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WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) – A U.S. Supreme Court justice on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would require Democratic President Joe Biden to reinstate a contentious immigration policy implemented by his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.

The brief order by conservative Justice Samuel Alito puts the litigation on hold while the high court considers how to handle the Biden administration’s request seeking to impose a longer-term block on the judge’s ruling that would require the government to revive the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program.

The Biden administration turned to the Supreme Court after the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late on Thursday denied a government request to delay the effective date of the lower court judge’s ruling a week earlier.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk “requires the government to abruptly reinstate a broad and controversial immigration enforcement program that has been formally suspended for seven months and largely dormant for nearly nine months before that,” Acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher wrote in papers to the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Trump.

The Justice Department wants the court to act immediately, with the judge’s injunction due to go into effect on Saturday.

Democrats and immigration advocates criticized MPP, informally known as “remain in Mexico,” saying it subjected mostly Central American migrants to unsanitary conditions and violence.

Arrests of migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have reached 20-year highs in recent months, a trend Republicans pin on Biden’s reversal of MPP and other hardline Trump immigration policies.

The Biden administration has left in place a Trump-era health order that allows border authorities to expel migrants to Mexico without the chance to seek asylum in the United States.

The ruling by the conservative-leaning 5th Circuit said the Biden administration must implement the MPP program in “good faith,” which appears to leave the government some discretion in how to move forward.

Roberto Velasco, a senior Mexican foreign ministry official responsible for North American relations, said Mexico had not yet received any notification from the U.S. government about the ruling.

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CAMP-PERRIN, Haiti, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Many survivors of an earthquake that killed more than 2,200 people in southern Haiti are worried about providing for their children, with more than half a million minors feared to be at risk from the fallout.

The Aug. 14 quake hammered infrastructure, destroying or damaging some 130,000 homes, cutting off roads and pitching thousands of families in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country into an uncertain future.

When the magnitude 7.2 quake struck, homemaker Lovely Jean was resting inside the general hospital of the southern city of Les Cayes, while her three-day-old baby, Love Shaiska, was in the neonatal ward being treated for an infection.

Les Cayes was one of the areas worst hit by the quake, and as the hospital walls trembled, Jean sent her husband, Pierre Alexandre, to grab the infant while she fled the building.

“The earth was shaking and I was crying, so scared of what was happening,” the 24-year-old said, cradling her child on the porch of their damaged home in a tiny village outside the town of Camp-Perrin, northwest of Les Cayes.

The three survived, though the hospital suffered damage that forced some of its departments, including the neonatal ward, to operate outside for days after the disaster.

But the problems were only beginning for Jean and her husband, a subsistence farmer.

Alexandre’s fields were buried by landslides during the earthquake and rain unleashed by Tropical Storm Grace, which pummeled Haiti last Tuesday. His entire potato and yuca crop was unreachable, leaving the family with barely any food to eat.

Meanwhile, Love Shaiska was struggling to suckle, forcing her parents to pull together cash to buy formula.

“I don’t know what we’ll do,” said Alexandre, 30.

A motorcycle drives on a road with cracks caused by a 7.2 magnitude quake in Marceline, Haiti August 22, 2021. REUTERS/Ricardo Arduengo

More than a dozen other parents who spoke to Reuters in the quake zone expressed similar concerns about how they would cope.

Over half a million children were affected by the earthquake, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said.

The temblor claimed the lives of at least 2,207 people, injured 12,268 more and left 344 missing, according to Haitian authorities, and followed an even more destructive earthquake in 2010 which killed tens of thousands of Haitians.

Still, there are a few encouraging developments. Late on Sunday, civil protection authorities said 24 people who had been reported missing, including four children, had been found and taken by helicopter to Camp-Perrin to be looked after.

Recovery efforts have been impeded by flooding and damage to roads, feeding tensions in hard-hit areas. In the past few days, residents have looted aid trucks in several towns across the south, stirring concerns about security.

Deep in the mountains of Haiti’s southern peninsula, in the department of Grand’Anse, near the town of Duchity, about a hundred farmers are living in slender tents of wooden poles and bedsheets they erected along the highway. The quake destroyed their homes, crops and the deep concrete-lined holes used to collect and store rain water.

Now, with scant food and water, many of the young children suffer from hunger, fevers and infections, said Evelya Michele, a mother of five living in the encampment.

At least a dozen children had broken out in rashes.

“The children are very vulnerable; there is no water so we can’t even wash them to keep them clean,” Michele said.

Her older children had taken off earlier that morning, walking to a nearby village in search of food.

“I didn’t send them; they just left without even asking me because they are hungry,” she said.

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BRASÍLIA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Monday that he will ask his health minister to set a date to end the use of face masks as a means of reducing transmission of COVID-19 in Brazil. This comes when there has been no let-up in the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

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By Patrick Oppmann, CNN

Havana (CNN)Following widespread anti-government protests last month, the Cuban government is now receiving unprecedented criticism from health care workers who say officials botched the island’s response to the pandemic.

Symbols of the socialist health care system pioneered by Fidel Castro, doctors and nurses are usually praised as “heroes in white coats” by the island’s state-run media.

In recent years Cuban health care workers have also become a key generator of hard currency for the communist-run government, which sells their services to countries that need doctors.

But as Cuba deals with shortages of medicines and oxygen and hospitals are overwhelmed with surging coronavirus cases, tensions between the government and health care workers –who are required to work for the state– have boiled over.

During a visit in August to the hard-hit province of Cienfuegos, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz blamed health care workers’ lack of discipline and “errors” for the breakdown in medical services.

Marrero acknowledged residents had complained about a lack of medicines as well but said “they are less than the complaints of mistreatment, of neglect or that [doctors] don’t make visits. That’s incredible!”

The comments ignited a firestorm among health care workers who have borne the brunt of the pandemic in Cuba, often while having to purchase their own protective gear and explain to patients sick with Covid why hospitals have run out of basic medicines and beds.

The Cuban government blames the US embargo for breakdowns in the healthcare system, but critics point out that the same US economic sanctions do not prevent the government from investing in a string of shiny new hotels.

“We just ask that they tell the truth,” said Dr. Rosell Alberteris, in a video posted online. “We only demand the supplies to treat our patients with dignity and decorum.”

“We want to keep working, we want to keep saving lives,” said Dr. Daily Almaguer in the video. “We are not responsible for the sanitary collapse in our country.”

At least 39 health care workers have uploaded videos from Holguín, a city of nearly 300,000 people close to the small town where both Fidel and Raul Castro were born, complaining of abysmal conditions in hospitals overrun by Covid.

Some of the doctors recorded videos from inside their hospitals, talking barely in a whisper as they slammed their government’s failures.

More Cuban doctors and nurses on social media from all over the island have expressed their support for the online protest, which is all the more remarkable as the Cuban government on Tuesday announced draconian new measures that prohibited “fake news” and postings that damage the island’s “prestige.”

“We aren’t afraid of the pandemic, we are afraid of the government,” Dr. Rafael Alejandro Fuentes Sanchez said in another video posted online. “How they could interpret that we have come out to demand our rights and the people’s right to receive good medical attention.”

Cuba’s main newspaper, the Communist-party daily Granma said the health workers were being used in “new enemy campaigns” and being turned into spokespeople for an “anti-Cuban offensive.”

Cuban officials also looked to defuse the confrontation with their frontline workers as the island’s battered health care system confronts the most precarious moment of the pandemic to date.

“Every time it seems we are tired, exhausted, beaten from this long period of the pandemic,” wrote Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel on Twitter. “We think about how much our doctors and nurses have given.”

Officials have begun to bring back brigades of Cuban health care workers from postings abroad and admit that the situation is far worse than the island’s statistics let on.

Amidst a shortage in tests, Cuban Health Minister José Angel Portal Miranda told the state-run Invasor newspaper that only people who had a positive Covid result at the time of death are counted as having died of the coronavirus.

“Not all the fatalities are able to take or obtain a PCR result,” the newspaper concluded. “Death sometimes arrives first.”

Magdiel Jorge Castro told CNN his grandfather died on Wednesday after being sent home from the hospital in Holguín where he was unable to receive results from a Covid test he took days earlier. Oxygen had run out in the hospital.

Castro said his grandfather suffered from a fever and fatigue and that other members of his family are ill with Covid-like symptoms. After his grandfather’s death, Castro said his family struggled to bury him.

“The funeral services are collapsed. There aren’t any coffins,” Castro said. “My family was in despair to have a deceased person for 15 hours in their bed in the tropical heat. The funeral home said there were 16 cases like his, people without a place to be buried.”

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FDA grants full approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday granted the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine full approval in a highly anticipated move that’s expected to boost vaccinations and spark more mandates nationwide.

The federal agency reached the milestone of issuing the first complete authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine after an approximately three-month review of Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech’s application to the FDA for full approval.

The vaccine will be marketed as Comirnaty, with the full authorization applying to vaccine recipients age 16 and older.

Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock praised the authorization in a press briefing, saying it “holds the promise of altering the course of the pandemic in the United States.”

“This is an unprecedented timeline given the volume of review and the meticulous manner in which it was done,” she said. “But we want to underscore that our efforts to move as quickly as possible have in no way sacrifice scientific standards for the integrity of our process.”

Why it matters: With slightly more than half of the total U.S. population fully vaccinated, experts and Biden administration officials are hopeful the agency’s full approval will serve as a catalyst for vaccinations in the country.

​​Biden used the announcement to urge the unvaccinated to stop waiting and get the shots

The full FDA approval is a chance to step up the messaging, and President Biden quickly gave remarks after the move on Monday, calling on unvaccinated Americans who have been waiting to get the shots to get vaccinated “today.”

Biden called the FDA’s full approval for the vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech earlier on Monday a “key milestone” in the fight against the virus, and said it takes away any final excuse for not getting vaccinated.

“After a strict process the FDA has reaffirmed its findings that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective and the FDA has given its full and final approval,” Biden said. “So let me say this loudly and clearly: If you’re one of the millions of Americans who said that they will not get the shot until it has full and final approval of the FDA, it has now happened.”=

And more people could now be mandated to get the shots through their employers

The full federal approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Monday immediately, as expected, led to new vaccination mandates by government entities, a development that suggests more could be coming.

Immediately after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave full approval to the vaccine Monday, New York City announced that all public school teachers and staff will be required to get the shot. The Pentagon later confirmed that it would move forward with a vaccine mandate for military service members.

Biden administration officials believe that the private sector will follow suit.

“For businesses and universities that have been thinking about putting vaccine requirements in place in order to create safer spaces for people to work and learn, I think that this move from the FDA, when it comes, will actually help them to move forward with those kinds of plans,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told CNN on Sunday, prior to the FDA announcement.

A few dozen corporations, including Microsoft, Tyson Foods, Walt Disney and Netflix, announced vaccine requirements after the Biden administration mandated vaccinations for federal employees late last month.

More companies will implement their own vaccine requirements following the FDA decision, said Michelle Strowhiro, a lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery who advises businesses on COVID-19 employment issues.

Biden threw his support behind company vaccine requirements

Biden called on companies to mandate COVID-19 vaccines on Monday, voicing strong support for such requirements following the FDA’s full approval for Pfizer’s vaccine.

“Today I’m calling on more companies in the private sector to step up the vaccine requirements that’ll reach millions more people,” Biden said during an address. “If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that.”

The president requested that business and government leaders follow in his footsteps after he previously ordered federal employees and onsite contractors to get vaccinated or endure regular COVID-19 testing. The administration has also directed troops, nursing home staff and workers at federal medical centers to get vaccinated.

“Do what I did last month: Require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements,” he said in his plea to leaders.

“It only makes sense to require a vaccine to stop the spread of COVID-19,” he added.

NYC mandates COVID-19 vaccinations for all public school teachers, staff

All New York City public school teachers and staff will need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the city announced Monday, shortly after the Food and Drug Administration gave final approval to the Pfizer vaccine.

Students in the country’s largest school district return to classes next month, and teachers and staff will need to have their first dose by Sept. 27. There is no alternative option for regular testing as some other districts have allowed.

Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter called the policy “another layer of protection for our kids.”

Previously, teachers were subject to the same requirements as other city employees, which meant they would need to be vaccinated or face weekly testing. Currently, about 63 percent of school employees have already been vaccinated.

Labor reaction: Vaccine requirements have been a thorny issue among some labor unions and it’s unclear how the unions representing teachers and other staff will respond.

Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said during a news conference that he will start bargaining with unions immediately over the specifics to make sure it is implemented fairly and equitably.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew in a statement said those details, like medical exemptions, may need to be worked out through arbitration if necessary.

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 NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS (August 23, 2021) —The management, staff and members of the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society offer our most sincere condolences to the family and friends on the passing of one of Nevis’ most committed citizens and one of our Founding Fathers, Mr. Arthur Evelyn, who died on Friday, August 13, 2021.

 Born in Butlers Village on June 25, 1928, Arthur Evelyn rose to become one of Nevis’ most beloved sons and an iconic figure. He attended Public Elementary School at Whitehall up to Standard 7, eventually finding employment in a drug store with a pharmacist from St. Kitts.

He was an eager learner for his new trade but there was no training available locally for pharmacists; being unable to travel abroad to further studies, he was fortunate to receive training from another pharmacist from Antigua who was working at the hospital. Young Evelyn continued his work at the pharmacy until eventually seeking to branch out on his own.

Unable to secure a loan for his own drug store, a wealthy Englishman in Nevis instead opened a drug store himself and made Evelyn manager. Eventually Evelyn was successful in getting a loan from a good friend and established the iconic Evelyn’s Drug Store in 1946. For decades it was the only drug store on Nevis and is still in operation today.

In 1967, Mr. Evelyn became the first Chairman of the newly formed Nevis Local Council, and – together with Dr. Simeon Daniel – not only sought to bring about improvements in the basic infrastructure of the island, but also solicited financial support to enable the presentation of a petition for secession in the United Kingdom. While individual independence was not attained for Nevis, their actions boosted the morale and pride of Nevisian people and ensured that Nevis gained significant control over its own affairs.

When the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) was officially inaugurated in 1983, the new Premier, Dr. Daniel appointed Mr. Evelyn the first Minister of Agriculture, Lands, Housing, Labour and Tourism (1983-1987). During this time, the Nevis Housing and Land Development Corporation (NHLDC) was established and he oversaw the first land reform programme in Nevis, giving the people of Nevis the opportunity to own land.

Because of his contributions to the development of Nevis and dedication to its people, the Old Treasury building on Charlestown’s Main Street was renamed in his honour in 2010.

Mr. Evelyn was active and influential in a number organisations in Nevis over his lifetime, including the Mental Health Association, the Blind Light and Visually Impaired Society, The Lions Club, Culturama, the Nevis Turf and Jockey Club, the Jaycees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) and the St. Paul’s Anglican Church vestry.

In 1980, his passion for Nevisian natural and cultural heritage and his belief that government shouldn’t be responsible for everything, he nurtured the establishment of the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society as a non-governmental organization, with the objective to protect and preserve the history and heritage of Nevisians.

During his years as a Minister, he made sure that he used the Society as support for the important aims of the new Nevis Island Administration.

He lived an extraordinary life of service to his community, and truly embodied the federation’s motto “Country Above Self.” The Society owes Mr. Evelyn an immense debt of gratitude and, in grieving with his family, friends and colleagues, we also gain much comfort from his remarkable life.

May he Rest in Eternal Peace.

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