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Cameroon says it has deployed more troops in the capital Yaoundé after yet another bomb exploded, leaving at least 20 people severely wounded. No one has claimed responsibility, but it is suspected that separatists fighting for the creation of an English-speaking state in Cameroon and people who escaped from prison a month ago are responsible.Naseri Paul Bea, governor of the Central Region, where Yaoundé is located, says he convened a security meeting Friday night because there has been mounting insecurity in the capital city. He says he is calling on the clergy and traditional rulers to help bring peace back to the city.”I instructed them to control those who sell arms, to include the traditional rulers to be able to know the new people who come into their quarters so that if there is any person who looks strange, they can be able to inform the forces of law and order{military},” said Bea.The government said on Thursday night, yet another bomb exploded in the Damas neighborhood, severely wounding five people. 15 others with wounds were later discovered in their houses. Bea says he has information that some prisoners were organizing the attacks from their detention centers.”Some of the organizers are in the prisons and they have people outside who are doing it {planting the bombs} for them,” said Bea. “I instructed the penitentiary administration to put their ears to the ground to be able to get those information and sensitize the population to know that the security of the country is their own security.”Bea said the bombs were locally made. It was the third locally made bomb to explode in a popular neighborhood in Yaoundé within two weeks. At least 37 people were wounded in the three explosions. No one has claimed responsibility.Rights activist Edwin Ayuk of the Cameroon Human Right Center says it is imperative for the government to open negotiations with English speaking separatist leaders who are detained at the Yaoundé-Kondengui prison if they want peace to return. Speaking via a messaging application from the English-speaking northwestern town of Bamenda, he said the government should also investigate the activities of former ministers arrested and detained at the Kondengui prison by Cameroon president Paul Biya for corrupt activities.”We have been calling on the government to call these individuals, sit with them on the table and let them discuss their differences so that the atrocities that have been going on can come to an end,” said Ayuk.Innocent Ngono, a peace and development lecturer at the university of Yaoundé says Cameroon should handle the insecurity in its capital city with care since it already has many security challenges.He says if Cameroon has been able to resist the security challenges it has been facing since 2013, it is because the population has supported the military through information sharing. He says he is afraid Cameroonians may now be reluctant to assist the military because the government is not showing serious signs of wanting to solve the crisis the country is facing.    Since 2013 Cameroon’s eastern border has suffered a spillover of the carnage in the Central African Republic with regular intrusions of rebels. Boko Haram terrorism on Cameroons northern border with Nigeria has entered its 10th year with at least 3,000 people killed. A separatist crisis in the English-speaking western regions of the French majority state has left at least 3,000 people dead and 500,000 displaced. The Cameroon military has been deployed to handle border disputes with Equatorial Guinea.Many civilians say if the attacks on the capital city Yaoundé are not stopped, the military may be overstretched.  
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As the coronavirus spreads in Africa, it threatens in multiple ways those who earn their living on the streets — people like Mignonne, a 25-year-old sex worker with HIV.The lockdown in Rwanda has kept many of her customers away, she said, so she has less money to buy food. And when she doesn’t eat, the antiviral drugs she takes for HIV can bring on pain, weakness and nausea, or even make her pass out.“Yet it’s equally dangerous when you don’t take the drug,” Mignonne said in an interview. “You will die.”Similar challenges exist elsewhere in Africa, which has the world’s highest burden of HIV.  Studies have shown that food insecurity is a barrier to taking the drugs daily and can decrease their efficacy, affecting not only sex workers but anyone where food — or the money to buy it — is scarce.Among sex workers in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, “most who are living hand-to-mouth have been lamenting that it’s making it difficult to adhere to treatment,” said Talent Jumo, director of the Katswe Sistahood, an organization for sexual and reproductive health.  That’s a danger as many sex workers around the world are excluded from countries’ social protection programs during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and elsewhere wrote in a new commentary for The Lancet.“Sex workers are among the most marginalized groups,” they wrote, adding that “it is crucial that disruption to health services does not further reduce access to HIV treatment.”  Rwanda, which offers free antiretroviral therapy to all, has been widely praised for its progress in controlling HIV. The country has kept HIV prevalence at 3% for more than a decade and the number of new infections has dropped.But sex workers and health experts warn that those gains could be lost.More than 45% of the estimated 12,000 sex workers in the East African country live with HIV. Not taking the antiretroviral therapy risks spreading the virus, said Aflodis Kagaba, a medical doctor and executive director of Health Development Initiative, a local organization that promotes better access to health care.The organization has been giving some sex workers food, hand sanitizer and hygiene materials and is talking with the government about budgeting aid for sex workers.“Sex workers are part of the society and they deserve to live a healthy life,” Kagaba said.In Migina, an entertainment area in the capital, Kigali, Mignonne acts as a leader of 60 sex workers, reminding colleagues with HIV to take their antiretroviral therapy and visit health centers every month.“Now many are telling me they cannot take the drug because they don’t have food. It’s understandable and I don’t know what to do,” she said. She, like other sex workers, gave only her first name for her safety.Rwanda was distributing food to households under lockdown but stopped after three months. It has since lifted lockdown restrictions for some businesses, but others such as bars are still closed.Now COVID-19 cases are rising more quickly, prompting authorities to impose a nighttime curfew. As of Friday, the country had more than 1,000 confirmed coronavirus cases.“We are seeing sex workers in Africa being denied the support others are given, like food,” UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima said this month. “Some are being shamed and run out of their homes and called the source of corona.” Her organization and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects have called for sex workers to be included in countries’ COVID-19 social protection programs.UNAIDS is also warning about possible shortages of medication for millions of people with HIV in the next two months, especially in developing countries. Lockdowns and border closures are slowing the drugs’ production and distribution. A World Health Organization survey of 99 countries found 32% already reporting disruptions to established antiretroviral therapy, Meg Doherty, director of the U.N. agency’s department of HIV, hepatitis and STIs, said this week.“We are engaging in unsafer sex practices because we can’t be able to access prevention tools or to drugs that we are used to,” Grace Kamau, a Kenya-based coordinator with the African Sex Workers Alliance, told a COVID-19 global webinar for sex workers last month.Agnes, an HIV-positive sex worker in Kigali, said new stigma also hurts. Before the coronavirus it was easy to make money, she said. Now “you cannot dare go on the streets, yet back in communities we are treated like outcasts,” the 26-year-old told The Associated Press. “During the lockdown, when local leaders distributed food, my family was skipped on account that I was a sex worker.”Local officials have denied discriminating against sex workers. Like many others, Agnes quickly consumed her small savings she had intended to use on running a business selling tomatoes. Now, like many others, she has no lifeline.Deborah Mukasekuru, the coordinator of the National Association for Supporting People Living With HIV, called it a “difficult situation.”“We try to mobilize food for sex workers, but they are many and we cannot feed all of them,” she said. “You cannot blame the government because corona caught the government unaware.” 
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Coronavirus cases have surpassed 11 million worldwide, as the outbreak continues to surge in several countries including the United States, where case numbers tallied their largest single day total, topping 57,000.Friday’s totals in the United States, reported by The Washington Post, marked the seventh record-breaking day of coronavirus cases in nine days. Cases are now rising in 40 out of the 50 U.S. states.The U.S. state of Florida reported 9,488 new cases Friday, a day after setting a new daily record with more than 10,000 cases.Florida said it has reached about 80 percent capacity of its hospital intensive care units while the state of Arizona reported it is at 91 percent capacity, an all-time high.Patrons observing social distancing rules sit outdoors at the Guerrilla Tacos restaurant in Los Angeles, July 3, 2020.President Donald Trump visited Mount Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday for an early Independence Day celebration that thousands of people attended.Although the U.S. leads the world in the number of COVID-19 cases, local officials did not require social distancing or mask-wearing at the event. However, free masks were available for those who wanted them.South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, said on Fox News earlier this week: “We’ve told folks that have concerns that they can stay home.”Brazil is another country where coronavirus cases are rising, surpassing 1.5 million. The nation has the world’s second-largest outbreak after the United States.On Friday, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro approved a law requiring people to wear face masks on streets and on public transportation. However, he vetoed clauses that would have required wearing a face mask in enclosed spaces, including churches, schools and shops. The president, who has been widely criticized by health experts for downplaying the severity of the virus, says such a move could violate property rights.In another development, the World Health Organization updated an account of how it learned of the coronavirus outbreak. It said it was alerted by its own office in China, and not by Chinese government officials. The agency had earlier said that the first report of the virus had come from China without further specifying from whom the information came.A woman wearing a face mask amid the spread of the new coronavirus walks past a mural of an Indigenous man in Bogota, Colombia, July 3, 2020.The United States has strongly criticized the World Health Organization for its early handling of the pandemic and its dealings with China and said it would withdraw from the group.In India, officials reported nearly 21,000 new daily cases of the coronavirus Friday. Johns Hopkins University said Friday that the South Asian nation has more than 625,000 COVID-19 cases.In Pakistan, the country’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi announced Friday he’s tested positive for the coronavirus. Qureshi, who says he is quarantining at home with a “slight fever” is the senior most government official in Pakistan to contract the virus.Australian officials say 10,000 people in Victoria have refused to take the coronavirus test this past week because they believe the outbreak is not real and is instead a “conspiracy theory.”The New York Times reports that Australia, which has been successful in keeping COVID cases to a minimum, is now locking down an area of 300,000 people in a largely immigrant community in the state of Victoria.In England, pubs are planning to reopen Saturday for the first time in more than three months.Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told voters not to be afraid to come out and cast ballots in the second round of the presidential election July 12.Despite hundreds of new cases reported daily, Poland has been relatively successful in fending off COVID-19, with 1,500 deaths.And in Mexico, a medical supply company has started using unmanned drones to deliver masks, gloves and other equipment to hospitals.Doctors, nurses and other medical workers have staged nationwide protests against what they say is a shortage of protective equipment. 
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At least 17 people, included journalists, were detained Friday in Moscow, after protesting in front of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters over criminal charges leveled against a Russian journalist.Prosecutors in Pskov requested a six-year prison term for Svetlana Prokopyeva, who wrote an article on the blast outside a branch of Russia’s FSB in Arkhangelsk in 2018.People have gathered here today because the prosecutors have asked for an impossible six years of prison for her article,” said journalist Irina Dolinina. “But they can’t express their opinion because they are detained and taken to the police car before they can take out their banners.”Protesters have expressed fear that Prokopyeva’s case could be followed by more repression in the country, as people are unable to freely protest because the coronavirus restrictions are still in effect.”Hereafter the society will be decaying, and the repressions will strengthen until people start expressing their anger,” said Moscow resident Alexander Matskevich. “I don’t know how far it (the repression) can go. We have an example of North Korea. I doubt anyone wants to have the same here.”Russian authorities had identified the attacker in Arkhangelsk as a local 17-year-old man and treated the case as an act of terrorism.In her article, Prokopyeva wrote that the attacker’s motives were linked to the political climate in Russia.After the publication, authorities accused Prokopyeva of publicly justifying terrorism.The court is expected to announce the final verdict on Monday. 
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Amid a controversy in Washington over media reports that Russia has offered bounties to the Taliban for killing American soldiers, some Afghan lawmakers are concerned about the potential beginning of a new proxy war in their country. VOA’s Rahim Gul Sarwan reports from Kabul.
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President Donald Trump is headlining U.S. Independence Day celebrations Friday at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, where he plans to criticize protesters for trying to “tear down” the nation’s history.A Trump campaign official said the president would denounce a “left-wing mob” for tearing down statues during demonstrations against racial inequality.The official, who described Trump’s planned remarks in advance only on condition of anonymity, said the president would condemn such “totalitarian behavior that is completely alien to American life.”The president’s speech is also expected to include traditional Independence Day praise of the country’s values.The celebration at Mount Rushmore will feature fireworks at the South Dakota national park for the first time in more than a decade.“It’s going to be a fireworks display like few people have seen. It’s going to be very exciting,” Trump said during a White House event Thursday.Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a giant sculpture featuring the faces of four American presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — carved into a granite mountainside.Native Americans Angry Over Trump Visit to Mount RushmoreNative Americans also question timing of the event, scheduled during a period in which Americans struggle to come to terms with racism and police violence, and underfunded tribes battle spread of COVID-19This would be the first fireworks display at Mount Rushmore since 2010, when the National Park Service stopped staging pyrotechnics out of concern that they could spark wildfires. The memorial is surrounded by 486 hectares of forested land and located next to the Black Hills National Forest’s Black Elk Wilderness.In April, the Park Service prepared an environmental assessment and concluded the fireworks would have “no significant impact.”Monumental feudTrump’s visit comes during a national debate over monuments honoring American leaders who were slaveholders or held racist views. Universities and local governments across the country are removing controversial monuments, at a time when many Americans are protesting for ways to address systemic racism following the death of George Floyd, an African American, in police custody in May.The president has consistently opposed protesters who want to remove statues of Confederate leaders and figures who supported slavery and white supremacy. Trump signed an executive order in June directing federal law enforcement agencies to prosecute people who damage federal monuments.Choosing Mount Rushmore as the backdrop of this year’s Independence Day event is a political strategy clearly informed by the debate over monuments, said Vanessa Beasley, who teaches presidential rhetoric at Vanderbilt University.“Trump is basically trying to say to his base audience; ‘Hey, if you don’t like what’s happening with all these monuments, I’m going to go to the biggest and most immovable monument there is and I’m going to claim it as my own,’ ” said Beasley to VOA. “I don’t think there’s any nuance or ambiguity in that message.”Americans urged to stay homeAs the nation witnessed a spike in new coronavirus cases, with an 80 percent increase in the past two weeks, health officials urged Americans to stay home on July Fourth — a holiday usually celebrated with big parties and town parades.  “The safest choice this holiday is to celebrate at home,” the Oregon Health Authority said in a news release.South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican who worked with the administration to organize the celebration at Mount Rushmore, said Monday that masks would be provided but social distancing would not be enforced.”In South Dakota, we’ve told people to focus on personal responsibility. Every one of them has the opportunity to make a decision that they are comfortable with. So, we will be having celebrations of American independence; we will have a large event July 3,” she said during an appearance on Fox News earlier this week.Tickets for the 7,500-person capacity event were allocated by lottery in June.In trying to balance personal liberties and freedom against public safety, the president and Noem have decided that they want to come down on the side of personal freedom, said Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management at The George Washington University, told VOA.“It’s quite risky,” he said.Presidential preferenceAmerican presidents typically have celebrated July Fourth based on their personal preferences and many have done so in ways that are “very much connected to what’s happening at that moment,” said Matthew Costello, a historian with the White House Historical Association, in an interview with VOA.James K. Polk, the nation’s 11th president and the one who pursued the expansion of the continental United States through wars in the mid-19th century, celebrated with military parades and other ways that were very much about patriotism, Costello said.“It was about the war effort, but it was also about continuing the fight for what he believed was in the best interest of the country,” he said.Trump is not the first American president to commemorate Independence Day in a pandemic. During the Spanish flu in 1918, Woodrow Wilson reviewed a parade that marched on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, Costello said.Wilson missed the Fourth of July in 1919, as he was returning from the Paris Peace Conference.Many historians, including John M. Barry, professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, believe Wilson himself fell ill with the flu around that time. 
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Alabama reported more than 1,700 new confirmed coronavirus cases — the highest number yet for a single day in the state — as doctors and state officials expressed concern about further spread during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.  The state on Thursday surpassed the previous high-water mark for the most infections reported in a 24-hour period while the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 also reached a new high of 843. The state this week also recorded the lowest availability in ICU beds since the pandemic began.  Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious-diseases physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who also had COVID-19, likened the spread in the state to a “wildfire.”  “The data are pretty dismal right now, not just in our state but around the country,” Saag said in a Friday interview with reporters.  In May, Alabama was averaging 300 cases a day, but now is at over 1,000. “The data are telling us we are headed toward a tough situation,” Saag said.After the state saw a surge in cases after Memorial Day, doctors and state officials pleaded with people to use precautions during the July Fourth holiday weekend.  “As we celebrate America’s independence this weekend, remember we’re still battling a pandemic. … Now is not the time to let our guard down. Our state & nation are depending on you,” Governor Kay Ivey said in a tweet.  Avoid virus ‘havens’Saag said the two things people can do to mitigate spread is to wear a mask and avoid large crowds — particularly ones where most people aren’t wearing masks.  “If people are gathering in large spaces together, it’s a haven for the virus,” Saag said.  Alabama has reported more than 41,000 cases of the new coronavirus since the pandemic began, with more than 25% of infections being reported in the last two weeks, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health. So far, at least 983 Alabamians have died after contracting the virus.  State Health Officer Scott Harris urged people to be cautious and not give in to “COVID caution fatigue.””Too many people are failing to take precautions and follow the simple steps that have been proven to prevent transmission of the virus,” Harris said in a message to the state.  Dr. Don Williamson, the former state health officer who now heads the Alabama Hospital Association, said Thursday that the state has about 16% of intensive care beds available, the lowest share vacant since the pandemic began. By comparison, in early April, the state had 35% of ICU beds available.  The Alabama Department of Corrections reported Thursday that a second prison employee had died after testing positive for COVID-19.  The prison system said 75 inmates and 173 staff members and contract employees had tested positive for COVID-19. Nine inmates and two employees have died after contracting the virus.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday he was still unsure whether he would go to Washington next week to celebrate a new North American trade treaty, citing concern about possible U.S. tariffs on aluminum.Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is to meet U.S. President Donald Trump next week, has said he would like Trudeau to attend.Mexican sources had previously said Lopez Obrador’s visit was planned for Wednesday and Thursday, with the possibility of a trilateral meeting on Thursday.FILE – Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks during an event to sign an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement, at the national palace in Mexico City, Dec. 10. 2019.”We’re still in discussions with the Americans about whether a trilateral summit next week makes sense,” Trudeau said in a news conference. “We’re obviously concerned about the proposed issue of tariffs on aluminum and steel that the Americans have floated recently.”U.S. national security tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, including from Canada and Mexico, were a major irritant during negotiations for the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal, which was reached last year and entered into force on July 1.But now, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is considering domestic producers’ request to restore the 10% duty on Canadian aluminum to combat a surge of imports.Coronavirus concernsConcern about the “health situation and the coronavirus reality that is still hitting all three of our countries” is another factor in his decision on whether to go to Washington, Trudeau said.Also next week, Trudeau said he would hold a two-day virtual Cabinet retreat — without saying which days — to discuss how to prepare for a potential second wave of COVID-19, among other things.The spread of the novel coronavirus has slowed steadily in Canada over the past eight weeks, but new cases are spiking in many U.S. states.As of July 2, Canada had recorded a total of 104,772 coronavirus cases, with 68,345 recovered and 8,642 deaths. 
 
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