Month: October 2022

Authorities in Cameroon say they are struggling to contain a cholera outbreak in an overcrowded refugee camp on its northern border with Nigeria. In the past week, three people have died in the Minawao refugee camp and at least 81 have been infected from the bacteria, which spreads through dirty water and food. The camp was designed to hold fewer than 15,000 refugees but currently has more than five times that number.
The camp located on Cameroon’s northern border is home to 76,000 Nigerians who have fled Boko Haram terrorist attacks.
Helen Ngoh, spokesperson for UNHCR Cameroon says the U.N. body needs support to contain the ongoing wave of infections and to prevent future outbreaks in the refugee camp.
“In Minawao specifically UNHCR needs at least 450,000 U.S. dollars to be able to increase portable water supply and also to be able to cover an existing gap of 900 latrines and to be able to improve waste management in the camp as well. All of these needs are extremely urgent at this point,” she said.

UNHCR says it is investigating suspected cases and treating patients free of charge. The refugee agency says it is also finding out if the disease has spread to host communities.
Ngoh said several hundred humanitarian workers have been deployed to the camp and host communities to educate refugees on prevention measures, which she said are basically respecting hygiene rules.
Nigerian refugee Special Bulama is among aid workers raising awareness about the outbreak and teaching civilians good hygiene practices.
Bulama says he has personally spoken about the disease to scores of families in the camp.
“We are telling the refugees to take care of themselves, they must boil water before they take [drink], they must wash their hands with Sabulu [soap], keep their latrines very safe because flies can take this disease to their food or to their water. We are telling them to help us to avoid this problem of cholera,” he said.
Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health has confirmed the outbreak. Government health officials say at least 22 people have died of cholera in several villages on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria and Chad. Humanitarian workers and health officials say many more people may be infected or are feared dead in difficult to access villages within the past two weeks.
The U.N. reports that up to October, more than 1,000 cases of cholera were reported in Nigeria.
Cameroon says hospitals in border localities are overwhelmed.
Officials in Cameroon say they are engaged in discussions with Nigeria and Chad to jointly combat cholera, a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration, usually spread through contaminated water. It can be fatal if not treated.

Source: Voice of America

In marking World Polio Day, advocates for a polio-free world are urging nations to commit to a new five-year strategy to eradicate this crippling disease and consign it to the trash bin of history.

An estimated 350,000 children were paralyzed by polio when the World Health Organization launched its Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988. In the world today, polio is endemic only in Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far this year, 29 cases have been recorded, putting the possibility of a polio-free world within reach.

The WHO notes the final stretch is the most difficult and cautions nations against letting down their guard too soon. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the 29 recorded cases include a small number in southeast Africa linked to a strain originating in Pakistan.

“While it does not affect the WHO African region’s wild polio free certification, it shows us that as long as polio continues to circulate anywhere, it is a threat to children everywhere. Despite this news, we have a unique window of opportunity right now to end polio for good.”

The WHO warns polio also can spread within communities through circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. These variants, it notes, can emerge in places where not enough people have been immunized against this crippling disease. It reports these variants continue to spread across parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe and new outbreaks have been detected in Britain, Israel and the United States in recent months.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell says the new polio eradication strategy is designed to take the world to the finish line. She says the strategy includes tactics to protect children from variant outbreaks and stop their spread to other countries.

“We are also working with governments to speed up our response to these outbreaks, acting immediately to ensure that they do not harm more children,” Russel said. “And we continue working to integrate polio activities with other immunization and health programs so we can reach high-risk children who have never received vaccines before. The new strategy will help us end all forms of polio. It will also help prepare countries to respond to future health threats.”

If this goal is reached, polio will become only the second disease after smallpox to have been wiped off the face of the Earth. U.N. health agencies say it will cost $4.8 billion to achieve this historic milestone.
The economic returns, they say, will be significant. They estimate eradicating polio would result in savings of more than $33 billion.

Source: Voice of America

Climate protesters threw mashed potatoes at a Claude Monet painting in a German museum to protest fossil fuel extraction Sunday but caused no damage to the artwork.
Two activists from the group Last Generation, which has called on the German government to take drastic action to protect the climate and stop using fossil fuels, approached Monet’s “Les Meules” at Potsdam’s Barberini Museum and threw a thick substance over the painting and its gold frame.
The group later confirmed via a post on Twitter that the mixture was mashed potatoes. The two activists, both wearing orange high-visibility vests, also glued themselves to the wall below the painting.
“If it takes a painting – with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all: Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!” the group wrote on Twitter, along with a video of the incident.
In total, four people were involved in the incident, according to German news agency dpa.

The Barberini Museum said later Sunday that because the painting was enclosed in glass, the mashed potatoes didn’t cause any damage. The painting, part of Monet’s “Haystacks” series, is expected to be back on display Wednesday.
“While I understand the activists’ urgent concern in the face of the climate catastrophe, I am shocked by the means with which they are trying to lend weight to their demands,” museum director Ortrud Westheider said in a statement.
Police told dpa they had responded to the incident, but further information about arrests or charges was not immediately available.
The Monet painting is the latest artwork in a museum to be targeted by climate activists to draw attention to global warming.
The British group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery earlier this month.
Just Stop Oil activists also glued themselves to the frame of an early copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and to John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” in the National Gallery.

Source: Voice of America

Hundreds of people applauded — and some wiped away tears — as a Mississippi community unveiled a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, not far from where white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager over accusations he had flirted with a white woman in a country store.
“Change has come, and it will continue to happen,” Madison Harper, a senior at Leflore County High School, told a racially diverse audience at the statue’s dedication.
“Decades ago, our parents and grandparents could not envision that a moment like today would transpire.”
The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.
The 2.7-meter-tall bronze statue in Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, dress shirt and tie with one hand on the brim of a hat.
The rhythm and blues song, Wake Up, Everybody played as workers pulled a tarp off the figure. Dozens of people surged forward, shooting photos and video on cellphones.
Anna-Maria Webster of Rochester, New York, had tears running down her face.
“It’s beautiful to be here,” said Webster, attending the ceremony on a sunny afternoon during a visit with Mississippi relatives. Speaking of Till’s mother she said: “Just to imagine the torment she went through — all over a lie.”
Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state, now about 38%.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, whose district encompasses the Delta, noted that Mississippi had no Black elected officials when Till was killed. He said Till’s death helped spur change.
“But you, know, change has a way of becoming slower and slower,” said Thompson, the only Black member of Mississippi’s current congressional delegation. “What we have to do in dedicating this monument to Emmett Till is recommit ourselves to the spirit of making a difference in our community.”
The statue is a short drive from an elaborate Confederate monument outside the Leflore County Courthouse and about 16 kilometers from the crumbling remains of the store, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, in Money.
The statue’s unveiling coincided with the release this month of Till, a movie exploring Till-Mobley’s private trauma over her son’s death and her transformation into a civil rights activist.
The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to his cousin’s kidnapping, wasn’t able to travel from Illinois for Friday’s dedication. But he told The Associated Press on Wednesday: “We just thank God someone is keeping his name out there.”
He said some wrongly thought Till got what he deserved for breaking the taboo of flirting with a white woman, adding many people didn’t want to talk about the case for decades.
“Now there’s interest in it, and that’s a godsend,” Parker said. “You know what his mother said: ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain.’”
Greenwood and Leflore County are both more than 70% Black, and officials have worked for years to bring the Till statue to reality. Democratic state Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood secured $150,000 in state funding and a Utah artist, Matt Glenn, was commissioned to create the statue.
Jordan said he hopes it will draw tourists to learn more about the area’s history. “Hopefully, it will bring all of us together,” he said.
Till and Parker had traveled from Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, the two teens took a short trip with other young people to the store in Money. Parker said he heard Till whistle at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.
Four days later, Till was abducted in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home. The kidnappers tortured and shot him, weighted his body down with a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the river.
Jordan, who is Black, was a college student in 1955 when he drove to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner to watch the murder trial of two white men charged with killing Till — Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam.
An all-white, all-male jury acquitted the two men, who later confessed to Look magazine that they killed Till.
Nobody has ever been convicted in the lynching. The U.S. Justice Department has opened multiple investigations starting in 2004 after receiving inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living.
In 2007, a Mississippi prosecutor presented evidence to a grand jury of Black and white Leflore County residents after investigators spent three years reexamining the killing. The grand jury declined to issue indictments.
The Justice Department reopened an investigation in 2018 after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Bryant — now remarried and named Carolyn Bryant Donham — saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives have publicly denied Donham, who is in her 80s, recanted her allegations. The department closed that investigation in late 2021 without bringing charges.
This year, a group searching the Leflore County Courthouse basement found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant.” In August, another Mississippi grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Donham, causing consternation for Till relatives and activists.
Although Mississippi has dozens of Confederate monuments, some have been moved in recent years, including one relocated in 2020 from the University of Mississippi campus to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried.
The state has a few monuments to Black historical figures, including one honoring civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville.
A historical marker outside Bryant’s Grocery has been knocked down and vandalized.
Another marker near where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been vandalized and shot. The Till statue in Greenwood will be watched by security cameras.
Jordan won applause when he said Friday: “If some idiot tears it down, we’re going to put it right back up.”

Source: Voice of America

A federal judge ruled Friday that relatives of people killed in the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max planes are crime victims under federal law and should have been told about private negotiations over a settlement that spared Boeing from criminal prosecution.
The full impact of the ruling is not yet clear, however. The judge said the next step is to decide what remedies the families should get for not being told of the talks with Boeing.
Some relatives are pushing to scrap the government’s January 2021 settlement with Boeing, and they have expressed anger that no one in the company has been held criminally responsible.
Boeing Co., which is based in Arlington, Virginia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Boeing, which misled safety regulators who approved the Max, agreed to pay $2.5 billion including a $243.6 million fine. The Justice Department agreed not to prosecute the company for conspiracy to defraud the government.
The Justice Department, in explaining why it didn’t tell families about the negotiations, argued that the relatives are not crime victims. However, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, said the crashes were a foreseeable consequence of Boeing’s conspiracy, making the relatives representatives of crime victims.
“In sum, but for Boeing’s criminal conspiracy to defraud the FAA, 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes,” he wrote.
Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband died in the second Max crash, in Ethiopia, said Boeing is responsible for his death.
“Families like mine are the true victims of Boeing’s criminal misconduct, and our views should have been considered before the government gave them a sweetheart deal,” she said in a statement issued by a lawyer for the families.
The first Max crashed Indonesia in October 2018, killing 189, and another crashed five months later in Ethiopia, killing 157. All Max jets were grounded worldwide for nearly two years. They were cleared to fly again after Boeing overhauled an automated flight-control system that activated erroneously in both crashes.

Source: Voice of America