Venezuela quarantined a Spanish cruise ship on Wednesday after three crew members were diagnosed with the A(H1N1) flu virus and Barbados and Grenada refused to allow its passengers to disembark.
The cruise ship, owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises, is docked off the Venezuelan island of Margarita and the 1,200 people aboard will not be allowed off for a week, Venezuelan officials said.
“The virus was detected in three crew members and the boat must now stay in quarantine until June 24,” state health official Jorge Alchaer said in comments printed by the government news service.
On Monday, the Ocean Dream operated by Pullmantur Cruises docked in Grenada, but no one was permitted to leave the ship because of reports several people on board had flu-like symptoms, a spokesman for Grenada’s Health Ministry said.
The cruise liner’s next destination was Barbados on Tuesday, but health officials refused to let the ship dock because 43 crew members exhibited flu-like symptoms, the Barbados Ministry of Health said in a statement.
Miami-based Royal Caribbean, which owns Pullmantur, said it could not comment on the situation. Pullmantur representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Many of the small island states in the eastern Caribbean depend on cruise ship arrivals as an important source of foreign exchange for their vulnerable economies.
A number of Caribbean states have reported confirmed cases of A(H1N1), which was declared a pandemic by the WHO last week. Venezuela has confirmed at least 45 cases, with no deaths. One person died from the virus in nearby Colombia.
Royal Caribbean chief executive Richard Fain said last week the flu outbreak had “a short, but highly disruptive impact to our operations,” although he added vessels were returning to their original itineraries.
The launch of a Pullmantur cruise targeting Mexican nationals, the Pacific Dream, had to be canceled because of the A(H1N1) outbreak in Mexico, the epicenter of the pandemic.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS