Around the World
By Associated Press
South Korea orders doctors who joined protracted strike over medical school plan to return to work
SEOUL, South Korea | South Korean officials issued return-to-work orders for doctors participating in a one-day walkout Tuesday as part of a protracted strike against the government’s plan to sharply boost medical school admissions.
Since February, more than 12,000 trainee doctors have been on strike in a deepening standoff with government officials, who want to grow the country’s number of doctors by up to 10,000 by 2035. Many reject the plan, set to begin next year, saying schools won’t be able to handle the increased flow and that the quality of the country’s medical services would suffer.
About 4% of the country’s 36,000 private medical facilities, categorized as clinics, have told authorities they would participate in a one-day strike on Tuesday, according to South Korea’s Health and Welfare Ministry.
This came a day after hundreds of medical school professors at four major hospitals affiliated with Seoul National University entered an indefinite walkout, raising concerns about disruptions in medical services.
There’s also a possibility that the strike could expand.
At a rally with thousands of doctors in Seoul on Tuesday, Lim Hyun-taek, the hard-line leader of the Korean Medical Association, said he would push for its members to enter an indefinite strike on June 27 if the government rejects its demands to completely scrap plans to increase medical school admissions. KMA is the country’s largest doctors’ lobby with more than 100,000 members.
South Korean Deputy Health Minister Jun Byung-wang said the one-day strike by clinics and the walkout by SNU-affiliated medical professors haven’t immediately caused significant problems in medical services.
He accused the protracted strike of threatening to destroy a “trusting relationship between doctors and patients our society has built for long.”
“We cannot allow unlimited freedom to the medical profession,” Jun said Tuesday. “Since they benefit from a medical licensing system that limits the supply (of doctors) and ensures their monopoly of the profession, doctors must uphold their end of professional and ethical responsibilities and legal obligations under the medical law.”
Under South Korean law, doctors defying return-to-work orders can face suspensions of their licenses or other punishment.
Jun said they planned to request hospitals to pursue damage suits against the striking medical professors if their walkouts prolong and disrupt medical services. He said hospitals that fail to sufficiently respond to the walkouts may face disadvantages in health insurance compensation and that the government plans to push legal action against any hospital that cancels reserved treatments with patients without notifying them in advance.
In a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Yoon Suk Yeol called the monthslong strike “regrettable” and warned that his government will sternly respond to “illegal activities that abandon patients.”
The striking doctors suffered a significant legal setback in May when the Seoul High Court rejected their request to block the government plan, which would raise the yearly medical school enrollment quota by 2,000 from the current cap of 3,058.
South Korea’s doctor-to-population ratio is one of the lowest in the developed world.
Government officials say the country needs significantly more doctors to cope with the fast-aging population and have downplayed doctors’ concerns about a possible decline in future incomes.
The striking doctors are a fraction of all doctors in South Korea, estimated to number between 115,000 and 140,000. Still, the walkouts have resulted in cancellations of numerous surgeries and other treatments at some large hospitals, which are more dependent on junior doctors and trainees.
Government officials earlier threatened to suspend the licenses of the striking doctors but later halted those administrative steps to facilitate dialogue.
Religious and cultural mentions removed from names of China’s Xinjiang villages, rights groups say
TAIPEI, Taiwan | Authorities in China’s western Xinjiang region have been systematically replacing the names of villages inhabited by Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities to reflect the ruling Communist Party’s ideology, as part of an attack on their cultural identity, a report released by Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.
About 630 villages in Xinjiang have had their names changed to remove references to Islam or the Uyghurs’ culture and history, according to the group’s report, done in collaboration with the Norway-based organization Uyghur Hjelp.
The report compared the names of 25,000 Xinjiang villages as listed by the National Bureau of Statistics of China between 2009 and 2023.
Words like “dutar,” a traditional Uyghur string instrument, or “mazar,” a shrine, have been removed from the names of villages, and replaced with words such as “happiness,” “unity” and “harmony” — generic terms often found in the Communist Party’s policy documents.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry didn’t immediately respond to faxed questions about the report and its policies in Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is a vast region bordering Kazakhstan that is home to about 11 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. In 2017, the Chinese government launched a campaign of assimilation that has included mass detentions, alleged political indoctrination, alleged family separations and alleged forced labor among other methods.
As part of the crackdown, more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities were estimated to be held in extralegal internment camps. The Chinese government at the time described the camps as “ vocational training centers “ and said they were necessary to curb separatism and religious extremism.
The U.N. Human Rights Office in 2022 found accusations of rights violations in Xinjiang “credible” and said China may have committed crimes against humanity in the region.
The changes to the names of Xinjiang villages included removing mentions of religion, including terms such as “Hoja,” a title for a Sufi religious teacher, and “haniqa,” a type of Sufi religious building, or terms such as “baxshi,” a shaman.
References to Uyghur history or to regional leaders prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 have also been removed, according to the report.
“The Chinese authorities have been changing hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from those rich in meaning for Uyghurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch. “These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs.”
The Chinese government wants to “erase people’s historical memory, because those names remind people of who they are,” said Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist based in Norway and founder of Uyghur Hjelp.
Most of the village name changes occurred between 2017 and 2019, at the height of the government crackdown in Xinjiang, according to the report.
At least nine dead, dozens injured as trains collide in India’s Darjeeling district, a tourist hotspot
NEW DELHI | A cargo train rammed into a passenger train in India’s eastern state of West Bengal on Monday, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens of others, officials said.
Television channels showed video of one train rammed into the end of the other, with one compartment rising vertically in the air. Doctors and ambulances rushed to the accident site in the Darjeeling district, a tourist spot nestled in the Himalayan foothills, soon after the collision. Scores of people gathered as rescuers searched through the debris.
Three of the nine dead were railway personnel, said Sabyasachi De, spokesperson of the Northeast Frontier Railway. Nearly 50 people were hospitalized.
The driver of the cargo train, who was among the dead, disregarded a signal and caused the collision, De said. Four compartments at the rear of the passenger train derailed due to the impact, he said, adding that most of the cars were carrying cargo while one was a passenger coach.
De said rescuers have finished searching for any more passengers, with workers now focused on restoring the damaged tracks and removing the derailed coaches. The rest of the coaches, carrying around 1,300 passengers, continued to their original destination of Kolkata, the state’s capital, he said.
The Kanchanjunga Express is a daily train that connects West Bengal state with other cities in the northeast. It is often used by tourists who travel to the hill station of Darjeeling, popular at this time of year when other Indian cities are sweltering in the heat.
More than 12 million people ride 14,000 trains across India daily, traveling on 64,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) of track. Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, several hundred accidents happen annually, most blamed on human error or outdated signaling equipment.
Last year, a train crash in eastern India killed over 280 people in one of the country’s deadliest accidents in decades.
Italy’s coast guard searches for dozens of migrants missing after their ship capsized
MILAN | Italy’s coast guard was searching by sea and from the air on Thursday for dozens of people missing when a boat capsized and partially sank earlier this week in the perilous central Mediterranean, officials said.
The partially submerged boat was still in view, but the commander of the search operation said that no bodies were in sight. The boat capsized about 120 miles off the Calabrian coast.
A fishing boat was the first to respond on Monday after the boat capsized and rescued 12 people, one of whom later died. Italy’s coast guard has recovered six bodies, and survivors say more than 60 people are missing. They include more than 20 children.
Survivors reported that the boat motor had caught fire, causing it to capsize off the Italian coast about eight days after departing from Turkey with about 75 people from Iran, Syria and Iraq on board, according to the U.N. refugee agency and other U.N. organizations.
A spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders said that the survivors have suffered both psychological and physical trauma, and “remained very confused.”
“They have been hospitalized … and don’t yet know who in their families is alive and who died at sea,’’ said Cecilia Momi, in charge of the group’s humanitarian affairs. “Entire families are destroyed. Some lost a wife, some lost a child, a husband, a friend, a nephew.”
Separately on Monday, the charity rescue ship Nadir rescued 51 people from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh and transported them to Lampedusa. Another 10 people on the same smugglers’ boat were found dead on the lower deck.
The deaths bring to more than 800 people who have died or went missing and are presumed dead crossing the central Mediterranean so far this year, an average of five dead a day, the U.N. agencies said.
The International Red Cross said that the tragedies are “another testament to Europe’s failing approach to migration and asylum, which prioritizes walls and deterrence over humane welcome.”
—From AP reports
