12-01-2022

In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch
effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he's doing well
three days after the highly experimental surgery.
Photo : AP
GD-72/22 (5x3)
GD-62/22 (10x3)
i
EU ends omicron travel ban on
flights from southern Africa
BRUSSELS : The European Union ended travel restrictions
on flights from southern Africa on Monday well over a month
after imposing them to in hopes of containing the spread of
the omicron variant of the coronavirus, reports UNB.
The highly contagious variant was first discovered in
southern Africa in late November and the 27-nation bloc
restricted travel for visitors from that region, where the
variant brought on a sudden surge of infections.
Omicron has since become the dominant variant and is
responsible in the EU and many other nations for a
unprecedent increase in infections. That made the travel ban
from southern Africa a moot point.
The French EU presidency announced Monday that the 27
member states agreed "to lift the emergency break to allow
air travel to resume with southern African countries."
It insisted that travelers from South Africa and neighboring
countries will still be subject to the other health measures on
vaccinations and recovery from the disease that other thirdnation
visitors also face.
N. Korea fires possible
missile into sea amid
stalled talks
SEOUL : North Korea on Tuesday fired what appeared to be
a ballistic missile into its eastern sea, its second weapons
launch in a week, the militaries of South Korea and Japan
said.
This month's launches follow a series of weapons tests in
2021 that underscored how North Korea continues to expand
its military capabilities during a self-imposed pandemic
lockdown and deadlocked nuclear talks with the United
States.
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea likely
fired a single ballistic missile from an inland area to its
eastern sea, and that the South Korean and U.S. militaries
were analyzing the launch. It didn't immediately say how far
the weapon flew.
Japan's Prime Minister's Office and Defense Ministry also
said the weapon was possibly a ballistic missile, but officials
didn't immediately provide more details.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said officials were checking
the safety of ships and aircraft around Japan, but there were
no immediate reports of disruptions or damage.
"It is extremely regrettable that North Korea has continued
to fire" missiles so soon after the U.N. Security Council
discussed its response to the North's earlier launch, Kishida
said.
The Offices of Guam Homeland Security and Civil Defense
said they were monitoring the reports of the launch but that
no immediate threat was assessed for Guam, a major U.S.
military hub in the Pacific.
The launch came six days after North Korea fired a ballistic
missile into the sea in what it later described as a successful
test of a hypersonic missile, a type of weaponry it claimed to
have first tested in September.
Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North
Korean Studies in Seoul, said North Korea may have tested
its purported hypersonic missile again in response to the
South Korean military playing down last week's test.
Seoul's Defense Ministry said after that test that North
Korea had exaggerated its capabilities and had tested a
conventional ballistic missile the South was capable of
intercepting. The ministry said it doubts that North Korea
has acquired the technologies needed for a hypersonic
weapon.
Michael Parks, Pulitzer winning
foreign correspondent, dies
LOS ANGELES : Michael Parks, the former top editor of the
Los Angeles Times who spent 25 years as a foreign
correspondent and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on
the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, has died. He
was 78, reports UNB.
Parks died of kidney failure and a heart attack at
Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California, late Saturday
after suddenly falling ill at home earlier in the day, his son,
Christopher Parks, told the Los Angeles Times.
Parks was foreign correspondent for the Times and the
Baltimore Sun and covered some of the 20th century's most
momentous events, including the Vietnam War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
After nearly three years as top editor at the Times, he
taught at the University of Southern California's Annenberg
School for Communication and Journalism for 20 years and
served two stints as director of its journalism school.
"His remarkable life and career remain a testament to
journalism not just being a job, but a calling. Michael shared
his deep knowledge and experience with all of us, and we will
be forever better because of it," Willow Bay, dean of USC
Annenberg, said in a statement.
Parks won the 1987 Pulitzer for international reporting.
The prize jury commended him for "balanced and
comprehensive coverage of South Africa."
"Michael was an extraordinarily gifted foreign
correspondent, one of the finest of his generation," said Scott
Kraft, who succeeded Parks as the Times' Johannesburg
bureau chief and is now the newspaper's managing editor.
From 1980 to 1995, Parks was the Times' bureau chief in
Beijing, Johannesburg, Moscow and Jerusalem. After stints
as deputy foreign editor and managing editor, he was named
the newspaper's editor in 1997.
Parks' tenure came to a dramatic end after a newsroom
uproar over a profit-sharing arrangement the Times struck
with Staples Center on revenue from ads in an October 1999
issue of the Times Magazine that was devoted to the opening
of the downtown arena.
Times writers and editors were furious when they learned
that top newspaper executives had struck the ad deal, saying
it undercut the integrity and independence of their
journalism by giving the subject of the magazine a stake in its
profits. Although Parks said he had not known about the
profit-sharing until after the magazine was written and
edited, but he did learn about it in time to have stopped it
from being published, which he did not do. He later
expressed.
GD-66/22 (16x3)
wEdnEsdAY, jAnUArY 12, 2022
7
The European Union ended travel restrictions on flights from southern
Africa on Monday well over a month after imposing them to in hopes of containing
the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Photo : Internet
†kL nvwmbvi g~jbxwZ
MÖvg kn‡ii DbœwZ