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Angered by doctors’ support for anti-junta protests, Myanmar’s military has arrested several doctors treating COVID-19 patients independently, colleagues and media said, as the health system struggles to cope with a record wave of infections.
 
Since the military overthrew the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in February, the ensuing turmoil and protests have thrown Myanmar’s COVID-19 response into chaos, as activists say scores of doctors have been arrested for their prominent role in a civil disobedience movement.
 
Myanmar registered over 6,000 new COVID-19 infections Thursday after reporting 286 deaths a day earlier, both record highs. Medics and funeral services say the real death toll is far higher, with crematoriums unable to keep pace.
 
To help people who either refuse to go to a state hospital because of opposition to the military, or find hospitals too strapped to treat them, some doctors participating in the anti-junta campaign have offered free medical advice over the telephone and visited the sick at home in some cases.
 
But according to doctors and media reports in the past few weeks, nine volunteer doctors offering tele-medicine and other services have been detained by the military in Myanmar’s two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay.
 
The information team of the army-led State Administration Council issued a statement denying reports that five doctors had been arrested in Yangon but omitted any reference to the alleged arrests in Mandalay, which included doctors active in the civil disobedience movement.
 
All telephone calls from Reuters to a spokesman for the military authorities were unanswered.
 
A doctor, who asked not to be named for fear of being targeted by military authorities, said four of his colleagues from the Medical Family – Mandalay Group had been arrested.
 
They included Kyaw Kyaw Thet, who had been tutoring medical students, and senior surgeon Thet Htay, who witnesses said had been seen handcuffed and bruised before being led away on July 16.
 
Their group was set up to advise virus sufferers over the telephone how to breathe, how to use an oxygen concentrator, which medicines to buy and how to administer them.
 
“We have been giving medical treatment to hundreds of patients per day,” the doctor said, adding that many more of those patients could have died if they had not been attended to.
 
Media reports from Yangon, which have been denied by military authorities, said three doctors from a COVID-19 response group were arrested after being lured to a home by soldiers pretending to need treatment. The authorities also denied a Myanmar News report that security forces had arrested two doctors during a follow-up raid on their offices in the North Dagon district of Yangon.
 
The National Unity Government, set up as a shadow body by army opponents, and media reports had also accused security forces of taking oxygen cylinders, protective wear and medicine for their own use during those raids.
 
‘Weaponizing COVID-19’
 
It was unclear why any of the doctors would have been detained, but the military has arrested medical staff previously for their conspicuous support for the civil disobedience movement.
 
An activist group, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, has said hundreds of doctors who joined the anti-junta campaign have been charged with spreading false news and 73 have been arrested.
 
The consequent shortage of staff at hospitals and clinics has added to public mistrust of the ruling military council.
 
A military spokesman urged people last week to cooperate with the government in order to overcome the epidemic. And according to some doctors, the latest arrests could be an attempt to force people to rely more on the military authorities.
 
Denying the reported arrests in Yangon, the military administration referred to information about COVID-19 patients being secretly treated and charged high prices or being directed to online cures, adding that lives were being lost unnecessarily.
 
Yanghee Lee, a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, is now on an advisory council. He has accused the junta of “weaponizing COVID-19 for its own political gain.”

 
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Space tourism notches another win after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos follows fellow billionaire Richard Branson in rocketing to weightlessness.  Plus, the hunt for ancient life on Mars is about to begin, and wildfires rage out of control in the U.S.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space
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Koshur Nizam — a hip-hop collective — is reviving “Conscious” hip-hop music in Indian-administered Kashmir. The genre made its way in the disputed territory following an anti-Indian government uprising in 2010. The rappers continued to produce their songs up to 2016, but pressure from the Indian government, financial constraints, and a lack of opportunity forced the rappers to move to other places or find other work to earn their livelihood.
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Claims for jobless benefits jumped in the U.S. last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, as the world’s biggest economy remains on an uneven recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

A total of 419,000 unemployed workers sought government compensation, up 51,000 from the revised figure of the week before, the agency said. The new figure followed declines in the number of claims in recent weeks and remained well above the 256,000 total recorded just before the coronavirus waylaid the American economy 16 months ago and closed many U.S. businesses.

The weekly claims total has tracked unevenly in recent weeks, but overall, jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs of workers, have fallen by more than 40% since early April, while remaining well above the pre-pandemic levels.

About 9.5 million people remain unemployed in the U.S. and looking for work. There also are 9.2 million job openings, the government says, although the skill sets of the jobless do not necessarily match the needs of employers.

The U.S. added 850,000 jobs in June, with the unemployment rate at 5.9%. Some employers are offering new hires cash bonuses to take jobs as the economy rebounds and consumers are willing to spend.

State governors and municipal officials across the U.S. have been ending coronavirus restrictions, in many cases allowing businesses for the first time in a year to completely reopen to customers. That could lead to more hiring of workers.

Nearly 60% of U.S. adults have now been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, boosting the economic recovery, although the pace of inoculations has dropped markedly from its peak several weeks ago, worrying health experts and government officials.

Now, the Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly, infecting tens of thousands of people who have not been vaccinated.

Officials in many states are offering a variety of incentives to entice the unvaccinated to get inoculated, including entry into lucrative lotteries for cash and free college tuition. The U.S. did not meet President Joe Biden’s goal of 70% of adult Americans with at least one vaccination shot by the July 4 Independence Day holiday. The figure stands shy of that at 68.4%, with Biden and health officials often calling for more people to get vaccinated.

With the business reopenings, many employers are reporting a shortage of workers, particularly for low-wage jobs such as restaurant servers and retail clerks. Biden suggested Wednesday night at a CNN town hall with voters in Ohio that employers having trouble finding enough workers may simply need to offer would-be workers more money to get them to agree to accept a job opening.

The federal government approved sending $300-a-week supplemental unemployment benefits to jobless workers through early September on top of less generous state-by-state payments.

But at least 25 of the 50 states, all led by Republican governors, are ending participation in the federal payments program, contending that the stipends let workers make more money than they would by returning to work and thus are hurting the recovery by not filling available job openings.

Some economists say, however, other factors prevent people from returning to work, such as lack of childcare or fear of contracting the coronavirus as the Delta variant first found in India infects more people.

The economic picture in the U.S. has advanced as money from Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package filters through the economy. The measure has likely boosted consumer spending, as millions of Americans, all but the highest wage earners, are now receiving $1,400 stimulus checks from the government or have already been sent the extra cash.

With more money in their wallets and more people vaccinated, Americans are venturing back to some sense of normalcy, going out to restaurants and spending money on items they had not purchased for a year.

Biden is supporting a plan to spend $1.2 trillion to repair deteriorating roads and bridges and construct new broadband service, agreeing to the deal with a group of centrist lawmakers. But lawmakers have struggled to reach a deal on how to pay for the package. With its approval still possible, it could add thousands of construction jobs to the U.S. economy.

Last week, Democratic lawmakers unveiled a $3.5 trillion plan for more health care coverage for older Americans, increased financial benefits for most U.S. families with young children, and more spending to advance clean energy. But Republicans are uniformly opposed to its cost and Biden’s plan to pay for it with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

The so-called human infrastructure measure will only win passage in the Senate if Democrats vote as a unified 50-member bloc, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding tie-breaking vote in the politically divided Senate, because no Republicans currently support it.
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Authorities in Madagascar have arrested several people they believe were part of a plot to kill President Andry Rajoelina.

The attorney general’s office issued a statement Thursday saying the suspects were part of a conspiracy to undermine the island nation’s security, including “the elimination and neutralization” of a number of people.

The suspects include both foreign nationals and Madagascar-born citizens.

The statement said the investigation is still ongoing.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and AFP. 
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Asian countries are reporting record COVID-19 waves this year compared to 2020, as vaccination drives fall short and governments lose hope that mass closures and border controls can keep the coronavirus away, observers in the region say.

Spread of the delta variant from India, infections among airline personnel and citizens who brought back the virus from trips spread COVID-19 in parts of Asia with recent outbreaks. Containment measures had relaxed in some spots after months of low caseloads while domestic travel picked up.

Officials from Bangkok to Taipei sidelined vaccine procurement last year while Western countries were preparing to make shots so widespread that England is now 87% vaccinated and in the United States just about any adult can get shots from a local drugstore.

Many Asian countries held back the respiratory disease in 2020 by barring foreign tourists and shutting down places where people gather. Manufacturing-reliant Asian economies held up economically last year for lack of long-term work stoppages.

“I call this a complacency curse,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

“Thailand did so well during virus stage last year that it sat on its laurels and got behind the curve on vaccine procurement,” he told VOA.

Thailand has fully vaccinated just 5% of its population, with Vietnam at around 1%, according to the Our World in Data research website. Vietnam hit a one-day coronavirus infection record of 5,926 on July 18, while Thailand posted its own record of 11,397 the same day.

In Taiwan, which reported its first major COVID-19 wave in May, just 0.5% of people had received two shots as of mid-July and 20% had gotten one shot.

In the Philippines, which has battled COVID-19 steadily for more than a year, daily caseloads have held at around 5,000 after an earlier spike. Malaysia touched a one-day record of 13,215 cases on July 15. Both have strict community quarantine rules.

Asian countries are fighting now to get vaccines because Western pharmaceutical companies are busy filling orders in other parts of the world, governments in Asia are slow to grant permits for domestic drug firms, and their citizens worry about side effects, news reports say. Cold storage has run short in some spots.

Many have turned to donations or rush orders from China, Japan and the United States. Taiwan and Vietnam aim to release domestically produced vaccines to augment supplies. Japan offered Vietnam $1.8 million as well for vaccine cold storage, the Vietnam Insider news website said in May.

“I think slowly [Vietnam] will recover as people are doing in Europe and in the U.S.,” said Phuong Hong, 40, a travel sector worker in Ho Chi Minh City who spends 95% of her time at home with four family members as they all await text messages from the government telling them when they qualify for vaccines.

“It should be faster, but I think the distribution channel — they also need to understand how to store the vaccine,” she said.

In Indonesia, the government has accepted vaccines from China and other sources, but the country’s full vaccination rate is just 6%. On July 15, Indonesia hit a record daily caseload of 56,757.

Citizens have a list of misgivings, said Paramita Supamijoto, an international relations lecturer at Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta. They might believe vaccines are not halal, according to Islamic rules about what a person should ingest, or that COVID-19 itself is a “hoax,” she said. Indonesians with possible symptoms tend to avoid hospitals, she added, in part because they’re full.

“It’s really complicated here in Indonesia, in general,” Supamijoto said. “You don’t know whether the people who stand next to you or sit next to you [are] healthy or not.”

Much of 660 million-population Southeast Asia now faces new rounds of economic inactivity triggered by business closures and stay-home orders to contain the virus. The Asian Development Bank said this month it had downgraded Southeast Asia’s 2021 economic growth forecast to 4.0% from 4.4% “as some countries reimpose pandemic restrictions.”

“Countries have been significantly impacted quite a lot in terms of their economies and the impact is increasing, so that’s I would say quite a contrast to what’s happening say in the U.S. and Europe, where things have improved quite a lot,” said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist at IHS Markit.

A surge in delta variant cases brought from India by frequent travel has added to Southeast Asia’s woes, Biswas added. He said, though, that most Asian countries are shunning the “total lockdowns” of last year because of the economic impacts.

Asian governments say vaccine supplies should surge in the second half of the year. Thai officials said in June they would fill an earlier pledge for doses by the end of this month, while Taiwan’s president set a target of vaccinating 25% of the island’s population by July 31.

Vietnam anticipates providing 110 million doses by December, though still short of its goal of 150 million doses for 75% of the population, Vietnam Insider reports.

Economic slowdowns are “not permanent,” said Song Seng Wun, an economist in the private banking unit of Malaysian bank CIMB, adding, “we will get back once the vaccine rollout comes.”  
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