Day: June 18, 2021

LANZAROTE, SPAIN – More than 40 African migrants were rescued after their boat ran aground on the rocky coast of Lanzarote in Spain’s Canary Islands late on Thursday, emergency services said, while over 100 people on two more boats made it safely to other islands.

Rescue workers pulled the body of a young boy out of the ocean on Friday afternoon, bringing the total death toll to four, while police divers were preparing to begin searching for one person who remains missing.

The bodies of a man and two women, one of whom was pregnant, had been recovered earlier in the day, an emergency services spokesperson said.

Local resident Marcos Lemes, who was first on the scene and alerted emergency services, told Reuters he had begun pulling people out of the water after giving his phone to a boy to use as a torch.

“I ran out of the house with two buoys that I keep at home and when I got there it was madness … I saw a huge number of people on the reef.”

A dozen of the rescued group, including two babies and two young children, were transferred to hospital, the regional emergency services said.

Another boat carrying 58 people made it to Fuerteventura and a third with 52 people landed on the tiny island of El Hierro.

So far this year more than 5,700 migrants have made the dangerous crossing from Africa to the Canaries archipelago, over twice as many as in the same period in 2020, which itself saw an eight-fold increase from 2019.

A record 850 died on the route last year, according to the United Nations migration agency, which suggested COVID-19 had prompted many workers in struggling industries like fishing or agriculture to migrate.

With arrival facilities on the Canaries packed to capacity, authorities have housed of migrants thousands in camps where conditions have criticized by rights groups.

Source: Voice of America

The Delta variant of the coronavirus, first detected in India, has been detected in neighboring Sri Lanka.

“It is the worst we could have imaged at such a time,” Dr. Chandima Jeewandara, director of the Allergy, Immunity and Cell Biology Unit at the Sri Jayewardenepura University, told The Hindu newspaper. “We are already dealing with a spike in cases with the Alpha variant. Delta poses a greater risk because our vaccine coverage is low, and among those who are vaccinated a majority have got only one dose.”

According to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, Sri Lanka, a nation of about 22 million people, has more than 233,000 COVID cases.

Israel’s new government that was sworn in Sunday said Friday it would transfer up to 1.4 million doses of soon-to-expire Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to the Palestinian authority in exchange for about the same number of doses the authority anticipates getting later this year.

Israel has been criticized for not sharing vaccine with the more than 4 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In South Korea, a delay in the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines has pushed the government to offer its residents mixed doses. People who received the Astra Zeneca vaccine as a first dose will now be offered the Pfizer vaccine for the second.

A panel of health care experts say they believe India will likely experience a third surge of coronavirus cases in October. “It will be more controlled” than previous surges, said Dr. Randeep Guleria, director at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, because some people have been inoculated.

On Friday, India reported more than 62,000 new COVID-19 cases in the previous 24 period. The nation also reported 1,587 COVID-19 deaths, the country’s lowest death toll in 60 days.

In the U.S., Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southeastern city of Atlanta, Georgia Friday to encourage people to get vaccinated for the coronavirus.

About 36% of Georgians have been vaccinated, a rate lower than most U.S. states.

Harris’s visit is part of a White House campaign to get 70% of all U.S. adults at least one dose of a vaccine by Independence Day on July 4.

Johns Hopkins said early Friday it has recorded more than 177 million global COVID-19 cases. The U.S. leads the world in the number of cases with 33.5 million, followed by India with 29.8 million and Brazil with 17.7 million.

Worldwide deaths from the disease have now topped 3.84 million.

Johns Hopkins also said 2.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA – The U.N. refugee agency, which just released its 2020 Global Trends report, said the number of people forcibly displaced last year by wars, violence, persecution and human rights violations hit a record high of 82.4 million, 4% more than in 2019.

This is the ninth consecutive year that forced displacement figures have continued to rise. Even lockdowns and border closures because of the coronavirus pandemic have not stopped people from fleeing for their lives in the face of war and atrocities.

Of the more than 82 million forcibly displaced, 26.4 million are refugees, who have crossed international borders in search of protection. Most of the rest are people displaced within their own countries because of conflict and violence.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the number of internally displaced people has doubled over the past 10 years.

“We are now in excess of one percent of humanity being forcibly displaced,” Grandi said. “And one of the many figures that to me is quite interesting and striking is that 42% of these people are children.”

The report found that more than two-thirds of all refugees who have fled abroad come from just five countries — Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. For the seventh consecutive year, Turkey has hosted the largest number of refugees, followed by Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Germany.

Grandi said new crises that have caused fresh displacements include northern Mozambique, where violence by armed groups, poverty, climate change and other factors have displaced up to 700,000 people.

He said violence in countries in the Central Sahel, including Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, has prompted 750,000 people to flee their homes.

“And then, of course, Ethiopia, where the Tigray crisis has provoked up to — and we are not even sure about that — up to 1 million additional internally displaced people in addition to about 50 to 60,000 that have crossed the border into Sudan.”

High Commissioner Grandi said the global trend for displacement crises in 2021 is not looking good. In the first six months of this year, he said, very few refugees have returned home and protracted refugee crises have stagnated.

At the same time, he said, new crises are arising, churning out new refugees and internally displaced people faster than solutions can be found.

Source: Voice of America