(LONDON) — France this week became the latest European country to tighten its coronavirus restrictions, with nations across the continent posting record numbers of COVID-19 infections in an omicron-fueled surge.
On Dec. 21, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, Dr Hans Kluge, warned that the omicron variant — believed by scientists to be far more transmissible than delta — was set to become the dominant variant on the continent following confirmation that it already had in Denmark, Portugal and the U.K.
Since then, the rate of infection has increased, with France, Italy, the U.K. and Spain posting historic record numbers of COVID infections in recent days. Infections, according to Kluge, are 40% higher than during the same period last year.
In France, where nearly 90% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated, from Jan. 3 there will be an obligation to work from home for three days a week and mask mandates in outdoor city centers. Several countries announced prior to Christmas that they would be introducing restrictions for after the holiday weekend.
In Germany, that means that nightclubs will have to close, large-scale events such as soccer games cannot occur with a live audience and the sale of fireworks is also banned and large-scale events for New Years’ Eve are prohibited.
The Netherlands, meanwhile, is already in an effective lockdown to combat COVID-19 infections, with schools, non-essential stores, bars and restaurants closed until Jan. 14. In the U.K., Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have reintroduced social distancing restrictions not seen since before the summer, while England has introduced health passports for mass gatherings and reintroduced mask mandates for public transport and outdoor settings.
However, England has been a notable outlier in that Boris Johnson’s government, encouraged by data that indicates the risk of hospitalization is lower from omicron than the delta variant, has not announced any new restrictions for the New Years’ period — despite the U.K. posting record numbers and more than 100,000 daily infections on several days last week.
Despite relatively high vaccination rates — around 68% of the European Union’s population has been fully vaccinated — there are concerns that not enough has been done to institute a booster drive across the continent which officials say is needed to drive up resistance against omicron.
For interstate European travel, the European Commission announced that their EU Digital COVID Certificate will only be valid for 9 months, meaning that boosters will be required for certificates to be renewed.
In several countries, life is set to become far more difficult for the unvaccinated. This month, Germany has placed major restrictions on access to public life for unvaccinated people — with only those who have been vaccinated or recently recovered allowed entry into non-essential stores, leisure facilities, bars and restaurants.
France meanwhile is set to change its COVID “health pass” into a “vaccine pass” from next month — now it is only valid with vaccination, rather than vaccination or proof of a negative test.
Several European officials have indicated that mandatory vaccinations are likely to become a fact of life in the future. Austria from February will institute a monthly fine on people who do not take up the offer of a vaccine. EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen has suggested vaccine mandates could be welcome, with concern that the estimated 150 million Europeans still unvaccinated are the group driving increases in hospitalizations.
(HONG KONG) — Hong Kong’s national security police arrested six people linked to Stand News, an independent online media outlet, in another sign that the city’s once-thriving press freedom is taking a turn for the worse.
Police also froze $7.8 million in assets and raided the outlet’s headquarters, where they seized “subversive articles,” officers said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Stand News announced after the raid that it would close, saying staff would no longer speak to the media.
The raid and arrests came about six months after the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily was forced to shut down following a newsroom raid, seizure of its assets, and arrest of its founder, Jimmy Lai.
Those arrested on Wednesday included former Stand News board members Denise Ho, a well-known pop singer and democracy activist, and Margaret Ng, an ex-lawmaker. Ronson Chan, deputy assignment editor and Hong Kong Journalists Association chairman, was also detained.
The arrests were made at their homes under a colonial-era law covering conspiracy to print or distribute seditious materials, police said in a statement. Chan attempted to live-stream police arriving at his door.
Chief Secretary John Lee said that anyone who uses “journalism as a disguise and a tool to carry out acts that endanger national security will be severely struck by the SAR government.”
The HKJA in a statement posted on Facebook said it is “deeply concerned that the police have repeatedly arrested senior members of the media and searched the offices of news organizations … HKJA urges the government to protect press freedom in accordance with the Basic Law.”
Around 200 officers raided the Stand News office, with a search warrant under the national security law, allowing them to “search and seize relevant journalistic materials.”
Police were seen carrying boxes out of the Stand News office.
(NEW YORK) — SydPath, an Australian-based lab, sent hundreds of patients the wrong test results, due to a “data processing error,” it said in a statement.
The lab announced in a statement Monday that a total of 995 people, who had taken COVID- tests on Dec. 22, Dec. 23 and Dec. 24 had received text messages that their test results were negative when the results had not yet been determined.
Of those 995 people, 486 people had actually tested positive.
This comes after the lab announced on Sunday it had told more than 400 people their results were negative when they were positive.
This error comes as the country sees the number of COVID-19 cases surge. On Tuesday, Australia reported 11,260 new positive cases, bringing its cumulative number of active COVID-19 cases to 323,285, according to the government’s Department of Health.
The lab, a part of St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, established an emergency response team to “rectify the issue as soon as possible,” according to its website, characterizing the mistake as a “clerical error.”
Those impacted had taken tests at any of the lab’s clinics.
SydPath said it will reduce the number of tests it processes “to ensure the volume remains within our capacity,” it said in the statement.
The lab said it reached out to those people and will update them with their correct results. It advised anyone impacted to self-isolate until they are contacted with their correct results, according to its website.
SydPath did not immediately respond to ABC News’ Request for comment.
(MOSCOW) — Russia’s deputy defense minister warned foreign ambassadors of a “high risk” of conflict between the country and its neighbor Ukraine — one day after President Vladimir Putin threatened “diverse” military and technical responses if the West doesn’t address his stated concerns.
These latest messages from Moscow are the kind that have had U.S. and other western officials on edge that Putin will launch an assault on Ukraine, even after President Joe Biden warned him doing so would bring massive penalties.
The Biden administration has repeatedly called for diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate tensions and end the war in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, nearly eight years after Russian troops armed separatist forces in a conflict that continues to simmer and claim lives.
But Russia’s demands for security guarantees, including that Ukraine be barred from joining NATO, have been called “unacceptable” by U.S. officials — possibly purposefully so, so that Russia can later claim to have given diplomacy a shot.
Russia has said it has no plans to invade but demanded the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine take seriously its concerns.
“We didn’t make the proposals just to see them blocked in terms of the diplomatic process, but for the purpose of reaching a negotiated diplomatic result that would be fixed in legally binding documents. We will aim at this,” Putin said Sunday.
His Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin blamed NATO again Monday for provoking conflict by sending warships and reconnaissance planes to back Ukraine. That echoes a statement last week by his boss, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who claimed Ukraine, with U.S. mercenary help, is preparing a chemical weapons attack.
“The alliance has recently switched to the practice of direct provocations accompanied by the high risk of turning into armed confrontation,” Fomin said during a meeting that included envoys from 14 NATO countries.
It’s the kind of false pretext for an invasion that U.S. officials and analysts have warned Russia may create to justify an invasion.
“Russia is ostensibly outraged by a crisis of their own making,” said Mick Mulroy, a senior Trump administration Pentagon official and ABC News national security analyst. “It was Russia that put around 175,000 troops on the border and threatened to invade again if its demands were not met — ‘Do what I ask, or I will attack and occupy a sovereign country against all international norms.'”
The estimated number of Russian troops near Ukraine have ranged from 60,000 to over 100,000, with one leaked U.S. intelligence document warning Russia could be prepared to swiftly deploy as many as 175,000. U.S. officials have cited those troop movements, along with Russian propaganda attacks on Ukraine, which they say have increased tenfold, and bellicose rhetoric as evidence of a possible invasion.
But diplomacy could stave off war. The U.S. and Russia have agreed to hold talks in January to address each side’s concerns, along with talks between NATO and Russia and meetings at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, according to U.S. officials. The OSCE, a key security forum, has deployed a war monitor in eastern Ukraine for years as the conflict has taken some 14,000 lives.
After coordinating a meeting between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-controlled separatists last week, the OSCE declared Thursday that both sides showed a “strong determination to fully adhere” to a July 2020 ceasefire agreement. The statement was heralded by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the State Department, whose spokesperson said, “We hope the resultant peace will create the diplomatic space necessary to de-escalate regional tensions and provide a positive atmosphere for further discussion.”
There has been no “resultant peace.” Three Ukrainian soldiers were wounded in shelling that last for hours on Sunday. There had been five times more ceasefire violations this month than last December, according to the OSCE.
But there was some notable Russian troop movements, according to state-run Interfax news agency, which reported that more than 10,000 troops pulled back from near Ukraine’s borders after military drills. The Kremlin also said Monday that it made sense to engage NATO directly about its security concerns, in addition to the U.S.
Whether that is yet a sign for hope that war can be avoided is unclear. U.S. officials have said it’s still unknown whether Putin has decided to invade, with tens of thousands of troops still in the area, including in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Russia invaded and seized in 2014.
(LONDON) — After a failed appeal earlier this month, Britain’s The Mail on Sunday included a front-page notice on Dec. 26 to readers that it lost the legal battle over publishing parts of a handwritten letter Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote in 2018 to her now-estranged father, Thomas Markle, in 2019.
“The Duchess of Sussex wins her legal case for copyright infringement against Associated Newspapers for articles published in The Mail on Sunday and posted on Mail Online – SEE PAGE 3,” read a line at the bottom of the front page of the newspaper.
At the top of the third page was a short piece giving more details regarding the duchess’ lawsuit with the tabloid.
“Following a hearing on 19-20 January, 2021, and a further hearing on 5 May, 2021, the Court has given judgment for the Duchess of Sussex on her claim for copyright infringement,” it read. “The Court found that Associated Newspapers infringed her copyright by publishing extracts of her handwritten letter to her father in The Mail on Sunday and on Mail Online.”
An additional line indicated this was just one part of the agreement handed down by the court in February and upheld in May. “Financial remedies have been agreed.”
The statement was also published on Mail Online the same day, with links to the court rulings included.
“This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right,” Meghan said in a statement after the latest appeal. “While this win is precedent setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.”
Meghan now lives in California with her husband, Prince Harry, and their two children, son Archie and daughter Lilibet.
(CAPE TOWN, South Africa) — South Africa’s Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, an anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died on Sunday. He was 90.
“The passing of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is another chapter of bereavement in our nation’s farewell to a generation of outstanding South Africans who have bequeathed us a liberated South Africa,” Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, said in a statement.
Tutu, a crusader for equality and racial justice, died in Cape Town, South Africa, the president’s office said.
He rose to global prominence as a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, struggling against a political and social system of minority rule that he saw as cruel and unjust. Amid a violent and turbulent time, Tutu was known for his sermons calling for non-violent action. He was awarded The Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
“Tutu was saluted by the Nobel Committee for his clear views and his fearless stance, characteristics which had made him a unifying symbol for all African freedom fighters. Attention was once again directed at the nonviolent path to liberation,” according to the prize committee.
After apartheid ended in 1994, Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body whose daunting mandate called for investigating the country’s history of oppression, applying justice where necessary and helping the entire population step as one into a brighter future.
Under Tutu, the commission sought a middle ground between launching courtroom trials for “all perpetrators of gross violations of human rights” and total amnesty for them, Tutu wrote in a memoir, No Future Without Forgiveness, published in 1999. The commission granted amnesty to those who offered full disclosures of the crimes committed.
“Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, had been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones,” Tutu wrote. “Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood.”
In leading the commission, Tutu “touchingly and profoundly demonstrated the depth of meaning of ubuntu, reconciliation and forgiveness,” Ramaphosa said on Sunday.
“Desmond Tutu was a patriot without equal; a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead,” he said. “We pray that Archbishop Tutu’s soul will rest in peace but that his spirit will stand sentry over the future of our nation.”
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on Oct. 7, 1931, in Klerksdorp, South Africa.
He was a teacher in South Africa before becoming a priest, a vocation that led him to study at King’s College London in the mid-1960s. He moved between the United Kingdom and South Africa for the next decade, holding teaching and theological leadership positions, according to the college.
St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg appointed Tutu as dean in 1975, making him the first Black priest to hold the position. Ten years later, he became the first Black bishop of Johannesburg. He was named archbishop of Cape Town a year later, elevating him to the highest position in the Anglican hierarchy in Africa, according to a biography posted by King’s College.
“On behalf of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the whole faith community, and I make bold to say, on behalf of millions across South Africa, Africa and the world, I extend our deepest condolences to his wife, Nomalizo Leah, his son, Trevor Thamsanqa and to his daughters, Thandeka, Nontombi and Mpho. And all of their families,” Thabo Makgoba, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, said in a statement on Sunday.
On the morning of April 27, 1994, when all South Africans were allowed to enter voting booths, a day that would mark both the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as president, Tutu rose early at the archbishop’s complex in Cape Town, he wrote in his memoir.
He drove from his residence in a “leafy upmarket suburb” to Gugulethu, deciding “that I would cast my vote in a ghetto township,” an action he described as symbolic.
“How do you convey that sense of freedom that tasted like sweet nectar for the first time? How do you explain it to someone who was born into freedom? It is impossible to convey,” Tutu wrote. “It is ineffable, like trying perhaps to describe the color red to a person born blind. It is a feeling that makes you want to cry and laugh at the same time, to dance with joy, and yet fearful that it was too good to be true and that it just might all evaporate. You’re on cloud nine.”
(NEW YORK) — If there is any doubt about climate change, look no further than the coldest regions of the planet for proof that the planet is warming at unprecedented rates, experts say.
The Arctic, is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world, according to this year’s Arctic Report Card, released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, occurs when the sea ice, which is white, thins or disappears, allowing dark ocean or land surfaces to absorb more heat from the sun and release that energy back into the atmosphere.
Widely considered by polar scientists as Earth’s refrigerator due to its role in regulating global temperatures, the mass melting of sea ice, permafrost and ice caps in the Arctic is hard evidence of global warming, according to experts.
“The Arctic is the frontline for climate change,” climate scientist Jessica Moerman, vice president of science and policy at the Evangelical Environmental Network, a faith-based environmental group, told ABC News. “We should be paying careful attention to what is happening in the Arctic. It may seem like it’s far away, but the impacts come knocking on our front door.”
Here is how melting in the Arctic could have detrimental effects around the globe, according to experts:
Coastal communities will eventually need to move inland
The biggest long-term effect of warming in the Arctic will be sea level rise, Oscar Schofield, a professor of biological oceanography at Rutgers University, told ABC News.
Melting from he Arctic — and the Greenland ice sheet in particular — is the largest contributor to sea level rise in the world. Although the contribution from the Greenland ice sheet is less than a millimeter per year of rising sea level, those small increments add up to between 6 inches to a foot since the Industrial Revolution — sea levels that infrastructure near oceans was not built to withstand, Schofield said.
A bit “counterintuitively,” the loss from the Greenland ice sheet will have its greatest impact on places far away from the Arctic, in low latitudes such as South America due to changes in the global ocean currents, Twila Moon, an Arctic scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center and one of the authors of the Arctic Report Card, told ABC News.
Sea level rise from melting and continued climate change will exacerbate coastal erosion, flood areas that had previously never seen flooding and even increase inland flooding as the salty ocean waters change groundwater tables and inundate freshwater resources, Moon said.
“If you look at where humanity lives, a great proportion of humanity lives right at the coastlines around the world,” he said. “And if you look at where most of the big, mega cities are, they’re right along coastlines: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco.”
Global weather systems will shift drastically
The environmental conditions in the Arctic affect weather systems across the world. The North and South poles act as the “freezers of the global system,” helping to circulate ocean waters around the planet in a way that helps to maintain the climates felt on land, Moon said.
“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Moerman said.
The jet stream, a band of strong winds moving west to east created by cold air meeting warmer air, helps to regulate weather around the globe. In the continental U.S., the jet stream forms where generally colder and drier Arctic air meets warmer and more humid air from the Gulf.
But as temperatures in the Arctic warm, the jet stream, which is fueled by the temperature differences, weakens, Moerman said. Rather than a steady stream of winds, the jet stream has become more “wavy,” allowing very warm temperatures to extend usually far into the Arctic and very cold temperatures further south than usual, Moon said.
“These cold air outbreaks are really severe,” Moerman said.
The variability in the climate in the Arctic, specifically the weakening of the polar vortex, which keeps cold air closer to the poles, likely led to the Texas freeze in February that led to millions without power and hundreds of deaths, a study published in Science in September found.
The study cited an “increasingly frequent number of episodes of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades” in the U.S., despite temperatures rising overall.
Scientists are also looking into whether the phenomenon of atmospheric blocking, is potentially linked with extreme summer or winter weather that occurs when the jet stream ebbs and causes weather patterns to stagnate over a period of time, Moon said.
That stagnation was likely the cause of the extreme flooding that occurred in 2017 in Houston, when the system from Hurricane Harvey remained over the region for days, dumping more than 50 inches of rain, and the multiple heatwaves that blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest this past summer, Moerman added.
“These have real-world impacts, whenever extreme cold air leaks out of the Arctic, because of that weakening polar vortex,” Moerman said. “And it goes into areas that are not prepared for that extreme weather.”
However, despite the existing evidence, more research needs to be done to further establish the link between the weakening polar vortex and extreme weather, Moerman said.
Shipping lanes will open
Melting sea ice in the Arctic is opening up lanes in the ocean for the global trade route — lanes that were previously blocked.
In the near future, the melting will have a big impacts on major shipping laws, Schofield said.
“They’re no longer going to be sending ships all the way down to the Panama Canal,” he said. “They’re going to go directly through the Arctic. And so it’s going to change commerce, and have very large economic impacts.”
But access has the potential to become a “hotbed for new conflict” as nations fight for control over the newly emerged routes, Moerman said.
“There’s a lot of effort by countries to really try to claim as much territory as they can right now, because there’s likely going to be a huge host of economic incentives to go to this new area and harvest what you can,” Schofield said.
Some national security implications could occur as a result of the warming as well, as ice melts and opens up previously blocked landmasses, Moerman added. The U.S. Department of Defense will likely need to restructure its defense profile in the Arctic when there is no longer an ice cap for much of the year, Schofield said.
The pristine ecosystem will likely be ruined
As the woes from a stalled supply chain continue, the ability for shipping containers to utilize more routes in the absence of ice could appear to be beneficial for the world economy.
But it would spell disaster for the regional environment.
Right now, the ecosystem in the Arctic is pristine and untouched, and there are several unique species and ecosystems that have acclimated to the presence of ice, Schofield said.
But as more ships come in and out of the region, the chances that large-scale environmental degradation will occur is high, Moerman said.
“We’re definitely seeing changes in animal populations,” Moon said. “Certainly animals that depend on sea ice as a primary habitat, as we’ve lost the vast majority of our thicker sea ice.”
The “poster child” for the effects of the loss of sea ice on species is the polar bear, Schofield said. Polar bear populations have dwindled so low, and the habitats have become so fragmented, that the animals are inbreeding, which could have disastrous effects on the survival of the species within generations.
In Alaska, the number of beaver ponds has doubled since 2000, likely due to the warming trend that has resulted in widespread greening in what was previously tundra, the Arctic Report Card found. The rapid acidification of the warming ocean waters is likely affecting the marine food chain, Moon said. And the increased marine traffic for both fishing and shipping is also likely affecting stress levels and behavior of species, including how they communicate, Moon added.
In addition to an increased chance of oil spills from increased commercial activity is the possibility of new oil and gas fields opening up in Russian territory could further amplify global warming as those natural gases are extracted, Moerman said.
“The question is, is can we get those policies and strategies set up now before there’s this massive sort of gold rush on the Arctic Ocean?” Schofield said.
Melting permafrost in the Arctic also poses natural environmental risks, Moon said. The majority of the ground in the Arctic is frozen, and as it thaws, microbes and other living organisms within the organic carbon in the permafrost begin to wake up, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Temperatures need to be below 0 degrees Celsius to grow and maintain ice, Schofield said. But we will likely never regain that ice, as it took thousands of years of snow layers accumulating on top of each other to create the massive ice sheet, which is several miles thick.
“At some point, we’re likely to cross the line where, you know, there’ll be almost no winter to speak up,” Schofield said. “And we see these kinds of effects in these polar regions, like the Arctic and the Antarctic.”
(NEW YORK) — Muzhgan Azizy escaped Kabul just weeks before the swift Taliban takeover and chaotic U.S. evacuation, but adjusting to her new freedom in America has been difficult.
“The resettlement journey for me was not easy. Actually so many challenges. It was a struggle, for sure,” Azizy, 36, told ABC News. “From finding a proper spot to do my grocery shopping, to paying my bill in our apartments’ portal. It’s like the worst — only because the system in the U.S. is completely different from what I used to back home.”
Having worked for the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan for five years, she said she was extraordinarily grateful to obtain a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) for her husband and 13-year-old son after waiting more than three years to get approved.
In July, Azizy and her immediate family went straight from Dulles International Airport in Virginia to an empty apartment she found online while still in Afghanistan, as Taliban fighters closed in on Kabul. “Luckily,” she said, the apartment was carpeted. They lived on that carpet for more than 25 days, she said, until she was able to get furniture and other household items.
The hardest part for Azizy is worrying about her elderly parents, who lived with her in Afghanistan and depend on her financially and emotionally. They weren’t able to come with her because under U.S. law, since she is married, they don’t qualify as “immediate family” under the SIV program.
“So that’s why I couldn’t bring them, but I left them all alone,” she said, trying to hold back tears. “And that’s very difficult for me, and they need my emotional support more than any other support because they are that age where they need their children around. I hope in the future I can find a way to bring them here safely, so that they can live with me here, and they also experience the safety, freedom and security.”
She tries to call them every day. Her father, she said, repeatedly tells her they are happy she’s not in Afghanistan to see how much the people are struggling under the Taliban regime.
“I want to say that we’ve left the whole nation behind,” she said. “People there, they suffer from hunger. They send their children [away] so that someone can feed them. The economy of the country is at its worst. So I really want the world to pay attention to them. They are people who have nothing to do with politics, and they suffer right now.”
Since the Taliban takeover in August, several countries halted aid to Afghanistan as they decide whether to recognize the Taliban government — even as the country nears economic collapse. Nearly 24 million people — more than half of all Afghans — are facing acute hunger, with nine million of them nearing famine, according to the United Nations.
In the U.S., Azizy said her family struggles to adjust to a new culture. Her husband worked as a civil engineer in Afghanistan but is now studying to become a site inspector since his education does not carry over, she said. Her 13-year-old son, enrolled in a public school in Virginia, has struggled with changing classrooms in high school, commonplace in America, but confusing to him, she recalled, since his school in Afghanistan had one room and one teacher.
“But I will say that I am grateful for all the challenges,” Azizy added. “When I first came into the United States like, the safety, the feeling of safety, security and freedom, hit us differently. So, I am grateful.”
Advocacy group hires Afghan refugees to help resettle new arrivals
Azizy’s outlook on life in the U.S. got better, she says, when she started working with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), the largest national faith-based nonprofit in the U.S. exclusively dedicated to serving immigrants and refugees.
She is now one of 12 Afghans working for LIRS full-time in a paid role from a new office space inside Lutheran Peace Church in Alexandria, Virginia. Azizy’s job as a senior program officer for Afghan placement and assistance is to ensure Afghan refugees resettling in Northern Virginia arrive safely at their final destination, have basic needs met and resources to start a new life.
Azizy praised the significance of having refugees from Afghanistan like herself employed in the office as they faces a “crisis” situation.
“I have a colleague that spent six days in Kabul Airport only to get into a plane. And when she tells me her story, it’s very sad. She says that, like, for six days she had a small bottle of water and she just kept drinking that little by little to stay alive,” Aziziy recalled. “I want to say that it’s not a normal refugee resettlement. It’s a crisis. So no matter how hard everyone works, there are still gaps.”
LIRS says its welcome centers are intended to fill gaps that other institutions can’t by offering mental health screenings, connections to health care providers, legal services, and referrals to community services such as food banks, faith communities and schools.
Zarmina Hamidi, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 after her family fled Afghanistan first for Pakistan due to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and works as a caseworker at LIRS, said it’s a “blessing” to have Afghans represented in the office, where hundreds of new refugees will soon arrive from U.S. military bases.
“I want to reiterate to them that this is temporary, that life will get better, that they’re in a nation where you can build your way up,” Hamidi told ABC News. “It’s a blessing for me to be offering that help, and I feel like they’re also blessed to have such resettlement agencies that have hired particularly Afghan nationals,” she said, “who speak their language, who are culturally aware, who can offer them that smooth transition.”
Hamidi says her own background as a double refugee, offers a helpful perspective for new refugees she meets, adding that when she started working she was happy but “surprised” to see that “every room I looked into – there were Afghans.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah – president and CEO of LIRS, who, as a young child, fled a civil war in Sri Lanka in 1980 with her family and came to the U.S. — said it was personally important to her to hire people who walked in the same steps as their clients.
“They literally are, in some ways, going through this experience,” she said of the refugee hires. “They may be a few months ahead of the clients that they’re serving – but they recently were our clients, and now they’re our staff.”
O’Mara Vignarajah cut the oversized, red ribbon to officially open a new office location last week in Alexandria, where Azizy and Hadidi work. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited on Monday to thank them.
“The physical location is where we can bring them in,” Vignarajah told ABC News at the opening. “We can walk them through the paperwork. We can explain how to enroll in public school. You can have a doctor speak with them. We can create that personal human connection, so they don’t feel like they’re just lost in a system that’s been shuffling them from the Kabul airport to a lily pad to military bases.”
With clients and employees who share a common experience, LIRS offers a special necessity for new arrivals — human beings who understand.
With 30K Afghans on US bases, advocates prepare for resettlement ‘crisis’
With 30,000 Afghans still on U.S. military bases, LIRS expects to welcome 700 Afghans through the new welcome center in the upcoming year and another 1,200 Afghans to existing sites. While LIRS has already resettled nearly 1,400 Afghan refugees in Northern Virginia since the summer, O’Mara Vignarajah said approximately 7,000 Afghans have indicated that they want to resettle in Northern Virginia — where the Afghan community is strong.
The launch of new sites underscores the surge in demand for resettlement services, advocates told ABC News, and illustrates nationwide efforts to rebuild the U.S. refugee program after years of budget cuts under the Trump administration. As demand for their services grows, LIRS recently added 12 new sites to their network this year, making for settlement services in 51 sites in 21 states across the nation.
“We are aggressively rebuilding the refugee resettlement infrastructure that was decimated under the previous administration,” O’Mara Vignarajah said in remarks at last week’s opening. “Over those four years, more than 100 local resettlement offices were forced to close their doors or suspend services as a result of severe cuts in the refugee program. We at Lutheran Immigration Refugee Service were forced to shatter 17 of our sites.”
“But spurred by the arrival of our Afghan allies,” she added, “it is the dawn of a new era of welcome.”
LIRS expects to host a job fair in the Peace Lutheran Church space in the coming months for recent refugees and to lease a warehouse nearby to house donations, where refugees can “shop” for basic items like clothes, diapers, books and toys.
Susan Hilbert, 74, of Annandale, Virginia, who is part of a women’s circle at another church nearby, said her friend group decided to write a $250 check to LIRS and another $250 note to the Peace Lutheran Church because, she said, “We wanted to do something for Afghan refugees, and we were finding lots of big organizations, but we wanted to make a difference locally that we could see.” Hilbert brought with her pots and pans to donate to the welcome site.
O’Mara Vignarajah, while praising volunteers like Hilbert, acknowledged there’s only so much her organization can do — and called on the U.S. government to do more.
“While it’s worth celebrating 75,000 Afghans evacuated this summer, history won’t judge us solely on how many we led to safety but on how many we left behind,” O’Mara Vignarajah said, also calling for the Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for evacuees.
O’Mara Vignarajah lamented that the first question they hear from new refugees almost exclusively is: “‘How can I get my family back in Afghanistan out of harm’s way?'”
“It’s a constant source of sleepless nights for those we serve, knowing their loved ones face Taliban, retribution, economic collapse, and a harsh winter amid humanitarian catastrophe,” she said. “So let’s be clear, while the military evacuation is over, our mission to protect our allies is not.”
Azizy is also calling on the U.S. government to make the process easier for Afghans to bring over at-risk and vulnerable family members, like her parents. Until then, she says she’ll keep calling them each day, as she adjusts to her new life in the U.S. — and helps others adjust, too.
“I knocked on all the possible doors to have an easier way for my parents to bring them here,” she said. “But every time, there is something that looks like a big challenge for me.”
ABC News’ Conor Finnegan contributed to this report.
(SEOUL, South Korea) — South Korea’s government will grant a special pardon to former President Park Guen-hye, who was in prison on corruption charges.
“From the perspective of national reconciliation, former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a long-term prison sentence, will be granted a special pardon,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement Friday.
Park had served almost five years of the 22-year prison sentence since March 2017.
“In the case of former President Park, her deteriorating health condition after serving nearly five years was considered,” President Moon Jae-in said in a statement on the special pardon Friday morning, according to South Korea’s presidential office.
The presidential office statement also said the pardon was a move to overcome the pain of the past and move on to a new era while asking for a deep understanding from those who disagree with the pardon.
There were split views on Moon’s decision to release the 69-year-old former president.
“I see it as an appropriate amnesty in terms of national unity,” Shin Beom-chul, director of the Center for Diplomacy and Security at the Korea Research Institute for National Strategy, told ABC News. “Conflicts between the ruling and opposition parties are growing too much, which is also an opportunity to resolve and the state needs to come together.”
On the other hand, civil society organization People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy sent out statements opposing the presidential pardon, claiming it is “far from social integration and an amnesty based on political considerations ahead of the presidential election in March.”
Along with Park, a total of 3,094 people will be released from prison on Dec. 31 as part of Moon’s special pardon.
Park was the first female president of South Korea and became the first democratically elected leader to be thrown out of office in 2017. Back then, the Constitutional Court upheld a parliament vote to impeach her over a corruption scandal that also landed the heads of two conglomerates in jail.
(MOSCOW) — Amid fears Russia might invade Ukraine, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has again repeated demands for guarantees from Western countries that NATO will not expand in eastern Europe, but also expressed hope that negotiations with the Biden administration in January could allow the two sides to “move forward.”
Putin offered the mixed messages on Thursday during his marathon end-of-year press conference in Moscow, making menacing accusations against Ukraine but also sounding more hopeful notes around the possibility for negotiation.
Western countries are alarmed that Russia may be preparing a renewed invasion into Ukraine this winter, amid a build up of tens of thousands of Russian troops on its border. Putin has demanded the U.S. and NATO give legal guarantees the alliance will not expand further and withdraw NATO troop deployments from eastern Europe.
The Biden administration has called those demands non-starters but has agreed to hold talks with Russia over its concerns. Putin on Thursday said those talks would take place in Geneva in January and said Russia had seen a “positive reaction” from the U.S. to its demands to negotiate.
“I hope that the first positive reaction and the announced possible start of work in the near future, in the first days of January, will allow us to move forward,” Putin said.
Putin said Russia was forced to confront NATO and Ukraine now to prevent the country potentially becoming a base for NATO missiles in the future.
“And so we put the question directly: there must be no movement of NATO further to the east,” he said. “The ball is in their court. They must answer us something.”
The U.S. and NATO countries have rejected Russia’s demands for a veto on NATO expansion, seeing them as an attempt by the Kremlin to have formal recognition for a sphere of influence over Ukraine. Analysts and Western officials have been trying to understand whether the Russian build up is a negotiating tactic or signals a real readiness to invade.
Putin’s comments on Thursday did little to move the needle. He said Russia did not want conflict but alleged there Ukraine might be preparing a military operation to re-take the Russian-controlled separatist regions in its east, saying Kyiv had tried to do it twice before in the past.
“They keep telling us: war, war, war,” Putin said. “There is an impression that, maybe, they are preparing for the third military operation and are warning us in advance: do not intervene, do not protect these people. But if you do intervene and protect them, there will be new sanctions. Perhaps, we should prepare for that.”
Analysts fear Russia might use the accusation of a Ukrainian attack as pretext to launch its own invasion. There are no signs Ukraine’s government is preparing such an assault, which would risk an overwhelming Russian response.
Russia last week published two draft treaties listing its demands from the U.S. and NATO. The proposals would limit NATO troops and military infrastructure to the countries where they were based before 1997, when the key eastern European members joined.
The Biden administration immediately rejected Russia’s demands limiting which countries can join NATO. But it has said it is ready to hold talks with Moscow about some of the other proposals, which are linked to arms control for example.
Putin spoke at length and angrily about NATO’s expansion eastward since the end of the Cold War, a grievance he has long held.
Asked by a journalist from Britain’s Sky News on Thursday if he would guarantee Russia will not invade Ukraine, Putin said it was Russia that needed guarantees from Western countries over NATO.
“What guarantees must we give you? You must give us guarantees. Right here and right now!” Putin said.
