World

The WHO’s emergency committee on Covid-19 on Wednesday unanimously affirmed that the virus remains a major public health danger and insisted that countries must stop dropping their guard.

With many nations relaxing public health and social measures, and drastically reducing testing for the virus, the World Health Organization’s group of experts said the pandemic was far from being at an end.

“Now is not the time to let our guard down — on the contrary, and this is an extremely strong recommendation,” committee chair Didier Houssin told a press conference.

“The situation is far from over with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, the circulation of the virus is still very active, mortality remains high and the virus is evolving in an unpredictable way,” the French doctor warned.

“Now is not the time for relaxation on this virus, nor weakness in surveillance, testing and reporting, nor laxity in public and social health measures and no resignation when it comes to vaccination.”

The committee meets every three months to discuss the pandemic and reports to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

It concluded that the pandemic still constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) — the highest level of alert that the WHO can sound.

– ‘Middle’ phase of pandemic –

The committee declared the Covid-19 outbreak a PHEIC on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.

Though it is the internationally-agreed mechanism for triggering an international response to such outbreaks, it was only Tedros after describing the worsening situation as a pandemic on March 11 that many countries woke up to the danger.

“The committee unanimously agreed that the Covid-19 pandemic still constitutes an extraordinary event that continues to adversely affect the health of populations around the world, poses an ongoing risk of international spread,” it said in a statement Wednesday.

Globally, in the week to Sunday, the number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths continued to decline for a third consecutive week, with more than seven million cases and over 22,000 deaths reported.

This  was the lowest number of Covid deaths since the early days of the pandemic.

However, some countries are still witnessing serious spikes in cases, which is putting pressure on hospitals, said Tedros, adding that the world is “still in the middle of the pandemic”.

“This virus has over time become more transmissible and it remains deadly especially for the unprotected and unvaccinated that don’t have access to health care and antivirals,” he said.

Tedros urged people to get vaccinated and continue wearing masks, especially in crowded indoor spaces.

The WHO said the Omicron variant accounted for 99.2 percent of samples collected in the last 30 days that have been sequenced and uploaded to the GISAID global science initiative, with the previously-dominant Delta variant now less than 0.1 percent.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Wednesday said she would back closer ties between NATO and Russia and pull Paris out of the alliance’s military command, if she defeats Emmanuel Macron for the presidency.

Le Pen faces Macron on April 24 in a run-off vote after she came second in the April 10 first round, with the latest polls showing the president holding on to a solid but slim lead.

Foreign policy is set to play an important role in the vote after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and also accusations from Macron that Le Pen is too close to President Vladimir Putin.

The far-right leader has sought to project a more moderate image in this campaign and held a news conference on foreign policy designed to present Le Pen as a credible figure on the global stage.

But tensions were exposed when her security tackled a female protester to the floor and then roughly dragged her out of the room by the arm.

The protester had stood up and brandished a picture — cut into a heart shape —  of Le Pen meeting Putin in Russia in 2017.

Le Pen said there should be a “strategic rapprochement” between NATO and Russia once the war launched by Moscow against Ukraine had ended.

“We must ask about the role of the alliance after the end of the Warsaw Pact,” the Moscow-led military alliance that grouped Soviet bloc nations, she told journalists.

– ‘In interest of France’ –

Le Pen emphasised that better ties with Russia would also prevent Moscow from becoming too close to China, noting that she was echoing an argument made by Macron in the past.

“This is in the interest of France and Europe but also I think the United States… which has no interest in seeing a close Sino-Russian relationship emerging,” Le Pen said.

She also reaffirmed her intention of repeating France’s 1966 move of leaving NATO’s integrated military command, while still adhering to its key article 5 on mutual protection.

France rejoined NATO’s military structure in 2009.

“I would place our troops neither under an integrated NATO command nor under a future European command,” she said, adding that she refused any “subjection to an American protectorate”.

On Europe, Le Pen made clear that any “Frexit” along the lines of Britain’s exit from the European Union was not on her agenda.

But she argued that French predictions that Brexit would prove “a cataclysm for the English” had not come true.

“The British got rid of the Brussels bureaucracy, which they could never bear, to move to an ambitious project of global Britain,” she said.

But she added: “This is not our project. We want to reform the EU from the inside.”

While Macron has returned to the traditional notion of the Franco-German motor driving Europe, Le Pen also made clear she would not put relations with Berlin at the heart of her foreign policy.

“Germany is the absolute opposite of France’s strategic identity,” said Le Pen, speaking of “irreconcilable strategic differences” between Paris and Berlin.

Le Pen has been under pressure over her party taking a loan from a Russian bank but she explained this by saying it could not get the loan either in France or in Europe.

– Macron ahead, but tight –

The latest polls showed Macron slightly extending a lead over Le Pen in the second round but also giving no indication that the president is in for an easy ride.

An Elabe poll showed Macron on 53.5 percent and Le Pen on 46.5, with the president inching up 1.5 percent since its last survey.

Meanwhile, Iposos showed Macron at 55 percent with Le Pen on 45.

Macron has repeatedly warned that the election is far from in the bag and analysts have said it will be crucial to win backing from supporters of hard-left candidate Jean Luc-Melenchon who finished third and narrowly missed out on the run-off. 

The president has taken a far more active role in the first three days of the final round campaign than he did for the most of the first round, where he appeared distracted by the war against Ukraine.

The opening salvoes of the campaign have been marked by bitter exchanges between the candidates, with Macron accusing Le Pen of “authoritarian tendencies” towards the media and his rival accusing the president of showing “febrility”. 

War crimes prosecutors visiting the site of civilian killings called Ukraine a “crime scene” Wednesday, as tens of thousands of Ukrainians fled their country in advance of a fresh assault to the east.  

The visit by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor to Bucha — the Kyiv suburb now synonymous with scores of atrocities against civilians discovered in areas abandoned by Russian forces — came as the new front of the war shifts eastward, with new allegations of crimes inflicted on locals. 

“Ukraine is a crime scene,” the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, told reporters in Bucha. The Hague-based court investigates and prosecutes war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

“We’re here because we have reasonable grounds to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court are being committed,” said Khan, promising to “follow the evidence” as forensic teams began their work. 

To the south, Ukrainian forces struggled to hold the key strategic port of Mariupol Wednesday as artillery pounded the battered and besieged city that has been cut off from the rest of the country since early March and where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has estimated “tens of thousands” of civilian deaths.

Russia’s defence ministry said Wednesday that 1,026 Ukrainian soldiers from the 36th Marine Brigade had surrendered in Mariupol, including 162 officers. Ukraine has not confirmed the claim.

Following its pullback earlier this month from areas north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Russia is refocusing its efforts eastward, the new frontline of the nearly seven-week war. 

It appears aimed at capturing more territory in Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists control the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, to create a solid southern corridor — including the port of Mariupol — to occupied Crimea.

 – Permeated with pain –

As Zelensky warned “the whole of Eastern Europe” was at risk if Europe wasted time in stopping Moscow, the Polish and Baltic presidents visited Ukraine in a show of support, while Britain said it had slapped sanctions on Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine and additional oligarchs.

“It is hard to believe that such war atrocities could be perpetrated in 21st-century Europe, but that is the reality,” said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda during a visit to the town of Borodyanka outside Kyiv, calling the area “permeated with pain and suffering”. 

“Civilian Ukrainians were murdered and tortured here, and residential homes and other civilian infrastructure were bombed.”

Britain said it would sanction 178 Russian separatists, including the two “self-styled” leaders of the Russia-backed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and six more oligarchs and their families. 

Meanwhile, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said Russia had engaged in “clear patterns of international humanitarian law violations” in Ukraine.

The report by the world’s largest security body covered the period from Russia’s February 24 invasion through April 1, before the discovery of hundreds of bodies in Bucha and elsewhere.

Those images spurred US President Joe Biden on Tuesday to level Washington’s strongest accusation yet, of genocide, against Putin’s actions in Ukraine, after having previously called the Russian president a “war criminal”.

“Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian,” Biden said, defending his statement.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Biden’s accusation “unacceptable” Wednesday, a day after Putin said Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was going to plan while brushing off images of civilian deaths as “fakes”.

 – ‘Hiding crimes’ – 

In a desperate attempt to flee what Ukrainian authorities warn will be a bloody new clash in the east, more than 40,000 people fled the country in the past 24 hours, the United Nations said Wednesday, bringing to 4.6 million the number of people who have fled since the conflict began. 

But Kyiv halted humanitarian corridors in several parts of the country Wednesday, deeming them “too dangerous” for evacuations. 

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russian forces around Zaporizhzhia in the south were blocking buses transporting the evacuated, while shooting at fleeing civilians in Lugansk.

Underscoring the risk to civilians, Ukrainian prosecutors on Wednesday accused Russian troops of shooting six men and one woman the day before in a residential home in the occupied southern village of Pravdyne.

“After this, intending to hide their crime, the occupiers blew up the building with the bodies,” prosecutors said in a statement.

Meanwhile, seven civilians were killed by Russian shelling in the northeastern Kharkiv region in the past 24 hours, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said on social media.

 – Clean them out –

In Mariupol, air strikes continued, particularly on the port and the huge Azovstal iron and steel works, the Ukrainian army said on Telegram. 

The steel plant’s maze-like complex has been a focus of resistance in Mariupol, with fighters using a tunnel system below the vast industrial site to slow Russian forces down. 

“It’s a city within a city,” said Eduard Basurin, a representative for pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, citing subterranean areas that cannot be bombed from above.

“You have to go underground to clean them out, and that will take time.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he could not confirm allegations that Russia had used chemical weapons in the area, but Washington had “credible information” Russia might use tear gas mixed with chemical agents in the besieged port.

 – Russians in morgue –

  

Suggesting a Russian buildup to the east, US private satellite firm Maxar Technologies published images Wednesday it said showed Russian ground forces moving towards the border with Ukraine. 

Other convoys in and near the Donbas region comprised around 200 vehicles including tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers, it said.

Even as the military focus shifted eastward, the grim work of accounting for the civilian dead continued in areas recently abandoned by Russia’s army.

North of Bucha in the town of Gostomel, locals exhumed the body of Mayor Yuriy Prylypko, who authorities said was shot while “handing out bread to the hungry and medicine to the sick” and hastily buried by a local priest. 

Up to 400 people are unaccounted for Gostomel, said regional prosecutor Andiy Tkach. AFP witnessed dozens of body bags filling a refrigerated lorry trailer, as two others awaited more corpses. 

“Our citizens are murdered and we must bury every person in the right way,” said Igor Karpishen, loading the truck.  

“I don’t have any words to express these feelings.”

Zelensky accused Russian forces in occupied towns of committing hundreds of rapes, including of young children and a baby. 

Bucha Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said more than 400 people were found dead after Moscow’s forces withdrew, with 25 reported rapes.

Meanwhile, an official in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro said Wednesday the remains of more than 1,500 Russian soldiers were being kept in its morgues. 

New York police intensified their hunt Wednesday for a fugitive gunman who shot 10 people in a subway car the day before, putting a city already rattled by rising gun violence further on edge.

Police have identified 62-year-old Frank James as a suspect in the attack, in which they say he detonated two smoke cannisters on board the train as it was pulling into a station in Brooklyn, then opened fire.

No one was killed in the attack, which also left 13 others injured as they scrambled to get out of the station or suffered smoke inhalation. None of the victims suffered life-threatening injuries.

James had posted several videos on YouTube of himself delivering long, sometimes aggressive political tirades. He also criticized New York mayor Eric Adams, who called on residents to be “vigilant” Wednesday. 

Adams, speaking on NBC’s Today show, said police had stepped up his security “out of an overabundance of caution” and that they were taking “the necessary steps” until the gunman was apprehended.

“You have a person that carried out a very sick action to harm innocent people in our system,” he said.

He told MSNBC that there was no sign James had had an accomplice.

Police later recovered a Glock 17 nine-millimeter handgun, three additional ammunition magazines and a hatchet from the scene. US media reported that James’ credit card and keys to a van he had rented were also found.

The 36th Street station in Brooklyn, where the train arrived as the attack was being carried out, was heavily patrolled by police on Wednesday as travellers waited for their trains.

Commuter Laura Swalm said she was “more alert” after the shooting. “Definitely looking around. And making sure, you know, it feels a little safe,” the 49-year-old from New Jersey told AFP.

Others were more defiant. “No one is going to drive me away from the subway. The subway is in my DNA,” said 56-year-old Dennis Sughrue.

– ‘Shot in the back of knee’ –

The gunman put on a gas mask just as the train was arriving at the station, then opened the smoke canisters and fire 33 times in total, police said.

“All you see is like a smoke, black smoke bomb going off, and then … people bum rushing to the back,” one of the gunshot victims, Hourari Benkada, told CNN, referring to a charge by passengers towards the door at the end of the car.

Benkada, speaking from his hospital bed, said he had boarded the first car at 59th Street and sat next to the gunman — but with his headphones on he did not notice anything until smoke began filling the car.

He said he did not understand that there were shots at first, and that he was trying to comfort a pregnant woman next to him. 

“I got pushed and that’s when I got shot in the back of my knee,” he said.

Benkada said the shooting lasted for perhaps a minute, and that he heard about 10 shots. 

The bullet went through the back of his knee and out the side, leaving a hole “the size of a quarter,” he said. “I lost so much blood.”

Shootings in New York have risen this year, and the uptick in violent gun crime has been a central focus for Adams since he took office in January. Through April 3, shooting incidents rose to 296 from 260 during the same period last year, according to police statistics.

Lax gun laws and a constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms have repeatedly stymied attempts to clamp down on the number of weapons in circulation in the United States, despite a majority of Americans backing greater controls.