Статті

The first wave of college students returning to their dorms aren’t finding the typical mobs of students and parents. What they found Friday were strict safety protocols and some heightened anxiety amid a global pandemic where virus infections are growing in dozens of states.North Carolina State University staggered the return of its students over 10 days and welcomed the first 900 students to campus, where they were greeted Friday by socially distant volunteers donning masks and face shields.The rite of passage was a well-organized but low-key affair, as boxes were unloaded, luggage was wheeled and beds were hauled.”It’s just odd not seeing anybody. You expect it to be hustle and bustle and all that around, but there was nothing. It was pretty empty,” said Dominick DePaola, an incoming freshman from Charlotte, North Carolina.Across the country, students are jumping through additional hoops by getting tests, navigating travel quarantines, and abiding by strict rules.Elon University in North Carolina mailed testing kits to all 7,000 students ahead of their arrival in a few weeks. Maine’s Colby College will be testing students before they arrive and then three times a week for the first two weeks on campus. They’ll be tested twice a week after that, until the semester ends.The University of Rhode Island is scaling back campus housing to abide by distancing requirements, causing a scramble for some students.At N.C. State, the university usually houses 10,000 students but will have 6,700 on its Raleigh campus this fall, said Chancellor Randy Woodson. And those students were arriving over an extended period instead of all at once over a single weekend as they normally would.Volunteer and student Nathan Hsieh wears a face shield as he assists college students who begin moving in for the fall semester at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C., July 31, 2020.”Just like the rest of the world, we have to figure out how to carry on,” said Betsy Flanagan, who was sending her freshman son, Arch, off to college. “This virus isn’t going away and it’s going to be with us for quite a while, so we all have to figure out how to safely exist, and that includes continuing to educate our future.”In West Virginia, one university put out the welcome mat Friday for students and their families, only to temporarily pull it away.Over an eight-day stretch, students at West Virginia State University, a small historically Black college, were given staggered, two-hour time slots to unload belongings into their residence halls, then were sent home until the start of the fall semester on August 10.”I don’t have anything to worry about,” said Jihad Shockley, a sophomore resident assistant from Columbus, Ohio, and a member of the Yellow Jackets’ men’s basketball team. “It’s like, if you get it, quarantine for two weeks (and) hope for the best. I guess I’m not really too scared about it.”Nationwide, it appears that the second surge of confirmed virus cases appears to be leveling off. But scientists warn that trend is driven by four big, hard-hit places — Arizona, California, Florida and Texas — and that cases are rising in more than two dozen other states.Students appeared to be ready to accept the risk and move on.Freshman Nicholas Cecil, of Hilliard, Ohio, missed his senior season of baseball and his high school prom, called off due to the virus. He’s ready to put that behind him at West Virginia State University, where he’s on the baseball team.”Honestly, it’s a new chapter in my life,” Cecil said. “It’s meeting new people, getting out, and playing baseball at a high level. It’s kind of the first step to being an adult. You’re living more so on your own.”In North Carolina, students were happy to be on campus, even if it was a bit subdued, compared to the normal, frenetic move-in process.”Because of corona, I didn’t really have too many expectations,” said Ann Grace Jacocks, an incoming freshman from Fayetteville, North Carolina.”A lot of classes are going to be online, so that’s not fun, but other than that, I’m ready to go,” said Arch Flanagan, an incoming freshman. 
…

The southern U.S. states of Florida and North Carolina have declared hurricane warnings after Hurricane Isaias drenched the Bahamas and headed toward the U.S. East Coast.Hurricane Isaias had sustained winds Friday of 120 kph and was expected to strengthen during the night, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said. The storm is currently a Category 1 hurricane with a chance of increasing to a Category 2, however the eye is forecast to stay in the Atlantic Ocean and not turn toward land.”While current projections have the eye of Isaias remaining at sea, the situation remains fluid and can change quickly,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told a media briefing.DeSantis issued a state of emergency for a dozen counties on the Atlantic Coast. Heavy rains from the storm are expected to begin in Florida late Friday and hit the Carolinas by early next week.In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper also declared emergencies in coastal counties and ordered the evacuation of Oracoke Island, which was hit by last year’s Hurricane Dorian.South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster told reporters he did not think a state of emergency was necessary.The hurricane has prompted authorities in parts of Florida to close coronavirus testing sites at a time when cases have been growing in the state.DeSantis said testing sites would remain open on Florida’s west coast as well as in some eastern hospitals and community centers.Officials in Miami-Dade County said they do not believe it will be necessary to open evacuation centers for this storm but said 20 centers remain on standby in case conditions change.In the Bahamas, officials evacuated people in Abaco and in the eastern end of Grand Bahama who have been living in temporary structures since Hurricane Dorian.Earlier, while still a tropical storm, Isaias hit Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, causing power outages and small landslides.A man died in the Dominican Republic when he was electrocuted by a fallen electrical cable, according to the Associated Press.U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico, which has yet to fully recover from 2017’s Hurricane Maria and a recent series of earthquakes.Isaias is the ninth named storm of a busy Atlantic hurricane season. This is the earliest date a storm beginning with the letter “I” has formed.  
…

A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.The three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston issued the decision more than six months after arguments were heard in the case.The April 15, 2013, attack killed three people and injured more than 260.Tsarnaev’s lawyers had argued that intense media coverage made it impossible to have a fair trial in Boston. They also pointed to social media posts from two jurors suggesting they harbored strong opinions even before the 2015 trial started.The appeals judges, in a hearing on the case in early December, devoted a significant number of questions to the juror bias argument.They asked why the two jurors had not been dismissed, or at least why the trial judge had not asked them follow-up questions after the posts came to light on the eve of the trial.The judges noted that the Boston court has a long-standing rule obligating such an inquiry.Tsarnaev’s lawyers said one of the jurors, who would go on to become the jury’s foreperson, published two dozen tweets in the wake of the bombings. One post after Tsarnaev’s capture called him a “piece of garbage.”Tsarnaev was convicted on 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction. He’s been serving his sentence in a high-security supermax prison in Colorado.His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a gunbattle with police days after the two brothers detonated two pressure cooker bombs near the marathon finish line. 
…

The United States intensified its economic pressure on China’s Xinjiang province on Friday, imposing sanctions on a powerful Chinese company and two officials for what it said were human rights abuses against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities.The move, the latest blow to U.S.-China relations, came a week after U.S. President Donald Trump closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, prompting Beijing to shutter the U.S. consulate in Chengdu.The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement it blacklisted the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, also known as XPCC, along with Sun Jinlong, former party secretary of XPCC, and Peng Jiarui, XPCC’s deputy party secretary and commander, over accusations they are connected to serious human rights abuse against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.”The Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities rank as the stain of the century,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.China denies mistreatment of the minority group and says the camps holding many Uighurs provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism.Washington’s action freezes any U.S. assets of the company and officials; generally prohibits Americans from dealing with them; and bars Sun Jinlong and Peng Jiarui from traveling to the United States.A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the company as a “a secretive, paramilitary organization that performs a variety of functions under the direct control” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”They are directly involved in the implementation of the CCP’s comprehensive surveillance, detention and indoctrination … which we all know targets the Uighurs and members of other ethnic minority members in Xinjiang,” the official said.The Treasury also issued a license, authorizing certain wind-down and divestment transactions and activities related to blocked XPCC subsidiaries until Sept. 30.Washington recently imposed sanctions on the autonomous region of Xinjiang’s Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, the highest-ranking Chinese official to be targeted, blacklisting the member of China’s powerful Politburo and current first party secretary of the XPCC, as well as other officials and the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.Peter Harrell, a former official and sanctions expert at the Center for a New American Security, said that from an economic perspective, Friday’s action was a “substantial escalation” of U.S. pressure and sends a warning to companies engaged in activity in China.”The Trump administration finally took a meaningful sanctions … action on Xinjiang, as opposed to ones that were primarily symbolic,” Harrell said.XPCC is a quasi-military group created in 1954. It was initially made up of demobilized soldiers who spent time in military training while developing farms on the region’s arid Land.Civilian members from eastern China later joined the corps, which now numbers 3.11 million people, or more than 12% of the region’s population. It is almost entirely made up of Han Chinese in a region that is home to the Muslim Uighur people. 
…

The United States has denounced the killing inside a courtroom of a naturalized U.S. citizen on trial for blasphemy in Pakistan.Tahir Ahmed Naseem, a 47-year-old resident from Illinois, was shot several times in front of the judge during a Wednesday hearing in the northwestern city of Peshawar. He was on trial for allegedly claiming to be a prophet of Islam, a crime punishable by death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.“We are shocked, saddened, and outraged that American citizen Tahir Naseem was killed…inside a Pakistani courtroom,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement issued on Thursday.The judicial proceedings against Naseem had been under way since 2018, when he was arrested for allegedly claiming to be the “last messenger of God” in online conversations with his Facebook friends in Pakistan.“Mr. Naseem had been lured to Pakistan from his home in Illinois by individuals who then used Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to entrap him,” the U.S. statement lamented.It noted that the U.S. government had been providing consular assistance to the victim and his family and “called the attention of senior Pakistani officials to his case to prevent the type of shameful tragedy that eventually occurred.”Pakistani police swiftly arrested the young assailant, who later took responsibility for killing Naseem for having committed blasphemy and for being an enemy of Islam.“We grieve with the family of Mr. Naseem. We urge Pakistan to immediately reform its often-abused blasphemy laws and its court system, which allow such abuses to occur, and to ensure that the suspect is prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” the U.S. State Department said.Security is usually tight around the court during cases related to blasphemy offenses because it is an extremely sensitive issue in Pakistan. Police said an investigation was underway to determine how the assailant managed to carry the weapons into the courtroom.Sam Brownback, U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, said he was disturbed by reports that a U.S. citizen was murdered while standing trial for blasphemy. “We call on @PakPMO and the Government of Pakistan to ensure the perpetrator is held accountable and investigate this egregious courtroom security lapse,” Brownback tweeted.The latest act of violence associated with Pakistan’s blasphemy laws has renewed calls for reforming them to prevent their misuse and to deter such incidents. But attempts by successive governments to reform the laws have failed under pressure from Islamic groups in the country.Domestic and international human rights groups maintain blasphemy charges are often fabricated by influential people in Pakistan to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal feuds with rival Muslim groups.Dozens of people are known to have been killed for allegedly committing blasphemy in Pakistan. Even mere accusations in certain instances have triggered mob lynchings of suspected blasphemers. The victims include doctors, teachers, lawyers and high-profile political figures.In a landmark 2018 judgment, the country’s Supreme Court acquitted a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, of blasphemy charges after she spent eight years on death row in a case that drew global attention.Bibi has since secured asylum in Canada along with her family, to escape death threats from Islamists in Pakistan after her acquittal.
…

As the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in the U.S. continues to climb, three of the nation’s top public health officials are scheduled to testify Friday before a House committee investigating the White House’s response to the pandemic. The three officials are: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the county’s top infectious disease expert; the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield; and the Assistant Secretary of Health Admiral Brett Giroir, the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing chief. The U.S. has almost 4.5 million COVID-19 cases and more than 152,000 people have died from the contagion, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center statistics.There are 17.3 million COVID-19 cases worldwide. Children carry more viral load than adults
The results of a small study published Thursday in a major U.S. pediatric journal says that young children carry more coronavirus genetic material in their noses than older children and adults.  The study, however, did not measure the rate at which the children transmit the virus to others.   The resurgence of COVID-19 in many countries is “driven in part by younger people letting down their guard during the Northern Hemisphere summer,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday.  Young adults, many without masks, are ignoring social distancing recommendations to pack bars, nightclubs, and beaches that have been reopened since authorities lifted coronavirus restrictions.  “The majority of young people infected tend to have more mild disease. But that’s not always consistent,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist who called nightclubs “amplifiers of transmission.” Young people who show mild or no symptoms can spread the virus to more vulnerable older people. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who is infected with COVID-19, wears a protective face mask as he attends a Brazilian flag retreat ceremony outside his official residence the Alvorada Palace, in Brasilia, Brazil, Wednesday, July 22, 2020…Brazil’s president still struggling 
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro, who tested positive for the coronavirus on July 7 and then negative last Saturday, said that after 20 days indoors he had mold on his lungs. He is being treated with antibiotics. He had repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as “a little flu.”  Brazil, as of Thursday evening, had 2.6 million confirmed cases and 91,263 deaths, People gather in Soho, as restrictions are eased following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London, Britain July 4, 2020. REUTERS/Henry NichollsBritain ponders new lockdown amid surge
Britain is reporting its highest number of new COVID cases since late June, with officials warning that more quarantines may be necessary. British health officials registered 846 new cases Thursday and Minister for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said a second wave of the virus is rolling across Europe and that Britain must defend against it. “It is absolutely vital as a country that we continue to keep our focus and our discipline, and that we don’t delude ourselves that somehow we are out of the woods or that that is all over, because it isn’t all over,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Thursday. British authorities added Luxembourg to the country’s quarantine list, meaning travelers from there must isolate for 14 days after entering Britain. Spain, which had been dropped from the list, has been reinstated and other countries may be added. Botswana lockdown
Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, reimposed a two-week lockdown on Thursday after a surge in new confirmed COVID-19 cases. The increase came as the WHO warned against easing coronavirus restrictions throughout Africa. The WHO says the number of infections on the continent has doubled in the past month. “We are concerned that … we will see an increase in cases as we have seen in [other] countries” where restrictions have been eased too soon,” WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said She said more than 20 African countries have recorded more new cases than in the previous weeks, with South Africa accounting for the most but increases also reported in Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe.  Moeti said Uganda, Seychelles and Mauritius are doing well in controlling the virus. Cuba reports new cases
Cuba reported nine new cases Thursday, and 37 new cases earlier this week. Just 10 days ago, Cuba reported no new cases for the first time since the outbreak began in March. However, it has reported no deaths for more than two weeks. Cuba has so far been relatively successful in fighting COVID-19, but the island’s top epidemiologist, Francisco Duran, said Thursday Cubans are getting careless.  “People are holding different types of gatherings without taking into account distancing and often without even using a face mask,” he said. “Each small peak underscores a lack of discipline … prompting stricter measures.” In Florida, Key West police arrested a couple who tested positive for COVID-19 for being in public in defiance of a quarantine order. Neighbors who videotaped the couple strolling and shopping gave the tapes to police. The couple’s arrest is among the first in the state for violating a quarantine. Florida, with 461,000 coronavirus cases and 6,600 deaths, is second only to California, which has 492,000 confirmed cases and 8,965 deaths, among U.S. states. Dog dies of coronavirus
National Geographic magazine is reporting that the first dog in the United States sickened by COVID-19 has died. Buddy, a 7-year-old German shepherd in New York became ill in April while his owner was recovering from the coronavirus. Buddy had the same symptoms as human patients, including difficulty breathing. He was euthanized earlier this month after he started vomiting and urinating blood and could no longer walk.  Buddy’s doctors said he was also suffering from cancer. Doctors say humans with pre-existing conditions are more susceptible to COVID-19.  The WHO says pet-to-people transmission of the coronavirus is unlikely.  National Geographic says 12 dogs and 10 cats have tested positive for coronavirus in the U.S.   
…

The Italian Senate has voted to lift right-wing Senator Matteo Salvini’s immunity from prosecution, related to his decision last August to not allow 164 migrants to get off a ship in Sicily.Thursday’s vote may clear the way for potential charges against the former interior minister who, during his 14 months in that position, repeatedly denied port entry to ships carrying rescued migrants at sea.Salvini’s policy resulted in several standoffs, forcing ships to remain at sea for weeks before European countries would allow entry to their ports or Italian courts ordered disembarking.For the case from last August, Salvini refused access to the rescue ship Open Arms for three weeks before it was allowed to enter a port on the Italian island of Lampedusa. 
…