WELLINGTON/TOKYO: A new wave of coronavirus infections is rapidly spreading through Asia, prompting warnings for residents from New Zealand to Japan to take precautions to slow the outbreak and help prevent health care systems from being overwhelmed. The renewed surge in cases, mostly of the BA.4/5 omicron variants, provides a further challenge for authorities grappling with the economic fallout of earlier waves of the pandemic while trying to avoid extending or reintroducing unpopular restrictions. The New Zealand government on Thursday announced free masks and rapid antigen tests as it tries to relieve pressure on the country’s health system, which is dealing with an influx of both COVID-19 and influenza patients during the southern hemisphere winter. “There’s no question the combination of a spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the worst flu season in recent memory and corresponding staff absences are putting health workers and the whole health system under extreme pressure,” Ayesha Verrall, Minister for COVID-19 Response, said in a statement. New Zealand, which has a population of 5.1 million, has almost 69,000 currently infected with the virus. Of those, 765 cases are in hospital, which has caused increases in wait times and surgeries to be canceled. In Japan, new COVID-19 cases have surged to levels not seen since early this year. The government has called on people to be especially careful ahead of an upcoming long weekend and imminent summer school vacations. Japan reported almost 95,000 cases on Wednesday and newly infected patients have increased by 2.14-fold compared to the last week, according to a government spokesperson. “The number of new cases is rising in every prefecture in Japan, and it seems to be rapidly spreading,” Health Minister Shigeyuki Goto said at the start of a committee meeting on dealing with the coronavirus. Tokyo raised its alert level to the highest tier. “Tomorrow, we will hold a meeting of the task force to decide on measures to be taken this summer, taking into consideration the national trend and the opinions of experts,” Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said at a meeting. Like New Zealand, South Korea was praised for its response early in the pandemic, but by Wednesday, daily cases there had tripled in a week to more than 39,000. Officials and experts expect South Korea’s new daily cases to reach 200,000 by around mid-August to end-September and are expanding inoculations of booster shots but not planning renewed curbs. Australia warned it could be hit with its worst COVID-19 outbreak over the next few weeks fueled by the BA.4/5 omicron variants. Authorities said “millions” of new infections could be expected, but ruled out any tough restrictions to contain the spread. “We’ve moved beyond that ... we’re not in the era of lockdowns and those sorts of things,” Federal Health Minister Mark Butler told radio station 2GB on Thursday, even as he urged Australians to consider working from home again. Australian hospital admissions are already hovering near levels seen in the last major omicron outbreak earlier this year with its health system also under pressure from high COVID and influenza numbers. While cases in Thailand have trended down, infections in Indonesia have picked up, reaching the highest since March. New infections and hospitalizations in the Philippines remain low, but the government has warned case numbers could rise at least 20-fold by the end of the month. Manila is urging more people to get their booster shots as health ministry data shows only a quarter of eligible adults have received their first booster as of July 12. Mainland China has reported an average of over 300 locally transmitted COVID-19 daily infections in July, higher than around 70 in June, as Beijing’s strict “dynamic COVID-zero” policy helps keep local clusters in check and has prevented any overwhelming of hospitals.

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s main city, Colombo, was calm on Thursday as people waited for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled to the Maldives to escape a popular uprising that erupted as the country struggles with an economic crisis. Rajapaksa was expected to head to Singapore though his final destination was not clear. His decision on Wednesday to make his ally Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe the acting president triggered more protests, with demonstrators storming parliament and the premier’s office demanding that he quit too. Rajapaksa had repeatedly assured the speaker of parliament that he would step down on Wednesday, but his resignation letter had not arrived as of early Thursday, said an aide to Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena. Police said one person was killed and 84 injured in clashes between riot police and protesters on Wednesday near the parliament building and the prime minister’s office, as people demanded the ouster of both Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe. Police spokesman Nalin Thalduwa said the man who died was a 26-year-old protester who succumbed after he was injured near the prime minister’s office. Protests against the economic crisis have simmered for months and came to a head last weekend when hundreds of thousands of people took over government buildings in Colombo, blaming the powerful Rajapaksa family and allies for runaway inflation, shortages and corruption. The area around parliament was deserted on Thursday morning. Police manned a barricade on the approach road. Nearby, life returned to normal, with shops open and plenty of cars on the road. The night before, an intersection there was packed with several hundred protesters and ambulances regularly ferried the injured out of the area. “We want Ranil to go home,” Malik Perera, a 29-year-old rickshaw driver who said he took part in the protests, said on Thursday. “They have sold the country, we want a good person to take over, until then we won’t stop.” Sitting in a park opposite the entrance to parliament, he showed bruising on his back that he said he received during the clashes. An overnight curfew imposed by the acting president ended early on Thursday with no arrests, Thalduwa said. Rajapaksa, his wife and two bodyguards left the main international airport near Colombo on an air force plane early on Wednesday. Maldives media said he was now waiting for a private jet to fly to Singapore. Reuters could not confirm his travel plans. Government sources and aides said the president’s brothers, former president and prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and former finance minister Basil Rajapaksa, were still in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s parliament is expected to name a new full-time president on July 20, and a top ruling party source told Reuters Wickremesinghe was the party’s first choice, although no decision had been taken. The opposition’s choice is their main leader Sajith Premadasa, the son of a former president.

PORT-AU-PRINCE: A week of gang violence in Haiti’s capital has left at least 89 people dead, a rights group said Wednesday, as soaring prices, fuel shortages and gang warfare accelerate a brutal downward spiral in the security situation in Port-au-Prince. The unrest erupted on July 7 between two rival factions in Cite Soleil, an impoverished and densely populated neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. As gunfire crackled in the slums for nearly a week, police, short-staffed and ill-equipped, did not intervene, while international humanitarian organizations struggled to deliver crucial food supplies and provide medical care to the victims. Thousands of families living in the slums that have sprung up here over the past four decades had no choice but to hide inside their homes, unable to fetch food or water — and, with many houses made of sheet metal, dozens of residents fell victim to stray bullets. “At least 89 people were killed and 16 others are missing” in the past week’s violence, the National Human Rights Defense Network said in a statement, adding that another 74 people sustained gunshot or knife wounds. Mumuza Muhindo, head of the local mission of Doctors Without Borders, on Wednesday urged all combatants to allow medics to safely access Brooklyn, an area of Cite Soleil most affected by the violence. Despite the danger, Muhindo said his group has operated on an average of 15 patients a day since last Friday. He said his colleagues have seen burned and rotting corpses along a road leading to the Brooklyn neighborhood, possibly either gang members killed in the clashes or people trying to flee. “It’s a real battlefield,” Muhindo said. “It’s impossible to estimate how many people have been killed.” Cite Soleil is home to an oil terminal that supplies the capital and all of northern Haiti, so the clashes have had a devastating effect on the region’s economy and people’s daily lives. Gas stations in Port-au-Prince don’t have any gas to sell, causing prices on the black market to skyrocket. Outraged, motorcycle cab drivers built barricades on some of the city’s main roads on Wednesday, and residents were only able to make short trips by motorcycle within their neighborhoods, according to journalists on the scene. That further complicates their already dangerous situation: for the past several years, Haiti has seen a wave of mass kidnappings, as gangs snatch people of all walks of life, including foreigners, off the streets. Emboldened by police inaction, gangs have become increasingly brazen in recent weeks. At least 155 kidnappings took place in the month of June, compared to 118 in May, according to a report released by the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights released Wednesday. The crushing poverty and widespread violence is causing many Haitians to flee to the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares a border, or to the United States. With no money and no visas, many of them risk their lives by boarding makeshift boats in the hopes of reaching Florida. Many end up in Cuba or the Bahamas, or are stopped at sea by American authorities and returned home. More than 1,200 undocumented migrants were sent back to Haiti in the month of June alone, according to government figures. When they return, they have to face the poverty they tried to escape and annual inflation of 20 percent, with economists warning that that it could spike further to 30 percent because of the global reverberations of Russia’s war in Ukraine. “We are seeing a significant increase in hunger in the capital and in the south of the country, with Port-au-Prince hit the hardest,” Jean-Martin Bauer, director of the World Food Program, said on Tuesday. Nearly half Haiti’s 11 million residents already face food shortages, including 1.3 million who are facing a humanitarian emergency, which precedes famine, according to UN calculations. But the violence interferes with efforts to help them also: already the WFP, trying to bypass areas of Port-au-Prince, seeks to deliver aid to the south and north of the country by air and sea.

WASHINGTON: John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN and former White House national security adviser, said on Tuesday that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries. Bolton made the remarks to CNN after the day’s congressional hearing into the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The panel’s lawmakers on Tuesday accused former President Donald Trump of inciting the violence in a last-ditch bid to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. Speaking to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, however, Bolton suggested Trump was not competent enough to pull off a “carefully planned coup d’etat,” later adding: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here but you know (in) other places — it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he (Trump) did.” Tapper asked Bolton which attempts he was referring to. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” Bolton said, before mentioning Venezuela. “It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed,” he said. In 2019, Bolton as national security adviser publicly supported Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido’s call for the military to back his effort to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro, arguing that Maduro’s reelection was illegitimate. Ultimately Maduro remained in power. “I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me (beyond Venezuela),” the CNN anchor said, prompting a reply from Bolton: “I’m sure there is.” Many foreign policy experts have over the years criticized Washington’s history of interventions in other countries, from its role in the 1953 overthrowing of then Iranian nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the Vietnam war, to its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan this century. But it is highly unusual for US officials to openly acknowledge their role in stoking unrest in foreign countries. “John Bolton, who’s served in highest positions in the US government, including UN ambassador, casually boasting about he’s helped plan coups in other countries,” Dickens Olewe, a BBC journalist from Kenya, tweeted.

WASHINGTON: A Virginia judge on Wednesday rejected actress Amber Heard’s demand for a new trial in the defamation case she lost to her former husband Johnny Depp. Heard’s lawyers had asked Judge Penney Azcarate to set aside the jury verdict awarding $10 million to Depp and declare a mistrial, but the judge denied the request. Heard had asked for a new trial because one of the seven jurors was not the man summoned for jury service but his son in a case of mistaken identity. “There is no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing,” Azcarate said, and the juror “met the statutory requirements for service.” “The juror was vetted, sat for the entire jury, deliberated, and reached a verdict,” the judge said. The jury in June found Depp and Heard liable for defamation — but sided more strongly with the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star following an intense six-week trial riding on bitterly contested allegations of domestic abuse. The case, live-streamed to millions, featured lurid and intimate details about the Hollywood celebrities’ private lives. The jury awarded $10 million in damages to Depp after finding that a 2018 newspaper article penned by Heard on her experience of “sexual violence” was defamatory. The 59-year-old Depp sued Heard over a Washington Post op-ed in which she did not name him, but described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The 36-year-old Heard, who had counter-sued, was awarded $2 million.

TOKYO: A Tokyo court Wednesday ordered former executives from the operator of the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant to pay 13.32 trillion yen ($97 billion) for failing to prevent the disaster, plaintiffs said. Four ex-bosses from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) were ordered to pay the damages in a suit brought by shareholders over the nuclear disaster triggered by a massive tsunami in 2011. Plaintiffs emerged from the Tokyo court holding banners reading "shareholders win" and "responsibility recognised". Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling, and said they believed it to be the largest amount of compensation ever awarded in a civil lawsuit in Japan. "Nuclear power plants can cause irreparable damage to human lives and the environment," the plaintiffs said in a separate statement after the ruling. "Executives for firms that operate such nuclear plants bear enormous responsibility, which cannot compare with that of other companies." The shareholders argued that the disaster could have been prevented if TEPCO bosses had listened to research and carried out preventative measures like placing an emergency power source on higher ground. Defendants said the studies they were not credible and the risks unpredictable. But the court ruled nuclear plant operators have "an obligation to prevent severe accidents based on the latest scientific and expert engineering knowledge", and the executives failed to heed credible warnings.

In a statement read to AFP by a TEPCO spokesman, the firm declined to comment on the ruling, saying only: "We again express our heartfelt apology to people in Fukushima and members of society broadly for causing trouble and worry" with the disaster. The damages are intended to cover the costs to TEPCO for dismantling the reactors, compensating affected residents, and cleaning up contamination. The lawsuit is designed so the money will go to TEPCO itself, which the plaintiffs own partially as shareholders. Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, called the decision "historic". "We realise that 13 trillion yen is well beyond their capacity to pay," he told reporters, adding that the plaintiffs expect the men to pay as much as their assets allow. There was no immediate word on whether the executives would appeal, though the plantiffs' legal team insisted "if they have heart to feel regret... they should deeply apologise to residents and follow the judgement without appealing". The size of the award is enormous. As a point of comparison, in 2015 British oil giant BP was ordered to pay $20.8 billion for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in what was described at the time as the highest fine ever imposed on a company in US history.

Three of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's six reactors were operating when a massive undersea quake triggered a devastating tsunami on March 11, 2011. They went into meltdown after their cooling systems failed when waves flooded backup generators, leading to the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Around 12 percent of the Fukushima region was once declared unsafe but no-go zones now cover around two percent, although populations in many towns remain far lower than before. TEPCO has been pursued in the courts by survivors of the disaster as well as shareholders, and six plaintiffs this year took the firm to court over claims they developed thyroid cancer because of radiation exposure. In 2019, a court acquitted three former TEPCO officials in the only criminal trial to stem from the disaster. They were among the four men ordered to pay damages in Wednesday's ruling: former chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro and former president Masataka Shimizu. The men had faced up to five years in prison if convicted of professional negligence resulting in death and injury, but that court ruled that they could not have predicted the scale of the tsunami that triggered the disaster. Kawai said when the shareholder suit was filed in 2012 that senior managers at TEPCO must be made to pay. "You may have to sell your house. You may have to spend your retirement years in misery," he said then. "In Japan, nothing can be resolved and no progress can be made without assigning personal responsibility." TEPCO is currently engaged in a decades-long effort to decommission the plant, a costly and difficult process. No one was killed in the nuclear meltdown, but the tsunami left 18,500 dead or missing.