NAIROBI: A suspected outbreak of the Marburg virus in northwest Tanzania has infected nine people, killing eight of them, the World Health Organization has said, weeks after an outbreak of the disease was declared over in neighboring Rwanda.
The viral hemorrhagic fever has a fatality rate as high as 88 percent, and is from the same virus family as the one responsible for Ebola, which is transmitted to people from fruit bats which are endemic to that part of East Africa.
The WHO said it received reliable reports of suspected cases in the Kagera region of Tanzania on Jan. 10, with symptoms of headache, high fever, back pain, diarrhea, vomiting blood, muscle weakness and finally external bleeding.
Samples from two patients were awaiting testing at Tanzania’s national laboratory for confirmation of the outbreak, WHO said in a statement on Tuesday.
The patients’ contacts, including health care workers, have been identified and were being followed up, WHO reported.
The outbreak in Rwanda, which shares a border with Tanzania’s Kagera region, infected 66 people and killed 15 before it was declared over on December 20.
Marburg virus can spread between people through direct contact or via blood and other bodily fluids of infected people, including contaminated bedding or clothing.
An outbreak in the Kagera region in March 2023 killed six people and lasted for nearly two months.
Suspected outbreak of Marburg virus kills eight in Tanzania, WHO says
https://arab.news/5rv9w
Suspected outbreak of Marburg virus kills eight in Tanzania, WHO says
- The viral hemorrhagic fever has a fatality rate as high as 88 percent, and is from the same virus family as the one responsible for Ebola
Putin attends Orthodox Easter service after declaring ceasefire in Ukraine
- The traditionally sung service starts late on a Saturday and lasts into the early hours of Sunday
President Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin joined other worshippers for an Easter service led by the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, a faithful backer of the Russian leader and an advocate for the war in Ukraine.
Hours after declaring a unilateral Easter ceasefire that Kyiv said was just words as fighting continued, Putin and Sobyanin stood in Moscow’s main church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, while Kirill led a procession, video of the service showed.
Holding a lit thin red candle and donning a dark suit, white shirt and a red tie as in years past, the Russian leader crossed himself several times when Kirill announced “Christ is risen.”
The traditionally sung service starts late on a Saturday and lasts into the early hours of Sunday.
For Putin, the Orthodox faith is central to his world view and he always attends services during major church holidays. For Orthodox Russians, Easter is the most important religious holiday.
At the service, Krill called for “lasting and just peace can be established in the vast expanses of historical Rus,” RIA state news agency reported, in what was a reference to a medieval territory that encompassed parts of what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. “How wonderfully it was said, do not do evil to another and do not treat others as you would not want them to treat you,” TASS agency cited Kirill as saying.
“If people adhered to this holiday commandment, then life would be completely different: family and social life and — let me say this — inter-governmental.”
Kirill has strongly backed the war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year. Thousands have been killed, the vast majority of them Ukrainians, and millions driven from their homes since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Zelensky says Ukraine will observe Putin’s Easter truce but claims violations
- The order to halt all combat over the Easter weekend came after months of efforts by US President Donald Trump to get Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday his forces would observe a surprise Easter truce announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin set to last until midnight on Sunday, even as air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv.
The 30-hour truce would be the most significant pause in the fighting throughout the three-year conflict.
But just hours after the order was meant to have come into effect, air-raid sirens sounded in the Ukrainian capital and Zelensky accused Russia of having maintained its artillery fire and assaults on the frontline.
Also on Saturday, Russia and Ukraine held a large exchange of prisoners, each side saying they had handed back more than 240 captured fighters.
The order to halt all combat over the Easter weekend came after months of efforts by US President Donald Trump to get Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire. On Friday, Washington even threatened to withdraw from talks if no progress was made.
“Today from 1800 (1500 GMT Saturday) to midnight Sunday (2100 GMT Sunday), the Russian side announces an Easter truce,” Putin said in televised comments during a meeting with the Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov.
Zelensky responded by saying Ukraine would follow suit, and proposed extending the truce beyond Sunday. But the Ukrainian leader also accused Russia of having already broken its promises.
Air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv and several other regions on Saturday evening.
“Russian assault operations continue on several frontline sectors, and Russian artillery fire has not subsided,” Zelensky said.
Putin had said the truce for the Easter holiday celebrated on Sunday was motivated by “humanitarian reasons.”
While he expected Ukraine to comply, he said that Russian troops “must be ready to resist possible breaches of the truce and provocations by the enemy.”
Zelensky in a social media post wrote: “If Russia is now suddenly ready to truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly — mirroring Russia’s actions.”
He added: “If a complete ceasefire truly takes hold, Ukraine proposes extending it beyond the Easter day of April 20.”
He proposed that “30 days could give peace a chance,” while pointing out that Putin had earlier rejected a proposed 30-day full and unconditional ceasefire.
“The fighting is ongoing, and Russian attacks continue,” Ukraine’s military command, the Chief of Staff, reported Saturday evening.
“In some areas on the frontline, Russian artillery continues to be heard, despite the promise of silence from the Russian leader. Russian drones are being used. It is quieter in some areas.”
Soldiers in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk close to the front line earlier greeted the truce announcement with skepticism.
Putin “might do it to give some hope or to show his humanity,” said Dmitry, a 40-year-old soldier. “But either way, of course, we don’t trust (Russia).”
Putin said the latest truce proposal would show “how sincere is the Kyiv’s regime’s readiness, its desire and ability to observe agreements and participate in a process of peace talks.”
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022.
Previous attempts at holding ceasefires for Easter in April 2022 and Orthodox Christmas in January 2023 were not implemented after both sides failed to agree on them.
“For millions of Ukrainians, Easter is one of the most important holidays. And millions of Ukrainians will go to church,” said Zelensky in his evening address.
“Over the years of this full-scale war, Russian attacks have destroyed or damaged more than 600 churches, prayer houses and places of worship.”
In Kramatorsk, one soldier, Vladislav, 22, said: “I feel like it’s going to start again after a while, and it’s going to go on and on.”
On the streets of Moscow, Yevgeny Pavlov, 58, said he did not think Russia should give Ukraine a breather.
“There is no need to give them respite. If we press, it means we should press to the end,” he told AFP.
Earlier Saturday, Ukraine and Russia said they had each returned 246 soldiers being held as prisoners of war in a swap mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
Zelensky said the total number of returned POWs now stood at 4,552.
The UAE’s foreign ministry said 31 wounded Ukrainians and 15 wounded Russians were also exchanged.
The UAE said it was committed to “finding a peaceful solution” to the conflict and “mitigating the humanitarian impacts.”
Russia said it had retaken the penultimate village still under Ukrainian control in its Kursk frontier region.
Kyiv had hoped to use its hold on the region as a bargaining chip in the talks.
Three Hegseth aides ousted in leak investigation decry ‘baseless attacks’
- Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning this week
WASHINGTON: Three former senior advisers to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decried on Saturday what they called “baseless attacks” after each was escorted from the Pentagon in an expanding probe on information leaks.
Dan Caldwell, a Hegseth aide; Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; and Darin Selnick, Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff were among four officials in Hegseth’s inner circle who were ousted this past week.
While the three initially had been placed on leave pending the investigation, a joint statement shared by Caldwell on X said the three were “incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended. Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.”
“At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with,” the post said.
Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning this week. The Pentagon said, however, that Ullyot was asked to resign.
The upheaval comes less than 100 days into the Trump administration where the Pentagon has found itself frequently in the epicenter of controversial moves — from firings of senior military and civilian staff to broad edicts to purge content that promoted diversity, equity or inclusion. That led to images or other online content of heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson being temporarily removed from the military’s websites, causing public uproar.
Last month, Hegseth announced that the Pentagon’s intelligence and law enforcement arms were investigating what it says are leaks of national security information following reports that Elon Musk was set to receive a classified briefing on potential war plans with China.
In the announcement by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, the office warned that Defense Department personnel could face polygraphs in the probe.
The departures also follow the firings of senior military officers, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown; Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti; National Security Agency and US Cyber Command director Gen. Tim Haugh; and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the US military representative to the NATO Military Committee.
250 years after America went to war for independence, a divided nation battles over its legacy
- Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington’s town green
LEXINGTON, Mass.: Tens of thousands of people came to Lexington, Massachusetts, just before dawn on Saturday to witness a reenactment of how the American Revolution began 250 years ago, with the blast of gunshot and a trail of colonial flair.
Starting with Saturday’s anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the country will look back to its war of independence and ask where its legacy stands today. Just after dawn on the Lexington Battle Green, militiamen, muskets in hand, took on a much larger contingent of British regulars. The battle ended with eight Americans killed and 10 wounded — the dead scattered on the grounds as the British marched off.
The regulars would head to Concord but not before a horseman, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode toward the North Bridge and warned communities along the way that the British were coming. A lone horseman reenacted that ride Saturday, followed by a parade through town and a ceremony at the bridge.
The day offers an opportunity to reflect on this seminal moment in history but also consider what this fight means today. Organizers estimated that over 100,000 came out for events in the two towns Saturday.
“It’s truly momentous,” said Richard Howell, who portrayed Lexington Minute Man Samuel Tidd in the battle.
“This is one of the most sacred pieces of ground in the country, if not the world, because of what it represents,” he said. “To represent what went on that day, how a small town of Lexington was a vortex of so much.”
Among those watching the Lexington reenactment was Brandon Mace, a lieutenant colonel with the Army Reserve whose ancestor Moses Stone was in the Lexington militia.
He said watching the reenactment was “a little emotional.”
“He made the choice just like I made and my brother made, and my son is in the Army as well,” Mace said. .”.. He did not know we would be celebrating him today. He did not know that he was participating in the birth of the nation. He just knew his friends and family were in danger.”
The 250th anniversary comes with President Donald Trump, scholars and others divided over whether to have a yearlong party leading up to July 4, 2026, as Trump has called for, or to balance any celebrations with questions about women, the enslaved and Indigenous people and what their stories reveal.
What happened at Lexington and Concord?
Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington’s town green.
Witnesses remembered some British officers yelled, “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels!” and that a shot was heard amid the chaos, followed by “scattered fire” from the British. The battle turned so fierce that the area reeked of burning powder. By day’s end, the fighting had moved to about 7 miles (11 kilometers) west to Concord and some 250 British and 95 colonizts were killed or wounded.
But no one knows who fired first, or why. And the revolt itself was initially less a revolution than a demand for better terms.
Woody Holton, a professor of early American history at the University of South Carolina, said most scholars agree that the rebels of April 1775 weren’t looking to leave the empire, but to repair their relationship with King George III and go back to the days before the Stamp Act, the Tea Act and other disputes of the previous decade.
“The colonizts only wanted to turn back the clock to 1763,” he said.
Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books include biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, said Lexington and Concord “galvanized opinion precisely as the Massachusetts men hoped it would, though still it would be a long road to a vote for independence, which Adams felt should have been declared on 20 April 1775.”
But at the time, Schiff added, “It did not seem possible that a mother country and her colony had actually come to blows.”
A fight for the ages
The rebels already believed their cause was bigger than a disagreement between subjects and rulers. Well before the turning points of 1776 — before the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine’s boast that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” — they cast themselves in a drama for the ages.
The so-called Suffolk Resolves of 1774, drafted by civic leaders of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, prayed for a life “unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles,” a fight that would determine the “fate of this new world, and of unborn millions.”
The revolution was an ongoing story of surprise and improvization. Military historian Rick Atkinson, whose book “The Fate of the Day” is the second of a planned trilogy on the war, called Lexington and Concord “a clear win for the home team,” if only because the British hadn’t expected such impassioned resistance from the colony’s militia.
The British, ever underestimating those whom King George regarded as a “deluded and unhappy multitude,” would be knocked back again when the rebels promptly framed and transmitted a narrative blaming the royal forces.
“Once shots were fired in Lexington, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren did all in their power to collect statements from witnesses and to circulate them quickly; it was essential that the colonies, and the world, understand who had fired first,” Schiff said. “Adams was convinced that the Lexington skirmish would be ‘famed in the history of this country.’ He knocked himself out to make clear who the aggressors had been.”
A country still in progress
Neither side imagined a war lasting eight years, or had confidence in what kind of country would be born out of it. The founders united in their quest for self-government but differed how to actually govern, and whether self-government could even last.
Americans have never stopped debating the balance of powers, the rules of enfranchisement or how widely to apply the exhortation, “All men are created equal.”
That debate was very much on display Saturday — though mostly on the fringes and with anti-Trump protesters far outnumbered by flag-waving tourists, locals and history buffs. Many protesters carried signs inspired by the American Revolution including, “Resist Like Its 1775,” and one even brought a puppet featuring an orange-faced Trump.
“It’s a very appropriate place and date to make it clear that, as Americans, we want to take a stand against what we think is an encroaching autocracy,” Glenn Stark, a retired physics professor who was holding a “No Kings” sign and watching the ceremony at the North Bridge.
Massachusetts’ Democratic governor, Maura Healey, who spoke at the North Bridge ceremony, also used the event to remind the cheering crowd that many of the ideals fought for during the Revolutionary War are again at risk.
“We see things that would be familiar to our Revolutionary predecessors — the silencing of critics, the disappearing people from our streets, demands for unquestioned fealty,” she said. “Due process is a foundational right. if it can be discarded for one, it can be lost for all.”
US Supreme Court intervenes to block Trump deportations
- Trump justifies summary expulsions — and the detention of people in El Salvador — by insisting that he is cracking down on violent Venezuelan criminal gangs now classified by the US government as terrorists
WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court, in a dramatic nighttime intervention Saturday, blocked President Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of an obscure law to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process.
The emergency ruling noted that two of the most conservative justices on the nine-member panel had dissented.
The order temporarily prevents the government from continuing to expel migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — last used to round up Japanese-American citizens during World War II.
Trump invoked the law last month to deport Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador that holds thousands of that country’s gangsters.
The court decision was triggered by imminent plans late Friday to expel dozens more Venezuelans under the act, meaning they would have been deported with next to no ability to hear evidence or challenge their cases.
The court said “the government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order.”
Trump justifies summary expulsions — and the detention of people in El Salvador — by insisting that he is cracking down on violent Venezuelan criminal gangs now classified by the US government as terrorists.
But the policy is fueling opposition concerns that the Republican is ignoring the US constitution in a broader bid to amass power.
The row over the Alien Enemies Act comes amid muscular assaults by the administration against big law firms, Harvard and other universities, and major independent media outlets.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the lead in seeking to halt Friday’s planned deportations, welcomed the Supreme Court ruling.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court,” attorney Lee Gelernt said.
On Saturday the government filed a motion with the Supreme Court arguing that it should not be prevented from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people it says are terrorists.
The government also asserted that even if it is blocked, the court should state that such deportations can go ahead using other laws.
Trump won the White House election last November in large part on promises to combat what he repeatedly claimed is an invasion of criminal migrants.
Trump’s rhetoric about rapists and murderers descending on suburban homes resonated with swaths of voters concerned about high levels of illegal immigration.
Trump has sent troops to the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada for allegedly not doing enough to stop illegal crossings, and designated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as terrorist groups.
A right-wing influencer who meets often with Trump, Laura Loomer, said Saturday that the president was “gracious” for flying out people who entered the country illegally, rather than having them “shot to death” at the border.
Democrats and civil rights groups have expressed alarm at an erosion of constitutional rights.
Under Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act — previously seen only during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — migrants have been accused of gang membership and sent to El Salvador without going before a judge or being charged with a crime.
Trump has also repeatedly said he would be open to sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to the notorious El Salvador prison, CECOT, outside San Salvador.
Attorneys for several of the Venezuelans already deported have said their clients were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
In the most publicized case to date, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported last month to CECOT before the Trump administration admitted he was sent there due to an “administrative error.”
Even after a court ruled that the Trump administration must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, Trump has doubled down and insisted he is a gang member — including posting an apparently doctored photo on social media Friday that showed MS-13 on his knuckles.
As court challenges pile up, the president and his allies have repeatedly attacked what they call “activist” judges.
Another right-wing influencer with a large social media following, Jesse Kelly, responded to the overnight order freezing deportations by posting: “Ignore the Supreme Court.”
