Archives for May 2021

TOKYO (AP) — Confronted in Japan with some of the strongest medical-community opposition yet to the Tokyo Olympics, IOC President Thomas Bach offered Wednesday to have added medical personnel available to help out when the games open in just over nine weeks.

Bach gave few details, speaking remotely at the opening of three days of meetings between the International Olympic Committee and local organizers. He said the help would come from various national Olympic committees and be available in the Olympic village and sports venues.

In his 12-minute address, Bach attempted to assure the Japanese public and athletes coming to Tokyo that the IOC will hold “safe and secure” Olympics in the midst of the pandemic.

“For obvious reasons we cannot give them (athletes) every detail yet, but the most important principle is very clear: the Olympic Village is a safe place and the Olympic and Paralympic Games will be organized in a safe way,” Bach said.

Bach said he anticipated more than 80% of those staying in the Olympic Village would be vaccinated. Reports locally say that Japan’s Olympic delegation will begin getting vaccinated in June.

Between 1-2% of Japanese are fully vaccinated, and its unlikely that even the elderly population will be fully vaccinated before the Olympics end on Aug. 8.

Bach appeared to be responding to one of the strongest demands so far to call off the postponed Olympics.

The 6,000-member Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association called for the Olympics to be canceled in a letter sent last week to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa, and Seiko Hashimoto, the head of the organizing committee.

The letter was made public this week on the group’s website.

“We believe the correct choice is to the cancel an event that has the possibility of increasing the numbers of infected people and deaths,” the letter said.

“Viruses are spread by people’s movements. Japan will hold a heavy responsibility if the Olympics and Paralympics work to worsen the pandemic, increasing the number of those who must suffer and die.”

Much of Japan, including Tokyo and Osaka, is under a state of emergency, which forced Bach to cancel a trip to Japan this month. Opposition to the Olympics is running at 60-80% in numerous polls, depending on how the question is phrased.

The Olympics are to open on July 23. The Paralympics follow on Aug. 24. They are a financial imperative for the IOC, which derives about 75% of its incomes from selling television rights and another 18% from sponsorship.

Japan has officially spent $15.4 billion or organize the Olympics, although government audits suggest the figure is much higher.

There is no indication the games will be canceled, though opposition continues with small street protests and online petition drives. Last month the British Medical Journal came out against holding the Olympics and many local scientists have voice their opposition.

Japan has has attributed more than 11,500 deaths to COVID-19, good by some standards but worse than most Asian neighbors.

The Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association warned of a possible collapse of Japan’s medical system, which could come under more pressure with Tokyo’s hot and humid summer months approaching as the Olympics open.

“Our nation is now undergoing a surge in coronavirus patients in a fourth wave, the worst so far,” the letter said. “The medical systems responding to COVID-19 are stretched thin, almost to their limits. The reality is that the entire medical system faces an almost insurmountable hardship in trying our best to respond with coronavirus measures.”

Bach said hundreds of sports events have been held safely during the pandemic, and cited recent test events in Tokyo that came off without many problems.

“None of these test events was a virus spreader for the Japanese people or the people of Tokyo,” he said.

Tokyo organizers have said about 10,000 medical personnel will be needed during the Olympics. They have also asked for 500 extra nurses, and 200 sports medicine specialists.

Several prefectures near Tokyo have said they will not give priority to treating Olympic athletes, and many towns in Japan have canceled plans to host foreign delegations.

“The doctors and nurses of the medical system who are being asked to respond are already at this point exhausted, and there is absolutely no extra manpower or facility for treatment,” the letter added.

Fans from abroad have already been banned, and Olympic organizers are expected to announce next month if local fans can attend in limited numbers — or not at all.

The Olympics and Paralympics will involve 15,000 athletes and tens of thousands of others entering Japan, which has had its borders virtually sealed for more than a year.

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More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/olympic-games and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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AP reporter Yuri Kageyama contributed to this report.

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GAZA CITY, Gaza (AP) — Suzy Ishkontana hardly speaks or eats. It’s been two days since the 7-year-old girl was pulled from the rubble of what was once her family’s home, destroyed amid a barrage of Israeli airstrikes. She spent hours buried in the wreckage as her siblings and mother died around her.

Children are being subjected to extensive trauma in Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip. For some, it’s trauma they’ve seen repeatedly throughout their short lives.

This is the fourth time in 12 years Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers have gone to war. Each time, Israel has unleashed heavy airstrikes at the densely populated Gaza Strip as it vows to stop Hamas rocket barrages launched toward Israel.

According to Gaza health officials, at least 63 children are among the 217 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza since the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas began on May 10. On the Israeli side, 12 people have been killed by Hamas rockets, all but one of them civilians, including a 5-year-old boy.

Israel says it does everything it can to prevent civilian casualties, including issuing warnings for people to evacuate buildings about to be struck. As Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, most of them intercepted by anti-missile defenses, Israel’s military has pounded hundreds of sites in Gaza, where some 2 million people live squeezed into a tight urban fabric.

Videos on social media from Gaza have shown the grief of survivors from families wiped out in an instant.

“They were four! Where are they? Four!” wailed one father outside a hospital after learning all four of his children had been killed. Another showed a young boy screaming “Baba,” as he ran to the front of the funeral procession where men were carrying his father’s body to burial.

The Ishkontana family was buried under the rubble of their home early Sunday, after massive bombing raids of downtown Gaza City that Israel said were targeting a Hamas tunnel network. The strikes came without warning.

Riad Ishkontana recounted to The Associated Press how he was buried for five hours under the wreckage, pinned under a chunk of concrete, unable to reach his wife and five children.

“I was listening to their voices beneath the rubble. I heard Dana and Zain calling, ‘Dad! Dad!’ before their voices faded and then I realized they had died,” he said, referring to two of his children.

After he was rescued and taken to the hospital, he said, family and staff hid the truth from him as long as they could. “I learned about their deaths one after another,” he said. Finally, Suzy was brought in alive, the second-oldest of his three daughters and two sons, and the only survivor.

Though she had only limited physical bruising from her seven hours under the rubble, the young girl was in “severe trauma and shock,” said pediatrician Dr. Zuhair Al-Jaro. The hospital was unable to get her the psychological treatment she needs because of the ongoing fighting, he said.

“She has entered into a deep depression,” he said. Only today, he said Tuesday, did she eat something after she was allowed briefly outside the hospital and saw her cousins.

As her father spoke to the AP, Suzy sat on the bed next to him, silent and studying the faces of the people in the room but rarely making eye contact. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she turned away. When her father started to answer for her, saying she wanted to become a doctor, the girl began sobbing loudly.

Ishkontana, 42, who recently stopped working as a waiter because of coronavirus lockdowns, said Suzy is smart and tech-savvy and loves smartphones and tablets. “She explores them, she has more experience dealing with them than I do,” he said. She also loves studying and would gather all her siblings into a play “class,” taking the role of their teacher, he said.

The Ishkontanas were just one family destroyed that day.

The strikes Sunday targeted Hamas tunnels running under Gaza City, the Israeli military said. The warplanes pounded al-Wahda Street, one of the city’s busiest commercial avenues, lined with apartment buildings with stores, bakeries, cafes and electronics shops on the ground floors.

Three buildings collapsed, and multiple people from at least three families were killed. In all 42 people died, including 10 children and 16 women.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, called the situation that led to the deaths “abnormal.” He said in one location the airstrikes caused a tunnel to collapse, bringing houses down with it, “and that caused a large amount of civilian casualties, which were not the aim.”

He said the military was analyzing what happened and “attempting to recalibrate” its ordnance to prevent a reoccurrence.

He said the bombing campaign targeting tunnel networks would be expanded to more areas of Gaza and that the military tries when possible to hit tunnels under roads rather than under houses.

Israel and Hamas have fought similar conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014, each time wreaking heavy destruction

The Norwegian Refugee Council said that 11 of the children killed so far in this war had been going through its psycho-social programs helping children deal with trauma — a sign of how children repeatedly are victimized by the violence. Among them was 8-year-old Dana, Suzy’s sister.

“It’s the fourth time for many of them to experience” bombardment around their homes, said Hozayfa Yazji, the refugee council area field manager.

Parents in Gaza desperately try to calm their terrified children, as bombs rain down, telling the youngest ones it’s just fireworks or trying to put up a cheerful front.

The violence “will of course affect the psychology of these kids,” he said. “We are expecting that … the situation will be much worse and more children will need more support.”

The refugee council works with 118 schools in Gaza, reaching more than 75,000 students through its Better Learning Program. The program trains teachers to deal with traumatized children and organizes fun exercises to relieve stress. It also does home-checks on children to provide help.

The council’s secretary-general, Jan Egeland, called for an immediate cease-fire, saying, “Spare these children and their families. Stop bombing them now.”

But he said, longer term, an end to the blockade on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory is necessary “if we are to avoid more trauma and death among children.”

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FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The Navajo Nation has by far the largest land mass of any Native American tribe in the country. Now, it’s boasting the largest enrolled population, too.

Navajos clamored to enroll or fix their records as the tribe offered hardship assistance payments from last year’s federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. That boosted the tribe’s rolls from about 306,000 to nearly 400,000 citizens.

The figure tops the Cherokee Nation’s enrollment of 392,000. But it, too, has been growing, said tribal spokeswoman Julie Hubbard. The Oklahoma tribe has been receiving about 200 more applications per month from potential enrollees, leaving Navajo’s position at the top unstable.

The numbers matter because tribes often are allocated money based on their number of citizens. Each of the 574 federally recognized tribes determines how to count its population. Navajo, for example, requires a one-quarter blood quantum to enroll. Cherokee primarily uses lineal descent.

Tribal governments received $4.8 billion from the CARES Act based on federal housing population data for tribes, which some said was badly skewed. The Treasury Department recently revised the methodology and said it would correct the most substantial disparities.

The Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, one of three tribes that sued the Treasury Department over the payments, said it’s satisfied with an additional $5.2 million it’s set to receive. The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians in Florida and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas would get $825,000 and $864,000 under the new methodology. Both said those amounts didn’t make sense when broken down to a per-person figure. They plan to continue their fight in court.

“We just cannot accept this as it is,” Carol Heckman, an attorney for Prairie Band, said in a court hearing last week. “We’re happy to keep talking about it, but Treasury would have to sweeten the pie.”

The Treasury Department will avoid much of the problems it encountered with CARES Act funding in the distribution of the $20 billion for tribes under the American Rescue Plan Act. The department said it will use tribally certified enrollment figures to pay out $12.35 billion and tribal employment data for $6.65 billion.

Another $1 billion will be divided equally among eligible tribal governments, the Treasury Department said. Alaska Native corporations, which own much of the Native land in Alaska under a 1971 settlement, aren’t eligible for any of the $20 billion in funding. The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether the corporations will get a slice of the CARES Act money.

The Treasury Department set a Monday deadline for tribal governments to submit their information online for the American Rescue Plan funding. It acknowledged that no formula perfectly can capture the needs of tribes, which have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic.

Tribes also won’t be under as tight of a deadline to spend the money as they were for the CARES Act and will have more flexibility. They can spend the money to replace lost revenue and improve water, sewer and broadband infrastructure that often lags behind the rest of the U.S.

The Navajo Nation is on track to get the largest share of the enrollment-based funding. About half of its members live on the vast 27,000-square-mile (70,000-square-kilometer) reservation that extends into New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

The tribe opened the hardship assistance program in November, up against an initial deadline to spend federal virus assistance by the end of the year. It required that applicants be enrolled as Navajo citizens. The response was huge, with the tribe paying out more than $322 million to more than 293,000 applicants, the tribal controller’s office said. Adults received up to $1,350 and children up to $450.

On the American Rescue Plan Act funding, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez questioned the fairness of awarding more money to tribes that enroll people with less than one-fourth blood quantum.

“Here on Navajo, we verify blood quantum, and that’s a requirement,” he told The Associated Press. “If they had that same requirement, one-quarter Cherokee, just imagine.”

The U.S. Census reflects higher numbers for Native Americans than tribes’ enrollment records because it allows people to self-identify as Native American and Alaska Native and report ties to multiple Indigenous groups across North America, Central America and South America. Not all of those 5.2 million people are eligible to enroll in tribes. The 2010 count put the Cherokee Nation around 820,000 and Navajo at 332,000.

Cherokee Native Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the recent higher enrollment figure from the Navajo Nation government shows Natives are strong and an important force for economies, education and environment.

“It’s truly a positive anytime our citizenship grows and thrives,” he said in a statement.

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