KAMITUGA: Slumped on the ground over a mound of dirt, Divine Wisoba pulled weeds from her daughter’s grave. The 1-month-old died from mpox in eastern Congo in August, but Wisoba, 21, was too traumatized to attend the funeral.
In her first visit to the cemetery, she wept into her shirt for the child she lost and worried about the rest of her family. “When she was born, it was as if God had answered our prayers — we wanted a girl,” Wisoba said of little Maombi Katengey. “But our biggest joy was transformed into devastation.”
Her daughter is one of more than 6,000 people officials suspect have contracted the disease in South Kivu province, the epicenter of the world’s latest mpox outbreak, in what the World Health Organization has labeled a global health emergency. A new strain of the virus is spreading, largely through skin-to-skin contact, including but not limited to sex. A lack of funds, vaccines and information is making it difficult to stem the spread, according to alarmed disease experts.
Mpox — which causes mostly mild symptoms like fever and body aches, but can trigger serious cases with prominent blisters on the face, hands, chest and genitals — had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa, until a 2022 outbreak reached more than 70 countries. Globally, gay and bisexual men made up the vast majority of cases in that outbreak. But officials note mpox has long disproportionately affected children in Africa, and they say cases are now rising sharply among kids, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, with many types of close contact responsible for the spread.
Health officials have zeroed in on Kamituga, a remote yet bustling gold mining town of some 300,000 people that attracts miners, sex workers and traders who are constantly on the move. Cases from other parts of eastern Congo can be traced back here, officials say, with the first originating in the nightclub scene.
Since this outbreak began, one year ago, nearly 1,000 people in Kamituga have been infected. Eight have died, half of them children.
Challenges on the ground
Last month, the World Health Organization said mpox outbreaks might be stopped in the next six months, with governments’ leadership and cooperation.
But in Kamituga, people say they face a starkly different reality.
There’s a daily average of five new cases at the general hospital, which is regularly near capacity. Overall in South Kivu, weekly new suspected cases have skyrocketed from about 12 in January to 600 in August, according to province health officials.
Even that’s likely an underestimate, they say, because of a lack of access to rural areas, the inability of many residents to seek care, and Kamituga’s transient nature.
Locals say they simply don’t have enough information about mpox.
Before her daughter got sick, Wisoba said, she was infected herself but didn’t know it.
Painful lesions emerged around her genitals, making walking difficult. She thought she had a common sexually transmitted infection and sought medicine at a pharmacy. Days later, she went to the hospital with her newborn and was diagnosed with mpox. She recovered, but her daughter developed lesions on her foot.
Nearly a week later, Maombi died at the same hospital that treated her mother.
Wisoba said she didn’t know about mpox until she got it. She wants the government to invest more in teaching people protective measures.
Local officials can’t reach areas more than a few miles outside Kamituga to track suspected cases or inform residents. They broadcast radio messages but say that doesn’t reach far enough.
Kasindi Mwenyelwata goes door to door describing how to detect mpox — looking for fevers, aches or lesions. But the 42-year-old community leader said a lack of money means he doesn’t have the right materials, such as posters showing images of patients, which he finds more powerful than words.
ALIMA, one of the few aid groups working on mpox in Kamituga, lacks funds to set up programs or clinics that would reach some 150,000 people, with its budget set to run out at year’s end, according to program coordinator Dr. Dally Muamba.
If support keeps waning and mpox spreads, he said, “there will be an impact on the economy, people will stop coming to the area as the epidemic takes its toll. ... And as the disease grows, will resources follow?”
The vaccine vacuum
Health experts agree: What’s needed most are vaccines — even if they go only to adults, under emergency approval in Congo.
None has arrived in Kamituga, though it’s a priority city in South Kivu, officials said. It’s unclear when or how they will. The main road into town is unpaved — barely passable by car during the ongoing rainy season.
Once they make it here, it’s unclear whether supply will meet demand for those who are at greatest risk and first in line: health staff, sex workers, miners and motorcycle taxi drivers.
Congo’s government has budgeted more than $190 million for its initial mpox response, which includes the purchase of 3 million vaccine doses, according to a draft national mpox plan, widely circulating among health experts and aid groups this month and seen by The Associated Press. But so far, just 250,000 doses have arrived in Congo and the government’s given only $10 million, according to the finance ministry.
Most people with mild cases recover in less than two weeks. But lesions can get infected, and children or immunocompromised people are more prone to severe cases.
Doctors can ensure lesions are clean and give pain medication or antibiotics for secondary infections such as sepsis.
But those who recover can get the virus again.
A new variant, a lack of understanding
Experts say a lack of resources and knowledge about the new strain makes it difficult to advise people on protecting themselves. An internal report circulated among aid groups and agencies and seen by AP labeled confidence in the available information about mpox in eastern Congo and neighboring countries low.
While the variant is known to be more easily transmissible through sex, it’s unclear how long the virus remains in the system. Doctors tell recovered patients to abstain from sex for three months, but acknowledge the number’s largely arbitrary.
“Studies haven’t clarified if you’re still contagious or not ... if you can or can’t have sex with your wife,” said Dr. Steven Bilembo, of Kamituga’s general hospital.
Doctors say they’re seeing cases they simply don’t understand, such as pregnant women losing babies. Of 32 pregnant women infected since January, nearly half lost the baby through miscarriage or stillbirth, hospital statistics show.
Alice Neema was among them. From the hospital’s isolation ward, she told AP she’d noticed lesions around her genitals and a fever — but didn’t have enough money to travel the 30 miles (50 kilometers) on motorbike for help in time. She miscarried after her diagnosis.
As information trickles in, locals say fear spreads alongside the new strain.
Diego Nyago said he’d brought his 2-year-old son, Emile, to the hospital for circumcision when he developed a fever and lepasions.
It was mpox — and today, Nyago is grateful he was already at the hospital.
“I didn’t believe that children could catch this disease,” he said as doctors gently poured water over the boy to bring his temperature down. “Some children die quickly, because their families aren’t informed.
“Those who die are the ones who stay at home.”
A gold mining town in Congo has become an mpox hot spot as a new strain spreads
https://arab.news/b2w5y
A gold mining town in Congo has become an mpox hot spot as a new strain spreads
- Mpox causes mostly mild symptoms like fever and body aches, but can trigger serious cases
- Lack of funds, vaccines and information is making it difficult to stem the spread
Russia backs 30-day ceasefire but with due account of nuances, Kremlin’s Peskov says
MOSCOW: Russia supports the implementation of a 30-day ceasefire in the Ukraine conflict, but only with due consideration of ‘nuances’ in the more than three-year-old war, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying on Friday.
“This theme was long put forward by the Ukrainian side...,” TASS news agency quoted Peskov as saying.
“And as soon as it was advanced by the (US administration of Donald Trump), it was supported by President (Vladimir) Putin with the reservation that it is very difficult to discuss this in detail if no answers are found to a large number of nuances around the notion of a ceasefire.”
Russia has repeatedly said that introducing a prolonged ceasefire depends on establishing mechanisms to monitor and uphold such a move.
Pakistan says India has put neighbors ‘closer to major conflict’
- Escalation comes after attack on tourists last month in Indian-run part of disputed Kashmir that killed 26 people
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Friday accused India of bringing the nuclear-armed neighbors “closer to a major conflict,” as the death toll from three days of missile, artillery and drone attacks passed 50.
The bloody escalation comes after an attack on tourists last month in the Indian-run part of disputed Kashmir that killed 26 people, and which New Delhi accused Islamabad of backing — an allegation Pakistan denied.
India responded with air strikes Wednesday on what it called “terrorist camps” in Pakistan, killing more than 20 civilians and fueling the worst clashes between the two in decades.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman Shafqat Ali Khan said that India’s “reckless conduct has brought the two nuclear-armed states closer to a major conflict.”
Military spokesman Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry told media: “We will not de-escalate — with the damages they did on our side, they should take a hit.”
“So far, we have been protecting ourselves but they will get an answer in our own timing,” he added.
On a third day of tit-for-tat exchanges, the Indian army said it had “repulsed” waves of Pakistani attacks using drones and other munitions overnight, and gave a “befitting reply.”
Late Friday, an Indian defense source told AFP that drones had been sighted in the Indian-administered Kashmir areas of Jammu and Samba, and in neighboring Punjab state.
Earlier, Pakistan’s military spokesman denied that Islamabad was carrying out such attacks.
The two countries have fought several wars over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided between the two.
On Friday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with his national security adviser, defense minister and the chiefs of the armed forces, his office said.
Most of the more than 50 deaths were in Pakistan during Wednesday’s air strikes by India and included children.
On Friday, Pakistani security and government officials said five civilians — including a two-year-old girl — were killed by Indian shelling overnight in areas along the heavily militarised Line of Control (LoC), which separates Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
On the other side, a police official said one woman was killed and two men wounded by heavy shelling.
Pakistani military sources said that its forces had shot down 77 Indian drones in the last two days, with debris of many incursions seen by AFP in cities across the country.
India said 300 to 400 drones had attempted to cross into its territory, and also accused Pakistani forces on Thursday of targeting three military stations.
Pakistan’s military said Wednesday that five Indian jets had been downed across the border, but New Delhi has not responded to the claims, while a military source said three jets had crashed on home territory.
Both sides have made repeated claims and counter-claims that are difficult to verify.
“The youth of Kashmir will never forget this act of brutality by India,” said 15-year-old Muhammad Bilal in Muzaffarabad, the main city in Pakistan-administered Kashmir where a mosque was hit Wednesday.
In Jammu, under Indian administration, 21-year-old student Piyush Singh said: “Our [attack] is justified because we are doing it for whatever happened to our civilians.”
Militants have stepped up operations in Kashmir since 2019, when Indian PM Modi’s Hindu nationalist government revoked its limited autonomy and took the state under direct rule from New Delhi.
Pakistan has rejected claims by New Delhi that it was behind last month’s attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, when gunmen killed 26 people, mainly male Hindu tourists.
India blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba — a UN-designated terrorist organization — for the attack.
The conflict has caused major disruption to international aviation, with airlines having to cancel flights or use longer routes that do not overfly the India-Pakistan frontier.
India had closed 24 airports, with local media reporting the suspension would remain in place until next week.
The mega Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament was on Friday suspended for a week, while Pakistan suspended Super League play indefinitely, barely a day after relocating it to the UAE.
World powers have called for both sides to exercise “restraint,” with several offering to mediate the dispute.
On Friday, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met with Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs Adel Al-Jubeir in Islamabad, according to a statement.
That meeting came after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met his Indian counterpart in Delhi on Thursday, days after visiting Pakistan.
The International Crisis Group, however, said “foreign powers appear to have been somewhat indifferent” to the prospect of war, despite warnings of possible escalation.
On Friday, the International Monetary Fund said it had approved a $1 billion payout to Pakistan, despite India’s objections.
Freed Palestinian student accuses Columbia University of inciting violence
- Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students
- “Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,”
NEW YORK: A Palestinian student arrested as he was about to finalize his US citizenship accused Columbia University on Thursday of eroding democracy with its handling of campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, who led anti-war protests at the Ivy League school in New York in 2023 and 2024, spent 16 days in a Vermont prison before a judge ordered him released on April 30.
On Friday, an appeals court in New York denied the government’s request to halt that order, saying the Trump administration’s jurisdictional arguments were unlikely to succeed and that it hadn’t shown that Mahdawi’s release has caused irreparable harm.
“Individual liberty substantially outweighs the government’s weak assertions of administrative and logistical costs,” wrote the three-judge panel at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Trump administration has said Mahdawi should be deported because his activism threatens its foreign policy goals, but the judge who released him on bail ruled that he has raised a “substantial claim” that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.
Mahdawi spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday, a day after pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with campus security guards inside the university’s main library. At least 80 people were taken into custody, police said.
Mahdawi said instead of being a “beacon of hope,” the university is inciting violence against students.
“Columbia University is participating in the destruction of the democratic system,” Mahdawi said in the interview. “They are supporting the initiatives and the agenda of the Trump administration, and they are punishing and torturing their students.”
A spokesperson for Columbia University, which in March announced sweeping policy changes related to protests following Trump administration threats to revoke its federal funding, declined to comment Thursday beyond the response of the school’s acting president to Wednesday’s protests.
The acting president, Claire Shipman, said the protesters who had holed up inside a library reading room were asked repeatedly to show identification and to leave, but they refused. The school then asked police in “to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community,” she said in a statement Wednesday evening, calling the protest actions “outrageous” and a disruption to students for final exams.
Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014.
At Columbia, he organized campus protests and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Mahmoud Khalil, another Palestinian permanent resident of the US and graduate student who was arrested in March.
On April 14, Mahdawi had taken a written citizenship test, answered verbal questions and signed a document about the pledge of allegiance at an immigration office in Colchester when his interviewer left the room. Masked and armed agents then entered and arrested him, he said. Though he had suspected a trap, the moment was still shocking, he said, triggering a cascade of contrasting emotions.
“Light and darkness, cold and hot. Having rights or not having rights at all,” he said.
Immigration authorities have detained college students from around the country since the first days of the Trump administration, many of whom participated in campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Mahdawi was among the first to win release from custody after challenging his arrest.
In another case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in favor of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, upholding an order to transfer her from a Louisiana detention center back to New England to determine whether her rights were violated and if she should be released.
Mahdawi said his message to the Turkish student and others was “stay positive and don’t let this injustice shake your belief in the inevitability of justice.”
“People are working hard. Communities are mobilizing,” he said. “The justice system has signaled to America with my case, and with Rumeysa’s yesterday with the Second Circuit, that justice is functioning and checks and balances is still in function.”
Mahdawi’s release, which is being challenged by the government, allows him to travel outside of his home state of Vermont and attend his graduation from Columbia in New York later this month. He said he plans to do so, though he believes the administration has turned its back on him and rejected the work of a student diplomacy council he served on alongside Jewish, Israeli and Lebanese students.
“I plan to attend the graduation because it is a message,” he said. “This is a message that education is hope, education is light, and there is no power in the world that should take that away from us.”
Migrants told of Libya deportation waited hours on tarmac, attorney says
- A Vietnamese worker was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center
- He was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya
WASHINGTON: Migrants in Texas who were told they would be deported to Libya sat on a military airfield tarmac for hours on Wednesday, unsure of what would happen next, an attorney for one of the men told Reuters.
The attorney, Tin Thanh Nguyen, said his client, a Vietnamese construction worker from Los Angeles, was among the migrants woken in the early morning hours and bused from an immigration detention center in Pearsall, Texas, to an airfield where a military aircraft awaited them.
After several hours, they were bused back to the detention center around noon, the attorney said on Thursday.
The Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters was first to report that US President Donald Trump’s administration was poised to deport migrants to Libya, a move that would escalate his immigration crackdown which has already drawn legal backlash.
Officials earlier this week told Reuters the US military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could change.
A US official told Reuters the flight never departed. As of Friday, it was unclear if the administration was still planning to proceed with the deportations.
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport non-Libyan migrants to Libya without adequate screenings for possible persecution or torture would clearly violate a prior court order.
Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing a class action lawsuit had made an emergency request to the court hours after the news broke of the potential flight to Libya.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Nguyen, who declined to name his client, said the man was told on Monday to sign a document agreeing to be deported to Libya. The man, who does not read English well, declined to sign it and was placed in solitary confinement and shackled along with four or five other men, the attorney said.
The man was never provided an opportunity to express a fear of being deported to Libya as required under federal immigration law and the recent judicial order, Nguyen said.
“They said, ‘We’re deporting you to Libya,’ even though he hadn’t signed the form, he didn’t know what the form was,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said his client, originally from Vietnam, has lived in the US since the 1990s but was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year during a regular check-in.
Vietnam declines to accept some deportees and processes deportation paperwork slowly, Nguyen said, making it harder for the US to send deportees there.
Activists hold ‘die-in’ protest at Soviet monument in Warsaw
- They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland made his way to the monument
- A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests
WARSAW: Pro-Ukrainian activists held a protest at a Soviet memorial in Warsaw where Moscow’s ambassador placed a wreath on Friday, as Russia celebrates World War II Victory Day.
Some two dozen protesters wrapped in white sheets, their clothes and faces splattered with a red substance imitating blood, lay at the foot of a monument at the cemetery for Soviet soldiers in Poland’s capital.
They chanted “terrorists” as Russia’s ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreyev, made his way to the monument with a wreath to commemorate the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
“The idea was that the path the ambassador would take to reach the monument would be lined with the graves of people who died innocently during the war” in Ukraine, Miroslaw Petryga, 70, who participated in the lie-in, told AFP.
Poland is a staunch ally of Kyiv, supporting Ukraine with military and political aid as it fends off a Russian invasion that is grinding through its fourth year.
“It was the gait of a man pretending not to see anything, with tunnel vision,” Petryga, a Ukrainian engineer who has lived in Poland for decades, said of Andreyev.
The ambassador walked past the protesters amid a heavy police presence and with a handful of supporters and security guards around him.
The activists also scattered children’s toys at the entrance to the cemetery. The teddy bears, balls and other items were also splattered with a blood-like liquid to symbolize child victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Some were wearing t-shirts with the slogan “Make Russia small again” and were collecting signatures under a petition to expel the Russian ambassador from Poland.
At the site, around a dozen people also gathered at a counter protest, wearing the St. George ribbon, a historical symbol of Russian and Soviet military successes.
Minor scuffles and verbal altercations broke out between the groups.
A handful of people also showed up to lay flowers at the cemetery away from the protests.
“We should honor the memory of those soldiers who died in the World War,” said Natalia, a 67-year-old who held a black-and-white photo that she said showed her father who had fought in the war.
The Russian citizen and longtime Polish resident declined to give her full name.
In 2022, the year Russia launched the full-scale war, protesters at the Soviet mausoleum threw a red substance at Moscow’s envoy.
A year later Andreyev was blocked by activists from laying flowers at the monument.
The Kremlin is using its annual Victory Day parade in Moscow — marking 80 years since the end of World War II — to whip up patriotism at home and project strength abroad as its troops fight in Ukraine.
But for Natalia Panchenko from the pro-Ukrainian organization Euromaidan, the day should serve as a reminder of Russia’s ongoing war.
“It is important to us that today, when people remember that there is a country called Russia, they do not remember Russia through Russian propaganda, but remember the real Russia,” Panchenko told AFP.
“And Russia is a terrorist state,” she said.
