News in Brief

Date: 01 June 2021 - 21:53

News ID: ۹۰۸۷۹

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Russia will conduct strategic military drills in the Arctic this autumn, the Interfax news agency cited Russia’s northern fleet as saying on Tuesday. Russia has built up in recent years its military presence in the Arctic, where receding ice has raised the prospect of resources opening up.

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BEIJING (Reuters) -- A 41-year-old man in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu has been confirmed as the first human case of infection with the H10N3 strain of bird flu, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) said on Tuesday. The man, a resident of the city of Zhenjiang, was hospitalized on April 28 after developing a fever and other symptoms, the NHC said in a statement. He was diagnosed as having the H10N3 avian influenza virus on May 28, it said, but did not give details on how the man had been infected with the virus. H10N3 is a low pathogenic, or relatively less severe, strain of the virus in poultry and the risk of it spreading on a large scale was very low, the NHC added. The man was stable and ready to be discharged from hospital. Medical observation of his close contacts had not found any other cases. Many different strains of avian influenza are present in China and some sporadically infect people, usually those working with poultry. There have been no significant numbers of human infections with bird flu since the H7N9 strain killed around 300 people during 2016-2017.

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SEOUL (Reuters) -- North Korea’s ruling party has amended its rules to create a de facto second-in-command under leader Kim Jong Un as he looks to revamp domestic politics, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said on Tuesday. Citing an unidentified source familiar with North Korea, the agency said the holder of the new post of “first secretary” would chair meetings on behalf of Kim Jong Un. Kim was elected as the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) in January, taking a title last held by his late father, Kim Jong Il. Now Kim wants the party to play a greater role in government, as compared to the more-military centered administration of his father, the agency added. “The term ‘military-first politics’, a major keyword in the Kim Jong Il era, is known to have been scrapped from the preface of the party by-laws,” it said. Kim Jong Un himself used the “first secretary” designation from 2012 to 2016. The new post is the most senior of the party’s seven secretaries and is likely to have been taken by Jo Yong Won of the politburo’s five-member presidium, Yonhap said.

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LIMA (Reuters) -- Peru almost tripled its official COVID-19 death toll to 180,764, following a government review, making it the country with the worst death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Peru has been among the hardest hit Latin America countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its hospitals overcrowded with patients and demand for oxygen outstripping availability. Experts had long warned that the true death toll was being undercounted in official statistics. The government said it will now update its death count, which stood at 69,342 as of Sunday, in part because of a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause. According to Johns Hopkins data, Hungary had the worst number of per capita COVID-19 deaths at about 300 per 100,000 people. With its updated death toll, Peru now stands at more than 500 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people. In Latin America, Brazil has the highest total death toll with more than 450,000 lives lost due to the pandemic. Based on population, however, Peru’s per capita death toll now more than doubles that of Brazil, according to the data.

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DHAKA (AFP) -- Several thousand Rohingya staged “unruly” protests against living conditions on a cyclone-prone island off Bangladesh where they were moved from vast camps on the mainland, police said. Since December, Bangladesh has shifted 18,000 out of a planned 100,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island of Bhashan Char from the Cox’s Bazar region, where some 850,000 people live in squalid and cramped conditions. Most of them had fled a brutal military offensive in neighboring Myanmar in 2017 that UN investigators concluded was executed with “genocidal intent”. Monday’s protest involved up to 4,000 people, police said, and coincided with an inspection visit by officials from the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).

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JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian police said they have arrested 11 suspected takfiri militants accused of plotting attacks at several Christian churches in easternmost Papua province. On Friday, the elite counterterrorism squad arrested 10 suspects in several raids in Papua’s Merauke district after receiving information about planned attacks in the province, a predominantly Christian region in Muslim-majority Indonesia, Merauke police chief Untung Sangaji said. The arrests led police to another suspect who was detained Sunday, and led them to seize data-x-items from various locations including chemicals for explosives, modified air guns able to fire real bullets, takfiri books and documents on planned attacks, he said. Sangaji said those arrested are suspected of being members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, which has pledged allegiance to the Daesh group and carried out a series of suicide bombings in Indonesia.