Our Reporter

A Japanese lawmaker died of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) at the age of 53, the first victim from the nation’s parliament, a party official said on Monday.

Yuichiro Hata, who served as transport minister under the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan, was pronounced dead at a Tokyo hospital on Sunday, and COVID-19 was the cause of his death, according to Tetsuro Fukuyama, secretary-general of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, which he belonged to.

Hata’s condition became significantly worse on Sunday while he was on his way to a hospital to receive a coronavirus test after developing fever late on Thursday, Fukuyama told reporters.

He was the son of late former Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata, who took office in 1994.

Meanwhile, Japan on Monday temporarily suspended the entry of foreign nationals until the end of January after detecting cases of the new coronavirus strain discovered in Britain.

Japan has so far confirmed a total of eight cases of a new coronavirus variant identified in Britain.

READ ALSO: Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada dies from COVID-19

Four people have been hospitalised while the other four, who had no symptoms, were sent into quarantine, the health ministry said.

The full ban comes after Japan on Thursday began to impose a temporary ban on new arrivals by non-resident foreign nationals, who have recently visited Britain and South Africa, where another new strain has been identified.

Japan has been facing a resurgence of the coronavirus, with a record high of 3,881 new infections on Saturday.

It also marked the fourth day in a row that a record was set for daily cases.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga urged the public on Friday to have a “quiet” year-end and New Year period to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Japan has so far avoided a virus outbreak on the scale seen in Europe and the U.S., with a total of more than 220,000 known infections and about 3,250 COVID-19-related deaths.

(NAN)

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BioNTech-Pfizer has postponed the delivery of new batches of its coronavirus vaccine to eight European nations including Spain, the Spanish health ministry said on Monday.

The hold-up is due to a “problem in the loading and shipment process” at its plant in Belgium, the health ministry said in a statement, citing the Spanish branch of Pfizer.

The Spanish health ministry did not specify which European nations aside from Spain have been affected.

The delay comes a day after Europe began its COVID-19 immunization program.

Delay ‘linked to’ temperature

Health Minister Salvador Illa told Spanish radio network SER that the delay was due to a problem “linked to the control of the temperature” of the shipments which was “apparently fixed.”

The vaccine, which uses mRNA technology, is extremely sensitive to heat. It is stored at nearly -70 degrees Celsius (-112°F) ahead of shipping, before being sent to distribution centres in specially designed cool boxes filled with dry ice.

On arrival, it must be kept at 2°C to 8°C for it to remain effective for up to five days.

Several German cities reported similar delays in receiving and administering coronavirus BioNTech-Pfizer on Monday after temperature trackers showed that they may not have been cold enough due to inconsistencies in the cold chain.

Tobias Kurth, epidemiologist and director of the Institute of Public Health at Berlin’s Charite hospital in Berlin told DW that Germany was already struggling with the low number of vaccines available. “The issue is that we don’t have enough vaccines available in the first weeks or months. So the mass vaccination will likely start in March or even April,” he said.

READ ALSO: EU to buy 300m doses of BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine

German Health Minister Jens Spahn told public broadcaster ZDF on Monday that the country “was doing everything together with BioNTech-Pfizer” to ramp up domestic production of the coronavirus vaccine in the country.

He said he hoped to get a production facility up and running in Marburg, in the central German state of Hesse, by February or March.

The distribution of an initial 200 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed BioNTech-Pfizer is scheduled to be completed for the EU by September, a spokesman for the EU Commission told news agency Reuters on Monday.

He added that talks were underway to agree the delivery of a further 100 million additional doses which are optional under the contract sealed with the two companies.

(www.newsnow.co.uk)

Our Reporter

A Chinese court handed a four-year jail term on Monday to a citizen-journalist who reported from the central city of Wuhan at the peak of last year’s coronavirus outbreak, on grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” her lawyer said.

Zhang Zhan, 37, the first such person known to have been tried, was among a handful of people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more dire picture of the pandemic epicenter than the official narrative.

“I don’t understand. All she did was say a few true words, and for that, she got four years,” said Shao Wenxia, Zhang’s mother, who attended the trial with her husband.

Zhang’s lawyer Ren Quanniu told Reuters: “We will probably appeal,” adding that the trial at a court in Pudong, a district of the business hub of Shanghai, ended at 12.30 p.m.

“Ms Zhang believes she is being persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech,” he had said before the trial.

Critics say that China deliberately arranged for Zhang’s trial to take place during the Western holiday season so as to minimize Western attention and scrutiny.

“Beijing’s selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year’s suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan,” tweeted Kenneth Roth, the Geneva-based executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been censored, and whistle-blowers such as doctors warned. State media have credited the country’s success in reining in the virus to the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

The virus has spread worldwide to infect more than 80 million people and kill over 1.76 million, paralysing air travel as nations threw up barriers against it that have disrupted industries and livelihoods.

In Shanghai, police enforced tight security outside the court where the trial opened seven months after Zhang’s detention, although some supporters were undeterred.

A man in a wheelchair, who told Reuters he came from the central province of Henan to demonstrate support for Zhang as a fellow Christian, wrote her name on a poster before police arrived to escort him away.

Foreign journalists were denied entry to the court “due to the epidemic”, court security officials said.

READ ALSO: China to overtake US as largest global economy by 2028 — Report

A former lawyer, Zhang arrived in Wuhan on Feb. 1 from her home in Shanghai.

Her short video clips uploaded to YouTube consist of interviews with residents, commentary and footage of a crematorium, train stations, hospitals and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Detained in mid-May, she went on a hunger strike in late June, court documents were seen by Reuters say. Her lawyers told the court that police strapped her hands and force-fed her with a tube. By December, she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach ache, low blood pressure and throat infection.

Requests to the court to release Zhang on bail before the trial and livestream the trial went ignored, her lawyer said.

Other citizen-journalists who had disappeared without explanation included Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.

While there has been no news of Fang, Li re-emerged in a YouTube video in April to say he was forcibly quarantined, while Chen, although released, is under surveillance and has not spoken

(www.newsnow.co.uk)

Unemployment benefits for millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet lapsed overnight as President Donald Trump refused to sign an end-of-year COVID-19 relief and spending bill that had been considered a done deal before his sudden objections.

The fate of the bipartisan package remained in limbo yesterday as Trump continued to demand larger COVID-19 relief checks and complained about “pork” spending.

Without the widespread funding provided by the massive measure, a government shutdown would occur when money runs out at 12.01 am local time tomorrow.

“It’s a chess game and we are pawns,” said Lanetris Haines, a self-employed single mother of three in South Bend, Indiana, who stood to lose her $129 (€105) weekly jobless benefit unless Trump signed the package into law or succeeded in his improbable quest for changes.

Washington has been reeling since Trump turned on the deal after it had won sweeping approval in both houses of Congress and after the White House had assured Republican leaders that Trump would support it.

Instead, he assailed the bill’s plan to provide $600 (€488) COVID-19 relief checks to most Americans — insisting it should be $2,000 (€1628). House Republicans swiftly rejected that idea during a rare Christmas Eve session. But Trump has not been swayed in spite of the nation being in the grip of a pandemic.

“I simply want to get our great people $2000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill,” Trump tweeted Saturday from Palm Beach, Florida, where he is spending the holiday. “Also, stop the billions of dollars in ‘pork’”.

President-elect Joe Biden called on Trump to sign the bill immediately as the midnight Saturday deadline neared for two federal programmes providing unemployment aid.

“It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority,” Biden said in a statement. He accused Trump of an “abdication of responsibility” that has “devastating consequences”.

“I’ve been talking to people who are scared they’re going to be kicked out from their homes, during the Christmas holidays, and still might be if we don’t sign this bill,” said Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat.

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Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has calculated that 11 million people would lose aid from the programmes immediately without additional relief; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.

Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the number may be closer to 14 million because joblessness has spiked since Thanksgiving.

“All these folks and their families will suffer if Trump doesn’t sign the damn bill,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, tweeted Wednesday.

How and when people would be affected by the lapse depended on the state they lived in, the programme they were relying on, and when they applied for benefits.

In some states, people on regular unemployment insurance would continue to receive payments under a programme that extends benefits when the jobless rate surpassed a certain threshold, Stettner said.

 

About 9.5 million people, however, had been relying on the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance programme that expired altogether Saturday. That programme made unemployment insurance available to freelancers, gig workers and others who were normally not eligible. After receiving their last checks, those recipients would not be able to file for more aid, Stettner said.

While payments could be received retroactively, any gap would mean more hardship and uncertainty for Americans who had already grappled with bureaucratic delays, often depleting much of their savings to stay afloat while waiting for payments to kick in.

The bill, which was in Florida awaiting Trump’s signature, would also activate a weekly $300 (€244) federal supplement to unemployment payments.