US to share millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses with other countries

The Biden administration on Monday announced that it will move to donate millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries, after pressure from lawmakers and advocates.

The United States has millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not yet authorized in the US, but is in other countries, and could play a key role amid worsening spikes in cases abroad, particularly in India.

“Given the strong portfolio of vaccines that the United States has already authorized, and that is available in large quantities, including two two-dose vaccines and one one-dose vaccine, and given AstraZeneca is not authorized for use in the United States, we do not need to use AstraZeneca in our fight against COVID over the next few months,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

Pressure had been mounting: Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) had called on the administration to release the doses on Sunday, as had Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, in a Washington Post op-ed on Saturday.

Still, doses not available right away: Psaki said the doses cannot be released immediately, as they will first have to undergo safety reviews by the Food and Drug Administration. A Baltimore plant that had been producing the vaccine has faced a string of problems and was cited by the FDA for multiple safety failures.

Once the FDA clears the doses, “in the coming weeks,” Psaki said about 10 million doses will be available. An additional 50 million doses are in “various stages of production” and could be available across May and June, she said.

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Hong Kong (CNN) The largest naval flotilla assembled by Britain in recent years will set sail in May on a months’ long voyage through the Pacific, the country’s Defense Ministry said Monday.

“When our Carrier Strike Group (CSG) sets sail next month, it will be flying the flag for Global Britain — projecting our influence, signaling our power, engaging with our friends and reaffirming our commitment to addressing the security challenges of today and tomorrow,” UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Monday.

“The UK is not stepping back but sailing forth to play an active role in shaping the international system of the 21st century,” Wallace said.

The strike group will be led by the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, marking its maiden deployment. The ship, one of the UK’s two aircraft carriers, is the largest warship the UK has ever sent to sea.

Joining the carrier will be two destroyers, two anti-submarine frigates, a submarine and two auxiliary supply ships, a ministry statement said.

A United States Navy guided-missile destroyer will sail with the group as well as a frigate from the Netherlands that will be tasked with air defense, the ministry said.

Air power within the group will be centered on RAF F-35B stealth fighters and US Marine Corps F-35Bs, all of which will fly from the deck of the 65,000-ton aircraft carrier.

When a version of this carrier strike group sailed together during military exercises off Scotland last fall, the Defense Ministry said it carried “the largest concentration of fighter jets to operate at sea from a Royal Navy carrier since HMS Hermes in 1983.”

It also said it was “the largest air group of fifth generation fighters at sea anywhere in the world.” Fifth-generation fighters are the most advanced warplanes in the air.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies says the UK carrier strike group “will be the most capable flotilla deployed by a single European navy in recent years.”

“While it will not replicate a US Navy carrier strike group, it will probably be closer to it than anything else that is currently deployable” by any other naval force, the IISS said.

Britain in March released a sweeping review of its military and foreign policy, in which it recognized a tilt toward the Indo-Pacific in the coming decade.

In Monday’s carrier strike group announcement, the Defense Ministry said the deployment is aimed toward a deeper UK security role in the region, with exercises planned alongside India, Japan and South Korea as well as US forces in the region.

It will also highlight one of Britain’s oldest security relationships, the Five Powers Defense Agreement among Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Exercise Bersama Lima will mark the 50th anniversary of the defense pact, the Defense Ministry said.

As part of the journey to the Pacific, the strike group will visit 40 countries, the UK Defense Ministry said. The voyage, which will see the strike group go through the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean on the way to the Pacific, will cover almost 30,000 miles (48,280 kilometers), the ministry said.

Britain has not released the exact route of the strike group in the Indo-Pacific, but a planned visit to Singapore will put in on the doorstep of the South China Sea and going through the waterway would be the most obvious and direct route to its stops in Japan and South Korea.

China claims almost all of the 1.3 million-square-mile South China Sea as its sovereign territory, and it has denounced the presence of foreign warships there as the root of tensions in the region.

When asked in March about the British deployment as well as French military activity in the South China Sea, China’s Defense Ministry said Beijing “firmly opposes any country interfering in regional affairs under the pretext of ‘freedom of navigation’ and damaging the common interests of regional countries.”

The UK carrier group is also expected to pass to the east of Taiwan, the self-governed island that China also claims as part of its territory and around which Beijing has been increasing its naval and air deployments in recent months.

In its defense review, the British government called out challenges posed by China.

“China’s increasing power and international assertiveness is likely to be the most significant geopolitical factor of the 2020s,” the review said, describing Beijing as “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security.”

The review said Britain planned to increase its military presence around the world.

Monday’s announcement of the scope of the carrier strike group reinforced that.

“The most significant deployment of its kind for a quarter of a century, it is a visible demonstration of the Royal Navy’s resurgence after decades of contraction,” Commodore Steve Moorhouse, commander of the strike group, said in a statement.

“As our nation redefines its place in the world post-Brexit, it is the natural embodiment of the government’s ‘Global Britain’ agenda. And against a backdrop of growing instability and competition, it reflects the United Kingdom’s continued commitment to global security,” Moorhouse said.

Japan welcomed the UK’s announcement, saying the carrier strike group’s visit will elevate the longstanding relationship between Tokyo and London to a “new level.”

It also said the deployment demonstrates “the UK commitment and Japan-UK collaboration to uphold and reinforce a ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ in the realm of security and defense,” according to a statement from Japan’s Defense Ministry.

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Sarah Marsh

Reuters

A wave of kidnappings is sweeping Haiti. But even in a country growing inured to horrific abductions, the case of five-year-old Olslina Janneus sparked outrage.

Olslina was snatched off the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince in late January as she was playing. The child’s corpse, bearing signs of strangulation, turned up a week later, according to her mother, Nadege Saint Hilaire, a peanut vendor who said she couldn’t pay the $4,000 ransom. Saint Hilaire’s cries filled the airwaves as she spoke to a few local radio stations seeking help raising funds to cover funeral costs.

Saint Hilaire is now in hiding after receiving death threats, she said, from the same gang that killed her daughter. “I wasn’t supposed to go to the radio to denounce what had happened,” she told Reuters.

Police in her impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhood, Martissant, told Reuters they were investigating the case.

Haiti’s epidemic of kidnappings is the latest crisis to befall this Caribbean island nation of around 11 million people, roiled by deepening political unrest and economic misery. Kidnappings last year tripled to 234 cases compared to 2019, according to official data compiled by the United Nations.

The real figures are likely much higher because many Haitians don’t report abductions, fearing retribution from criminal gangs, according to attorney Gedeon Jean, director of the nonprofit Center for Human Rights Analysis and Research in Port-au-Prince. He said the research center recorded 796 kidnappings last year.

Haiti’s national police force did not respond to a request for comment. President Jovenel Moise has said repeatedly that his government is doing all it can, and has put more resources into anti-kidnapping efforts. Still, he publicly acknowledged on April 14 that “kidnappings have become generalized” and that efforts to combat persistent insecurity have been “ineffective.”

Human rights activists and a new report from Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic allege that Moise’s government has allied itself with violent criminal gangs to maintain its grip on power and to suppress dissent. Opposition groups have called for Moise to resign and hand power to a transitional government that would delay presidential and legislative elections slated for September until the nation is stable enough to ensure a free and fair contest.

Haiti’s acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph denied those allegations and the report’s findings. He said anti-democratic forces are whipping up violence to destabilize Moise’s administration in an election year. “They are fomenting the gangs to stop there being elections,” Joseph told Reuters.

Criminals have targeted some poor people, like Saint Hilaire, for modest sums. Many more victims come from the ranks of the Haitian middle class – teachers, priests, civil servants, small business owners. Such targets aren’t rich enough to afford bodyguards but have enough assets or connections to scrape up a ransom.

In one of the most high-profile recent cases, five Catholic priests, two nuns and three laymen were kidnapped on April 11 in the commune of Croix-des-Bouquets, northeast of the capital. Four members of the group were subsequently released and six are still missing, according to an April 25 statement by the Society of Priests of St. Jacques, a French missionary society linked to four of the kidnapped priests. An official with that group declined to comment on whether a ransom was paid.

“For some time now, we have been witnessing the descent into hell of Haitian society,” the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince said in a statement earlier this month.

‘KILLING THE ECONOMY’

Haiti last experienced a major surge in kidnappings and gang violence after a rebellion toppled then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, prompting the United Nations to send in a peacekeeping force.

The departure of that force in October 2019 was followed by a resurgence in gang crime, according to human-rights activists, who say kidnapping has proven lucrative at a time when Haiti’s economy is teetering.

Rights activists say politics also play a role. They allege Moise’s government has harnessed criminal groups to terrorize neighborhoods known as opposition strongholds and to quell public dissent amid street protests that have rocked the country the past three years.

The report released April 22 by the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School alleges “high-level government involvement in the planning, execution and cover-up” of three gang-led attacks on poor neighborhoods between 2018 and 2020 that left at least 240 civilians dead. The report relied on investigations of the attacks by Haitian and international human rights experts. It alleges the government provided gangs with money, weapons and vehicles and shielded them from prosecution.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury in December sanctioned reputed Haitian gang leader Jimmy Cherizier and two former Moise administration officials – Fednel Monchery and Joseph Pierre Richard Duplan – for helping orchestrate one of the attacks. All three have denied wrongdoing.

Kidnapping is an outgrowth of impunity for criminal organizations, according to Rosy Auguste Ducena, program manager of the Port-au-Prince-based National Network for the Defense of Human Rights.

“We are talking about a regime that has allied itself with armed gangs,” Ducena said.

Justice Minister Rockefeller Vincent denied any government alliance with gangs. He told Reuters in December that the wave of kidnappings was the work of political enemies seeking to undermine Moise “by creating a sense of chaos.”

The rise in kidnappings has petrified many Haitians. The heads of seven private business associations this month issued a joint statement saying they had reached “a saturation point” with soaring crime. They endorsed a nationwide work stoppage that occurred on April 15 to protest Haiti’s security crisis.

“Kidnapping is killing the economy,” said Haitian economist Etzer Emile. He said the tourism and entertainment sectors have withered.

Moise’s administration says it is working hard to end the terror. Two years ago it revived a commission aimed at disarming gang members and reintegrating them into society. Over the past year, the government has increased the police budget and solicited advice from Colombia, which once battled its own kidnapping epidemic. In March, Haiti created an anti-kidnapping task force to attack the problem with tactics such as tracing laundered ransom money.

Still, four policemen died last month in a gun battle with alleged criminals in a slum where kidnapping victims are often held. The government declared a month-long state of emergency in gang-controlled neighborhoods. Yet abductions continue to mount.

Moise, who has opted not to seek re-election this September, has defied the opposition’s calls for him to step down early. On April 14 he issued a statement saying he aimed to form a government of national unity to better tackle the “pressing problem of insecurity.”

HOODS, GUNS AND TORTURE

Many Haitians remain skeptical – and on edge.

One victim was a 29-year-old doctor. He was kidnapped in his own vehicle last November after leaving the Port-au-Prince hospital where he had just finished an overnight shift. He told Reuters his story on condition of anonymity.

At dawn, four armed assailants hustled him into the back seat, threw a hood over his head and held him at gunpoint as they drove, he said. His captors eventually tossed him into a room with three other abductees – a man and two women – who had been snatched earlier.

The physician said his kidnappers ordered him to phone his family to request $500,000 for his release. The first two people he tried said they couldn’t pay. The kidnappers slapped him and delivered a threat.

“They said that if I called a third person that didn’t give me a satisfying response, they would kill me,” he said.

The doctor’s girlfriend said she and three friends negotiated with the gang. She wouldn’t say how much they paid, fearful of becoming targets for other criminals.

The doctor said he reported his abduction to Haiti’s national anti-kidnapping police unit. That unit did not respond to requests for comment.

The physician does not know the fate of his fellow abductees. He said the kidnappers poured melted Styrofoam on their skin because their families had yet to pay up.

Saint Hilaire, the mother of the young girl who was kidnapped and murdered, said she continues to watch her back after speaking publicly about the abduction.

The kidnappers “told me to make sure I never ran into them, because they would kill me,” she said.

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Reuters- Latin Americans, hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, are struggling to get vaccinated, a threat to the region’s fragile economic recovery as lockdowns tighten amid a dangerous surge of infections and rising death tolls.

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St. Lucia-born poet Canisia Lubrin is the 2021 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Lubrin’s book-length poem The Dyzgraphxst earned her the US$10,000 prize, courtesy One Caribbean Media.

It is the second consecutive year that a poet has won the most prestigious international annual award for Caribbean writing, and the fourth work of poetry to win in the 11-year history of the prize.

Lubrin is the third St. Lucia-born writer to win the overall prize, all for poetry.

Vahni Capildeo, also an outstanding poet from Trinidad and Tobago, winner of the Forward Poetry Prize, and chief judge of this year’s OCM Bocas Prize, made the announcement online via the Bocas Lit Fest website, Facebook, and YouTube in a virtual presentation on Saturday.

Joining her on the final judging panel for the prize were Jamaican poet and academic Opal Palmer Adisa, Trinidadian-American writer and scholar Rosamond S. King, and Malachi McIntosh, editor of the UK-based literary journal Wasafiri.

The Dyzgraphxst, published by Penguin Random House Canada, was chosen by the judges from a shortlist of the three books previously selected as category winners, which included Jamaica-born Maisy Card’s debut novel These Ghosts Are Family — the best book of fiction by a Caribbean writer in 2020 — and Trinidadian Andre Bagoo’s wide-ranging collection of essays The Undiscovered Country — the best non-fiction book of 2020 by a Caribbean author.

Card and Bagoo will receive awards of US$3,000 each.

In her judge’s remarks, Vahni Capildeo said The Dyzgraphxst “is exciting, experimental, and maintains integrity from beginning to end…. Aware of and alive with the impulses and innovations of Aimé Césaire, Dionne Brand, and so many more revolutionary thinkers with whom we have been blessed.”

“These poems take apart our individual personal pronoun, the ‘I’,” said Capildeo, “questioning and finding new ways to feel and think and know what we suppose to be our ‘self’. Some books use language to keep running smoothly. This book shifts what language can be and do. It is thrilling to read it and to relish giving up the illusion of mastery of meaning; to revel in not fully understanding, like swimming beyond the breakers in a sea full of flotsam and jetsam.”

Lubrin is a writer, editor, teacher and critic.

Frequently anthologised, her work has been translated into Spanish and Italian.

She is the author of the awards-nominated poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis, and The Dyzgraphxst is her latest book. In addition to winning the OCM Bocas Prize, the book was recently shortlisted for Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize, and in March 2021 Lubrin was also named a winner of a 2021 Windham Campbell Prize.

She teaches at the University of Toronto and is soon to become an editor at Penguin Random House.

 

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CNW- As St. Vincent and the Grenadines continue to reel from the aftermath of the eruption caused by the La Soufriere Volcano last week, their Caribbean neighbors and Caribbean diaspora are stepping up to offer their assistance.

Among the groups conducting disaster relief efforts is the Caribbean Consular Corps in Miami, which recently sent a shipment of essential supplies of water and face masks, to victims of the disaster.

At an urgent meeting convened by the Caribbean Consular Corps on April 15, it was agreed they would join in solidarity to support the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

According to a joint statement from the group “We are standing with our brothers and sisters in this time of need. As Caribbean people, we believe it is important that we stand together in solidarity. At any time, any one of our countries could be affected by a natural disaster.”

It was further stated that the consuls general were pleased that the Caribbean diaspora has been responding favorably to the needs of the victims and that they will jointly give these initiatives their wholehearted support.

The initial reports highlighting the devastation included clouds of ash blanketing the island causing water and power outages. Thousands of residents were evacuated as it is expected that explosions could continue for days or weeks causing further damage. The residents, especially the frontline workers, will desperately need all their support at this time, the statement continued.

According to the team of consuls general, it was agreed that each consulate would contribute to the cause by donating basic medical supplies of masks and personal care packages, and also large volumes of water. The consuls general are working to boost the support of their respective governments.

The team included Consuls General Gilbert Boustany of Antigua and Barbuda, Dean of the Consular Corps in Miami; Linda Mackey of The Bahamas, Neval Greenidge of Barbados, Stéphane Gilles of Haiti, R. Oliver Mair of Jamaica, Tassa Jean of St. Lucia, Deputy Consul General Dianne Perrotte of Grenada, and Acting Consul General of Trinidad and Tobago Jean Andria Narinesingh.

 

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