Fire forces 700 patients to flee hospital
JOHANNESBURG -- Nearly 700 patients were being evacuated Saturday from Johannesburg's Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, where a fire blazed overnight in South Africa's largest city.
No injuries or casualties have been reported. The fire has been contained, but the hospital has been closed for seven days, said David Makhura, premier of Gauteng province.
Four hundred patients had already been moved to other public hospitals in the metropolitan area and an additional 270 would be moved by the end of Saturday, Makhura said.
The fire caused the third floor of the hospital's parking garage to collapse.
Sixty firefighters battled the blaze through the night. It started Friday morning and had been doused by the afternoon, but then reignited in the evening.
The fire has caused extensive damage to the hospital, which has more than 1,000 beds and serves Johannesburg, a city of 6 million people, and the surrounding province. It is one of the biggest public hospitals in the country and a designated treatment center for covid-19.
U.S., Japan stoking division, China says
BEIJING -- China hit back at the U.S.-Japan show of alliance during talks between President Joe Biden and Japan Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, calling it an "ironic attempt of stoking division."
China said Suga and Biden's news conference Friday, in which they issued a statement on shared values in democracy and human rights, and aired concerns about China's activities in the Indo-Pacific region, had gone "far beyond the scope of normal development of bilateral relations."
"It cannot be more ironic that such attempt of stoking division and building blocs against other countries is put under the banner of 'free and open,'" the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement Saturday.
The statement by the Japanese and U.S. leaders also mentioned the importance of "peace and stability" in the Taiwan Strait, marking the first time a Japanese prime minister had spoken out on Taiwan in a communique with the United States since 1969 talks between Richard Nixon and Eisaku Sato.
Japan, long cautious in managing relations with its neighbor, has become more outspoken with Suga.
The U.S. and China have clashed over a wide range of issues in the past few years, including human rights in Tibet and the Xinjiang region, a crackdown on protests and political freedom in Hong Kong, China's assertion of its territorial claims to Taiwan and most of the South China Sea, and accusations that Beijing was slow to inform the world about the covid-19 outbreak.
China claims self-governing Taiwan as its territory and says, like Hong Kong, it should be under Beijing's control.
"The U.S. should never try to play the Taiwan card," Le Yucheng, China's vice foreign minister, said Friday. "It is very dangerous. This is our red line. The U.S. should never try to cross it."
Russia orders Ukrainian diplomat's exit
MOSCOW -- Russia has ordered a Ukrainian diplomat to leave the country after allegedly receiving classified information from a database of the country's main security agency and Ukraine responded by expelling a Russian diplomat.
Alexander Sosonyuk, the Ukrainian consul in St. Petersburg, was detained Friday while meeting with a Russian and obtaining material from a database of the Federal Security Service, according to the agency.
On Saturday, the Russian foreign ministry informed charge d'affaires Vasily Pokotilo that Sosonyuk must leave the country by Thursday. No details of the classified material were made public.
The Ukrainian foreign ministry later said it has ordered a senior diplomat to leave, but didn't identify the person.
The expulsions come amid escalating tensions over Russia's military buildup along the border with the eastern Ukraine region that is under the control of Russia-backed rebels.
Jailed Putin foe near death, doctor says
MOSCOW -- A doctor for imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike, says his health is deteriorating rapidly and the 44-year-old Kremlin critic could be on the verge of death.
Physician Yaroslav Ashikhmin said Saturday that test results he received from Navalny's family show him with sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, and heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidneys.
"Our patient could die at any moment," he said in a Facebook post.
Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union, said on Twitter that "action must be taken immediately."
Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin's most visible and adamant opponent.
His physicians have not been allowed to see him in prison. He went on a hunger strike to protest the refusal to let them visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs. Russia's state penitentiary service has said Navalny is receiving all the medical help he needs.
-- Compiled by Democrat-Gazette staff from wire reports
