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Officials: Many Haitian migrants are being released in US

DEL RIO, Texas (AP) — Many Haitian migrants camped in a small Texas border town are being released in the United States, two U.S. officials said, undercutting the Biden administration’s public statements that the thousands in the camp faced immediate…Read More

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‘Dose of hope’: Biden pushing rich nations to share vaccine

President Joe Biden is set to push well-off nations to do more to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control around the world, as world leaders, aid groups and global health organizations sound the alarm about the slow pace of global vaccinations. …Read More

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Trump sues niece, NY Times over records behind ’18 tax story

NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday sued his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s rep…Read More

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Racism, climate and divisions top UN agenda as leaders meet

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Racism, the climate crisis and the world’s worsening divisions will take center stage at the United Nations on Wednesday, a day after the U.N. chief issued a grim warning that “we are on the edge of an abyss.” …Read More

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107-year-old Japanese twins certified as world’s oldest

TOKYO (AP) — Guinness World Records has certified two Japanese sisters as the world’s oldest living identical twins at 107, in an announcement Monday coinciding with Respect for the Aged Day, a national holiday in Japan….Read More

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Gessika Thomas and Daina Beth Solomon

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti/CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico, Sept 21 (Reuters) – Angry scenes broke out at Haiti’s main airport on Tuesday among migrants sent home from a squalid Texas border camp, as U.S. President Joe Biden faced mounting pressure to stop an expulsions policy the U.N. refugee chief said may be illegal.

Nearly 10,000 migrants, mainly Haitian, remain in worsening conditions in the impromptu camp that sprang up under a bridge spanning the Rio Grande from the Texas town Del Rio to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuna.

In recent days, U.S. authorities have removed at least 4,000 people from the site for processing in detention centers. Some 523 Haitians have been deported to their homeland on four flights, with repatriations set to continue on a regular basis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said.

Returnees reacted angrily as they stepped off flights at Port-au-Prince airport after spending thousands of dollars on arduous voyages from the troubled Caribbean nation via South America hoping for a better life in the United States.

On Tuesday, they found themselves back where they started.

A group of men in white T-shirts rushed back toward the plane after they disembarked in Port-au-Prince, with one man attempting to get back on board, Reuters witnesses said.

The migrants broke into a restricted area of the airport as they attempted to recover passports and personal belongings, and ground staff closed the door of the plane before the man could scale the steps back into the cabin.

Tempers ran high, exacerbated by news the Haitian government had accepted the deportations.

“I am angry at the government. We were told in prison that the Haitian government had signed to send us back to Haiti. They are all bad people, these authorities,” said Yranese Melidor, 45, who arrived on an earlier flight.

The disturbances underscored the instability in the Caribbean nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, where a presidential assassination, rising gang violence and a major earthquake have spread chaos in recent weeks.

Filippo Grandi, the head of the U.N refugee agency, said U.S. expulsions to such a volatile situation might violate international law and could constitute refoulement, or exposing people seeking shelter to life-threatening situations.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also called out Biden, a fellow Democrat, on Tuesday, saying it “defies common sense” to expel the migrants to Haiti and expressing anger over tactics used by border guards to control the crowds at the camp.

Vice President Kamala Harris said the situation was complex and that the United States needed “to do a lot more” to support the basic needs of people in Haiti.

“People want to stay home, they don’t want to leave home, but they leave when they cannot satisfy their basic needs,” she told reporters.

Republican politicians with an eye on the 2022 midterm elections, when they hope to retake control of Congress, have been quick to portray the sprawling camp in Texas as the result of Democrats’ push to end some migration restrictions.

The camp’s population peaked at up to 14,000 at the weekend, according to the U.N’s refugee agency.

On Tuesday, the camp on the U.S. side of the river had expanded into a nearby forest area as migrants sought shade and cover. Some families built makeshift tents with branches and leaves, while parents washed their children using jugs of river water. One toddler had an untreated hernia on his stomach.

Migrants said food remained scarce and there were not enough portable toilets. In a small tent she had pitched under trees, a Haitian mother cradled her 15-day-old baby.

Fearful of the expulsions, some of the migrants have set up a new camp on the Mexican side of the river.

Mexican authorities also prepared flights and buses to Mexico’s southern states after it began detaining Haitians in Ciudad Acuna, just across the border from Del Rio. The removal transport appeared aimed at reducing the concentration around the camps.

Mexican and Haitian authorities held talks on Tuesday about how to deal with the migrant influx, with Mexico set to offer space for Haiti’s government to open consular offices in the southern cities of Tenosique and Talisman, close to the Guatemalan border.

They also agreed to schedule repatriation flights to Haiti for “for all those people of Haitian origin who wish to return to their country”, Mexican authorities said.

“HELPING GREATLY”

The new camp on the Mexican side has been growing, with migrants aided by groups, including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, as well as the U.N’s migration agency.

Residents from Ciudad Acuna brought food.

Surreane Petit, who clutched her 3-year-old son at her side, said staying in Mexico was a huge improvement over the U.S. camp. “Here the Mexican people are helping greatly.”

“Over there we were hungry,” Petit said. “Under the bridge there was no help, no help.”

She said she had lived the last five years in Chile, where her son was born, but decided to leave after pandemic lockdowns made it hard to leave her house to find work.

Following an outpouring of anger over an incident in which mounted U.S. border agents in cowboy hats used horse reins like whips to intimidate the migrants, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas emphasized that U.S. border agents were delivering medical attention and working with the Red Cross.

Mayorkas said he was horrified by the images, echoing increasingly strident criticism from the White House, which said the footage “does not represent who we are as a country.”

The agents under investigation have been assigned administrative duties and are no longer dealing with migrants, Mayorkas said. He also ordered that the conduct of personnel in Del Rio be consistent with the policies, training and “the values of this department.”

Despite the risk of being returned to Haiti, many migrants remained in the Del Rio camp.

Carly Pierre, 40, said he was staying there because he saw a chance to make it into the United States with his wife and two children, ages 3 and 5, after several years living in Brazil.

“There are deportees and there are people who will make it in,” he said, his shorts still wet from having crossed the river to buy ice and soda at a convenience store on the Mexican side.

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United Nations Headquarters, NY (CNN) With Covid-19 and the environment at the top of the agenda at this year’s United Nations’ General Assembly, observers braced for the first world leader to speak in the UN headquarters’ storied hall: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, notorious for both his off-the-cuff comments and controversial handling of the pandemic and the environment.

The Brazilian President’s speech was calmly given, even monotone at times, opening with a numbing sales pitch of his country to investors that touted developments in sanitation and transportation services. He was presenting “a new Brazil whose credibility has been recovered in the world” — one very different from the country devastated by the coronavirus on his watch and lashed by fires in the Amazon, where Bolsonaro has pushed for development.

The conservative populist leader stuck to established provocations on social and pandemic issues, repeatedly alluding to the importance of “the traditional nuclear family” and criticizing pandemic lockdown measures. Doctors should be free to prescribe the use of “off-label” medications against Covid-19, added the president, who has long championed the unproven malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine as a treatment.

Brazil traditionally goes first in the General Assembly’s weeklong roster of speeches by member states, and Bolsonaro, who is up for reelection next year, had already set a pugnacious tone for his appearance, publicly flouting the UN’s “honor system” that calls for foreign delegations to be vaccinated before entering the building. Bolsonaro declared last week that he would not get vaccinated, because he already had Covid-19.

“Why do you take a vaccine? To have antibodies, right? My antibodies rate is really high. I can show you the document,” he said in a live social media broadcast. He added that he will only make a decision about getting vaccinated “after everyone in Brazil gets the vaccine” — a dissonant voice as the General Assembly pushes this year to increase vaccination throughout the globe, and cajoling wealthier nations to share more doses with poorer ones.

But while the Brazilian President has tended to use appearances at the UN to reject foreign authority — showing a similar allergy to being told what to do when it comes to another globe-spanning crisis: global warming — he seemed to sidestep any direct confrontation on that front.

In 2020 at the UNGA podium, as flames raged in the Amazon, he told the hand-wringing world to back off, claiming foreign agents were overhyping the wildfires in “the most brutal misinformation campaign.” He has long painted the environmental concerns expressed by foreign governments, local indigenous groups, and organizations as prelude to an imagined foreign invasion of the Amazon.

This year, a quieter Bolsonaro acknowledged “environmental challenges” but boasted that the Amazon region had seen a drop of 32% deforestation in August compared to the prior year, citing numbers from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research indicating 918 square kilometers of deforestation. The number is still nearly double what was registered in August 2018, before the Bolsonaro administration, however.

In contrast, data from the Amazon Institute of Man and Environment (Imazon) — which monitors the deforested areas by satellite — suggest 1,606 square kilometers of deforestation in August, a 7% rise in comparison to the same month last year. It is also the highest rate for August in a decade, according to Imazon´s satellites imagery.

The president also called on other countries to do their part by fulfilling commitments to climate funding “at substantial amounts.” His own government has previously received significant foreign aid from other countries to help halt deforestation — a tactic that some environmental advocates in Brazil criticize, pointing out that not all the money allocated for environmental work in Brazil is spent in the first place.

Bolsonaro, never a fan of pandemic restrictions, acknowledged as much in Tuesday’s speech before world leaders, saying that while he regrets “all of the deaths that took place in Brazil and worldwide,” the toll of unemployment must be balanced against that of the coronavirus. Over the past year, he had frequently raged against municipal and state-level lockdown orders in Brazil, even during the grimmest moments of the pandemic, when hospitals filled to capacity and whole cities ran out of oxygen. Over half a million Brazilians have died in the pandemic — the highest death toll in the world after the United States.

A more moderate tone had been expected from Bolsonaro this year, said Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and vice president for policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas. For one thing, the assembly’s mood was simply different, with fewer fellow right-wing populist leaders to join Bolsonaro in giving international busybodies the middle finger.

“Bolsonaro is more isolated than ever,” Winter told CNN. “Trump left, Netanyahu is gone. The main country that really aligns with his brand of right-wing conservatism is Victor Orban’s Hungary,” he says. (Bolsonaro did have a sit-down scheduled with Poland’s conservative, anti-LGBTQ president Andrzej Duda before he took the stage Tuesday, though.)

This year, too, the stakes of climate change have never been clearer, with catastrophic fires and floods seen around the world. Brazil’s vast forest works as an “air conditioner” for the globe, influencing global temperature and rainfall patterns, and absorbing carbon dioxide, and Winters says Bolsonaro had already previewed a new “constructive” tone on coordinating climate protection during a summit convened by US President Joe Biden this spring, when Bolsonaro presented a plan to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030 and neutralize greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In a meeting Monday with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro showed the same mild-mannered stubbornness that he later displayed at the podium. The two leaders discussed climate and Covid-19, and Bolsonaro “affirmed Brazil’s commitment to sustainable development,” a Brazilian Foreign Ministry statement read after the meeting.

But when it came to getting vaccinated per the United Nations’ request, he was as unmoving as ever.

During footage of the meeting at the UN headquarters, Johnson could be heard telling Bolsonaro, “AstraZeneca, it’s a great vaccine. Get the AstraZeneca vaccine. I had it twice.” Bolsonaro laughed the tip off. “No, not yet,” he said.

Reporting contributed by CNN’s Rodrigo Pedroso in Sao Paulo.

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Brazilian health minister tests positive for Covid-19 while in New York for UN meeting

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CNW- Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley wants at least 10,000 people to be vaccinated against COVID-19 every week for the next five weeks, which she said would determine when curfews and other restrictions would be eased and eventually lifted.

Addressing the nation on Saturday, Mottley said if vaccinations pick up to the level she wants, Barbados would be much closer to herd immunity.

Currently, just under 6,500 persons are being vaccinated in Barbados weekly, and while saying she was happy to see an increasing number of people coming forward to be vaccinated, she urged more Barbadians to get inoculated.

“We are trending in the right direction, but the overall rate does need still some pumping up; it is still a little bit too low,” Prime Minister Mottley said.

Barbados is currently under a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew Mondays to Saturdays, and a 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on Sundays.

The Prime Minister stressed, however, that with any removal of restrictions, members of the public would still have to wear masks, sanitise and engage in physical distancing.

Noting that the six people who have died from COVID-19 this past week were unvaccinated, Mottley pleaded: “Help us by protecting yourselves, by taking the vaccinations.”

“There is a small percentage… of seven percent, who are likely to have the breakthrough cases among the vaccinated people, but if we catch them early as well we can ensure that none of them go the way of the others who regrettably have gone to the great beyond,” she added, reiterating her view that the COVID-19 pandemic is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Health authorities recently started a mobile vaccination drive and the Prime Minister said that has been reaping success.

She noted that the pop-up vaccination sites in the community had made a “clear and visible difference” and that discussions were held earlier this week about increasing the number of locations.

Mottley further disclosed that some private sector entities had asked if their premises could be used for some of the community pop-ups and those discussions were ongoing.

Training for private medical doctors who will be administering COVID-19 vaccines began Sunday.

Prime Minister Mottley also told the nation that she wanted to get and distribute oximeters to a number of households across the country, so persons could test the proportion of oxygenated haemoglobin in their blood, so they would present to health officials earlier for diagnosis and treatment.

So far, about 125,000 people have received at least their first jab of one of the three vaccines available – AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sinopharm.

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Sept 22 (Reuters)

U.S. to donate an additional 500M COVID-19 vaccines

The United States plans to donate an additional 500 million COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE to nations around the world, lifting the total the country is sharing to more than 1 billion doses, according to a source familiar with the plans.

President Joe Biden is hosting a virtual summit on COVID-19 on Wednesday and is likely to announce the new pledge then. The United States is pushing global leaders to endorse its targets for ending the COVID-19 pandemic, including ensuring 70% of the world’s population is vaccinated by this time in 2022, according to a draft U.S. document viewed by Reuters. read more

Locked-down Melbourne beefs up security as protesters gather

Australia’s Victoria state on Wednesday reported a jump in new COVID-19 infections as Melbourne braced for a third straight day of protests against lockdown restrictions, with police deploying in strength to disperse crowds. Television footage showed crowds of protesters walking in the middle of streets in different parts of the city, with police sometimes giving chase.

Melbourne is in its sixth lockdown, the most of any Australian city since the pandemic began. Authorities are aiming for a staggered reopening, easing some curbs when the full vaccination rate for the adult population reaches 70%. The rates of people aged 16 and older who are fully vaccinated is 45% in Victoria. read more

Chinese city in semi-shutdown after first cases since Feb

China’s northeastern city of Harbin, population 10 million, went into semi-shutdown after reporting new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases for the first time since early February. Three of 16 new local cases reported in China for Sept. 21 were in Harbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.

Indoors venues such as cinemas, gyms and mahjong parlours were shut, and tourist sites were ordered to limit visitor traffic at half of their capacity, state television reported on Tuesday. The city would also suspend offline classes at all kindergartens, primary schools and high schools for a week from Wednesday, state television said late on Tuesday. read more

New Zealand says it may not get to zero COVID-19 cases again

New Zealand may not get back to having zero coronavirus cases in the community, the director general of health said on Thursday, as the country continues efforts to stamp out the infectious Delta variant of the virus.

“The important thing is we are going to keep finding any infections and basically continue to contact trace, test and isolate people so that we stop the virus circulating in the community,” Ashley Bloomfield, the director general of health told Radio New Zealand.

“Get that vaccination rate up over 90% … that’s absolutely our new means whereby we will be able to get back to the freedoms we had,” he said. read more

IMF calls for coordinated action, accountability in COVID-19 battle

The chief economist of the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday called for coordinated action and greater accountability to ensure that the world meets a target of vaccinating 40% of people in every country against COVID-19 by the end of 2021.

“It’s not enough to make announcements and pledges. You have to come through on it,” said Gita Gopinath, adding it was critical to allocate adequate supplies of vaccines, especially to African countries with big deficits, by year’s end, even if some shots did not get into people’s arms until early next year. read more

WORLD STATS

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