Suella Braverman departs as UK home secretary

 Suella Braverman is understood to have departed as UK home secretary after Liz Truss cleared her diary and called off a planned visit amid desperate attempts to save her premiership, the Guardian has been told.

There is speculation that Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary who strongly backed Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race, will replace Braverman in another sudden revamp of Truss’s government.

The prime minister, who had been due to visit a defence technology company on Wednesday afternoon and do a TV clip, spoke to Braverman at a meeting in the House of Commons, sources said.

No 10 denied that Braverman had been sacked but did not respond to requests for clarification about the nature of her departure.

It would be another massive blow to the prime minister’s authority after she was forced to sack Kwasi Kwarteng and rip up her economic strategy to avoid a markets meltdown.

Sources claimed the move was at the behest of the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who has taken over control of the government’s economic response following Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, but who they claimed was now “pulling the strings”.

Braverman was an outspoken critic of Truss’s U-turn on the top rate of tax, suggesting she thought the prime minister had fallen victim to a “coup” earlier this month. Some Tory MPs on the libertarian right of the party have been left dismayed by the prime minister’s subsequent moves to ditch other tax cuts.

Braverman’s departure comes after the Home Office passed a major piece of legislation – the Public Order Act. An ally who spoke to her earlier this week said she had been “upbeat”.

Replacing Braverman with Shapps, less than a week after sacking Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor in place of Hunt, would be another sign of Truss trying to both appeal to a broader section of the Conservative party, and replacing perceived ideologues with more experienced ministers.

The home secretary, who was given the job when Truss entered No 10 in early September, was seen as a backbench and party member-pleasing choice for the role, given her robust views on immigration, law and order and culture war issues.

However, the former attorney general has been at the centre of several immediate controversies since taking over, including speaking out against a proposed trade deal with India due to her worries about it increasing immigration to the UK.

Braverman has also pledged to reduce net migration to the UK to tens of thousands a year, a target promised before and generally found to be impossible to achieve.

On Tuesday, the home secretary used a debate on environmental protests to blame a “coalition of chaos” including opposition parties and the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for supporting groups such as Just Stop Oil.

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Russia begins evacuation from Kherson in south

 Tens of thousands of civilians and Russian-appointed officials are being moved out of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region ahead of a Ukrainian offensive, says the Russia-installed local leader.

Vladimir Saldo said 50-60,000 civilians would leave four towns on the west bank of the Dnieper river in an “organised, gradual displacement”.

All Russian-appointed departments in Kherson city would cross the river too.

Russian TV footage showed a number of people gathering near the Dnieper.

As they queued for boats, it was not clear how many were leaving. The transfer or deportation of civilians by an occupying power from occupied territory is considered a war crime.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak pointed out it was less than a month since Russia had held a ceremony to annex Kherson: “Reality can hurt if you live in a fictional fantasy world.”

Late on Monday, Russia’s new military commander in Ukraine, Gen Sergei Surovikin, had described the situation in Kherson city, the regional capital, as difficult.

A Russian-installed official, Kirill Stremousov, warned Kherson residents that Ukrainian forces would launch an assault on the city “in the very near future”. “No one is going to retreat but we also want to save your life. Please move as quickly as possible to the left bank,” he added.

Mr Saldo, who was appointed governor of the region by Moscow, told Russian TV that no-one was about to surrender, but it was “undesirable” for residents to remain in a city facing military action. “In the past two days, more than 5,000 people have left Kherson,” he was quoted as saying.

Earlier this month, Kherson’s exiled deputy mayor said only 100,000 residents remained in Kherson city of the pre-war population of 320,000, with many fleeing Russia’s occupation.

The mayor of Russian-occupied Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, warned that Kherson’s civilians were facing enforced deportation and being deprived of their homes so that Russia could populate the city with “soldiers and traitors”. Last month, Ukraine said 2.5 million people had been forcibly deported from Ukraine to Russia.

The Russian-appointed governor accused Ukraine of building up for a large-scale offensive and planning to destroy the Kakhovka dam on the River Dnieper, flooding the area. Gen Sergei Surovikin describes the situation in Ukraine as “tense”

Kherson was the first major city to fall to Russian forces when they invaded Ukraine in February. However, in just a few weeks the Ukrainian military has recaptured territory in the north of the region and pushed as far as 30km (19 miles) south along the Dnieper, threatening to trap Russian troops.

As well as annexing Kherson, the Kremlin also announced last month that three other Ukrainian regions were part of Russia – a claim rejected internationally.

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Indonesia Bans All Syrup, Liquid Medicines After 99 Child Deaths

 The Indonesian government has announced a ban on all syrup and liquid medicine prescription and over-the-counter sales following the deaths of nearly 100 children from acute kidney injury this year.

The ban announced on Wednesday comes as the Southeast Asian country’s health authorities probe an unexplained rise since January in the number of children’s deaths from acute kidney injury (AKI).

“Until today, we have received 206 reported cases from 20 provinces with 99 deaths,” the health ministry’s spokesperson Muhammad Syahril Mansyur told a press briefing.

“As a precaution, the ministry has asked all health workers in health facilities not to prescribe liquid medicine or syrup temporarily … we also asked drug stores to temporarily stop non-prescription liquid medicine or syrup sales until the investigation is completed,” he said.

The rise in childhood AKI fatalities in Indonesia comes as The Gambia’s government probes the death of 70 children from AKI linked to paracetamol syrups used to treat fever, which contained excessive levels of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol, in a scandal linked to four Indian-made cough syrups.

Read Full Story …. Aljazeera >>> :   

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First ever bone marrow transplant conducted at Nairobi West Hospital

 Nairobi — The Nairobi West hospital has successfully conducted the first ever bone marrow transplant in the country, to a female patient ailing from multiple myeloma which is a type of blood cancer.

The hospital’s Chief Medical Director Professor Andrew Gachi addressing the media on Tuesday described the procedure as a major advancement of medicine in the country, noting that most patients with blood disorders and cancers have had to travel overseas to seek the highly specialized treatment.

Prof. Gachi told reporters that the bone marrow transplant to the patient identified as Margret aged 55 years was conducted at the facility by a team of specialists, led by Dr. Guarav Dixit, a specialist in bone marrow transplant and blood cancers.

“This is a great milestone in the medical history of this country. We have successfully transplanted bone marrow to a patient who had multiple myeloma, and we expect to discharge her in two days,” stated Prof. Gachi.

He said they will collaborate with other institutions to conduct training with their internationally recognized transplant specialists, as part of measures to provide easy access to bone marrow transplants as a possible cure for patients with complex blood disorders in the country.

“Our aim is also to be the leading Bone Marrow Transplant unit not only in East Africa, but across Africa,” he added.

Dr. Dixit, also a doctor at the New Delhi cancer centre in India, explained that the process conducted on the first patient at the Nairobi West facility is known as autogorous which involves harvesting healthy cells from the patient, destroying the patient’s abnormal or damaged cells and then re-injecting the healthy cells to the patient.

Dr Dixit noted that the Bone Marrow Treatment is a very crucial treatment procedure , because “in some instances, it offers the only hope of cure in treating blood cancers like Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL), that would otherwise be difficult to treat with conventional chemotherapy alone’.

He said BMT can also be used to treat Multiple Sclerosis and pediatric immunodeficiencies, and that it’s a safe procedure for patients with sickle cell disease if done at a young age.

“It is important to note that this therapy is evidence based across the globe, and now readily available in Kenya to all who may need it in a world class facility,” he stated.

Noting that the Bone Marrow Transplant process is highly specialized and delicate, Dr Gachi said that the treatment will cost between 25,000 and 35,000 dollars.

He however said this will be certainly lower than going outside the country for the same.

The cancer burden has been rising globally, exerting significant strain on populations and health systems at all income levels.

Data from the National Cancer Institute of Kenya shows that In Kenya, cancer is the 3rd leading cause of death after infectious and cardiovascular diseases.

The International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) GLOBOCAN report for 2018 estimated 47,887 new cases of cancer annually with a mortality of 32,987.

By Jemimah Mueni

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