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Sudan: Bashir, aides charged for plotting the 1989 coup

Agencies
November 13, 2019

Khartoum, Nov 13: Sudanese authorities on Tuesday filed new charges against ousted leader Omar al-Bashir and some of his aides for "plotting" the 1989 coup that brought him to power, the country's protest movement said.

Bashir, who was a brigadier at the time, seized power in an Islamist-backed coup that toppled the then elected government of prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi.

But Bashir himself was ousted by the army in April after months of nationwide protests against his iron-fisted rule of three decades.

He has already been jailed since, but on Tuesday authorities filed a separate case against him and several of his aides for the 1989 coup.

"Arrest warrants have been issued against all military and civilian members who plotted and carried out the 1989 coup," the legal committee of the protest movement Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) said in a statement.

It said arrest warrants and travel bans were issued against Bashir, and other top figures of his regime, such as Nafa Ali Nafa, Ali Osman Taha and Ibrahim al-Sanousi.

The authorities have also issued an arrest warrant against Ali al-Haj, a senior leader from the Islamist Popular Congress Party, which was an ally of Bashir's government.

Like Bashir, Nafa and Taha are already in prison, while Sanousi and Haj are still free.

The FFC said the prosecutors informed them of the new arrest warrants and travel ban against Bashir and others during a meeting earlier on Tuesday.

A source in the prosecutor's office confirmed to AFP that new arrest warrants had been issued against Bashir and his aides.

The Sudanese Professionals Association, which is part of the umbrella protest movement and initially spearheaded the campaign against Bashir, also posted the FFC statement on Twitter.

If found guilty, the accused could face the death penalty or life imprisonment under Sudanese law.

Bashir is also wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the war in Darfur.

He is currently on trial in a Sudanese court for illegally acquiring and using foreign funds.

Sudan is now ruled by a joint civilian and military sovereign council, which is tasked with overseeing the country's transition to a civilian rule as demanded by the protest movement.

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Agencies
March 25,2020

Moscow, Mar 25: An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale struck off Russia's Kuril Islands on Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The magnitude of the quake, which occurred at 2:49 am (UTC), was registered at a depth of 56.7 kilometres, about 219 kilometres southeast of the Russian town of Severo-Kuril'sk, the USGS said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage to the property as a result of the quake.
Further details are awaited.

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Agencies
August 5,2020

Ninety per cent of a sample group of coronavirus-recovered patients from a prominent hospital in China's Wuhan city where the pandemic broke out have reported lung damage and five per cent of them are again in quarantine after testing positive for the virus, according to a media report on Wednesday.

A team at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University led by Peng Zhiyong, director of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, has been conducting follow-up visits with '100 recovered patients' since April.

The first phase of this one-year programme finished in July. The average age of the patients in the study is 59.

According to the first phase results, 90 per cent of the patients' lungs are still in a damaged state, which means their lungs ventilation and gas exchange functions have not recovered to the level of healthy people, state-run Global Times reported.

Peng's team conducted a six-minute walking test with the patients. They found that the recovered patients could only walk 400 metres in six minutes while their healthy peers could walk 500 metres in the same period.

Some recovered patients have to rely on oxygen machines even three months after being discharged from the hospital, Liang Tengxiao, a doctor from the Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, was quoted as saying by the report.

Liang's team is also conducting follow-up visits with recovered patients aged above 65.

The results also showed that antibodies against the novel coronavirus in 10 per cent of the 100 patients have disappeared.

Five per cent of them received negative results in Covid-19 nucleic acid tests but positive results in Immunoglobulin M (IgM) tests, and thus have to be quarantined again, the report said.

IgM is usually the first antibody produced by the immune system when a virus attacks. A positive result in an IgM test usually means that a person has just been infected by the virus.

It is still unclear if this means these people have been infected again.

The 100 patients' immune systems have not fully recovered as they showed a low level of B cells -- - a primary force for killing viruses in the human body -- but a high level of T cells which only recognise viral antigens outside infected cells.

"The results revealed that the patients’ immune systems are still recovering," Peng said.

The patients also suffered from depression and a sense of stigma. Most of the recovered patients told the team that their families were not willing to have dinner with them at the same table, the report said.

Less than half of the recovered patients have returned to work, it said.

The findings are significant as the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan city.

Hubei province for which Wuhan is the provincial capital has reported a total of 68,138 confirmed Covid-19 cases till now. The disease has claimed 4,512 lives in the province, according to the official data.

China reported 27 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 22 locally-transmitted cases, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.

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News Network
April 2,2020

Washington, Apr 2: The total US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 4,000 early Wednesday, more than double the number from three days earlier, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

The number of deaths was 4,076 -- more than twice the 2,010 recorded late Saturday.

More than 40 percent of recorded deaths nationally were in New York state, the Johns Hopkins data showed.

On Tuesday the United States exceeded the number of deaths in China, where the pandemic emerged in December before spreading worldwide.

The number of confirmed US cases has reached 189,510, the most in the world, though Italy and Spain have recorded more fatalities.

After initially downplaying the threat from new coronavirus in the early stages of the US outbreak, President Donald Trump warned of "a very, very painful two weeks" to come for the country on Tuesday.

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