(UN News)* — Now is a time for unity in the global battle to push the COVID-19 pandemic into reverse, not a time to cut the resources of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is spearheading and coordinating the global body’s efforts, said UN chief António Guterres, on Tuesday [14 April 2020].
UN Photo / Jean Marc Ferré | UN Secretary-General António Guterres (left) with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press briefing in Geneva. (file)
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 14 2020 (IPS)* – Vietnam, just south of coastal China, is the 15th most populous country in the world with 97 million people.According to its Ministry of Health (MoH), as of 13 April, there were 262 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 144 recovering or discharged from hospitals, and no deaths.
Poor country, early action
With officials acting quickly to trace and test contacts, as well as quarantine and treat the infected, Vietnam contained the first wave of infections in January. Following a second wave of 41 new cases, Vietnam imposed a national isolation order on 31 March.
The country has already conducted more than 121,000 tests, with more than 75,000 people in quarantine or isolation.
After more than a dozen people, linked to Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, tested positive, authorities have been tracing contacts, advised more than 10,000 people who were at the hospital since March 12 to get tested, and locked down a nearby rural hamlet for 14 days.
In Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”, a stunned Amanda Wingfield enters the second scene repeating an enigmatic question: “Deception? Deception?” Amanda revels in the fantasy world of her genteel girlhood, when she cultivated good looks and witty conversation to entertain numerous gentlemen callers, all of whom went on to become rich and successful, except for her wayward and absent husband.
Marilyn Langlois
She envisions a gentleman caller entering their forlorn apartment any day now and swooping her painfully shy, disabled daughter, Laura, off to financial security and wedded bliss.
As a back-up plan, she sent Laura to typing and shorthand school to acquire her own means of support
Laura’s extreme nervousness caused her to break down the first day of class, and since then she secretly spent class time walking around town alone, to parks and museums, to avoid her mother’s anger.
When Amanda encounters evidence of Laura’s dishonesty, she can’t believe her own daughter, whom she has dutifully raised and fed, could deceive her so monstrously.
In refusing the mask, Trump appears to be a tough, strong male | Image fromWall Street International.
10 April 2020 (Wall Street International)* — I would like to ask you to take a moment, perhaps at home, to stop and rethink some of your narratives.
Let us reflect on some of the social narratives we live by. These stories are usually partly true, and thus very resistant to change, but they can be misleading if they are out of date or encourage us to ignore essential other parts of the bigger picture.
13 April 2020 (RT)* — Senior religious leaders in Sweden have urged the government to provide relief for asylum seekers, sparking anger from native Swedes who claim the calls for Christian charity don’t seem to extend to the country’s own citizens.
Asking big questions and learning from our different experiences are the first steps to a better world beyond coronavirus.
People wait to get food at the Union Gospel Mission in Portland, Oregon, US, on 3 April 2020 | Alex Milan Tracy/SIPA USA/PA Images (Image posted here from openDemocracy’s article).
9 April 2020 (openDemocracy)* — Despite the theme of daily messages and memes we’re receiving, we are not “all in the same boat” – and this pandemic is proof.
Tripoli (IOM)* — More than 200,000 people have been displaced in the year since the conflict reignited in Libya according to new data compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Migrants in a detention centre in Tripoli. Photo IOM/Safa Msehli
Tripoli accounts for approximately 150,000 of recorded new displacements, but people were also forced to leave their homes in other conflict-affected areas in the country, including Murzuq, Sirt and Abu Gurayn.
In this article I want to document a sample of the rapidly increasing evidence of how this coup is taking shape and to reiterate a strategy for defeating it.
The coup was designed to take immediate measures to ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms, only ‘won’ (in name at least) after many centuries of struggle, were stripped away from us and to do it in such a way that people would fearfully accept it.
India unblocks exports of hydroxychloroquine after Trump threatened Modi of possible retaliation if it failed to supply the anti-malarial medicine to the US.
When it came to the threat of retaliation, PM Narendra Modi succumbed to Donald Trump’s pressure. | Photo: EFE
9 April 2020 (teleSUR)* — After Donald Trump threatened India of possible retaliation if it failed to export the anti-malarial medicine to the United States, New Delhi approved the export of Hydroxychloroquine— floated as a plausible COVID-19 treatment drug.
10 April 2020 (Wall Street International)* — Although springtime has arrived this year just when it always does, no one is there to welcome it. No sigh of relief as winter coats and scarves, boots and gloves are exchanged for shorts and t-shirts. Instead we are all protectively sequestered, staring out our windows and doors with amazement that the seasons, the rhythms of life go on without us.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 