A court in the Maldives has overturned the conviction of former President Abdulla Yameen and cancelled his 11-year prison sentence.

The High Court said on Thursday that his 2022 trial had been unfair and ordered a new trial.  “The lower court ruling was not fair,” Judge Hassan Shafeeu said while reading out a lengthy decision that was broadcast live.

The decision was made three days before the Indian Ocean archipelago nation holds a parliamentary election, in which Yameen is fielding candidates from a political party he formed while serving his sentence.

Yameen was convicted on two charges when a court found he had accepted a bribe to grant a lease on an islet for tourism development while he was in power from 2013 to 2018.

Thursday’s ruling set that verdict aside. The high court overturned the prison sentence due to procedural irregularities and ordered a lower court to restart the trial on charges of bribery and money laundering. Yameen is also on trial for separate bribery charges at the court.

Yameen’s co-accused Yusuf Naeem, a businessman who was said to have paid the alleged bribe of $1m, was also freed.

Yameen, 64, had been held at the high-security Maafushi Prison but was transferred to house arrest the day after his ally, Mohamed Muizzu, won presidential elections in September.

The pro-China former leader had borrowed heavily and built thousands of houses and other infrastructure during his five-year tenure.

The Maldives will hold its parliamentary election on Sunday.

(Aljazeera)

The ongoing global spread of “bird flu” infections to mammals including humans is a significant public health concern, senior UN medics said on Thursday, as they announced new measures to tackle airborne diseases.

Dr Jeremy Farrar, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO),  said that the avian influenza virus – which is also known as H5N1 – has had an “extremely high” mortality rate among the several hundred people known to have been infected with it to date.

To date, no human-to-human H5N1 transmission has been recorded.

“H5M1 is an influenza infection, predominantly started in poultry and ducks and has spread effectively over the course of the last one or two years to become a global zoonotic – animal – pandemic,” he said. “The great concern, of course, is that in doing so and infecting ducks and chickens – but now increasingly mammals – that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans. And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission.”

Commenting on an ongoing outbreak of H5N1 virus among dairy cows in the United States, the WHO senior official urged further close monitoring and investigation by public health authorities, “because it may evolve into transmitting in different ways”.

Cows graze near a drilling rig in Texas, USA.

He added: “Do the milking structures of cows create aerosols? Is it the environment which they’re living in? Is it the transport system that is spreading this around the country? This is a huge concern and I think we have to … make sure that if H5N1 did come across to humans with human-to-human transmission, that we were in a position to immediately respond with access equitably to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.”

The development comes as the WHO announced updated language to describe airborne pathogens, in a bid to increase international cooperation in the event of a new – and expected – global pandemic.

The initiative was originally sparked by the COVID-19 emergency and the recognition that there was a lack of commonly agreed terms among medics and scientists to describe how the coronavirus was transmitted, which increased the challenge of overcoming it, Dr Farrar explained.

To counter this, the WHO led consultations with four major public health agencies from Africa, China, Europe and the United States, before announcing agreement on a number of agreed new terms. These include “infectious respiratory particles” or “IRPs”, which should be used instead of “aerosols” and “droplets”, to avoid any confusion about the size of the particles involved.

Over and above the new terminology, the initiative cements the commitment of the international community to tackle ever “more complex and more frequent epidemics and pandemics”, Dr Farrar told journalists in Geneva.  “It’s a hugely important first step. But next, we need to keep the disciplines, the experts together. We’re using the same terminology, the same language, and now we need to do the science that provides the evidence on tuberculosis, on COVID and other respiratory pathogens, so that we know how to control those infections better than we have done in the past.”

On the potential H5N1 public health risk, the WHO Chief Scientist cautioned that vaccine development was not “where we need to be”. Neither was it the case that regional offices and country offices and public health authorities around the world have the capability to diagnose H5N1, he noted.

(UN News)

Lightning and heavy rains have killed hundreds of people across Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At least 50 people have died in Pakistan in storms that have been lashing the country, officials said on Tuesday, as they urged emergency services to remain on high alert. Authorities in Afghanistan also reported a death toll of 50 the same day.

Most of the deaths in Pakistan were reported in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where torrential rains and flash floods triggered landslides, damaged homes and uprooted trees.

Rains caused dozens of houses to collapse in the northwest and in eastern Punjab province. A spokesman for the provincial disaster management authority said 21 people had died, with more rains expected this week.

A man with his motorbike wades through a flooded road in Peshawar, Pakistan, April 15, 2024 (Aljazeera)

A spokesman for the disaster management authority in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan, said 21 people died there.

Rain also lashed the capital, Islamabad, and killed seven people in southwestern Balochistan province. Streets flooded in the northwestern city of Peshawar and in Quetta, the Balochistan capital.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in televised remarks that he had ordered authorities to provide relief aid. Authorities have now declared a state of emergency in the southwest of the country.

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has asked emergency services to remain vigilant amid the forecast of severer weather conditions.

A motorcyclist and a motorist drive along a flooded road in Peshawar (Aljazeera)

Heavy flooding from seasonal rains has also killed at least 50 people in Afghanistan and injured 36 others over recent days, the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority (ANDMA) reported on Tuesday.

More than 600 houses were damaged or destroyed while about 200 livestock died, the Taliban authorities said earlier. The flooding also damaged large areas of agricultural land and more than 85km (53 miles) of roads, he said.

Afghanistan has provided aid to nearly 23,000 families, with flash floods reported in 20 of the country’s 34 provinces.

The storms add to the challenges facing Afghanistan, which is still recovering from decades of conflict and numerous natural disasters.

A series of earthquakes in the western province of Herat in October killed at least 1,500 people, according to the United Nations.

Speaking to local media, Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said climate change was to blame for the surge in lightning incidents.

Despite contributing very little to the global climate crisis, Pakistan remains one of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

In 2022, floods – caused by a “monsoon on steroids”, as described by UN chief Antonio Guterres – killed at least 1,739 and affected 33 million people. At their peak, the floods submerged more than one third of the country.

(Aljazeera)