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FRANKFURT: Germany must revamp its COVID-19 vaccination strategy to tackle the omicron variant and to ensure it can develop a new vaccine rapidly if it faces a more deadly coronavirus variant in the future, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said.
Lauterbach, who was appointed health minister last month, made his comments in an advanced release of an interview to be published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.
“If we get a variant that is as contagious as omicron, but significantly more deadly, we should be able to develop and produce a new vaccine in a very short time,” Lauterbach said.
The government is planning to put a permanent system in place to purchase and provide shots rapidly at any given time because there could be serious new outbreaks, he said.
“We must not fall into the naive assumption that it (the pandemic) will be over soon. It’s not over,” he said.
Germany closed large vaccination centers in several states last summer when demand for COVID-19 shots briefly declined to a trickle before picking up again.
The omicron variant now accounts for 44 percent of coronavirus infections in Germany, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious disease said.
On Saturday, the RKI counted 55,889 newly reported corona infections within 24 hours, more than double the number a week earlier.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz and regional leaders tightened the rules for restaurant and bar visits on Friday as part of efforts to encourage more people to get a third vaccination, or booster shot, but shortened quarantine periods.
The Bundestag lower house of parliament will also soon discuss a draft bill for a general vaccination mandate.
SACRAMENTO, California: Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, was denied parole Thursday by California’s governor, who said the killer remains a threat to the public and hasn’t taken responsibility for a crime that altered American history.
Kennedy, a US senator from New York, was shot moments after he claimed victory in California’s pivotal Democratic presidential primary. Five others were wounded during the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has cited RFK as his political hero, rejected a recommendation from a two-person panel of parole commissioners who said Sirhan, 77, should be freed. The panel’s recommendation in August had divided the Kennedy family, with two of RFK’s sons — Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — supporting his release, and their siblings and mother vehemently opposing it.
In his decision, Newsom said the assassination was “among the most notorious crimes in American history,” Aside from causing Kennedy’s then-pregnant wife and 10 children “immeasurable suffering,” Newsom said the killing “also caused great harm to the American people.”
It “upended the 1968 presidential election, leaving millions in the United States and beyond mourning the promise of his candidacy,” Newsom wrote. “Mr. Sirhan killed Senator Kennedy during a dark season of political assassinations, just nine weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder and four and a half years after the murder of Senator Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy.”
He said Sirhan still lacks insight, refuses to accept responsibility and has failed to disclaim violence committed in his name. That adds “to his current risk of inciting further political violence,” Newsom wrote.
In 1973, terrorists took 10 hostages at an embassy in Sudan, demanding the release of Sirhan and other prisoners and killing three diplomats when their demands weren’t met, he noted.
Sirhan, who will be scheduled for a new parole hearing no later than February 2023, will ask a judge to overturn Newsom’s denial, defense attorney Angela Berry said.
“We fully expect that judicial review of the governor’s decision will show that the governor got it wrong,” she said.
State law holds that inmates are supposed to be paroled unless they pose a current unreasonable public safety risk, she said, adding that “not an iota of evidence exists to suggest Mr. Sirhan is still a danger to society.”
She said the parole process has become politicized, and Newsom “chose to overrule his own experts (on the parole board), ignoring the law.”
Parole commissioners found Sirhan suitable for release “because of his impressive extensive record of rehabilitation over the last half-century,” Berry said. “Since the mid-1980’s Mr. Sirhan has consistently been found by prison psychologists and psychiatrists to not pose an unreasonable risk of danger to the public.”
During his parole hearing, the white-haired Sirhan called Kennedy the “hope of the world.” But he stopped short of taking full responsibility for a shooting he said he doesn’t recall because he was drunk.
“It pains me … the knowledge for such a horrible deed, if I did, in fact, do that,” Sirhan said.
Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, and six of his children hailed Newsom’s decision in a statement that called RFK a “visionary and champion of justice” whose life “was cut short by an enraged man with a small gun.”
“The political passions that motivated this inmate’s act still simmer today, and his refusal to admit the truth makes it impossible to conclude that he has overcome the evil that boiled over 53 years ago,” they wrote.
The panel’s decision was based in part on several new California laws since he was denied parole in 2016 — the 15th time he’d lost his bid for release.
Commissioners were required to consider that Sirhan committed his crime at a young age, when he was 24; that he now is elderly; and that the Christian Palestinian who immigrated from Jordan had suffered childhood trauma from the conflict in the Middle East.
In addition, Los Angeles County prosecutors didn’t object to his parole, following District Attorney George Gascón’s policy that prosecutors should not be involved in deciding whether prisoners are ready for release.
The decision had a personal element for Newsom, a fellow Democrat, who displays RFK photos in his official and home offices. One of them is of Kennedy with Newsom’s late father.
SAO PAOLO: The medals were billed as the most sustainable ever produced.
To match the festive spirit of South America’s first Olympics, officials from Brazil, the host country for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, boasted that the medals hung around the necks of athletes on the winners’ podium were also a victory for the environment: The gold was produced free of mercury and the silver recycled from thrown away X-ray plates and mirrors.
Five years on, the refiner that provided the gold for the medals, Marsam, is processing gold ultimately purchased by hundreds of well-known publicly traded US companies — among them Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon — that are legally required to responsibly source metals in an industry long plagued by environmental and labor concerns.
But a comprehensive review of public records found that the Sao Paulo-based company processes gold for, and shared ownership links to, an intermediary accused by Brazilian prosecutors of buying gold mined illegally on Indigenous lands and other areas deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The AP previously reported in this series that the scale of prospecting for gold on Indigenous lands has exploded in recent years and involves carving illegal landing strips in the forest for unauthorized airplanes to ferry in heavy equipment, fuel, and backhoes to tear at the earth in search of the precious metal.
WASHINGTON: The US has brandished the threat of sanctions if troubled Somalia misses its latest deadline for elections.
Somali leaders on Sunday announced that elections that were due to be concluded last year will take place by Feb. 25.
“Somalia’s elections are more than a year behind schedule. The US is prepared to take measures against spoilers if the new National Consultative Council timeline is not met,” the State Department’s Africa bureau said in a Twitter post.
The mandate of President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohammed, better known as Farmajo, expired in February 2021 and was controversially extended in April, triggering deadly gunbattles in the streets of Mogadishu.
World powers have voiced fear that election delays, as well as the ongoing feud between Farmajo and Prime Minister Mohammed Hussein Roble, could set off new troubles for a country that has lacked stable governance for three decades.
Somalia is battling a deadly insurgency by Al-Shabab extremists and is in the grip of a drought that has left one in four people facing acute hunger, according to UN estimates.
Several people were killed on Wednesday in a suicide car bomb blast in Mogadishu, which was claimed by Al-Shabab.
The government said in a statement on Twitter that the blast killed four people and injured six others, while a local government security officer had earlier told AFP that at least six people were killed.
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama: Attorneys for a woman who left her Alabama home to join Daesh plan to continue fighting for her and her young son even though the Supreme Court declined to consider her lawsuit seeking to re-enter the United States, one of the lawyers said Wednesday.
Hoda Muthana and her 4-year-old child, the son of a man she met while with Daesh, have been living in a Syrian refugee camp for nearly the entire life of the child, and it’s unclear what steps might come next to argue for their admittance into the United States, said Christina Jump, who represents the woman’s family.
But Jump, who works with the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, said attorneys are considering options.
“We intend to stand by Hoda and her son and their rights to citizenship,” she said. “We do intend to keep working on her behalf.”
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the appeal of a lawsuit filed by relatives on behalf of Muthana, who was born in New Jersey and fled her home in suburban Birmingham in 2014 to join Daesh, apparently after becoming radicalized online.
She later decided she wanted to return to the United States, but the government determined she was not a US citizen and revoked her passport while she was overseas, blocking her return. The government cited her father’s status as a diplomat from Yemen at the time of her birth in 1994.
While the Supreme Court refused to consider overturning lower court rulings that said Muthana could be kept out of the country, Camp said she still believes “the Department of State does not have the authority to revoke citizenship in the manner that was done to Ms Muthana.”
Both relatives and lawyers have a hard time maintaining regular contact with Muthana because she isn’t allowed to have her own cellphone in the camp where she lives and Internet service is spotty, said the attorney.
Muthana has renounced Daesh and both she and her son have been threatened because of her stance, Camp said. The child’s father is dead.
The decision to revoke her passport was made under former President Barack Obama. The case gained widespread attention because former President Donald Trump tweeted about it, saying he had directed the secretary of state not to allow her back into the country.

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