Day: May 15, 2022

BERLIN, GERMANY — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Sunday with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Berlin, where the two men discussed plans to work together to ensure Ukrainian food exports reach consumers in Africa and Asia.

The two are attending a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, called to discuss the situation in the ground on Ukraine and to coordinate efforts to provide Ukraine with the humanitarian assistance and the weapons it needs to defend itself against Russia.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has caused food prices to rise and raised the threat of famine in many parts of the world. Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven countries meeting in Germany Saturday called on the Russian government to end its blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports to free up exports of critically needed Ukrainian grain, fertilizer and other agricultural products.

Blinken and the NATO foreign ministers also plan to discuss Finland’s leaders’ decision to apply to join NATO without delay. The United States has said it would support both Finland and Sweden’s applications to join the transatlantic security alliance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto in a phone call initiated by Finland Saturday that any attempt by Helsinki to join NATO would harm bilateral relations. Finland’s leaders cite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a threat to their country’s security, since the Finland and Russia share a 1,340-kilometer border.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayiip Erdogan has also expressed concerns about Finland and Sweden joining the alliance. Senior U.S. officials says they are working to clarify Turkey’s position.

Source: Voice of America

DAKAR, SENAGAL — Senegal President Macky Sall called Sunday for the creation of a pan-African credit ratings agency, saying that the “very arbitrary” nature of the system of assessment by international organizations made it more expensive for African countries to borrow on global debt markets.

Sall, who is currently head of the African Union, told private radio RFM that there was a need — “given the injustices, the sometimes very arbitrary ratings” by international agencies — “to have a pan-African” body.

His comments came on the eve of the Dakar Economic Conference 2022, organized by African economists.

“In 2020, when all economies were suffering fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, 18 of the 32 African economies rated by at least one of the big agencies saw their ratings downgraded,” he said.

That meant that 56% of African countries saw their credit ratings downgraded, compared with 31% of countries globally over the same period, Sall argued.

“Studies show that at least 20% of the ratings criteria for African countries are based on more subjective factors, cultural or linguistic ones for example, which bear no relation to the parameters used for measuring economic stability,” he said.

As a result, “the perception of investment risk in Africa is always much higher than the real risk. That means our insurance premiums are higher and that makes our credit more expensive.”

African countries continued to pay much higher interest rates as a result of this unfair system, Sall said.

Source: Voice of America

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Sunday declared 10 people saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including an anti-Nazi Dutch priest murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and a French hermit monk assassinated in Algeria.

The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair due to knee and leg pain, was driven to the altar at the start of the ceremony, which was attended by more than 50,000 people in St Peter’s Square. It was the one of the largest gatherings there since the easing of COVID-19 restrictions earlier this year.

Francis limped to a chair behind the altar but stood to individually greet some participants. He read his homily while seated but stood during other parts of the Mass and read his homily in a strong voice, often going off script, and walked to greet cardinals afterwards.

Francis read the canonization proclamations while seated in front of the altar and 10 cheers went up in the crowd as he officially declared each of 10 saints.

Titus Brandsma, who was a member of the Carmelite religious order and served as president of the Catholic university at Nijmegen, began speaking out against Nazi ideology even before World War II and the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

During the Nazi occupation, he spoke out against anti-Jewish laws. He urged Dutch Catholic newspapers not to print Nazi propaganda.

He was arrested in 1942 and held in Dutch jails before being taken to Dachau, near Munich, where he was subjected to biological experimentation and killed by lethal injection the same year at the age of 61. He is considered a martyr, having died because of what the Church calls “in hatred of the faith.”

The other well-known new saint is Charles de Foucauld, a 19th century French nobleman, soldier, explorer, and geographer who later experienced a personal conversion and became a priest, living as a hermit among the poor Berbers in North Africa.

He published the first Tuareg-French dictionary and translated Tuareg poems into French. De Foucauld was killed during a kidnapping attempt by Bedouin tribal raiders in Algeria in 1916.

The other eight who were declared saints on Sunday included Devasahayam Pillai, who was killed for converting to Christianity in 18th century India, and Cesar de Bus, a 16th century French priest who founded a religious order.

The others were two Italian priests, three Italian nuns, and a French nun, all of whom who lived between the 16th and 20th centuries.

“These saints favored the spiritual and social growth of their nations and the whole human family, while sadly in the world today, distances are widening, tensions and wars are increasing,” Francis said after the Mass.

World leaders had to be “protagonists of peace and not of war,” he said in an apparent reference to Ukraine.

Miracles have been attributed to all the new saints.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that only God performs miracles, but that saints, who are believed to be with God in heaven, intercede on behalf of people who pray to them.

Several other Catholics killed in Nazi concentration camps have already been declared saints. They include Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe and Sister Edith Stein, a German nun who converted from Judaism. Both were killed in the Auschwitz camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Source: Voice of America

MUTASA, ZIMBABWE — Zimbabwe’s government says religious beliefs, topography and school closures are hampering efforts to contain a measles outbreak which has claimed at least 20 lives and infected hundreds of other people in the eastern part of the country. As The World Health Organization says the country must intensify its surveillance system and vaccinate all children.

Dr. Cephas Fonte, the Mutasa district medical officer where the measles outbreak was discovered last month, says more than 100 children are being treated for the infectious viral disease which causes a fever and a red rash. Fonte says logistical factors have impacted the response time.
“Mutasa is a mountainous area, so some areas are hard to reach. We have some of our friends who are religious objectors, so it has been hard to break through to them, though they are slowly responding now. I think by the end of next week, we would have achieved something,” he said.

He also says school closures have posed a challenge but that with schools reopening now…

“We are now reaching those children while they are clustered at one place, which becomes faster for us,” he said.

Dr. Alex Gasasira heads the World Health Organization’s country office in Zimbabwe. He says the U.N. body has been working with the government to ensure that the disease is contained through immunization.
“The vaccine is the best prevention. We are also strengthening surveillance, ensuring parents, community members are aware and they report any child who has any symptoms suggesting measles. We are also ensuring that opportunities for vaccination are enhanced. This we should do throughout the country not just in the affected communities because we know that measles is very, very transmissible; it spreads very, very fast,” he said.

Tariro Mhando, a public health officer from the University of Zimbabwe, has been deployed to investigate why there is an outbreak of the measles, a disease which was last recorded in the country more than 10 years ago.
“What we found out is most cases, the deaths that were recorded are not vaccinated and we have most cases in unvaccinated as well. And only the few that have [been vaccinated] have mild symptoms,” she said.

The government says it hopes to conduct immunizations for measles throughout Zimbabwe in the coming weeks to contain the disease.

Source: Voice of America