Parts of Sydney went into lockdown Friday as a coronavirus outbreak in Australia’s largest city continued to grow.
Health authorities reported an additional 22 locally transmitted cases and imposed a weeklong lockdown in four areas, saying people could leave their homes only for essential purposes.
The outbreak of the highly contagious delta variant was first detected last week, and 65 people have been infected.
“If you live or work in those local government areas, you need to stay at home unless absolutely necessary,” said Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of New South Wales state.
She said the lockdown would have a significant impact on businesses, especially in the central business district of the city of more than 5 million people.
“This is in order for us to ensure that this doesn’t take a hold for weeks and weeks, and we believe this is a proportionate response to the risk,” Berejiklian said.
A day earlier, the premier had said there wasn’t any need for further restrictions despite it being the “scariest period” the state had been through during the pandemic.
Photo album stolen from ‘Perfect Storm’ bar returned
A precious photo album stolen from the Massachusetts bar made famous in Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book “The Perfect Storm” and the 2000 movie of the same name has been returned with a note of apology, the bar’s owners said.
The album was delivered via U.S. Mail to the Crow’s Nest in Gloucester this week, owner Gregg Sousa said.
It came from Georgia.
“We really are thrilled to have it back,” Sousa said.
It appeared to be unharmed.
“I just wanted to return this,” the accompanying note said. “It was taken by a drunk friend, and I do not feel that was right. SORRY.”
China slams U.S. curbs on solar materials as economic attack
China’s government on Friday criticized U.S. curbs on imports of solar panel materials that might be made with forced labor as an attack on its development and said Beijing will protect Chinese companies, but gave no details of possible retaliation.
The U.S. customs agency said Thursday it will block imports of polysilicon from Hoshine Silicon Industry Co., which might use forced labor as part of a Beijing campaign against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in the northwest. Imports from six other Chinese suppliers of raw materials and components for solar panels also are to be restricted.
Washington is using “human rights as a disguise” to “suppress the industrial development of Xinjiang,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian.
“The United States doesn’t care at all about the Xinjiang people,” Zhao said. “Their real plots and sinister intentions are to mess up Xinjiang to contain China.”
George Floyd statue defaced with hate group’s symbol
A statue of George Floyd that was installed in Brooklyn less than a week ago was spray-painted and marked with a white supremacist group’s logo in an act of vandalism that the police were investigating as a hate crime, officials said Thursday.
The defacing of the statue, which was unveiled on Flatbush Avenue last Saturday to commemorate the Juneteenth holiday, was discovered by officers early Thursday, the police said. It was covered with black spray paint and marked with a stencil for Patriot Front, a white supremacist group with a small-but-growing presence in New York City.
“It’s at the epitome of not only anti-Blackness and racism, but it is also about the lack of even basic human decency about the life of George Floyd,” said Imani Henry, a lead organizer with Equality for Flatbush, a local community group that opposes gentrification in the area and fights against police brutality.
“For someone to desecrate an innocent person’s tribute is just beyond the pale,” Henry said.
Widow says antivirus pioneer John McAfee was not suicidal
The widow of John McAfee, the British-American tycoon who died in a Spanish prison this week while awaiting extradition to the United States, said Friday her husband was not suicidal when she last spoke to him hours before he was found dead.
“His last words to me were ‘I love you and I will call you in the evening,’” Janice McAfee said.
“Those words are not words of somebody who is suicidal,” she added in her first public remarks since the software entrepreneur’s death Wednesday.
Authorities in Spain are conducting an autopsy on McAfee’s body but have indicated that everything at the scene indicated that the 75-year-old killed himself.
