North Korea is on the path to “finally defuse” a crisis stemming from its first acknowledged outbreak of COVID-19, the state news agency said yesterday.
The North said that 99.98 percent of its 4.77 million fever patients since late April have fully recovered, but due to an apparent lack of testing, it has not released any figures of those that proved positive.
“The anti-epidemic campaign is improved to finally defuse the crisis completely,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
It added that the North had reported 310 more people with fever symptoms.
The WHO has cast doubts on North Korea’s claims, saying last month it believed the situation was getting worse, not better, amid an absence of independent data.
The North’s declaration could be a prelude to restoring trade long hampered by the pandemic, one analyst said.
“Under the current trend, North Korea could announce in less than a month that its COVID crisis is over and that could be a prelude to resuming cross-border trade,” said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Sejong Institute’s North Korea studies center in South Korea.
Analysts say the authoritarian North has used the pandemic to tighten already strict social controls. Pyongyang blamed its outbreak on “alien things” near its border with the South, urging its people to avoid anything that comes from outside.
Daily new cases of fever in North Korea reported by KCNA have been declining since the reclusive country first acknowledged in mid-May that it was battling an outbreak of COVID-19.
Lacking a public vaccination effort, the North said it was running intensive medical checks nationwide, with daily polymerase chain reaction tests on water collected in borderline areas among the measures.
The North also said it has been developing new methods to better detect the virus and its variants, as well as other infectious diseases, such as monkeypox.
In a market in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, customers flock to Ache Moussa’s stall to have their long plaits smeared with a special paste in an age-old ritual. Each strand of hair, from the root to the end, is slathered in a traditional mixture of cherry seeds, cloves and chebe seeds, the most important ingredient of all. Users say the recipe makes their hair grow longer and more lustrous. Local and natural hair products are gaining popularity across Africa as people turn away from commercial cosmetics. Moussa applies the mixture and shapes the client’s locks into a gourone — a traditional hairstyle consisting of
The US yesterday wrapped up its first multidomain exercise with Japan and South Korea in the East China Sea, a step forward in Washington’s efforts to enhance and lock in its security partnerships with key Asian allies in the face of growing threats from North Korea and China. The three-day Freedom Edge increased the sophistication of previous exercises with simultaneous air and naval drills geared toward improving joint ballistic-missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, surveillance and other skills and capabilities. The exercise, which is expected to expand in years to come, was also intended to improve the countries’ abilities to share missile warnings —
‘ONE FELL SWOOP’: Overturning a landmark ruling that said judges should defer to experts would ‘cause a massive shock to the legal system,’ a dissenting opinion said Prosecutors overstepped in charging Jan. 6, 2021, rioters with obstruction for trying to prevent certification of the 2020 presidential election, the US Supreme Court said on Friday, throwing hundreds of cases into doubt, while another controversial ruling struck down 40 years of legal precedent on federal agencies’ ability to regulate critical issues. The matter was brought to the court through an appeal by former police officer Joseph Fischer, a supporter of former US president Donald Trump who entered the Capitol with hundreds of others in 2021. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said prosecutors’ interpretation of the law would “criminalize
‘APOCALYPTIC : An UN official said that Lebanon was ‘the flashpoint beyond all flashpoints,’ and a conflict that involved it would draw in Syria and other nations Israel on Wednesday said that it does not want war in Lebanon, but could send its neighbor “back to the Stone Age.” The border between the two countries has seen daily exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants since the attack on Israel by Hezbollah’s ally Hamas on Oct. 7 last year, which triggered the war in Gaza. Fears those exchanges could escalate have grown in the past few weeks as cross-border attacks intensified and after Israel revealed it had approved plans for a Lebanon offensive, prompting new threats from Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said