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Three U.N. troops were killed early Sunday and three wounded when their convoy hit a roadside bomb, an official said, in the latest violence to hit the war-torn West African state. Chadian peacekeepers were on a routine patrol in Aguelhok commune in the north of the country, according to a U.N. official stationed in the area. “There are three dead and three seriously wounded,” said the official, who declined to be named.Olivier Salgado, the spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, confirmed the account to AFP, adding that reinforcements had been sent into the area.Known as MINUSMA, the U.N. mission has some 13,000 troops drawn from several states deployed across the vast semi-arid country. Mali is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in 2012 and which has claimed thousands of military and civilian lives since.Despite the presence of thousands of French and U.N. troops, the conflict has engulfed the center of the country and spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.  Laying roadside bombs is a favored tactic of jihadists active in the Sahel.Also known as improvised explosive devices, they kill and maim scores of victims every year in Mali.
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A kidnapped Italian aid worker who had been held in an al-Shabab-controlled area of Somalia has been freed. Silvia Romano arrived in Rome on Sunday after being freed outside Mogadishu on Saturday. She spent overnight in a safe location in Mogadishu before being flown home. Security officials told VOA Somali that Romano was recovered from a forest near the town of Afgoye, 30 kilometers west of Mogadishu. The terms of her release are not known. 
 Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced the release in a tweet.Silvia Romano è stata liberata! Ringrazio le donne e gli uomini dei servizi di intelligence esterna. Silvia, ti aspettiamo in Italia!— Giuseppe Conte (@GiuseppeConteIT) May 9, 2020Romano, who was working for an Italian charity was abducted by gunmen in November 2018 in Kilifi County, Kenya. It’s not clear how the gunmen managed to transport her into Somalia. Somali security sources say they believe she was kidnapped by al-Shabab militants who previously abducted aid workers and demanded ransom. The abduction of two Spanish aid workers working for Doctors Without Borders in October 2011 was one of reasons Kenya government gave for its subsequent military intervention into Somalia that year. Al-Shabab also harbors bandits including pirates who abduct foreign sailors, and aid workers. Three Iranian sailors, two Cuban doctors, two Kenyans and a German nurse working for the ICRC are still being held in areas controlled by al-Shabab.     
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Iranian officials said Sunday they are ready for a prisoner exchange with the U.S. but that they have yet to hear from U.S. officials.  “Iran has already stated our readiness to discuss the release of all prisoners without preconditions . . . but Americans have not responded,” Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiel said, according to the Iranian government website Dolat.ir. Both countries have called for the swap because of concerns about COVID-19. Iran has been hard hit by the virus, while the U.S. leads the world in the number of infections.  The exact number of prisoners held by either side is not immediately clear.  The last, rare prisoner exchange between the two longtime foes happened December 7, when Iran freed Chinese American academic Xiyue Wang in return for the U.S. releasing Iranian scientist Masoud Soleimani. The swap happened in Zurich through Swiss mediation. Iran Silent on 12 Iranians Detained by US Despite Pledge to Swap Prisoners Again Iran has said nothing publicly about 12 Iranian citizens under prosecution or convicted of crimes in US since December prisoner swap and appears to have done little to help them In the four months since then, the U.S. has said it’s worked continuously for the release of four Americans whom Washington has accused Tehran of unjustly jailing on trumped up charges, including Navy veteran Michael R. White.   As Iran’s coronavirus pandemic worsened and spread to its prison system in March, U.S. officials added urgency to their calls for the Americans to be released to safeguard their health. Iranian authorities granted White a prison furlough on March 19 after he exhibited coronavirus symptoms, but they have refused to let him leave the country or free the other Americans.       
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Iraq’s new prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, chaired his first cabinet meeting Saturday after being sworn in earlier in the week.Kadhimi had meetings with U.S. Ambassador Matthew H. Tueller and Iranian Ambassador Iraj Masjedi.His meeting with the Iranian envoy comes as tensions between the United States and Iran have escalated following the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassim Soleimani in January.Welcoming Iraq’s new government, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledged to help Kadhimi and urged implementation of reforms.Kadhimi assumed office Thursday, following weeks of negotiations. He had served as the director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service since 2016.
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Former U.S. President Barack Obama says current U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been “an absolute chaotic disaster.”  In a conference call with former staff members, Obama said, “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset of ‘what’s in it for me’  and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”  The U.S. leads the world in the number of cases and deaths from the virus.  More than 1.3 million people in the U.S. have been infected and nearly 80,000 people have died.  In this April 18, 2020 photo provided by the Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Gov. Cuomo provides a coronavirus update during a press conference in the Red Room at the State Capitol in Albany.In New York, the U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Saturday that three children have died and more than 70 other children have fallen ill from a syndrome associated with the virus.   Children were initially thought not to be as susceptible to the virus, but reports are beginning to emerge challenging that. Like other countries, the U.S. does not have adequate supplies of test kits, meaning the sickest people get tested before those with mild symptoms, raising the possibility those with mild or no symptoms may not get tested at all and go uncounted. Pushing to reopen the U.S. from measures meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus, President Donald Trump has recently touted the U.S. testing system.  But the system has been criticized for failures in the critical early weeks of the outbreak and its ongoing underperformance compared to some other countries.  During a recent meeting with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Trump said Germany has a “very low mortality rate like we do.” In fact, the U.S. has reported COVID-19 deaths at a rate of 234 per 1 million people, compared to Germany’s reported rate of 90 fatalities per million.  President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting about the coronavirus response in the Oval Office of the White House, May 7, 2020, in Washington.On Friday, Trump insisted “testing isn’t necessary,” an indication of his increasing tendency to reject the advice of health experts. The Trump administration continues to defend its decision not to release a detailed coronavirus reopening plan for the U.S., maintaining it would have been too narrowly focused for the country’s 50 states. Germany is grappling with new outbreaks since it began easing restrictions. The Robert Koch Institute said Sunday the infection rate had gone up to 1.1.  The infection rate, known as the reproduction rate, is growing when the rate exceeds 1.1.   There have also been outbreaks at three slaughterhouses in Germany.  South Korea has shut down more than 2,100 bars and other establishments in Seoul after new coronavirus outbreaks were linked to people who frequented nightclubs last weekend after the government relaxed social distancing guidelines. Many of the infections were traced to a 29-year-old man who went to three nightclubs before testing positive.  Schools in South Korea were scheduled to begin reopening this week, but that may be delayed after the new outbreaks while officials say probes into the new cases would determine the next steps.   Worldwide, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases has surpassed 4 million. The global death tally is nearly 280,000, according to Johns Hopkins University statistics. In central Afghanistan Saturday, clashes between aid-seeking protesters and police have claimed the lives of at least four civilians, including a journalist, and injured 14 others, officials said.  
  
The violence erupted as a coronavirus-induced shutdown and partial border closures with neighboring countries disrupted food deliveries into landlocked Afghanistan.  
 
Saturday’s clashes broke out after dozens of people gathered outside the governor’s office in impoverished Ghor province to protest what they said was a lack of official assistance for their poverty-stricken families. 
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In a world suddenly fearful of touch, voice technology is getting a fresh look.Voice-activated systems such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri have seen strong growth in recent years, and the virus pandemic could accelerate that, analysts say.Voice assistants are not only answering queries and shopping, but also being used for smart home control and for a range of business and medical applications which could see increased interest as people seek to limit personal contact.”Voice has already made significant inroads into the smart home space, and voice control can mean avoiding commonly touched surfaces around the home from smartphones, to TV remotes, light switches, thermostats, door handles and more,” said analyst Jonathan Collins of ABI Research.The pandemic is likely to provide “additional motivation and incentive for voice control in the home that will help drive awareness and adoption for a range of additional smart home devices and applications,” Collins said.ABI estimates that voice control device shipments for smart home devices hit 141 million last year, and in 2020 will grow globally by close to 30 percent.For the broader market of voice assistants, Juniper Research estimates 4.2 billion devices in use this year, growing to 8.4 billion by 2024, with much of the interactions on smartphones.Smart locks, doorbellsCollins said he expected to see growing interest in smart locks and doorbells, along with other smart home systems, to eliminate the need for personal contact and face-to-face interaction as a result of the pandemic.Avi Greengart, a technology analyst and consultant with Techsponential, said data is not yet available but that “anecdotally, voice assistant usage is way up” as a result of lockdowns.Greengart said he expects a wider range of business applications for voice technologies in response to health and safety concerns.”Looking forward, office spaces will need move towards more touch-free controls; voice can be a solution, although motion triggers for lighting is often easier and more friction-free,” he said.”However, I do expect smart speakers — along with an emailed list of commands — to be a common feature at hotels and other rental properties. The fewer touch points, the better.”Post-pandemic outlookJulian Issa of Futuresource Consulting said there appears to be “an uptick in the use of voice assistants since the virus outbreak” during the pandemic.”Whilst avoiding touching surfaces may play a small part in this, it is mainly due to consumers spending far more time at home with their devices,” Issa said.Chris Pennell, another Futuresource analyst, said he expects adoption of digital assistants is likely to accelerate, “especially in client facing areas such as healthcare, retail and entertainment.”One example of this already in use is a Mayo Clinic tool using Amazon Alexa which allows people to assess their symptoms and access information on the virus.Other medical applications are also in the works for voice technologies.Veton Kepuska, a Florida Tech computer engineering professor who specializes in speech recognition technologies, is seeking to develop voice-activated medical robots that can help limit physical contact and contagion.”If we had this infrastructure in place, we would have been better off today,” said Kepuska, who was spurred by the COVID-19 outbreak to seek funding for the research effort.Kepuska said this effort could lead to a “humanoid” medical robot which can take over many tasks from doctors or nurses with voice interaction.”The pandemic has created a situation where we need to think about how to deliver services to people who need our help without putting ourselves in danger,” he said. 
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Most American schools are closed until the start of the next school year in the fall in a bid to contain the coronavirus. But many teachers and students are pushing ahead with studies online — though this method has posed some unexpected difficulties for students, teachers and parents. For VOA, Alexey Gorbachev has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
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The Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), a white supremacist group based in St. Petersburg, is increasingly expanding its outreach beyond Russia through the establishment of transnational networks with like-minded neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups, experts on the group warn.RIM adheres to an ultranationalist ideology and aims to bring Russia’s tsarist rule back. The group is known for disseminating anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric on its online networks.In April, the U.S. State Department listed three leaders of the group, Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariyev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The move marked the first time the U.S. had labeled a white supremacist group as a terrorist organization.“The Russian Imperial Movement is an organization that has very likely thousands of members, an organization that trained two individuals who then later carried out terrorist attacks in Sweden,” said Jason Blazakis, the director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.Combat training in St. PetersburgOver the years, RIM has been able to persuade foreign white supremacists from various countries to visit the group’s camps in St. Petersburg for combat training, Blazakis told VOA. The group’s capacity and intent to carry out terrorist activities make it a major threat, he added.RIM was established in St. Petersburg by Vorobyev in 2002. The group reportedly has two training camps in St. Petersburg that are run by its paramilitary unit called Partisan. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists gain combat experience there before relocating to conflict zones.The group’s second paramilitary unit, the Imperial Legion, has been found fighting on the side of pro-Russia separatists in the war in eastern Ukraine. An April report by the Soufan Center concluded that the Imperial Legion has sent its fighters to other conflict areas, including Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic.“This group has innocent blood on its hands,” Nathan Sales, the coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, said during a teleconference following the U.S. ban on the group in early April.In 2016, two Swedish men, trained by RIM in St. Petersburg for 11 days, later that year conducted terrorist attacks in Gothenburg, Sweden, Sales said.Viktor Melin and Anton Thulin, identified as the two perpetrators of the Gothenburg bomb attacks, targeted asylum centers and seriously wounded a man. Swedish authorities said the men were members of the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a neo-Nazi group aiming to create a pan-Nordic nation.RIM allegedly established contacts with NRM during a right-wing conference called the International Russian Conservative Forum in March 2015 in St. Petersburg. Rodina, a Russian political party, organized the conference.“At the conference, there was a resolution to try to coordinate Russian and European conservative elements,” Magnus Ranstorp, a research director at the Swedish Defense University, told VOA.“Later, Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, one of the leaders of the RIM, came to one of the social gatherings organized by the Nordic Resistance Movement called Nordic Days, and he spoke there. Also, he donated a sum of money to the Nordic Resistance Movement,” Ranstorp said.Visiting USSome observers of RIM claim the group has made similar moves elsewhere by sending its representatives to sympathetic foreign organizations. In 2017, RIM representative Stanislav Shevchuk reportedly visited Washington, D.C., and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to join a far-right rally.“It was the first time that we had a meeting on the U.S. soil of the American white nationalists and then the members of the Russian far right nationalist community,” Casey Michel, an investigative journalist who covered RIM’s American ties, told VOA.He said Shevchuk then met Matthew Heimbach, the head of the far-right Traditionalist Worker Party, in Washington. The two were seen in a photograph holding a Russian imperial flag in front of the White House.Contacted by VOA about the alleged ties between RIM and the Traditionalist Worker Party, Sales, of the State Department, said U.S. officials were aware of such reports, without providing more information.“Any group whose leaders or members have visited the United States or any group that has sought to recruit Americans into its twisted causes is a matter of grave concern,” Sales said.Russian officials have condemned the U.S. embargo on RIM, calling it a part of “the Russophobia of the U.S. establishment.”“Since Washington has not substantiated its decision with convincing and detailed information, we have the impression that it was made primarily for propaganda purposes and has little to do with cooperation in countering international terrorism,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a press briefing in April.Some experts said Russian intelligence units such as the Federal Security Service are likely aware of RIM activities but allow it to operate for short-term benefits.The “Kremlin knew what the Russian Imperial Movement was doing, and it never hid what they were doing,” Anton Shekhovtsov, a Vienna-based senior fellow at the Free Russia Foundation, told VOA.RIM’s recruitment efforts and pledge to send members to combat zones were “beneficial to the Kremlin in its aggression against Ukraine,” Shekhovtsov said. 
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Two cabinet-level U.S. officials were in self-quarantine on Saturday after coming into contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, according to a spokesman and a media report.Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield “will be teleworking for the next two weeks” after a “low-risk exposure” on Wednesday to a person at the White House who has the disease, The Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing a spokesman.U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn is in self-quarantine for a couple of weeks after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, an FDA spokesman told Reuters late Friday.Hahn immediately took a diagnostic test for the coronavirus and the results were negative, FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum said in an emailed statement.”As Dr. Hahn wrote in a note to staff today, he recently came into contact with an individual who has tested positive for COVID-19. Per CDC guidelines, he is now in self-quarantine for the next two weeks,” the FDA spokesman said.Politico reported that Hahn had come into contact with Katie Miller, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary.Miller, the wife of one of President Donald Trump’s senior advisers, tested positive on Friday, raising alarm about the virus’ potential spread within the White House’s innermost circle.The diagnosis of Miller, who is married to White House immigration adviser and speech writer Stephen Miller, was revealed by Trump in a meeting with Republican lawmakers on Friday. A valet for Vice President Mike Pence has also tested positive.
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Syria’s oil ministry has announced that it is reducing its automobile fuel subsidies, removing owners of more than one car and users of vehicles with powerful engines from its ration system.The ministry said Saturday that the decision was effective Sunday.War-ravaged and sanction-battered Syria is grappling with a new phase of its economic crisis. Its local currency began plummeting in value late last year, and now coronavirus restrictions have limited economic activities and likely hurt government revenues from the sale of fuel.
 
Subsidized fuel is distributed through a smart card system, whereby smaller cars receive up to 100 liters (26 gallons) of fuel a month at 250 Syrian pounds a liter (36 cents per 0.25 gallons.)
 
Non-subsidized fuel goes for nearly double the price at 450 Syrian pounds a liter (64 centers per 0.25 gallons.) The smart card distribution and limit on subsidized fuel were introduced last year amid an increasing fuel shortage.
 
The economy of the war-ravaged country, also suffering from years of sanctions, saw the local currency plummet late last year. That sent prices of basic goods soaring and was soon followed by restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus that limited movement and trade.
 
The price of vegetables and eggs went up by as much as 75% in March and the government included subsidized bread under the smart card system. It also banned the export of some commodities, including eggs and dairy, to contain the price rise.
 
The Syria Report, which follows the local economy, reported last month a drop in the consumption of oil by about 50% because of coronavirus movement restrictions — a decline that is likely to have hurt government revenues. The government produces some of its fuel for domestic needs but buys the rest from Iran, which extends a credit line to Damascus, that in turns sells it for a profit on the market.
 
Restrictions on movement are being gradually lifted. Public transportation resumes operating within provinces starting Sunday. 
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Russian soldiers are operating drones over Venezuela as part of a search for members of a paramilitary force that led a botched invasion this week, local media reported, citing deleted tweets from a state military command center.At least eight Russian special forces members will be “operating drones to run search and patrol operations” near La Guaira, the coastal state just north of Caracas, according to a report Friday from local news outlet El Nacional. It posted a screenshot of a tweet it said was later deleted on Thursday from the profile of the military command, known as ZODI La Guaira.An aircraft arrived at the country’s international airport on Thursday that would join the search mission, ZODI La Guaira wrote in a separate tweet, posting a photo of a helicopter. El Nacional said that tweet was also later deleted.The aircraft’s origin and the reason the tweets were deleted were not immediately evident.The information ministry did not immediately reply to a request for clarification.Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency on Saturday that the report represented an attempt to denigrate the cooperation between Moscow and Caracas.’Fake News’ZODI La Guaira on Friday posted a tweet saying the command “categorically denies interference by the Russian military” in its ranks. The post included a screenshot of a tweet from user @YourNewsAnonLat about Russia’s alleged support, saying the claim was “Fake News.” It did not address the screenshots of the previous alleged tweets from the account.Even though the incursion was broadly considered a humiliating failure since authorities initially announced it had been broken up on Sunday, organizers in subsequent days have said members of the force continued to fight.There has, however, been no evidence of any military actions on the part of the group since Sunday.Thirty-one people have been arrested for their role in the bungled incursion, Chief Prosecutor Tarek Saab said Friday, including two Americans who work for the security firm that organized it, Silvercorp USA.Authorities said eight people were killed.The two captured Americans appeared on state television in Venezuela on Wednesday and Thursday, saying they had been tasked by Silvercorp with taking control of the Caracas airport in order to fly out President Nicolas Maduro after his planned seizure by the group.On Friday, Venezuela requested the extradition of U.S. veteran Jordan Goudreau, chief executive of Florida-based Silvercorp USA, who has claimed responsibility for the plan, and two U.S.-based Venezuelans for their roles in the failed incursion.
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Coinciding with Friday’s observance of the African Day for the Reduction of Maternal and Newborn Mortality, Cameroon disclosed that tens of thousands of newborn babies continue to die at birth and thousands of women continue to lose their lives while giving birth each year in the central African of 25 million. Health officials say the situation is worse on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, where most mothers do not go to hospitals.
 
Martina Lukong Baye, Cameroonian Coordinator of the National Multisector Program to Combat Maternal, Newborn and Child Mortality, says it is unfortunate that the number of mothers and babies dying in Cameroon has remained high due to many women neglecting prenatal care and some delivering at home using untrained traditional birth attendants.
 
“We are counting about 4,000 women dying every year from causes linked to pregnancy or delivery. It is pathetic. It is about 22,000 newborn babies that we lose every year. It is really, really unacceptable.” Baye said.
 
Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health, however, reports that the number of pregnant women who die has dropped from 8,000 in 2015 to 4,000 in last year, and babies who are dying each year has decreased from 30,000 in 2015 to 22,000 last year.  
 
Baye says Cameroon could do more to reduce most of the deaths by paying more attention to reasons why the women and babies die.
   
“The first direct cause of women dying in Cameroon is bleeding. We do not have enough blood available in our health facilities to give these women. The other cause too, now, that is quite prominent now is hypertension in pregnancy. The other cause now would be infection after delivery and, of course, home deliveries,” Baye said.
 
According to a 2018 Cameroon government-sponsored demographic and health survey, 33% of Cameroonian deliveries are carried out at home or with African traditional birth attendants, without trained health staff members.  
 
The situation is critical on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, where Boko Haram has chased medical staff away and torched hospitals, and the border with the Central African Republic that has been an epicenter of CAR rebel atrocities.  
 
Malachie Manaouda, Cameroon’s health minister, says the government has taken measures to improve health care delivery at hospitals as an urgent measure to reduce the deaths.  
He says the universal health coverage plan Cameroon is developing prioritizes mother and child care. He says President Paul Biya is personally supervising the plan as an indication of a strong political will to stop women from dying while giving birth, and babies from dying before, during or shortly after birth.
 
Manaouda said Cameroon has, within the past three years, equipped maternities and trained and recruited about a thousand midwives and pediatricians to attend to the needs of mothers and babies. He also said the government two years ago instructed all hospitals on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria and Cameroon’s border with CAR to offer free prenatal care.
 
The African Day for the Reduction of Maternal and Newborn Mortality, observed since 2009, offers an opportunity for African countries, members of the African Union, to intensify actions aimed at reducing maternal and infant mortality, examine challenges faced, and press for greater political commitment among African countries to stop mothers and babies from dying.
 
 
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Malawi’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by President Peter Mutharika and the Malawi Electoral Commission and upheld the order for a re-run of the presidential election held a year ago in which Mutharika won a second term.The court said Friday some of the 137 grounds in Mutharika’s appeal were fictitious and embarrassing. The ruling means the country must proceed with a presidential election re-run scheduled for July 2.
 
Results of last May’s voting had Mutharika at 38.7%, Lazarus Chakwera of the opposition Malawi Congress Party at 34.1% and Vice President Saulos Chilima, leader of the opposition United Transformation Movement, at 20.2%.  
 
In June, though, Chakwera and Chilima challenged the results in the Constitutional Court, accusing the Malawi Electoral Commission of helping Mutharika to rig the polls.  
 
In its verdict in February, the Constitutional Court nullified the poll results, citing massive irregularities, and ordered fresh elections with 150 days.  
 
Both the MEC and Mutharika appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.  
 
Delivering the verdict Friday, Supreme Court Justice Frank Kapanda said the court found that the irregularities in the election “were not only serious but also troubling”.  “Widespread use of Tip-Ex [correction fluid], illegal alterations of large number of tally sheets, the use of numerous duplicate tally sheets where originals unspeakably went missing. Among other many irregularities established by the court below,” Kapanda said, addind that such irregularities seriously undermined the credibility, integrity and fairness of the elections.  
    
“We agree with the court below that the conduct of the second appellant [MEC] in the management of the 12 May, 2019, general elections, which resulted in gross violations and breached of the constitution and applicable  laws, demonstrated serious incompetence and a neglect of duty on the part of electoral commissioners  in multiple dimensions,” Kapanda said.
     
The Supreme Court also upheld the Constitutional Court’s order that the winner should get at least 50% plus one of the votes.
 
However, it ordered that no new voter registrations should be accepted for the new polls and that only presidential candidates who participated in the nullified May elections should be allowed to run in the rematch.
   
The Supreme Court ruling means that MEC should stop the ongoing new voter registration exercise which was expected to end June 7.  
 
MEC spokesperson Sangwani Mwafulirwa says the commission respects the court ruling and would announce its next move at an appropriate time.  
 
Presidential candidate Chakwera said the verdict has demonstrated impartiality on the part of the country’s judicial system.  
 
“I am so happy. I could dance if I had dancing legs and I think our Supreme Court justices have  just continued to uphold the bar that was raised by the Constitutional Court and we believe that Malawi will sent an example not in just the African continent and across the world that if you seek justice you can find it,” Chakwera said.  
 
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The reverend approached the makeshift pulpit and asked the Lord to help him make some sense of the scene before him: two caskets, side by side, in a small-town cemetery busier now than ever before.The Rev. Willard O. Weston had already eulogized other neighbors lost to COVID-19, and he would do more. But this one stood as a symbol to him of all they had lost. The pair of caskets, one powder blue, one white and gold, contained a couple married 30 years who died two days apart, at separate hospitals hours from each other, unaware of the other’s fate.The day was dark. There was no wind, not even a breeze. It felt to some like the earth had paused for this.Eddie Keith, 65, of Dawson, Ga., locks the church doors as he leaves on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga. He visits his pastor’s church a couple times a week.As the world’s attention was fixated on the horrors in Italy and New York City, the per capita death rates in counties in the impoverished southwest corner of Georgia climbed to among the worst in the country. The devastation here is a cautionary tale of what happens when the virus seeps into communities that have for generations remained on the losing end of the nation’s most intractable inequalities: these counties are rural, mostly African American and poor.More than a quarter of people in Terrell County live in poverty, the local hospital shuttered decades ago, and businesses have been closing for years, sending many young and able fleeing for cities. Those left behind are sicker and more vulnerable; even before the virus arrived, the life expectancy for men here was six years shorter than the American average.Rural people, African Americans and the poor are more likely to work in jobs not conducive to social distancing, like the food processing plant in nearby Mitchell County where four employees died of COVID-19. They have less access to health care and so more often delay treatment for chronic conditions; in southwest Georgia, the diabetes rate of 16 percent is twice as high as in Atlanta. Transportation alone can be a challenge, so that by the time they make it to the hospital, they’re harder to save.A tattered U.S. flag whips in a heavy wind on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.At least 21 people have died from COVID-19 in this county, and dozens more in the neighboring rural communities. For weeks, Weston’s phone would not stop ringing: another person in the hospital, another person dead. An hour before this funeral, Weston’s phone rang again, and this time it was news that another had succumbed to the virus—his own first cousin, as close to him as a brother.Some here had thought that their isolation might spare them, but instead it made the pandemic particularly cruel. In Terrell County, population 8,500, everyone knows everyone and every death is personal. As the mourners arrived at the cemetery, just the handful allowed, each knew others suffering and dying.The couple’s son, Desmond Tolbert, sat stunned. After caring for his parents, he’d also rushed his aunt, his mother’s sister, to a hospital an hour away, and there she remained on a ventilator. Her daughter, Latasha Taylor, wept thinking that if her mother survived, she would have to find a way to tell her that her sister was dead and buried.”It’s just gone haywire, I mean haywire,” thought Eddie Keith, a 65-year-old funeral home attendant standing in the back who was familiar with all the faces on the funeral programs piling up. “People dying left and right.”Usually, on hard days like this, he would call his friend of 30 years, who was a pastor at a country church and could always convince him that God would not give more than he could endure.But a couple weeks earlier, that pastor had started coughing, too.An illuminated cross stands in front of a residence near downtown Dawson, Ga., on April 17, 2020.As Georgia and other states rush to reopen, some out-of-the way places might believe that the virus won’t find them. Many here thought that, too. But it arrived, quietly at first then with breathtaking savagery.The cemetery on the edge of town staggered graveside services, one an hour, all day. The county coroner typically works between 38 and 50 deaths a year; they reached No. 41 by mid-April. They ordered an emergency morgue.Of the 10 counties with the highest death rate per capita in America, half are in rural southwest Georgia, where there are no packed skyscraper apartment buildings or subways. Ambulances rush along country roads, just fields and farms in either direction, carrying COVID-19 patients to the nearest hospital, for some an hour away. The small county seats are mostly quiet, the storefronts shuttered, some long ago because of the struggling economy, and some only now because owners are too afraid to reopen.These counties circle the city of Albany, which is where authorities believe the outbreak began at a pair of funerals in February. Albany is also home to the main hospital in the region, Phoebe Putney Memorial, which serves an area of 800,000 people spanning more than 50 miles in every direction, many of them with little other access to care.The hospital saw its first known coronavirus patient on March 10; within a few days, it had 60 and the ICU was full. Two weeks later, patients began flooding in from farther-flung rural communities. Helicopters buzzed from the top of the parking garage, flying patients to other hospitals that still had room to take them. They burned through six months of masks and gowns in six days, said Phoebe Putney president Scott Steiner. Then they were competing for supplies against wealthier, more politically powerful places; they paid $1 each for surgical masks that typically cost a nickel and were losing about $1 million each day.Cousins Latasha Taylor, left, and Desmond Tolbert sit during an interview on April 18, 2020 in Dawson, Ga.The patients were very sick. Some died within hours. Some died on the way, in the back of ambulances. The region is predominantly black, but still African Americans died disproportionately, Steiner said. African Americans accounted for about 80% of the hospital’s deaths.Black people have been dying at alarming rates across the country: the latest Associated Press analysis of available data shows that African Americans represent about 14 percent of the population in the areas covered but nearly one-third of those who have died.By nearly every measure, coronavirus patients are faring worse in rural Georgia than almost anywhere else in America, according to researchers at Emory University in Atlanta. Although New York City had thousands more deaths, the per capita death rate in these Georgia counties is just as high.”They are vulnerable people living in vulnerable places, people who are marginalized on a variety of measures, whether we’re talking about race, whether we’re talking about education or employment, in places that have fewer resources,” said Shivani Patel, an epidemiologist at Emory. Then COVID-19 arrived: “It’s like our worst nightmare coming true.”Dr. James Black, the medical director of emergency services at Phoebe Putney, was born in this hospital, grew up in this region and is proud of how they’ve managed with the odds stacked against them. He hasn’t had a day off in two months. The question now, he believes, is whether society decides, in the wake of the virus, to continue neglecting its most vulnerable people and places.”I think that history is going to judge us not only on how well we prepared, it’s not going to just judge us on how well we responded,” he said, “but what we learned from it, and what we change.”Georgia has lost seven rural hospitals in the last decade. Nine counties in rural Georgia don’t even have a doctor, according to the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals; 18 have no family practitioner, 60 have no pediatrician, 77 without a psychiatrist.Ezekiel Holley, the longtime leader of Terrell County’s NAACP, said health care is what has left him “banging his head against a wall.”At first Holley thought a virus would be one thing that did not discriminate. He opened the newspaper, scanned the faces in the obituaries and knew every one of them.”Then I thought, why are low income people and people of color dying more than anyone else? This is the richest nation in the world, why doesn’t it have a level playing field?” he said. “Tell me that.”Eddie Keith, 65, of Dawson, Ga., poses for a portrait outside of his church on April 19, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.At first, Benjamin Tolbert just felt a malaise; he had no appetite. Within a couple days, he could barely stand.His son, Desmond, took him to the hospital in Albany. By then it was full, and he was sent to another hospital an hour south. Benjamin’s wife, Nellie Mae, who everyone called Pollye Ann, got sick the next day. She was routed from the Albany hospital to another an hour north.Everyone in town knew Benjamin, 58, as a hard worker. He had worked for 28 years at a Tyson Foods plant, and yet he always found more work to do, washing his car, tending the lawn. He and his wife had been together 30 years. He was mild-mannered, but she found a joke in everything. She was a minister, she played the organ, sang gospel and danced, wildly, joyfully.”Oh my goodness, she was a dancer, and the dances were so hilarious, you would just fall out laughing watching her dance and laugh at herself,” said their niece, Latasha Taylor, whom they loved like a daughter. Benjamin would hang back, but Pollye Ann would pull him up and he’d dance along with her.Both were diabetic, Pollye Ann had had heart valve surgery, Benjamin had been on dialysis. Pollye Ann’s sister, Katherine Taylor Peters, often got dialysis treatments with him. They were a close-knit family: Peters lived just blocks away.Shortly after the Tolberts got sick, Peters called her daughter and said she too had an incessant cough and was struggling to breathe. Latasha was working hours away, so she called her cousin, Desmond, and asked him to check on her.He put her in his car and drove her to another hospital an hour from home. They soon sedated her and put her on a ventilator.Much of the rest is a blur for Desmond and Latasha: calls from doctors and nurses, driving hours among three hospitals, begging to see their parents but being told it was far too dangerous.”I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t talk to them,” said Desmond, 29, who had lived with his parents all this life. Suddenly he was alone.And all around them, neighbors were getting sick.”So many people, it’s a feeling you can’t even explain. It’s like a churning in your stomach,” said Taylor. “People you’re normally waving at, speaking to in passing, at the pharmacy, you’re never going to see them again.”Desmond was on the phone with a nurse as his mother took her last breath. Two days later, the call came from his father’s caregivers. Benjamin never knew that his wife got sick. She didn’t know her husband was on his death bed. They were apart, far from home, without their son at their sides.The only solace he can find is imagining them meeting again on the other side, and that neither had to live without the other one.Nellie ‘Pollye Ann’ Mae and Benjamin Tolbert, a couple married for 30 years, are buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga. Both They died two days apart.Eddie Keith had known this couple all his life, he knew their phone number by heart, where they lived, where they worked, their mothers and fathers.”They knew me real well,” he said, “as well as I knew them.”He has worked for the funeral home for 35 years, and part of his job is to pick up the bodies. He got a call about Pollye Ann’s passing, and when a hometown person dies someplace else, he considers it his duty to bring them home to Dawson.Sometimes he talks to them as he drives, sometimes he sings.When the second call came about her husband, two days later, he wondered if what was happening in his city might be too much to bear. He’s used to death. But now people were dying one right after the next, too quickly to reckon with each in real time.Keith is a deacon at a country church down a dirt road just outside of town. His pastor, Rev. Alfred Starling, always told him that God doesn’t make mistakes, and Keith wanted to be reminded of that now, because Dawson’s people kept dying, and Keith kept retrieving them. But the next morning he was picking up a body in Tallahassee when the pastor’s wife called. He’d gone to the hospital with a bad cough, and he hadn’t made it.They’d known each other 30 years. Once, years ago, he’d complimented his pastor’s necktie. After that, every time the pastor bought himself a tie, he bought Keith one too. It became a symbol of their love for each other. “He would always look out for me,” he said.Keith pulled off the road and sat there a half an hour.”Why God? Why God? Why God?” he thought, and he caught himself. He was always taught not to question God, so he asked for forgiveness.There were three funerals the next day, and he left just after to pick up his pastor’s body.He talked to him: “I didn’t think you’d leave me so early; I thought we were going to grow old together.”He thought of his pastor’s favorite spiritual. “Good news, good news,” the pastor would sing and walk from behind the pulpit, a little strut in his step. “I’m going to lay down my burden, store up my cross. And I’m going home to live with Jesus, ain’t that good news.”He sang it to his pastor as he drove him home.Horace Bell, 60, of Americus, Ga., controls an excavator while digging a grave at the Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.By time the Tolberts’ funeral arrived, so many had been lost to COVID-19 that Rev. Willard Weston had gotten used to delivering his eulogies through a mask. Gloves. Hand sanitizer. Don’t touch, don’t embrace, no matter how much you want to.”At this pace, you don’t get a chance to really take a deep breath from the previous death, and then you’re getting a call about another,” he said. He’d found himself on his knees in his bathroom, trying to scream out the sadness so he could keep going.He put on his suit and tie.He walked outside, looked up to the sky and pleaded with God to find the strength to deliver a double funeral.”Lord, how can I go and do this?”In normal times, the Tolbert family’s funeral would have drawn a packed house. Pollye Ann was a minister at Weston’s church. She could deliver testimony like no one he’d ever seen: she was like a freight train, he recalled, slow at first then faster, faster, faster. People were drawn to her.Instead it was just him and a handful of mourners in the cemetery, staring at the two caskets. He read from scripture and told their son, Desmond, that he’d never walk alone.He worried his instinct to comfort with an embrace would overtake his knowledge that he couldn’t, so he walked away and got in his car. He felt guilty. He prayed for God to take that guilt away. Because there was more to do. The next Saturday, he would have three funerals, back to back.A couple weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, he was preparing to leave his empty church and head home for the weekend without a single funeral planned for the first time in weeks. It felt hopeful. Then his phone rang again.”Man, no. Oh, wow,” he said, and his shoulders slumped.”Some more bad news. Somebody else has passed.”Willie Johnson, 66, left, Horace Bell, 60, center, and Eugene Davis, 58, right, lower a burial vault into a grave at Cedar Hill Cemetery on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Ga.There was some good news too.Pollye Ann Tolbert’s sister survived weeks on a ventilator. She still tested positive for coronavirus and remained in isolation, so her daughter Latasha could only talk to her by phone.The first thing she asked when she woke was how her sister and brother-in-law were doing. Latasha paused. Her mother repeated the question. It felt unreal. Mail still arrived in the mailbox for them. Their house was just as it was the day they left for the hospital. She and her cousin had washed the linens and wiped the surfaces to rid it of virus, but were otherwise too paralyzed to move a thing.”I had to tell her that while she was sleeping, her sister and brother-in-law left us forever,” Latasha said. “They’re already buried, they’re in the ground.”Peters told her daughter that the last thing she remembered was a doctor on the phone, telling her that her sister wasn’t going to make it. She thought she would die too, if not from COVID-19, then from grief.She had hoped it was all a bad dream.Then she woke up.This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. 
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The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.The files also show that after the AP reported Thursday that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval.The trove of emails show the nation’s top public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spending weeks working on guidance to help the country deal with a public health emergency, only to see their work quashed by political appointees with little explanation.The document, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen. It included detailed “decision trees,” or flow charts aimed at helping local leaders navigate the difficult decision of whether to reopen or remain closed.White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Friday that the documents had not been approved by CDC Director Robert Redfield. The new emails, however, show that Redfield cleared the guidance.This new CDC guidance — a mix of advice already released along with newer information — had been approved and promoted by the highest levels of its leadership, including Redfield. Despite this, the administration shelved it on April 30.FILE – Robert Redfield, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director.As early as April 10, Redfield, who is also a member of the White House coronavirus task force, shared via email the guidance and decision trees with President Donald Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, top adviser Kellyanne Conway and Joseph Grogan, assistant to the president for domestic policy. Also included were Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other task force members.Three days later, the CDC’s upper management sent the more than 60-page report with attached flow charts to the White House Office of Management and Budget, a step usually taken only when agencies are seeking final White House approval for documents they have already cleared.The 17-page version later released by the AP and other news outlets was only part of the actual document submitted by the CDC, and targeted specific facilities like bars and restaurants. The AP obtained a copy Friday of the full document. That version is a more universal series of phased guidelines, “Steps for All Americans in Every Community,” geared to advise communities as a whole on testing, contact tracing and other fundamental infection control measures.On April 24, Redfield again emailed the guidance documents to Birx and Grogan, according to a copy viewed by the AP. Redfield asked Birx and Grogan for their review so that the CDC could post the guidance publicly. Attached to Redfield’s email were the guidance documents and the corresponding decision trees — including one for meatpacking plants.“We plan to post these to CDC’s website once approved. Peace, God bless r3,” the director wrote. (Redfield’s initials are R.R.R.)Redfield’s emailed comments contradict the White House assertion Thursday that it had not yet approved the guidelines because the CDC’s own leadership had not yet given them the green light.Two days later, on April 26, the CDC still had not received any word from the administration, according to the internal communications. Robert McGowan, the CDC chief of staff who was shepherding the guidance through the OMB, sent an email seeking an update. “We need them as soon as possible so that we can get them posted,” he wrote to Nancy Beck, an OMB staffer.Beck said she was awaiting review by the White House Principals Committee, a group of top White House officials. “They need to be approved before they can move forward. WH principals are in touch with the task force so the task force should be aware of the status,” Beck wrote to McGowan.The next day, April 27, Satya Thallam of the OMB sent the CDC a similar response: “The re-opening guidance and decision tree documents went to a West Wing principals committee on Sunday. We have not received word on specific timing for their considerations.“However, I am passing along their message: they have given strict and explicit direction that these documents are not yet cleared and cannot go out as of right now — this includes related press statements or other communications that may preview content or timing of guidances.”According to the documents, the CDC continued inquiring for days about the guidance that officials had hoped to post by May 1, the day Trump had targeted for reopening some businesses, according to a source who was granted anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press.On April 30 the CDC’s documents were killed for good.FILE – A woman wearing a face mask walks past the White House in Washington, D.C., April 1, 2020.The agency had not heard any specific critiques from either the White House Principals Committee or the coronavirus task force in days, so officials asked for an update.“The guidance should be more cross-cutting and say when they should reopen and how to keep people safe. Fundamentally, the Task Force cleared this for further development, but not for release,” wrote Quinn Hirsch, a staffer in the White House’s office of regulatory affairs (OIRA), in an email to the CDC’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.CDC staff working on the guidance decided to try again.The administration had already released its Opening Up America Again Plan, and the clock was ticking. Staff at the CDC thought if they could get their reopening advice out there, it would help communities do so with detailed expert help.But hours later on April 30, CDC Chief of Staff McGowan told CDC staff that neither the guidance documents nor the decision trees “would ever see the light of day,” according to three officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.The next day, May 1, the emails showed, a staffer at CDC was told “we would not even be allowed to post the decision trees. We had the team (exhausted as they are) stand down.”The CDC’s guidance was shelved. Until May 7.That morning The Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had buried the guidance, even as many states had started allowing businesses to reopen.After the story ran, the White House called the CDC and ordered officials to refile all of the decision trees, except one that targeted churches. An email obtained by the AP confirmed the agency re-sent the documents late Thursday, hours after news broke.“Attached per the request from earlier today are the decision trees previously submitted to both OIRA and the WH Task Force, minus the communities of faith tree,” read the email. “Please let us know if/when/how we are able to proceed from here.” 
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American lawmakers are promoting legislation to change the name of the street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington to honor Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower who died of COVID-19 after Beijing silenced his attempts to warn the world about the coronavirus.“I am honored to introduce this legislation to rename the street in front the Chinese Embassy after Dr. Li,” said U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming when she offered the bill in the House of Representatives on Thursday.“May this serve as a constant reminder to the world and to the Chinese government that truth and freedom will prevail, that we will not forget the bravery of Dr. Li, and that the Chinese Communist Party will be held accountable for the devastating impact of their lies.”A companion bill was introduced in the Senate on the same day. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, one of the sponsors of the legislation, said Li is regarded as a “hero to the Chinese people.”“Chairman Xi [Jinping] can try to claim Dr. Li as the [Communist] Party’s own martyr, but the Chinese people know that it was Dr. Li’s selfless work and voice that the party sought to silence,” Sasse said in a written statement.Naming the street outside the embassy after Li, he said, “will draw a glaring contrast between the cruelty and lies of the Chinese Communist Party and the decency and compassion of the Chinese people.”Li, an eye doctor who practiced at Wuhan Central Hospital, warned some of his medical school colleagues at the end of December that a SARS-like phenomenon appeared to be on the horizon. He was summoned by local authorities for sounding the alarm.It has since emerged that authorities issued official documents around that time ordering that no one other than designated government officials talk about the coronavirus.At the time, China had not acknowledged human-to-human transmission of the disease – to be named COVID-19 only later – and doctors treating patients with the disease were discouraged from wearing protective equipment. Li contracted the disease and died on February 7.According to Chinese media reports, three other doctors at Wuhan Central Hospital had also succumbed to COVID-19 as of early March.Not the first attempt to rename streetThis is not the first attempt to rename the street outside the Chinese Embassy. There was a proposal in 2017 to name the street for dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who died while in detention in a Chinese hospital that year.Similarly, the street outside the then-Soviet embassy was renamed in 1984 in honor of prominent dissident Andrei Sakharov, a renowned Russian physicist and dissident who suffered years of persecution at the hands of Soviet authorities.In an editorial advocating for the name change in honor of Liu Xiaobo, The Washington Post argued that while the Sakharov name change had raised tensions with the Soviet Union, “it also sent a strong message to Soviet diplomats and beyond that Sakharov and activists like him were not forgotten.”Similarly, the editorial said: “each time a Chinese diplomat entered or left the embassy, he or she would confront Mr. Liu’s legacy – and maybe spare a thought for the hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists currently detained by the Communist Party. This should be impetus enough for the change [of the name of the street].”Earlier this week, deputy U.S. national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said Li had embodied the true spirit of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which was marked by patriotic calls for cultural and social reforms aimed at strengthening China in a spiritual and fundamental sense.Meanwhile, in Washington, the Chinese Embassy and its ambassador appear to be busy countering criticism over Beijing’s delay in reporting the scale and deadliness of the coronavirus outbreak. Ambassador Cui Tiankai made his case in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday under the title “Blaming China will not end this pandemic.”The embassy’s website also featured stories about China’s Anhui and Liaoning provinces sending medical supplies to the U.S. states of Maryland and Utah, with signs touting “Anhui loves Maryland.”Elsewhere in the world, there are signs China’s diplomatic overtures have run into at least a temporary dead end. Sweden recently closed the last of the Chinese government-sponsored Confucius Institutes, and Sweden’s second-largest city called off its sister city ties with Shanghai.
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Carolina Vásquez lost track of days and nights, unable to see the sunlight while stuck for two weeks in a windowless cruise ship cabin as a fever took hold of her body.On the worst night of her encounter with COVID-19, the Chilean woman, a line cook on the Greg Mortimer ship, summoned the strength to take a cold shower fearing the worst: losing consciousness while isolated from others.Vásquez, 36, and tens of thousands of other crew members have been trapped for weeks aboard dozens of cruise ships around the world — long after governments and cruise lines negotiated their passengers’ disembarkation. Some have gotten ill and died; others have survived but are no longer getting paid.  Both national and local governments have stopped crews from disembarking in order to prevent new cases of COVID-19 in their territories. Some of the ships, including 20 in U.S. waters, have seen infections and deaths among the crew. But most ships have had no confirmed cases.”I never thought this would turn into a tragic and terrifying horror story,” Vásquez told The Associated Press in an interview through a cellphone app from the Greg Mortimer, an Antarctic cruise ship floating off Uruguay. Thirty-six crew members have fallen ill on the ship. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last month that about 80,000 crew members remained on board ships off the U.S. coast after most passengers had disembarked. The Coast Guard said Friday that there were still 70,000 crew members in 102 ships either anchored near or at U.S. ports or underway in U.S. waters.The total number of crew members stranded worldwide was not immediately available. But thousands more are trapped on ships outside the U.S., including in Uruguay and the Manila Bay, where 16 cruise ships are waiting to test about 5,000 crew members before they will be allowed to disembark. A fishing boat sails past the Princess Cruises’ Ruby Princess cruise ship as it docks in Manila Bay during the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Cavite city, Philippines, May 7, 2020.As coronavirus cases and deaths have risen worldwide, the CDC and health officials in other countries have expanded the list of conditions that must be met before crews may disembark. Cruise companies must take each crew member straight home via charter plane or private car without using rental vehicles or taxis. Complicating that mission, the CDC requires company executives to agree to criminal penalties if crew members fail to obey health authorities’ orders to steer clear of public transportation and restaurants on their way home.  “The criminal penalties gave us (and our lawyers) pause,” Royal Caribbean International President and CEO Michael Bayley wrote in a letter to crew members earlier this week, but he added that company executives ultimately agreed to sign.  Melinda Mann, 25, a youth program manager for Holland America, spent more than 50 days without stepping on dry land before finally disembarking from the Koningsdam ship Friday in Los Angeles. Before she was transferred to the Koningsdam, she tried to walk off another ship with other U.S. crew members last week but the ship’s security guards stopped them. For 21 hours a day, Mann remained isolated in a 150-square-foot (14-square- meter) cruise cabin that is smaller than her bedroom in her Midland, Georgia, home. She read 30 books and was only able to leave her room three times a day to walk around the ship. Her contract ended April 18, so she was not paid for weeks.  “Keeping me in close captivity for so long is absolutely ridiculous,” Mann said in a telephone interview. Earlier this week in Nassau, Bahamas, crew members from Canada aboard the Emerald Princess were told to prepare to be flown home in a charter plane. But the Bahamian government did not allow the ship to dock in the end.  A man wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, looks at Cruise Ships docked at the port due to a no-sail order in Long Beach, California on April 11, 2020.Leah Prasad’s husband is among the stranded crew members. Prasad said she has spent hours tracking down government agencies to help her husband, a Maitre D’Hotel for Carnival.  “He is getting discouraged. He is stuck in a cabin,” Prasad said. “It is not good for his mental health.” Angela Savard, a spokeswoman for Canada’s foreign affairs, said the government was continuing to explore options to bring Canadians home. For those aboard the Greg Mortimer in Montevideo, desperation is setting in, crew members told the AP.  The Antarctic cruise set sail from Argentina on March 15, after a pandemic had already been declared. The ship’s physician, Dr. Mauricio Usme, said that when the first passenger fell ill, on March 22, he was pressured by the captain, the cruise operator and owners to modify the health conditions that had to be met for the ship to be admitted into ports.  Dr. Usme refused. The boat anchored in the port of Montevideo on March 27. More than half of its passengers and crew tested positive for COVID-19. Finally, on April 10, 127 passengers, including some who were infected, were allowed to disembark and fly home to Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., Canada and Europe. Crew members were told to stay on board.  The doctor was hospitalized in an intensive care unit in Montevideo, along with a Filipino crew member, who later died. “People are exhausted and mentally drained,” said Dr. Usme, now recovered and back on the Greg Mortimer. “It’s a complex situation. You feel very vulnerable and at imminent risk of death.” CMI, the Miami-based company that manages the boat, said it has been “unable to get the necessary permissions” to let crew members of 22 nationalities go home, but said they were all still under contract receiving pay. Marvin Paz Medina, a Honduran man who works as the ship’s storekeeper, sent a video to the AP of his tiny cabin of about 70 square feet (6.5 square meters), where he has been confined for more than 35 days. “It’s hard being locked up all day, staring at the same four walls,” he said. Paz Medina says his children keep asking him when he’s coming home, but he doesn’t have an answer.  “We are trapped, feeling this anxiety that at any moment we can get seriously ill,” said Paz Medina. “We do not want this anymore. We want to go home.”  
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