of 71 trillion rupiah ($4.3 billion) so as to keep the annual deficit under a legislated ceiling of 3 percent of GDP, said Dadan Hindayana, the head of the newly formed National Nutrition Agency.
Hindayana said the money would buy an estimated 6.7 million tons of rice, 1.2 million tons of chicken, 500,000 tons of beef, 1 million tons of fish, vegetable and fruit, and 4 million kiloliters of milk, and at least 5,000 kitchens would be set up across the country.
On Monday, a truck carrying about 3,000 meal portions arrived before lunch at SD Cilangkap 08, a primary school in the Jakarta satellite city of Depok. The 740 students were provided plates containing rice, stir-fried vegetables, tempeh, stir-fried chicken and oranges.
“We send a team to each school to facilitate the meal distribution to students every day,” Hindayana said, adding that the program will provide one meal per day for each student from early childhood education to senior high school levels, covering a third of the daily caloric needs for children, with the government providing the meals at no cost to recipients.
But the populist program has drawn criticism from investors and analysts, ranging from conflation with the interests of industrial lobby groups or the sheer scale of the logistics required, to the burden on Indonesia’s state finances and economy.
Economic researcher from the Center of Economic and Law Studies, Nailul Huda, said with Indonesia’s tight fiscal condition, state finances are not strong enough to support the fiscal burden and this will lead to additional state debt.
“That is not comparable to the effect of free meals program which can also be misdirected,” Huda said, “The burden on our state budget is too heavy if it is forced to reach 100 percent of the target recipients, and it will be difficult for Prabowo’s government to achieve the economic growth target of 8 percent.”
He warned it could also worsen the external balance of payments for the country, which is already a major importer of rice, wheat, soybeans, beef and dairy products.
But Reni Suwarso, the director of Institute for Democracy, Security and Strategic Studies said the stunting rate in Indonesia is still far from the target of a 14 percent reduction in 2024.
According to the 2023 Indonesian Health Survey, the national stunting prevalence was 21.5 percent, down around 0.8 percent compared to the previous year. The United Nations Children’s Fund or UNICEF estimated one in 12 Indonesian children younger than 5 are wasted while one in five are stunted.
Wasting refers to low weight for the child’s height, while stunting refers to low height for the child’s age. Both conditions are caused by malnourishment.
“That’s so bad and must be solved!” Suwarso said, “Child malnourishment have severe consequences, threatening the health and long-term development of infants and young children throughout this nation.”
More than 260 Rohingya refugees arrive in Indonesia
- The mostly Muslim ethnic Rohingya are heavily persecuted in Myanmar
- Latest group of refugees arrived on a beach in the region’s town of West Peureulak
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia: More than 260 Rohingya refugees, including women and children, arrived in Indonesia’s easternmost province of Aceh after floating at sea for days, an official said Monday.
The mostly Muslim ethnic Rohingya are heavily persecuted in Myanmar and thousands risk their lives each year on long and dangerous sea journeys to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.
An East Aceh official, Iskandar – who like many Indonesians goes by one name – said this latest group of refugees arrived on a beach in the region’s town of West Peureulak on Sunday night around 10:25 p.m. local time (1525 GMT Sunday).
“There are 264 of them – 117 men and 147 women,” Iskandar said Monday, adding that in the group, around 30 were children.
He said they had initially been on two boats, one of which had sunk off the coast while the second managed to move closer to shore.
They could then walk to the shore when the tide was low, he said.
“They told me they were rejected in Malaysia,” Iskandar said, adding that the local government has not decided where to move the Rohingya refugees.
Rohingya arrivals in Indonesia tend to follow a cyclical pattern, slowing during the stormy months and picking back up when sea conditions calm down.
In November, more than 100 refugees were rescued after their boat sank off the coast of East Aceh.
In October, 152 Rohingya refugees were finally brought ashore after being anchored for days off the coast of South Aceh district while officials decided whether to let them land.
Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention and says it cannot be compelled to take in refugees from Myanmar, calling instead on neighboring countries to share the burden and resettle the Rohingya who arrive on its shores.
Many Acehnese, who have memories of decades of bloody conflict themselves, are sympathetic to the plight of their fellow Muslims.
But others say their patience has been tested, claiming the Rohingya consume scarce resources and occasionally come into conflict with locals.
