Mere minutes after leaving a Criminal Investigation Department social at the Gravity Night Club, Assistant.Commissioner Balram Persaud, was involved in an accident and is now hospitalized in a serious condition.
The accident occurred about 23 hrs as the second in command of the Guyana Police Force was heading home on the main road close to Dairy Village, West Coast Demerara. “We hear that he was driving home at about 11:30 and he tyre blow out and the car flip over and he get injured bad,” reported a nephew, Johnny.
Up to yesterday afternoon as news of the accident spread, relatives and friends gathered at the Balwant Singh Hospital but according to reports, no one was allowed inside to see Persaud. “We hear that he deh really bad and doctors say his chances are 50/50. “They tell we that they will give us more information (today) so we are waiting and hoping for the best,” said another relative who did not give his name…[+]

Men exposed to the Zika virus and who have a pregnant partner should use a condom or abstain from sex until the baby is born, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised Friday in guidelines aimed at preventing sexual transmission of the virus. Officials also said that pregnant women who have been exposed to Zika should talk with their doctors about testing for the virus.

While saying that the situation with Zika is “evolving rapidly” and that much had been learned in just the past two weeks, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden stressed in a news briefing that the primary concern with Zika at this time is protecting pregnant women and their unborn babies from a neurological disorder known as microcephaly.(CNN)…[+]

EGYPT/IRELAND – Dublin teenager Ibrahim Halawa, who is on hunger strike in an Egyptian prison today, has said fellow inmates are being tortured and “crucified”. The 19-year-old has told a caseworker from human rights organization Reprieve that some prisoners were being tied up naked in a crucifix position in the prison’s halls. Others had been electrocuted using pools of water to increase the pain.

Ibrahim’s sister Somaia told the Herald yesterday that his latest letter to his family in Dublin alleges that “experimental torture” is being carried out at the prison. He said he was regularly beaten with rubber bars, and was singled out by one senior guard for particular abuse. “Some prisoners were tied naked in a crucifix position in the prison’s halls, while others had been electrocuted, using pools of water to increase the pain,” he said. He alleges that he had been stripped naked, sexually assaulted, whipped with metal chains and walked upon, and he said he has been held around the clock in a windowless cell with no natural light or fresh air. (INDEPENDENT IRELAND)…[+]

GERMANY – Cologne has beefed up security for the city’s annual carnival, after many women suffered sexual assaults and robberies there on New Year’s Eve. The city in western Germany is putting 2,500 police officers on the streets for the week-long event.

Germany was shocked by the New Year assaults, largely blamed on migrants. More than 100 women were victims, but the full scale only emerged later. Separately, police have arrested three suspected Islamist militants in raids. The two men and one woman detained are among four suspected of links to the so-called Islamic State group. One of those held was being sought by Algerian authorities, and they may have been planning an attack in Germany, police said. Two men – a Tunisian and a Moroccan – have been charged over the Cologne offences. But in total there were 945 complaints to Cologne police after the New Year trouble, 559 of them allegations of sexual assault. Thirty-five suspects are being investigated. German authorities spoke of a new type of crime, in which gangs of drunken men – described as North African – targeted women.(BBC)…[+]

USA – President Barack Obama made his first visit to a U.S. mosque on Wednesday, in an effort to allay the fears of Americans accustomed to pop-culture portrayals of Muslims as terrorists, and to reassure Muslim American youth about their place in the nation. Obama, declaring that attacks on Islam were an attack on all religions, decried the “inexcusable political rhetoric” against Muslims from Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates. “We have to understand that an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths,” he said at the mosque outside of Baltimore, which he said had received threats twice in the past year. “When any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up.”

Trump, the Republican front-runner, called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States after authorities described a California couple who killed 14 people last December as radicalized Muslims inspired by Islamic State militants.(REUTERS)…[+]

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti’s outgoing president has released a brash pop song jeering at his critics and aiming sexually suggestive lyrics at his main target, the award-winning journalist Liliane Pierre-Paul.

In an unusual move by a sitting leader, President Michel Martelly released during what is likely his last week in office, a track called Bal Bannann Nan”— Haitian Creole for “Give Them the Banana.” Martelly’s choice to be Haiti’s next president, Jovenel Moïse, is nicknamed ‘Neg Bannann’ — Banana Man in Haitian Creole.

Martelly’s song was the talk of social media and Haiti’s call-in radio shows Monday. While some dismissed it as a light piece of entertainment that harkens back to the president’s days as the self-proclaimed “bad boy” of Haitian pop music, others were repelled.(JAMAICA OBSERVER)…[+]

PARIS, France – French schools have begun allowing students to smoke on their grounds to prevent them becoming terror targets on the streets outside, a union says. The union of school administrators first called for the measure days after the Paris attacks in November, but the health ministry refused. The SNPDEN union renewed its call last week, but a union official said some schools had already gone ahead anyway.

A third of French teenagers smoke, according to government statistics. “Students massing on the street constitutes a very high risk, one that is certainly greater than that posed by the consumption of tobacco,” SNPDEN Deputy Secretary General Michel Richard told France Info. Mr Michel said the union was not attempting to minimize the dangers linked to smoking, but he said it was “necessary in this particular context to protect against the biggest risks”. France’s health ministry refused the union’s initial request to allow smoking on school grounds, saying the state of emergency currently in force in France “did not affect rules about smoking”, Mr Michel said.(BBC)...[+]

BRAZIL – The spread of Zika virus across Latin America, with its apparent tragic consequences for the babies of infected pregnant women, has parallels with the emergence of Aids more than 30 years ago, according to a senior epidemiologist on the frontline in Brazil. Wilson Savino, director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, said the current state of scientific ignorance around the virus and its effects resembles that over HIV – the human immunodeficiency virus which gives rise to Aids – in the early 1980s. “Back then, the scientific and medical community did not know what was going on until many people had died and considerable research had been undertaken,” said Savino. “Then it turned out to be a global health issue. In Brazil, although we have identified the Zika virus, we don’t know much about it compared with dengue or yellow fever. The degree of ignorance is comparable to what we faced 32 years ago.(theguardian)…[+]

GENEVA, Switzerland – The World Health Organization declared a “public health emergency of international concern” Monday over the Zika virus and the health problems that doctors fear it is causing. The agency said the emergency is warranted because of how fast the mosquito-borne virus is spreading and its suspected link to an alarming spike in babies born with abnormally small heads – a condition called microcephaly – in Brazil and French Polynesia.

Reports of a serious neurological condition, called Guillame-Barre Syndrome, that can lead to paralysis, have also risen in areas where the virus has been reported. Health officials have specifically seen clusters of this in El Salvador, Brazil and French Polynesia, according to WHO’s Dr. Bruce Aylward. The conditions have not yet been conclusively linked to the virus.

“The experts agreed that a causal relationship between Zika infection during pregnancy and microcephaly is strongly suspected, though not yet scientifically proven,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general said. (CNN)…[+]

LYON, France – France’s anti-terror police have arrested six people who allegedly planned to attack sex clubs and leave for Syria.  The group of five men and a woman, who had already bought bus tickets to join ISIS in Syria via Bulgaria and Turkey, were arrested outside the French city of Lyon. At least two of them were planning to obtain weapons to attack French nightspots and then leave Syria-bound after 8 February, according to French security forces. The suspects had converted to Islam and were in the radar of French intelligence for extremist views. French authorities said the suspects were known for ‘active proselytism, their allegiance to Daesh, or their calls for Jihad’.  (DailyMail)…[+]