MANILA: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has given his government a week to process some 24,000 repatriated Filipino workers stuck for weeks on cruise ships or in coronavirus quarantine, so they can finally go home.
Thousands are aboard cruise vessels off Manila Bay or stuck in hotels and crowded health facilities, some growing frustrated having tested negative for the coronavirus and completed the mandated 14-day quarantine.
Overseas Filipino Workers, or OFWs, are breadwinners and a key support base of Duterte. Their more than $30 billion of annual remittances is a key driver of the Philippine economy, sustaining millions of family members.
“The president said they can use all government resources and whatever means of transportation — bus, airplane, ships — to bring the OFWs home,” Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said on Monday.
The government is braced for hundreds of thousands more workers to return due to job losses as the coronavirus devastates economies worldwide. It has blamed the delays on a testing bottleneck.
The cruise ship cluster off Manila Bay numbered 29 vessels on Monday, none with passengers aboard. They contain thousands of Filipino crew still awaiting coronavirus tests, many no longer receiving salaries and venting frustrations having already met conditions for release.
Crew reached by Reuters said information was scarce and prolonged isolation was taking a toll on their mental and emotional health.
Jex Bañega, a receptionist on Carnival Corp’s Pacific Explorer, said he was being well cared for, but after 35 days of quarantine, his cabin felt more like prison cell.
“We’re only thinking of going home to our families. The comfort of our homes is different,” Banega said
More than 30,000 overseas Filipinos have returned home and 515 of 27,000 tested for coronavirus were positive as of May 20, authorities said. The Philippines has over 14,000 cases, of which 868 were deaths.
Philippine President Duterte answers call of workers under COVID-19 quarantine eager to go home
https://arab.news/p575j
Philippine President Duterte answers call of workers under COVID-19 quarantine eager to go home
- Thousands are aboard cruise vessels off Manila Bay or stuck in hotels and crowded health facilities
- The government is braced for hundreds of thousands more workers to return due to job losses as the coronavirus devastates economies worldwide
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
