Sonny Chiba: Japan’s martial arts star and Kill Bill actor dies of Covid at 82

Japanese actor and martial arts great Sonny Chiba has died at the age of 82 from complications related to Covid.

Chiba was a star in Japan and was best known to Western audiences for his memorable role as the swordsmith in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

He enjoyed an on-screen career spanning five decades, which also included the 1970s Street Fighter trilogy and 2006’s The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift.

His agent Timothy Beal said he was “a humble, caring and friendly man”.

Beal told the AFP news agency it was “such tragic news”, adding: “He was a great friend and an awesome client.”

Paying tribute online, Mortal Kombat actor Lewis Tan wrote: “A true action legend. Your films are eternal and your energy an inspiration.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is responsible for the Oscars, also said he was a “legend” who “blended toughness with depth”.

Chiba studied martial arts throughout the 1960s, excelling in karate. Following in the footsteps of Bruce Lee, he then landed roles in Japanese films and TV series, including with the influential Toei studio.

He made a name for himself outside his own country in Street Fighter as the ruthless martial arts mercenary and anti-hero Takuma Tsurugi.

“For me, the most enjoyable role to play is the bad guy,” he told Jonathan Ross in a TV interview in 2007.

image caption Chiba (far left) with Tarantino and other cast members at the premiere of Kill Bill – Volume One in Tokyo in 2003

The crossover-hit film series caught the eye of a young Tarantino, and almost 30 years later the director would cast him to play Hattori Hanzo in 2003’s Kill Bill – Volume 1.

The popular character was a samurai-turned-sushi chef who came out of retirement to forge a sword for the Bride, played by Uma Thurman.

He reprised the role in Kill Bill: Vol 2. Chiba also appeared in Kinji Fukasaku’s 2003 film Battle Royale II: Requiem, as well as Justin Lin’s instalment of the Fast and Furious franchise.

The former gymnast had been set due to work on Outbreak Z, an upcoming zombie movie starring Wesley Snipes.

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Tensions rise in struggle to get aid to victims

Five days after a powerful earthquake killed at least 2,189 people in Haiti help is trickling in, but struggling people say they need it more quickly.

The poorest country in the Americas is in urgent need of medical, food and sanitation assistance, experts say.

Rescue crews are still digging through rubble in a search for survivors, as the stench of death fills the air.

“We are preparing for a public health disaster,” says Nadesha Mijoba of the Haitian Health Foundation.

“The sanitation situation is quite critical… it is our hope that we don’t have an outbreak of cholera,” Ms Mijoba also warned BBC News.

Since the 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit the island on Saturday, the US military has transported at least 200 severely injured people to hospital.

Despite rainy conditions, many people have been sleeping outside due to fears that aftershocks could cause more buildings to collapse.

“We are afraid to go inside, so we sleep on the ground in the street,” one person in the hard-hit region of Les Cayes told BBC News.

“I don’t have a job, I don’t have water, I don’t have food. My house was destroyed, there is nothing,” said another woman.

Around 53,000 homes were completely destroyed in the quake, with about 77,000 more damaged.

The US Army is preparing to set up a field hospital in Les Cayes. The US and British Navy are also each sending ships to help with rescue and recovery efforts.

Doctors are struggling to treat the more than 12,200 people who have been injured. Hundreds are still missing, and presumed trapped under the rubble.

Rescue workers had had to contend with armed gangs who attacked aid convoys.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that following negotiations, the gangs had agreed to let aid through.

But a major Port-au-Prince hospital closed for two days after two doctors were kidnapped by criminals. A pregnant mother and her baby died while waiting for one of the captured doctors, who was meant to be on his way to perform an emergency Caesarean delivery.

The earthquake compounds problems facing the impoverished nation, which is already reeling from a political crisis following the assassination of its president last month.

Haiti has been hit by a series of natural disasters in the past, including Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

The deadliest was the 2010 earthquake which killed more than 200,000 people and caused extensive damage to the country’s infrastructure and economy.

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US accuses Abiy’s government of blocking aid

The US international development agency has blamed the Ethiopian government for a shortage of humanitarian aid in the country’s conflict-torn Tigray region.

USAID accused the government of “obstructing” access to Tigray, as it warned that food aid was set to run out this week for the first time.

Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of famine amid the conflict between government and rebel forces.

Ethiopia has denied “purposely” blocking aid.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s spokeswoman told reporters that the government was allowing aid convoys to enter Tigray, but that security was a “priority that cannot be compromised”.

“It is a volatile area so… there [are] going to be continuous checks and processes,” she said.

In her statement, USAID chief Samantha Powers described the flow of humanitarian assistance into the northern region as “woefully insufficient”.

She said food warehouses were “virtually empty” and that aid workers would soon have nothing to distribute.

“This shortage is not because food is unavailable, but because the Ethiopian government is obstructing humanitarian aid and personnel, including land convoys and air access,” she said.

USAID called on the Ethiopian government to “immediately allow humanitarian assistance”.

It noted that aid trucks have been unable to leave the town of Semera in the neighbouring Afar region – currently the only accessible land route into Tigray.

The United Nations has separately told the BBC more than 100 aid trucks are stuck on this route.

Its World Food Programme has warned that it is running out of stocks of food.

The conflict in Tigray began in November, when Mr Ahmed ordered a military offensive against regional forces. He said he did so in response to an attack on a military base housing government troops.

The escalation came after months of feuding between Mr Abiy’s government and leaders of Tigray’s dominant political party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

For almost three decades, the party was at the centre of national power, before it was sidelined by Mr Abiy, who took office in 2018 after anti-government protests.

Mr Abiy – a Nobel Peace Prize winner – pursued reforms, but when Tigray resisted, the political crisis erupted into war.

The Ethiopian government has designated the TPLF as a terrorist group, while it says it remains the legitimate government in Tigray.

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China allows couples third child amid demographic crisis

BEIJING (AP) — China will now allow couples to legally have a third child as it seeks to hold off a demographic crisis that could threaten its hopes of increased prosperity and global influence.

 

The ceremonial legislature on Friday amended the Population and Family Planning Law as part of a decades-long effort by the ruling Communist Party to dictate the size of families in keeping with political directives. It comes just six years after the last change.

 

From the 1980s, China strictly limited most couples to one child, a policy enforced with threats of fines or loss of jobs, leading to abuses including forced abortions. A preference for sons led parents to kill baby girls, leading to a massive imbalance in the sex ratio.

 

The rules were eased for the first time in 2015 to allow two children as officials acknowledged the looming consequences of the plummeting birthrate. The overwhelming fear is that China will grow old before it becomes wealthy.

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Biden pledges to Americans in Kabul: ‘We will get you home’

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is pledging to Americans still trapped in Afghanistan: “We will get you home.”

Biden also said Friday the United States is committed to evacuating all Afghans who assisted the war effort — a potentially vast expansion of the administration’s commitments on the airlift so far, given the tens of thousands of Afghan translators and others, and their close family members, seeking evacuation.

 

Biden’s comments at a White House news conference Friday come as the U.S. government struggles to ramp up a massive airlift clearing Americans and other foreigners and vulnerable Afghans through the Kabul airport, rescuing them from a Taliban takeover of the country.

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NHS Wales: Waiting times hit record levels

The numbers on waiting lists for non-urgent hospital treatment in Wales have again hit record levels.

There were 624,909 people waiting in June, with the list climbing steadily each month and up by 41% since the early days of the Covid pandemic.

Those waiting the longest, more than nine months, rose again to 233,210.

A&E waiting time performance was the worst on record and Conservatives called the figures “catastrophic”.

Emergency departments and the Welsh ambulance service both had their busiest months since the pandemic began.

A&E waiting times were the worst for a second month in a row – with only 69.8% of patients spending less than four hours waiting to be dealt with.

The headline figure for the number of patients waiting for non-urgent hospital treatment has been growing since the pandemic began, not helped by surgery being postponed during the first Covid wave.

There were another 17,869 people added to the list in the past month and numbers waiting more than nine months grew by 5,457.

A Welsh government spokesperson said: “Waiting times for treatment continue to grow.

“However, it is encouraging to see progress being made with the number of patients waiting over 52 weeks falling for the third month in a row.

“We also saw the largest number of specialist consultations completed and treatments started in any month since the start of the pandemic.”

It comes as Wales’ health minister pledged £551m to help health and social services recover from the pandemic.

Eluned Morgan said Covid had had a “massive impact” on the NHS and social services in Wales and was still facing significant costs in dealing with it.

The figures for June 2021 show:

• The overall waiting list for treatment is a record 624,909
• Numbers of patients waiting more than 36 weeks – nine months – to start treatment in hospital have grown from 25,634 in February 2020 to 233,210 (an increase of 810%)
• The longest waits included 54,394 people due for orthopaedic or trauma treatment – a 546% increase since February 2020
• Inroads have been made into those waiting for cardiothoracic surgery, but there were still 108 waiting more than nine months, more than twice the pre-pandemic number
• Another 34,104 people have been waiting more than nine months for ophthalmology treatment – compared to 4,083 before the start of the pandemic
• Numbers waiting for diagnostic tests were “markedly higher” than before the pandemic
• Cancer patients who started their first definitive treatment within 62 days of it first being suspected was the second highest number on record although performance against the 62 day target fell slightly on the previous month.

The figures also show the Welsh Ambulance Trust received more calls in July than in any month since the pandemic began – with the highest proportion of “red” calls, those immediately life-threatening emergencies, on record.

There were also the highest attendances at A&E departments since the pandemic began and waiting time performance was the worst on record.

The target is that 95% of patients should be seen within four hours but that fell to 69.8% in July.

This dropped as low as 44.7% at Glan Clwyd Hospital in Denbighshire and 43.8% at the new Grange University Hospital in Torfaen.

The Grange, which opened in the middle of the pandemic last November, had nearly 8,000 people through the doors of its emergency department in July.

The monthly performance was the second-lowest ever for a Welsh A&E unit, after Wrexham Maelor Hospital in February last year.

Overall in Wales more than 7,000 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E – one in 10 patients and another record high – with the target that no-one should wait that long.

Senior consultants said there was a “severely challenging situation,” with “unrelenting pressure” on staff and fears the NHS would not be able to cope, with added winter pressures looming.

“Staff are already facing burnout, exhaustion, stress and moral injury,” said Dr Suresh Pillai, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Wales.

“The health service and its workforce need the assurance that there is a robust and comprehensive plan to manage this likely increase in demand and provide adequate resources for staff and departments.”

‘Catastrophic’

There were 94,176 attendances to emergency units over the month.

For the ambulance service, only 57.8% of more than 3,580 red calls arrived within eight minutes compared with the target of 65%. This was down from 60.6% in the previous month.

But more people started treatment for cancer in the latest month than in the previous month.

The total number of patients starting their first cancer treatment and the number of patients starting their treatment within the target time were the second highest since the current records began.

The Conservatives called the figures “catastrophic”, saying Wales should be seeing improvements after it moved from the peak of the pandemic.

Health spokesman Russell George said: “To record the worst ever A&E waiting times and the longest NHS treatment waiting list in the same month shows a complete lack of leadership.”

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No plane leaving empty, said the UK defence secretary

No plane carrying Britons and Afghans from Kabul has left empty, the UK defence secretary has said.

Ben Wallace rejected reports that some flights from Kabul contained only a few people, saying the UK was “absolutely ploughing through the numbers”.

He told BBC Breakfast “every hour counts” and confirmed “the Taliban are letting our people through”.

But Taliban checkpoints ring the perimeter of the airport and chaotic scenes are unfolding outside.

About 4,500 US troops are in temporary control of Karzai International Airport, with about 900 British soldiers also on patrol at the site as part of efforts to secure the evacuation flights.

The Taliban are blocking Afghans without travel documents from entering. Twelve people have been killed in and around Kabul airport since Sunday, according to a Taliban official quoted by the Reuters news agency.

But even those with valid papers have struggled to get to the airport, with reports that some have been beaten by Taliban guards.

An Afghan interpreter who worked for the British army said he received permission to come to the UK last week, but was now in hiding and would “face death” if the Taliban found him.

Peymana Assad, a London councillor who was visiting relatives in Kabul, said she joined hundreds of people walking along the traffic-jammed road to the airport to escape – only to find she reached the UK meeting point too late.

Ms Assad, who had previously left Afghanistan as a three-year-old refugee, said a local family allowed her to wait at their home until she could contact the Foreign Office and arrange to join a later RAF evacuation flight.

The defence secretary said the UK would continue to stay in Afghanistan as long as the US ran the airport, but said the government was also already investing in “third country hubs” for processing people “if they get out to other countries in the region”.

Mr Wallace said seven to 10 RAF planes were taking off every day, with at least 138 due on the next flight out.

He said the passengers on the flights out of Afghanistan this week had included British government personnel, British citizens, media and human rights staff and Afghans who had worked for the UK.

Downing Street said military flights took about 1,200 people out of Kabul between Saturday and 08:00 BST on Wednesday, about 900 of whom were Afghan nationals and the remainder British citizens.

Since late June, 2,000 Afghans who worked for the UK have been resettled with their families under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP), according to the Home Office, with a target of 5,000 by the end of 2021.

The UK has also committed to take in up to 20,000 Afghan refugees over the next few years under a separate resettlement scheme – including 5,000 this year.

Two evacuation flights came into the UK on Wednesday, the Minister of Defence said – a military plane into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and a passenger plane into an unnamed civilian airport.

On board were Afghans being relocated under the ARAP scheme for those who worked with the British military, British citizens and some other foreign nationals. The MoD did not provide exact numbers but said each flight could hold about 250 passengers.

Eight RAF transport aircraft – a mix of A400 Atlas planes, C-130 Hercules aircraft and C-17 Globemasters – were due to fly to Kabul on Thursday.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Twitter that another 10 Foreign Office and Home Office staff had been sent to Afghanistan to help with the evacuation.

US President Joe Biden said US troops may stay in Afghanistan beyond his withdrawal deadline at the end of this month.

He told ABC News between 10,000 and 15,000 Americans needed to be evacuated, along with 50,000 to 65,000 Afghans such as former translators for the American military.

Mr Wallace said a plane left Kabul on Thursday morning carrying “115 people and their families – those are the Afghans on there as opposed to other personnel”.

He added: “None of our planes are leaving empty… our planes never leave empty. If we have spaces on them, we offer them up to other nations.”

Downing Street said the UK helped to fly 76 Australians out of Afghanistan on an RAF plane on Wednesday.

image caption British nationals and Afghan evacuees depart a flight from Afghanistan at RAF Brize Norton on 17 August 2021

He said: “We have a full programme today of many more people coming out – trying to reach our… capability towards the end of the month. And that is so far on track…. we are doing it as fast as we can.”

Mr Wallace said many of the flights were at full capacity.

“You and I wouldn’t be allowed to fly some of the way those planes are flying in safety, so we are taking considerable risk”, he said, adding: “Alongside those people will be troops or others coming in and out.”

The defence secretary said additional UK troops would be deployed to Afghanistan to help manage public order on the ground at Kabul airport.

Meanwhile, Labour has accused Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab of putting interpreters’ lives at risk after he declined to phone the Afghan foreign minister to get help for the evacuation. The BBC has been told the call was made by a junior minister instead.

But Mr Wallace said “the only thing that mattered” was whether Kabul airport would continue to allow people to get out, telling Breakfast: “No amount of phone calls to an Afghan government at that time would have made any difference.”

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