NEWS OF THE DAY

From Around the World

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Prestigious prize: Israel’s prestigious Dan David Prize was awarded Thursday to Canadian author Michael Ignatieff and Reporters Without Borders for their work in promoting democracy amid an authoritarian wave to crack down on academic and journalistic freedom. The $ 1 million prize is named after the late philanthropist Dan David and administered by Tel Aviv University. Previous recipients of the prize include former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, novelist Margaret Atwood, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and American filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen.

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Canal walls: Years of neglect combined with wear and tear from heavy trucks driving next to Amsterdam’s famous canals have left miles of canal walls at risk of subsiding and in urgent need of repair, the city’s municipality said Thursday. Amsterdam Municipality, which is responsible for maintaining some 1,600 bridges, 373 miles of canal walls and five traffic tunnels, said the report found that six miles of the walls are in very bad condition and at elevated risk of subsiding. City councilor Sharon Dijksma said urgent action is needed.

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Building collapse: As emergency teams worked around the clock in search of survivors trapped in the rubble of an eightstory apartment building in Istanbul, its collapse put the spotlight on illegal construction and raised alarms over the scope of possible destruction in the event that a large earthquake hit the city. Search teams recovered seven bodies from the rubble on Thursday, raising the death toll from Wednesday’s collapse to 10. Thirteen people were pulled out of the debris with injuries, including a 5-year-old girl who was rescued 18 hours after the collapse. The building had 43 registered residents. Officials have said the building’s top three floors were built illegally although the cause of the collapse is still under investigation.

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Blood drain: A Danish court sentenced a 36-year-old woman to four years in jail for having drained more than a pint of blood from her young son as often as once a week over a five-year period. The court in Herning says the woman — a trained nurse — performed 110 drains using a catheter on the boy between the ages of 1 and 6, and told hospital doctors that his low blood count was due to a rare bone marrow disease. A courtordered psychiatric report said she suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental condition where caregivers make a child ill in order to attract attention to themselves. The woman was not identified.

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Measles outbreak: The Philippines expanded the area of a declared measles outbreak on Thursday from the highly populated capital to nearby regions, after a steady rise in infections and deaths attributed to the disease in recent weeks. The government’s Epidemiology Bureau raised the “red flag” after an increase in infections in the capital, Manila, as well as the northern and southern ends of Luzon, the island that includes the capital. The Department of Health said that measles had killed 55 children age 4 or younger in Manila since the start of the year. Trust in immunization programs was seriously damaged in 2017 after the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur admitted that a dengue vaccine it had distributed in the country, Dengvaxia, could backfire: If people who never had dengue were vaccinated and later become infected, the vaccine could provoke a much more severe form of the illness.

Chronicle News Services