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Thousands of Cubans took to the streets in Havana to lash out at the worsening conditions in the country under the communist regime—the biggest protest in decades—prompting the country’s president to call on “revolutionary” citizens to counter the protesters.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who also heads the Communist Party, addressed the country and blamed the U.S. for stoking the anger, according to the Washington Post. 

SOCIALIST SANDERS MUM ON PROTESTS

“The order to fight has been given – into the street, revolutionaries!” he said in an address, according to the BBC.

Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus cases, as it suffers the consequences of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. The country also reported 7,000 daily COVID-19 infections on Sunday and 47 deaths.

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, took to Twitter to say the “U.S. supports freedom of expression and assembly across Cuba, and would strongly condemn any violence or targeting of peaceful protesters who are exercising their universal rights.” 

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel is seen during a demonstration held by citizens to demand improvements in the country, in San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba, on July 11, 2021. (Photo by Yamil LAGE / AFP) (Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images)

Many of the protesters in the town of San Antonio de los Banos were young and hurled insults at Diaz-Canel. They shouted that they are “not afraid.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, the son of a Cuban immigrant, took to Twitter on Sunday in support of the thousands of protesters.

Cruz reposted a video that claimed to show dozens in front of the Communist Party Headquarters and said the current regime will be “consigned to the dustbin of history.”

“It has brutalized & denied freedom to generations of Cubans, and forced my family & so many others to flee,” he tweeted. “The American people stand squarely with the men & women of Cuba and their noble fight for liberty.”

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In 2009, a year after Raul Castro formally replaced Fidel as Cuba’s president, Díaz-Canel became minister of higher education. In 2012 he rose to one of Cuba’s vice presidencies and soon thereafter was named first vice president.

DEM SOCIALISTS ALSO MUM ON PROTESTS 

“We are calling on all the revolutionaries in the country, all the Communists, to hit the streets wherever there is an effort to produce these provocations,” Diaz-Canel said, according to Reuters.

Witnesses told the Post that tear gas was deployed and dozens of protesters were detained. The paper said there were multiple people wounded.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/world/cuban-president-urges-countrys-revolutionary-citizens-to-counter-protesters

A student washes her hands before entering a classroom at a school in Blantyre, Malawi, in March 2021. Top scientists say that many African countries, including Malawi, appear to have already arrived at a substantially less threatening stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Joseph Mizere/Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images


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A student washes her hands before entering a classroom at a school in Blantyre, Malawi, in March 2021. Top scientists say that many African countries, including Malawi, appear to have already arrived at a substantially less threatening stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Joseph Mizere/Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

Most important, he says, the finding suggests that it has now been months since Malawi entered something akin to what many countries still struggling with massive omicron waves consider the holy grail: the endemic stage of the pandemic, in which the coronavirus becomes a more predictable seasonal bug like the flu or common cold.

In fact, top scientists in Africa say Malawi is just one of many countries on the continent that appear to have already reached — if not quite endemicity — at least a substantially less threatening stage, as evidenced by both studies of the population’s prior exposure to the coronavirus and its experience with the omicron variant.

The Malawi mystery

To understand how these scientists have come to hold this view, it helps to first consider what the pandemic has looked like in a country such as Malawi.

Before the omicron wave, Malawi didn’t seem to have been hit too hard by COVID-19. Even by July of last year, when Malawi had already gone through several waves of the coronavirus, Jambo says it appeared that only a tiny share of Malawians had been infected.

“Probably less than 10% [of the population], if we look at the number of individuals that have tested positive,” says Jambo.

The number of people turning up in hospitals was also quite low — even during the peak of each successive COVID-19 wave in Malawi.

Jambo knew this likely masked what had really been going on in Malawi. The country’s population is very young — it has a median age of around 18, he notes. This suggests most infections prior to omicron’s arrival were probably asymptomatic ones unlikely to show up in official tallies. People wouldn’t have felt sick enough to go to the hospital. And coronavirus tests were in short supply in the country and therefore were generally used only for people with severe symptoms or who needed tests for travel.

So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.

“There was absolutely no way we would have guessed that this thing had spread that much,” says Jambo.

Similar studies have been done in other African countries, including Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa, adds Jambo. “And practically in every place they’ve done this, the results are exactly the same” — very high prevalence of infection detected well before the arrival of the omicron variant.

Jambo thinks the findings from the blood samples in Malawi explain a key feature of the recent omicron wave there: The number of deaths this time has been a fraction of the already low number during previous waves.

Less than 5% of Malawians have been fully vaccinated. So Jambo says their apparent resistance to severe disease was likely built up as a result of all the prior exposure to earlier variants.

“Now we have had the beta variant — we have had the delta variant and the original,” notes Jambo. “It seems like a combination of those three has been able to neutralize this omicron variant in terms of severe disease.”

A promising pattern

Beachgoers play soccer in Durban, South Africa, during the omicron surge in December 2021.

Rajesh Jantilal/AFP via Getty Images


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Beachgoers play soccer in Durban, South Africa, during the omicron surge in December 2021.

Rajesh Jantilal/AFP via Getty Images

And now that the omicron wave has peaked across Africa, country after country there seems to have experienced the same pattern: a huge rise in infections that has not been matched by a commensurate spike in hospitalizations and death.

Shabir Madhi is a prominent vaccinologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

“I think we should draw comfort from the fact that this has been the least severe wave in the country,” he says.

The most likely reason, he says, is that — like Malawi — South Africa gained immunity through prior infections, he says.

One difference is that in South Africa’s case, this immunity came at a high price. South Africa’s population is substantially older than Malawi’s, and during the delta wave last summer, hospitals in the country were swamped.

Still, the upshot, says Mahdi, is that “we’ve come to a point where at least three-quarters — and now after omicron, probably 80% — of South Africans have developed immunity and at least protection against severe disease and death.”

Will the protection last?

Of course, whether Africa is truly now in a less dangerous position depends on a “key question,” says Emory University biologist Rustom Antia. “How long does the immunity that protects us from getting ill last?” Antia has been studying what would need to happen for the coronavirus to become endemic.

But Mahdi says there’s reason to be optimistic on this front. Research suggests this type of protection could last at least a year. So Mahdi says in African countries — and likely in many other low- and middle-income countries with similar experiences of COVID-19 — the takeaway is already clear: “I think we’ve reached a turning point in this pandemic. What we need to do is learn to live with the virus and get back to as much of a normal society as possible.”

What does that look like? For one thing, says Mahdi, “we should stop chasing just getting an increase in the number of doses of vaccines that are administered.” Vaccination efforts should be more tightly targeted on the vulnerable: “We need to ensure that at least 90% of people above the age of 50 are vaccinated.”

Similarly, when the next variant comes along, Mahdi says, it will be important not to immediately panic over the mere rise in infections. This rise will be inevitable, and any policy that’s intended to stop it with economically disruptive restrictions, such as harsh COVID-19 lockdowns, isn’t just unnecessarily damaging — “it’s fanciful thinking.” Instead, officials should keep an eye out for the far more unlikely scenario of a rise in severe illness and death.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/28/1072591923/africa-may-have-reached-the-pandemics-holy-grail

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia, the de-facto leader of oil producer group OPEC, to delay its decision on oil output by a month, the kingdom said in a statement.

The Saudis declined, and in early October OPEC+ — which includes non-OPEC oil exporters like Russia — announced its largest supply cut since 2020, to the tune of 2 million barrels per day starting from November. That means tighter supplies and higher prices at a time of already high inflation and worries of a global recession, which angered U.S. lawmakers who are now calling for a “reevaluation” of relations with the Saudi kingdom.

Notably, the White House’s request would have delayed the decision until after the U.S. midterm elections.

In a statement dated Wednesday, the Saudi government defended its move and said all OPEC decisions are based on economic forecasts and needs.

“The Government of the Kingdom clarified through its continuous consultation with the US Administration that all economic analyses indicate that postponing the OPEC+ decision for a month, according to what has been suggested, would have had negative economic consequences,” the statement read.

Responding to the Saudi claims, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby reframed the exchange and accused the kingdom of aiding Russia’s revenues and hampering the impact of Western sanctions on Moscow for its war in Ukraine.

“In recent weeks, the Saudis conveyed to us – privately and publicly – their intention to reduce oil production, which they knew would increase Russian revenues and blunt the effectiveness of sanctions. That is the wrong direction,” Kirby said. “We presented Saudi Arabia with analysis to show that there was no market basis to cut production targets, and that they could easily wait for the next OPEC meeting to see how things developed.”

Kirby said, without giving examples, that other OPEC members opposed Saudi Arabia’s move, and reiterated the Biden administration’s vow to reexamine its relationship with Riyadh.

“Other OPEC nations communicated to us privately that they also disagreed with the Saudi decision, but felt coerced to support Saudi’s direction,” he said. “As the President has said, we are reevaluating our relationship with Saudi Arabia in light of these actions, and will continue to look for signs about where they stand in combatting Russian aggression.”

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said there would be “consequences” for Saudi Arabia’s oil production cut, which the kingdom is carrying out in coordination with other OPEC members and non-OPEC allies like Russia. Many in Washington saw this as a snub and a blatant display of siding with Moscow.

U.S. lawmakers have urged the cutting of military sales to Saudi Arabia, America’s top weapons buyer, and are encouraging the passing of antitrust legislation that would go after OPEC.

Riyadh rejected the accusations of making any politically motivated moves.

“The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would first like to express its total rejection of these statements that are not based on facts, and which are based on portraying the OPEC+ decision out of its purely economic context. This decision was taken unanimously by all member states of the OPEC+ group,” the Saudi government statement said.

“The Kingdom affirms that the outcomes of the OPEC+ meetings are adopted through consensus among member states, and that they are not based on the unilateral decision by a single country. These outcomes are based purely on economic considerations that take into account maintaining balance of supply and demand in the oil markets.”

The developments spotlight the growing tensions in the nearly 80-year-old U.S.-Saudi relationship, as both parties suggest the other is failing to uphold their end of the bargain in a friendship broadly based on the principle of energy for security.

They also highlight how little control Washington has on Saudi and OPEC energy policy.

“The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US has soured after OPEC+ opted to cut oil quotas – Saudi Arabia is clearly leaning away from the US orbit,” James Swanston, Middle East and North Africa economist at London-based consultancy Capital Economics, said in a client note Thursday.

Still, the Saudi government stressed the continued importance of its relationship with the U.S.

“The Kingdom affirms that it [views] its relationship with the United States of America as a strategic one that serves the common interests of both countries,” it said in its statement.

“The Kingdom also stresses the importance of building on the solid pillars upon which the Saudi-US relationship had stood over the past eight decades. These pillars include mutual respect, enhancing common interests, actively contributing to preserve regional and international peace and security, countering terrorism and extremism, and achieving prosperity for the peoples of the region.”

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/biden-admin-asked-saudi-arabia-to-postpone-opec-cut-by-a-month-saudis-say.html