World

The World Health Organization on Tuesday approved the Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use — the second Chinese jab to receive the WHO’s green light.

The UN health agency signed off on the Beijing-based firm Sinovac’s two-dose vaccine CoronaVac, which is already being deployed in several countries around the world.

“I’m happy to announce that the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine has been given WHO emergency use listing after being found to be safe, effective, and quality-assured,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference.

“The easy storage requirements of CoronaVac make it very suitable for low-resource settings,” he added.

“It’s now crucial to get these life-saving tools to the people that need them quickly.”

The WHO said the emergency use listing (EUL) gives countries, funders, procuring agencies and communities assurance that the vaccine has met international standards.

Last month Sinopharm became the first Chinese vaccine to be approved by the WHO.

The organisation has also given EUL status to vaccines being made by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and the AstraZeneca jab being produced in India, South Korea and the EU, which it counts separately.

WHO’s listing paves the way for countries worldwide to approve and import a vaccine for distribution quickly, especially those states without an international-standard regulator of their own.

It also opens the door for the jabs to enter the Covax global vaccine-sharing facility, which aims to provide equitable access to doses around the world, particularly in poorer countries.

Currently only AstraZeneca and some Pfizer jabs are flowing through the scheme.

“The world desperately needs multiple Covid-19 vaccines to address the huge access inequity across the globe,” said Mariangela Simao, the WHO’s assistant director general for access to health products.

“We urge manufacturers to participate in the Covax facility, share their know-how and data and contribute to bringing the pandemic under control.”

– Efficacy rate –

“WHO recommends the vaccine for use in adults 18 years and older, in a two-dose schedule with a spacing of two to four weeks,” the agency said in a statement.

“Vaccine efficacy results showed that the vaccine prevented symptomatic disease in 51 percent of those vaccinated and prevented severe Covid-19 and hospitalisation in 100 percent of the studied population.”

The Sinovac vaccine contains an inactivated form of coronavirus that cannot cause the disease. It also has a substance that helps strengthen the immune response to the vaccine.

When given the shot, the immune system identifies the inactivated virus as foreign and makes antibodies against it, which will then recognise the active virus and defend the body against it.

Few people aged over 60 took part in the clinical trial of Sinovac’s jab.

However, the WHO said there should be no upper age limit on the vaccine as there is “no reason to believe it has a different safety profile” in older generations.

The Sinovac jab is already in use in 22 territories around the world, according to an AFP count.

Apart from China, the countries using Sinovac include Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and Turkey.

Chen Xu, China’s ambassador in Geneva, said CoronaVac’s EUL status expanded the number of global tools to fight the pandemic.

“China will continue to work with the international community to promote the accessibility and affordability of Covid-19 vaccines especially in (the) developing world,” he said in a tweet.

As Israelis clashed with Palestinians in recent weeks, one hardline nationalist lawmaker allied with embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was repeatedly stoking the flames: Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the one-man “Jewish Power” party.

The 45-year-old lawyer and father of six, who lives in a settlement near Hebron in the Israel-occupied West Bank, took his seat in the Knesset in April as part of a “Religious Zionism” alliance orchestrated by Netanyahu. 

Ben-Gvir has since been ubiquitous at Israel’s most explosive sites. 

He opened a “parliamentary office” in the occupied east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah – where Jewish Israelis are vying to expel Palestinian residents from their homes, built on land that belonged to Jews prior to 1948.

Those tensions, and related clashes in the city’s al-Aqsa mosque compound, spiralled into the 11-day military escalation last month between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas that rules Gaza.

Jerusalem tensions and the Gaza conflict also sparked mob violence between Israeli Jews and Arabs in Israeli cities, and Ben-Gvir visited the sites of street battles to rally far-right vigilantes.

Supporters of Ben-Gvir encouraged avenging “Jewish blood” in cities including Bat Yam, where a Jewish mob was later filmed beating an Arab driver and smashing Arab-owned stores. 

In other places, Arabs attacked synagogues and Jewish-owned cars and homes.

Police commissioner Kobi Shabtai accused Ben-Gvir of starting “a Jewish intifada”, or uprising, Israeli media reported. 

Ben-Gvir was unapologetic and told AFP that police should crack down harder.

“If they did what’s necessary, and fired — live fire, not rubber bullets — at a person throwing a firebomb, we’d already be in a better place,” he argued. 

– ‘Dog whistle for violence’ –

Israeli politics has shifted rightward under Netanyahu, known as Bibi, and an end to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip appears remote to most observers. 

Now that a cross-party alliance seeks to oust the veteran premier after 12 straight years in power, Ben-Gvir remains loyal to his benefactor.

“I want Bibi to be the prime minister and I want to be in that government,” he told AFP. “I want to pull the government to the right.” 

Ben-Gvir’s party calls for “removing Israel’s enemies from our land” and for annexing the West Bank, home to some 2.8 million Palestinians. 

Though he is the sole legislator of his party, Ben-Gvir commands outsized attention.

He had the third-highest number of media appearances of all Israeli politicians in March and April, according to the Ifat media monitor. 

He is also skilled at connecting with supporters online, said internet activist Achiya Schatz, who monitored some 70 WhatsApp and Telegram groups. 

“When it comes to creating networks of avoiding police, avoiding the law, dog whistling for violence — he is the best,” Schatz said. 

“In the extremist groups, he’s the messiah.”

Ben-Gvir recently threatened to sue Facebook for blocking WhatsApp accounts of his supporters, including one activist whose group hosted calls for Jewish vigilantes to bring weapons to the city of Lod, where Arab and Jewish citizens had clashed. 

“Come with your faces covered. We’re not going to tangle with the police. Only with Arabs,” wrote one member. 

Facebook did not reply to AFP questions.

Ben-Gvir, who has provided legal defence to Israeli Jews accused of deadly crimes against Palestinians, justified the inflammatory message. 

“The law in Israel says a person who is attacked is allowed to defend himself,” he said.

– Achieving notoriety –

As a young man, Ben-Gvir achieved notoriety for stealing the ornament from former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac — weeks before Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist at a rally as he sought to build a permanent peace with Palestinians. 

“Like we reached this symbol, we can reach him too,” Ben-Gvir said at the time. 

He drew inspiration from late extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach movement was banned in Israel after another member, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994.

Ben-Gvir keeps Kahane’s books in his office, though the lawmaker told AFP he disagrees with some of the rabbi’s points, like the notion “that we have to expel all the Arabs”.

In Israel’s recent political turmoil, Netanyahu is now under heavy pressure from an alliance led by the centrist Yair Lapid, who has until midnight Wednesday to form a new government. 

Lapid has offered to rotate the prime minister post with pro-settlement hardliner Naftali Bennett going first. 

“Bennett sold out his voters and his values and is leading Israel to a disaster,” Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram.

Extremism expert Eran Tzidkiyahu says a new government headed by Bennett could marginalise Ben-Gvir.

Bennett “can look Ben-Gvir in the eye and say, ‘I don’t need your approval,'” Tzidkiyahu said.

Ben-Gvir said his voters elected him for a mission.

“I’m in the Knesset not by accident,” he told AFP. “The Israeli public wants to stop being a sucker to our enemies.”

An attack that killed six Chadian soldiers at a border post with the Central African Republic will be jointly investigated by the two countries, after a high-level meeting Tuesday appeared to ease tensions.

Chad has blamed the CAR army for the attack, and says five of the soldiers were abducted then executed in the incident on Sunday, which it labelled a “war crime” that would “not go unpunished”. 

CAR had put the blame on rebels it said its soldiers had been pursuing.

At the meeting between the two states’ foreign ministers, “the CAR side, after expressing surprise at the attack, firmly condemned it and expressed its profound sympathy to the government and people of Chad”, a joint statement released afterwards said. 

The two parties “underlined the urgency of clarifying the circumstances in which this attack took place” and agreed to set up an independent international commission of inquiry.

The two sides also agreed to work together to strengthen security along the border. 

Earlier the mood was more tense, with Chadian government spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah telling AFP that the attacks were premeditated and that the Central African authorities must “accept and admit their errors”.

He had said Chad would press for an international investigation, adding: “depending on what these emissaries tell us, we will see what we can do”.

The three CAR ministers carried a letter from President Faustin Archange Touadera, spokesman of the CAR presidency Albert Yaloke Mokpeme told AFP.

The team are due to meet Chad’s junta leader, Mahamat Idriss Deby, on Wednesday.

The incident has placed the spotlight on the occasionally fraught relations between Chad — ruled by a junta that took power just six weeks ago — and the CAR, an unstable country battling powerful armed groups.

CAR regularly accuses its northern neighbour of supporting armed rebel groups from inside Chad. 

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Israeli politicians battling to unseat veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have until just before midnight Wednesday to make their “change” coalition, composed of bitter ideological rivals, viable.

They only have until the end of the day — 2059 GMT — to cobble together an administration that would end 12 straight years of rule by the hawkish heavyweight, Israel’s longest-ruling premier.

The high-stakes push is led by former TV presenter Yair Lapid, a secular centrist, who on Sunday won the crucial support of hardline religious nationalist Naftali Bennett, a tech multi-millionaire.

“The coalition negotiation team sat all night and made progress toward creating a unity government,” a Bennett spokesman said in a statement.

But to reach a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset, their unlikely alliance would also have to include other left and right-wing parties — and would probably need the support of Arab-Israeli politicians.

That would result in a government riven by deep ideological differences on flashpoint issues such as Jewish settlements in the Israel-occupied West Bank and the role of religion in politics.

Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party, was tasked with forming a government by President Reuven Rivlin after Netanyahu again failed to put together his own coalition following Israel’s fourth inconclusive election in less than two years.

Lapid has reportedly agreed to allow Bennett, who heads the Yamina party, to serve first as a rotating prime minister in a power-sharing agreement, before swapping with him halfway through their term.

Late Tuesday, a source close to the negotiations told AFP negotiators were hammering away to “finalise a deal as soon as possible”.

– ‘Greater goal’ –

Israel’s latest political turmoil adds to the woes of Netanyahu, who is on trial for criminal charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust while in office — accusations he denies.

If he were to lose power, he would not be able to push through changes to basic laws that could give him immunity, and would lose control over certain Justice Ministry nominations.

The last-minute talks also follow a flare-up of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, which ended after 11 days of deadly violence with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire on May 21.

Netanyahu, who served an earlier three-year term in the 1990s, had warned on Sunday of “a left-wing government dangerous to the state of Israel”.

The premier, who heads the right-wing Likud party and has developed a reputation as a wily political operator, was scrambling to scupper the new alliance.

Likud’s lawyers tried to hobble the emerging coalition by challenging Bennett’s right to serve first as prime minister, given that it was Lapid who was charged with forming the government.

But the legal adviser to Israel’s president knocked down the challenge.

Opponents of the possible alternative government meanwhile accused Bennett and his right-wing partners of betraying their voters.

Spokesmen for both Lapid and Bennett confirmed to AFP that the two have received additional security protection.

Lapid said Monday that obstacles remained to build the coalition, but added: “That’s our first test — to see if we can find smart compromises in the coming days to achieve the greater goal.”

In order to build the anti-Netanyahu bloc, Lapid must sign individual agreements with seven parties, whose members would then vote in parliament to confirm their coalition.

They include the hawkish New Hope party of Netanyahu’s former ally Gideon Saar and right-wing secular nationalist Avigdor Lieberman’s pro-settlement Yisrael Beitenu party.

The centrist Blue and White party of Defence Minister Benny Gantz, the historically powerful centre-left Labor party and the dovish Meretz party would also join.

– Arab Israeli support? –

If all those parties indeed sign on, the emerging alliance still needs the backing of four more lawmakers.

For that, Lapid is counting on parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, which have not yet announced their intentions.

Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamic conservative Raam party, which has four seats, has generally voiced openness to any arrangement that improves living conditions for Israel’s 20 percent Arab minority of Palestinian descent.

Political analyst Afif Abu Much said Tuesday that Abbas would not pursue ministerial posts, but wanted chairmanship of two parliament committees and budgets for Arab communities.

He also aimed to revoke a law that has hardened penalties for illegal construction, which is seen to impact Arab communities disproportionately.

“They don’t want to be part of the government,” Abu Much told AFP. “What they want is to be the address of the Arab people in Israel.”

Political scientist Jonathan Rynhold warned that it would be unwise at this point to write off Netanyahu, “the best card player by miles”.

If Lapid fails to muster a majority, and lawmakers cannot agree on another candidate for prime minister, Israelis will return, yet again, to the polls.

Abbas told reporters Tuesday that negotiations appeared to be heading “in a good direction”.

But, he said: “until it’s finished, nothing is finished.”

An American subsidiary of Brazilian meat processor JBS told the US government that it has received a ransom demand in a cyberattack it believes originated in Russia, forcing some plants to cut production.

JBS received the demand from “a criminal organization likely based in Russia” following the attack that has affected its operations in Australia and North America, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

The White House statement comes as yet another major US sector finds its operations under duress, less than a month after a cyberattack temporarily shut down the Colonial Pipeline network supplying about 45 percent of the fuel consumed on the US east coast.

“The White House has offered assistance to JBS, and our team and the Department of Agriculture have spoken to their leadership several times in the last day,” Jean-Pierre said.

“The White House is engaging directly with the Russian government on this matter and delivering the message that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals.”

Brazil-based JBS is a sprawling meat supplier with operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, Mexico, New Zealand and Britain.

“We have cybersecurity plans in place to address these types of issues… the vast majority of our beef, pork, poultry and prepared foods plants will be operational tomorrow,” Andre Nogueira, JBS chief in the United States, said in a statement Tuesday.

The company statement did not say if any ransom had been paid.

Its Australian facilities were said to have been paralyzed by the attack, with up to 10,000 meat workers being sent home without pay, according to a union representative.

– Cybersecurity vulnerabilities –

“It’s affecting JBS processing facilities around (Australia),” AMIEU Queensland branch secretary Matt Journeaux told AFP. “They have stood down workers across JBS operations.”

Several plants in North America were also affected by the incident.

The Facebook page for JBS’ Green Bay, Wisconsin plant said there was no production Monday. Another plant in Utah was also not operating, said a person who answered the phone and declined to give his name.

A plant in Iowa said four departments did not operate on Monday, while remaining units were working normally, according to its Facebook page.

JBS’ Canada division canceled some operations, but said on Facebook later in the day that normal production would resume.

The United Food and Commercial Workers local representing workers in Colorado and Wyoming said some shifts were canceled on Monday, according to its Facebook page.

Colonial’s multi-day shutdown in May sparked panic buying in some eastern states, and ended when the company paid $4.4 million in ransom to the hackers.

The online vulnerabilities of US oil conduits led the federal government last week to impose cybersecurity requirements on petroleum pipelines for the first time.

The JBS and Colonial Pipeline incidents follow a 2020 hack of the SolarWinds software company. Last week, Microsoft warned that the state-backed Russian group behind the SolarWinds attack had re-emerged with a series of attacks on government agencies, think tanks and other groups.

“The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving and we must adapt to address new and emerging threats,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday.

The discovery of the remains of 215 children at one of several boarding schools set up a century ago to forcibly assimilate Canada’s indigenous peoples has once again  compelled the nation to confront its painful past.

The grim find at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in western British Columbia province offered a stark reminder of the widespread discrimination experienced by the country’s indigenous people — and the particular tragedy of the schools.

In 2015, a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) report said Canada’s assimilation policy pursued until the latter half of the 20th century — including atrocities at the schools — amounted to “cultural genocide.”

That led to a renewed push to atone for Canada’s past behavior, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made reconciliation with the country’s 600 tribes a priority for his government, but not everyone is convinced progress is imminent.

“For many First Nations, Metis or Inuit communities in Canada, several generations of their families attended the schools and the trauma affiliated with (them) is still very present,” Tricia Logan, head of the Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, told AFP.

“It’s hard to say if Canada is willing or able to face the truth,” Logan said, noting that some people still “deny that what happened at the schools was negligent or abusive.”

About 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Metis youngsters in total were enrolled in these schools. At least 4,100 died, according to the TRC report.

“We all have a role to play in dismantling systemic inequalities and discrimination — it starts with acknowledging the truth about these past wrongs,” Trudeau said Tuesday.

– ‘Devastating’ –

In 2008, the government in Ottawa issued a formal apology as part of a Can$1.9 billion (US$1.5 billion) settlement with former students at the residential schools, which were run by the government and the Catholic church.

Then in 2015, the TRC report called for major changes to school curricula, among its 94 recommendations, to highlight the history and lingering impacts of the residential schools program.

Logan said the public response to that report was mostly “empathetic and supportive,” but some remarks were also “very racist or harmful.”

Few spoke out about their experiences at the 139 schools until the last one closed in Saskatchewan province in 1996.

The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc tribe said last week it had used ground-penetrating radar to confirm the remains of the 215 students who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School — far more than the 50 deaths officially on record.

It was the largest of Canada’s boarding schools for indigenous youth, with up to 500 students attending at any one time. 

Attendance was compulsory, and generations of children were separated from their families, Logan said. After decades under church administration, the government took it over, finally closing its doors in 1978. 

The discovery of the unmarked graves in Kamloops has for many former students been “devastating,” Logan said.

“I do not think the news came as a surprise to survivors and their families, but learning new truths about the schools compounds existing trauma that (they) carry all the time,” she explained.

It also “reminds survivors about their time and the considerable losses they experienced at the schools,” she said.

– Abuse, disease, malnutrition –

Logan, who is credited with decades of research on the residential schools, said they had “notoriously high rates of physical and sexual abuse, disease, malnutrition and neglect that all contributed to high death rates.”

Underfunded and under-equipped, they became breeding grounds for tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia.

Former students told of being served scraps and culturally unsuitable foods, brutal punishments meted out by teachers, rapes and sexual violence, and other abuses.

They were also prohibited from speaking their native languages or practicing their customs, effectively “killing the Indian in them,” according to the TRC report.

Today, those experiences are blamed for a high incidence of poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as high suicide rates, in Canada’s indigenous communities.

The TRC noted that parents’ requests to have their sons or daughters’ remains returned home were rejected at the time by the government as too costly. 

Now, most of the school cemeteries where they are interred have been abandoned.

– ‘Much more to do’ –

After the Kamloops revelation, more excavations of school burial sites are now being planned across Canada. Trudeau has promised “concrete actions.”

For Logan, “the work is enormous and there is much more to do.”

The Federation of Sovereign Indian Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan, said the undocumented deaths of students must be exposed for “closure to begin healing.”

“These children deserve the respect and dignity of proper burials… to ensure that their souls are at peace,” the group said in a statement.

The US military will hand over its main Bagram Air Base to Afghan forces in about 20 days, an official said Tuesday, as Washington carries out its final withdrawal after nearly two decades of war.

The vast base, built by the Soviets in the 1980s, is the biggest military facility used by US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, with tens of thousands of troops stationed there during the peak of America’s military involvement in the violence-wracked country.

“I can confirm we will hand over Bagram Air Base,” a US defence official told AFP without specifying when the transfer would take place.

An Afghan security official said the handover was expected in about 20 days, and the defence ministry had set up special committees to manage it.

In Washington, the Pentagon indicated that the pace of the withdrawal was picking up. As of Monday, US Central Command estimated it had completed 30-44 percent of the so-called “retrograde” process.

It has shipped the equivalent of 300 loaded C-17 transport planes out of the country.

In April, President Joe Biden set a target of September to remove all the 2,500 US troops and some 16,000 civilian contractors out of the country, aiming to end the US military’s two-decade-old presence.

– Handing over bases –

Bagram base was the centre for nationwide command and air operations for the past two decades.

It also houses a prison that held thousands of Taliban and jihadist inmates over the years.

Washington had already handed over six military bases to Afghan forces before May 1, when it began accelerating the final withdrawal of troops.

Last month it completed the withdrawal from Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan, once the second-largest foreign military base in the country.

The US withdrawal comes despite bloody clashes across the country between the Taliban and Afghan forces.

In the latest violence to rock the capital Kabul, at least 10 civilians were killed and 12 wounded in two separate blasts targeting passenger buses in the city late on Tuesday, police said.

In a separate incident, an explosion caused a power outage leaving several parts of Kabul in darkness.

Peace talks were launched in September in Qatar between the Taliban and Afghan government, but so far have failed to strike any deal to end a war that has killed tens of thousands of people over nearly two decades.

On Tuesday, a group of Afghan government negotiators reached Doha in the hope of resuming stalled talks.

“Our team is ready for serious negotiations. There is no military solution to this conflict,” Najia Anwari, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Peace, told AFP, adding that no date had been fixed for resuming the talks.

Fawzia Koofi, one of four women negotiators from the government team, said on Twitter before leaving for Doha that she hoped for a “meaningful and result based negotiation this time to end the bloodshed and suffering of my people”.

“We need to see more willingness and sincerity in the talks as the few months ahead of us are crucial for Afghanistan and the region.”

Last month the two sides had agreed to speed up the talks, with the Taliban saying the dialogue would begin after the festival of Eid al-Fitr that ended on May 16.

A giant sinkhole that was expanding by dozens of meters each day has alarmed residents in a rural area of central Mexico where it was threatening to swallow a house.

When the Sanchez family heard a loud crash on Saturday they first thought that it was a lightning strike.

But they soon discovered that the ground had collapsed just meters from their home in a field in Santa Maria Zacatepec in the state of Puebla.

The hole, which is full of water, was about 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) wide by Sunday.

It rapidly grew to 60 meters on Monday and around 80 meters on Tuesday, the authorities said, coming perilously close to the house of the Sanchez family, who fear they will be left homeless.

“We have nothing. We’re not from here. We have no relatives. We’re alone,” Heriberto Sanchez, originally from the southeastern state of Veracruz, told the media.

Scientists and the authorities were considering hypotheses including a geological fault or variations in the soil’s water content as the possible causes.

As the sinkhole has grown, large chunks of earth continually have broken away from the rim, scaring off onlookers approaching a security cordon set up by the authorities.

In a video posted on social media, two men were seen approaching the hole shortly before it expanded suddenly, forcing them to run to safety.

“It will grow until nature decides, when the water stops exerting pressure,” Puebla state governor Miguel Barbosa said.

“The important thing now is public safety,” he said, adding that the authorities would compensate those affected.

Elephants are known to use versatile trunks to grab objects big and small, drink great draughts, and sniff out water kilometres away. 

But a tusker’s proboscis can also switch to vacuum mode to eat, with suction power ranging from faint to ferocious, researchers said Wednesday.

A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology observed the world’s largest land mammal suck up rutabaga, draw chia seeds out of water, and pick up large tortilla chips without breaking them, the scientists reported in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Up to now, it was thought that only fish exhibited this kind of suction prowess.

Experiments were carried out with the help of a 34-year-old female African elephant from Zoo Atlanta, including tests to see how she would deal with rutabaga chunks of varying size and number.

They observed that while the elephant used its sensitive prehensile tip to grab on to big chunks, she preferred suction to consume larger quantities of smaller pieces.  

“A loud vacuuming sound accompanies the suction as food is quickly drawn onto the tip of the trunk,” a team led by David Hu, Georgia Tech wrote. 

The elephant chose not to use vacuum power, however, when offered grains of bran measuring about 1 millimetre, “presumably to avoid getting the grains lodged in its trunk,” the study noted.

“Instead, the trunk tip squeezed the bran together to pick them up.”

– Precision and power – 

The study found that elephants generate suction force not only by using their huge lungs, but also by increasing the diameter of their nasal passages. 

Using ultrasound imaging, the scientists watched the elephant use muscle contractions to dilate its nostrils up to 30 percent, increasing trunk capacity more than 60 percent.

By observing the elephant drinking water from a container with chia seeds at the bottom, they were able to calculate that she sucked in the fluid at a flow rate equivalent to 24 shower heads at once. 

The elephant inhaled at speeds nearly 30 times faster than a human sneeze.

The suction ability displayed was not just powerful, but precise.

In one test, researchers placed a tortilla chip on the flat surface of a force plate, which measures movement strength.

Weighing in at about 100 kilogrammes (220 pounds), the elephant’s trunk could smash the chip with very little pressure.

But instead of grabbing it, the elephant applied suction near to or directly on the chip to guide it into its sensitive prehensile “fingers”. 

Despite the chip’s hard-to-grab thinness and fragility, the elephant “could usually pick it up without breaking it”. 

The laboratory that conducted the study specialises in biomechanics, with particular interest in how animal behaviours can influence the development of robot technology.

The study notes how elephant trunk mechanics have already influenced existing technologies, citing robots that refuel ships or deliver air or water to victims trapped under debris.

Algeria partially reopened its borders Tuesday after more than a year of being sealed off because of the coronavirus pandemic, as flights between Algiers and Paris resumed.

Since March 17, 2020, millions of Algerians abroad have been shut out of the country as land borders and maritime links were closed and commercial flights stopped. 

But last week, the government announced that from June 1, it would progressively start allowing in flights from France, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey, with travellers having to undergo a five-day quarantine at designated government hotels, which they must pay for themselves.

The measures have caused considerable discontent among the large Algerian diaspora, especially in France.

Late Tuesday afternoon, an Air Algeria flight carrying almost 300 passengers landed in Algiers from Paris-Orly airport. 

Earlier in the day, the same aircraft had taken around sixty passengers to Paris. 

Local media showed the passengers disembarking onto the tarmac at Algiers, before being led directly to coaches to be taken to their hotel for isolation.

Algeria’s health ministry says the country has recorded almost 3,500 deaths from Covid-19 since the first case was registered in February 2020. 

Around 130,000 cases have been registered in the country of 44 million.

A curfew is in place in 19 out of 58 of Algeria’s prefectures, and its land and sea borders remain closed for now.