LONDON: Britain let down its citizens by leaving the nation ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic because of significantly flawed planning and failures by ministers and scientific experts, a public inquiry concluded in a scathing report on Thursday.
Britain recorded one of the world’s highest number of fatalities from COVID with more than 230,000 deaths reported by December 2023, while the nation’s finances are still suffering from the economic consequences.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered an inquiry in May 2021, and its first report, which examined the nation’s preparedness for an outbreak, was damning.
“Had the UK been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of the financial and human cost may have been avoided,” the report by the inquiry chair, former judge Heather Hallett, said in the report.
“The inquiry has no hesitation in concluding that the processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil service failed their citizens.”
The inquiry found there had been a “lack of adequate leadership” with “groupthink” clouding expert advice. Ministers had not been given a broad enough range of opinions, and then had failed to sufficiently challenge what they did receive.
A flawed 2011 strategy, which had underpinned the nation’s preparations for such an emergency, had prepared for only one type of pandemic — influenza.
It was outdated, had focused on dealing with the impact of an outbreak rather than trying to prevent its spread, and had not taken into account the economic and social impact, the report said. That strategy was virtually abandoned on its first encounter with COVID.
“The Secretaries of State for Health ... who adhered to the strategy, the experts and officials who advised them to do so, and the governments of the devolved nations that adopted it, all bear responsibility for failing to have these flaws examined and rectified,” the report said.
Radical reform
Hallett made 10 recommendations, saying preparation for a civil emergency should be treated the same way as a threat from a hostile state.
“There must be radical reform. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering,” she said in her introduction to the report.
Her inquiry’s first module has only examined Britain’s preparedness, and later reports will provide assessments of the more politically charged issues of decision-making during the pandemic against a backdrop of widespread accusations of government incompetence.
Johnson himself was forced from office in July 2022, with revelations of parties during COVID lockdowns among the many scandals that ended his premiership. A parliamentary committee later concluded he had misled lawmakers over the parties.
Rishi Sunak, the finance minister during the pandemic who later became prime minister, was also fined for breaking lockdown rules at the time.
“We know that for lives to be saved in the future, lessons must be learnt from the mistakes of the past,” Brenda Doherty said on behalf of the campaign group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK ahead of the report’s release.
“Sadly, nobody knows the true cost of the government’s failure to prepare as we do.”
British public were failed by flawed planning for COVID pandemic, inquiry finds
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British public were failed by flawed planning for COVID pandemic, inquiry finds
- Britain recorded one of the world’s highest number of fatalities from COVID with more than 230,000 deaths reported by December 2023
- Nation’s finances are still suffering from economic consequences
Paris Holocaust memorial, synagogues hit with paint
- “I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” Retailleau said
- No arrests have been made
PARIS: France’s Holocaust memorial, two synagogues and a restaurant in central Paris were vandalized with green paint overnight, according to police sources on Saturday, prompting condemnation from government and city officials.
“I am deeply disgusted by these heinous acts targeting the Jewish community,” French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on X.
No arrests have been made.
Retailleau last week called for “visible and dissuasive” security measures at Jewish-linked sites amid concerns over possible anti-Semitic acts.
In a separate message seen by AFP, the interior minister on Friday had again ordered heightened surveillance ahead of the upcoming Jewish Shavuot holiday.
The French Jewish community, one of the largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials since the Gaza war erupted on October 7, 2023.
“Anti-Semitic acts account for more than 60 percent of anti-religious acts, and the Jewish community is particularly vulnerable,” Retailleau said in the message seen by AFP.
Paris authorities would be lodging a complaint over the paint incident, said the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
“I condemn these acts of intimidation in the strongest possible terms. Anti-Semitism has no place in our city or in our Republic,” she said.
In May 2024, red hand graffiti was painted beneath the wall at the memorial in central Paris honoring individuals who saved Jews from persecution during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation of France.
US judge prevents Trump from invalidating 5,000 Venezuelans’ legal documents
- The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued
- TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster
NEW YORK: A federal judge prevented the Trump administration from invalidating work permits and other documents granting lawful status to about 5,000 Venezuelans, a subset of the nearly 350,000 whose temporary legal protections the US Supreme Court last week allowed to be terminated.
US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco in a Friday night ruling concluded that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likely exceeded her authority when she in February invalidated those documents while more broadly ending the temporary protected status granted to the Venezuelans.
The US Supreme Court on May 19 lifted an earlier order Chen issued that prevented the administration as part of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda from terminating deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program.
But the high court stated specifically it was not preventing any Venezuelans from still challenging Noem’s related decision to invalidate documents they were issued pursuant to that program that allowed them to work and live in the United States.
Such documents were issued after the US Department of Homeland Security in the final days of Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure extended the TPS program for the Venezuelans by 18 months to October 2026, an action Noem then moved to reverse.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
Lawyers for several Venezuelans and the advocacy group National TPS Alliance asked Chen to recognize the continuing validity of those documents, saying without them thousands of migrants could lose their jobs or be deported.
Chen in siding with them said nothing in the statute that authorized the Temporary Protected Status program allowed Noem to invalidate the documents.
Chen, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, noted the administration estimated only about 5,000 of the 350,000 Venezuelans held such documents. “This smaller number cuts against any contention that the continued presence of these TPS holders who were granted TPS-related documents by the Secretary would be a toll on the national or local economies or a threat to national security,” Chen wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Chen ruled hours after the US Supreme Court in a different case allowed Trump’s administration to end the temporary immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants under a different Biden-era program.
India’s military chief admits jets downed in recent clashes with Pakistan
- Islamabad previously claimed to have shot down 6 Indian jets in early May
- Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart, says expert
NEW DELHI: India’s military chief Gen. Anil Chauhan has confirmed for the first time that the Indian Air Force lost jets in clashes with Pakistan in May.
Earlier this month, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said his country shot down six Indian jets, an assertion that Delhi had refrained from commenting on.
Chauhan, chief of defense staff of the Indian Armed Forces, is the first Indian official to make the most direct admission over the fate of the country’s fighter jets during the conflict that erupted on May 7.
“What is important is that, not the jet being downed, but why they were being downed,” Chauhan told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Saturday, while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
“The good part is that we are able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it and then implement it again after two days and fly all our jets again, targeting at long range.”
Pakistan’s claims of shooting down six Indian combat aircraft were “absolutely incorrect,” Chauhan said, without specifying how many jets India lost.
India and Pakistan recently saw their worst clashes in half a century, during which both sides traded air, drone and missile strikes, as well as artillery and small arms fire along their shared border.
It was triggered by a gruesome attack on tourists near the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir on April 22, in which 26 people — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — were killed.
Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor for National Security Studies at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, said that the Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart.
“Initially, Indians were surprised. Maybe they underestimated the capacity of the Pakistani Air Force,” Karnad told Arab News on Saturday.
“I think what was surprising was that India did not use the airborne early warning (and) control system, the NETRA, which Pakistan has used very well,” he said. “I’m not sure how much the Indian Air Force expected this kind of tactical innovation. So, this is something that the Indian Air Force realized very quickly.”
According to Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, a retired officer of the Indian Air Force, Pakistan benefited from its Chinese-made weapons during the early May conflict.
“This brings us to the lessons which underscore that India was not fighting Pakistan on one front but two countries: Pakistan and China,” Kak told Arab News.
“Every single superior technology, capability, operationally and tactically, or in strategic terms, are made available to Pakistan. That must concern us: What kind of force structure we must have and what kind of capabilities we must build against the combo.”
Death toll rises to 17 in Indonesia quarry collapse as search continues
- The victims were trapped in the rubble when the Gunung Kuda quarry in Cirebon district collapsed
- By Saturday afternoon, rescuers had retrieved 16 bodies
CIREBON, Indonesia: The death toll from the collapse of a stone quarry in Indonesia’s West Java province has risen to at least 17, with eight people still missing, officials said Saturday.
The victims were trapped in the rubble when the Gunung Kuda quarry in Cirebon district collapsed on Friday. A dozen survivors were found by rescuers.
By Saturday afternoon, rescuers had retrieved 16 bodies, while one of the survivors died in the hospital, said local police chief Sumarni. She said rescuers are searching for eight people still believed to be trapped
“The search operation has been hampered by bad weather, unstable soil and rugged terrain,” said Sumarni who goes by a single name like many Indonesians.
She said the cause of the collapse is still under investigation, and police have been questioning six people, including the owner of the quarry.
Local television reports showed emergency personnel, along with police, soldiers and volunteers, digging desperately in the quarry in a steep limestone cliff, supported by five excavators, early Saturday.
West Java Governor Dedi Mulyadi said in a video statement on Instagram that he visited the quarry before he was elected in February and considered it dangerous.
“It did not meet the safety standard elements for its workers,” Mulyadi said, adding that at that time, “I didn’t have any capacity to stop it.”
On Friday, Mulyadi said that he had ordered the quarry shut, as well as four other similar sites in West Java.
Illegal or informal resource extraction operations are common in Indonesia, providing a tenuous livelihood to those who labor in conditions with a high risk of injury or death.
Landslides, flooding and tunnel collapses are just some of the hazards associated with them. Much of the processing of sand, rocks or gold ore also involves the use of highly toxic mercury and cyanide by workers using little or no protection.
Last year, a landslide triggered by torrential rains struck an unauthorized gold mining operation on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, killing at least 15 people.
Indonesian NGOs demand Israel be held accountable over atrocities in Gaza
- No health facility operational in northern Gaza as of Friday
- Palestinians receiving inadequate aid after prolonged blockade
JAKARTA: Indonesian civil society organizations are urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on Gaza, as Tel Aviv’s latest military onslaught on the besieged enclave pushed the territory’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse.
All hospitals in northern Gaza were out of service as of Friday, according to Jakarta-based NGO Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, which funds the Indonesia Hospital located in the Gazan city of Beit Lahiya.
Al-Awda Hospital — the only remaining facility providing health services in north Gaza — evacuated its patients on Thursday following orders from the Israeli military, which launched a wave of new attacks earlier this month across the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and forcing most public facilities in the area to close.
“Even after various condemnations and warnings, Israel the colonizer continues to commit crimes across the Gaza Strip,” said Dr. Hadiki Habib, chairman of MER-C’s executive committee.
“MER-C’s stance is in line with the Indonesian constitution, in which we do not recognize colonization in any shape or form … Israel’s colonization and crimes against humanity (in Gaza) must be held accountable at the international level.”
Indonesia is a staunch supporter of Palestine, and sees Palestinian statehood as being mandated by its own constitution, which calls for the abolition of colonialism.
The Indonesia Hospital was one of the first targets hit when Israel began its assault on Gaza, in which it regularly targets medical facilities.
Attacks on health centers, medical personnel and patients constitute war crimes under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Israel’s latest offensive comes after a two-month blockade on the enclave after Tel Aviv unilaterally broke a ceasefire with the Palestinian group Hamas in March.
It is a continuation of Israel’s onslaught of Gaza that began in October 2023 and has killed more than 54,300 Palestinians and wounded more than 124,000. The deadly attacks have also put 2 million more at risk of starvation after Israeli forces destroyed most of the region’s infrastructure and buildings and blocked humanitarian aid.
Aid only recently began to enter the besieged territory, although only in limited quantities.
“The suffering of the people is massive due to starvation, and there is limited aid because of the blockade,” Habib said. “A humanitarian crisis must not be used as a transactional tool. Stop this war and open the food blockade in Gaza. We will continue to voice this demand.”
Various scholars and human rights organizations have said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including Amnesty International and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.
“Zionist Israel’s crimes in Gaza must be held accountable. They must be put on trial and punished for genocide. There is no longer doubt that their crimes constitute genocide,” Muhammad Anshorullah, who heads the executive committee of the Jakarta-based Aqsa Working Group, told Arab News on Saturday. “Netanyahu’s regime must be arrested, tried and punished, just like how the Allied powers arrested, tried and punished Nazi elites through the Nuremberg Trials. There is nothing more urgent globally aside from stopping the genocide in Gaza.”
