Tag Archives: oceania

headline

Authorities scramble as Australia closes borders to NZ

Australia has suspended travel with New Zealand for at least 72 hours.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government made the decision following advice from the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC).

Acting Chief Medical Officer Professor Michael Kidd said the decision was made after a case was detected in a woman who had left hotel quarantine in New Zealand on January 13.

Qantas jet lands.

"That person was tested last Friday, January 22, and returned a positive COVID-19 test result late on Saturday, January 23rd. The infected person visited at least 30," Professor Kidd said.

Anyone who has arrived in Australia from New Zealand since January 14 must get tested and isolate.

The woman is confirmed to have the South African variant of coronavirus.

New Zealand health authorities said she likely picked it up in hotel quarantine.

The 56-year-old woman tested positive yesterday after staying in managed isolation at the Pullman Hotel in Auckland.

Genomic sequencing has confirmed the strain of the virus is linked to South Africa, and it considered to be more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain.

READ MORE: Nation's first virus cases in months visited 30 venues

The woman travelled to New Zealand via London and Singapore after travelling around Spain and the Netherlands last year.

She returned two negative tests while staying at the hotel, but then returned a positive result days after leaving.

It's likely she contracted the strain from another overseas traveller currently in managed isolation.

READ MORE: Two killed, three children injured in New Zealand chopper crash

New Zealand health authorities are contact tracing almost 30 venues visited by the woman.

As many as 15 people who work in retail settings will now self-isolate after New Zealand's COVID Tracer app identified them as close contacts.

"As part of the investigative process carried out by the public health unit, the person was able to provide thorough details on where they had been since departing managed isolation," health authorities said.

"Four close contacts are being tested and are required to isolate for a full 14 days since their last exposure."

READ MORE: NZ agrees in principle to travel bubble with Australia in 2021

"The person visited a number of places in the Northland region on departing managed isolation and went to around 30 locations," authorities warned.

"Importantly the person has been vigilant in using the COVID Tracer app since leaving MIF and we have been able to rapidly identify these locations and are in the process of notifying them."

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Bodies found burned and shot in Mexico

Mexican authorities say they have found 19 shot and burned bodies near a town across the Rio Grande from Texas in an area that has seen violent territorial disputes between organised crime groups in recent years.

The Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office said late Saturday that the bodies were discovered along a dirt road outside Camargo after residents reported a burning vehicle.

Authorities found two vehicles on fire, one containing four bodies and the other 15. Some rifles were also found.

All had been shot, but shells were not found at the site, leading investigators to believe they were killed somewhere else.

READ MORE: Senior Mexico cartel figure arrested over massacre of Mormon family

READ MORE: Over 100 bodies found in secret Mexican graves

A Camargo official, who requested anonymity due to security concerns, said the killings occurred Friday, but people had been afraid to report them.

Meanwhile, in Guatemala, rumors swirled Sunday that Guatemalan migrants were among the dead.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement that Guatemala's embassy in Mexico and consulate in Monterrey were communicating with state and federal authorities “to determine if among the victims is any person of Guatemalan nationality.”

It said they had activated consular aid protocols.

Camargo is a major smuggling transit point for drugs and migrants.

Organised crime groups covet control of stretches of the border because they make money off everything that crosses the border.

Camargo is near the edge of territory historically controlled by the Gulf cartel and in recent years a remnant of the Zetas known at the Northeast cartel has tried to take over.

In January 2020, 21 bodies, most burned, were found in various vehicles near the neighboring town of Ciudad Mier.

Days later the Mexican army killed 11 alleged gunmen in the area.

headline

Trump coronavirus adviser says some saw it as 'hoax'

The coordinator of former US president Donald Trump's coronavirus task force said she had to grapple with COVID-19 deniers in the White House and that someone gave the president "parallel" streams of data that conflicted with hers.

Defending her tenure, Deborah Birx told CBS's Face the Nation that she was at times censored by the Trump administration but denied ever withholding information.

Dr Birx said she would see Mr Trump "presenting graphs that I never made" and that "someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president".

READ MORE: Coronavirus deaths top 400,000 in Trump's final hours

She added that in the White House, "there were people who definitely believed that this was a hoax".

Dr Birx did not identify the COVID-19 deniers and said she did not know who was presenting the parallel data to Mr Trump, but said she realises now that Mr Trump's coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas was providing some of it.

Dr Birx said last December that she would retire but was willing to first help President Joe Biden's team with its coronavirus response as needed.

More than 25 million people have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 418,000 people have died in the US since the pandemic

Mr Biden will formally reinstate COVID-19 travel restrictions on non-US travellers from Brazil, Ireland, the United Kingdom and 26 other European countries that allow travel across open borders, according to two White House officials.

READ MORE: Biden signs burst of coronavirus orders, requires masks for travel

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the order, also confirmed on Sunday that South Africa would be added to the restricted list because of concerns about a variant of the virus that has spread beyond that nation.

Mr Biden is reversing an order from Mr Trump in his final days in office that called for the relaxation of the travel restrictions from Tuesday.

headline

Australia Day date change: Nearly 50 per cent against the move

Nearly 50 per cent of people are opposed to changing the date of Australia Day from January 26.

Just 28 per cent of Australians want the date to be moved, according to a new Ipsos poll for Nine News and The Age/Sydney Morning Herald.

Of the 1222 people surveyed nationally, 48 per cent were against the date change and a further quarter neither agreed or disagreed.

Protests are planned across on Australia Day tomorrow, regarded by some Indigenous Australians as 'Invasion Day'.

January 26 marks the day when Captain Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove and proclaimed British sovereignty, in 1788.

The move led to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from the land they had inhabited for thousands of years up to the arrival of the First Fleet.

Invasion Day

Forty-one per cent of those surveyed believed changing the date of Australia Day would be important in improving the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

While 49 per cent believed the date was likely to move within the next decade.

But more younger people are in support of a change with 47 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 in favour, compared with 19 per cent of those aged 55 and over.

Northern Territory senator Malarndirri McCarthy says the date change debate is one that happens every year.

"I believe the focus should be on changing attitudes," Senator McCarthy told Today.

"We have so much to do in our country that we can do and should be doing, and I would like to see a lot more energy into changing the attitudes of towards not only first nations people but how we can work together going forward on 26th January."

The date change debate had "escalated into a much more frenzied sort of discussion" in recent years, she said.

"To the point of some people feeling really uncomfortable to talk about it and I don't think we should see anybody being uncomfortable to talk about their feelings and views about this particular day."

She suggested "a minute's silence" or "a healing ceremony" in the morning of Australia Day, arguing "we can do all of it" while embracing all viewpoints.

This statue of Captain James Cook was sprayed with slogans in 2017, in protest of Australia day.

But, she said, "first nations people don't all think the same, just like anyone else".

"We can always look at our differences but we have to find the one thing that brings us together and respect and reflect on some of the atrocities of the past and even the current day."