Mother of jailed UK-Egyptian hospitalised 242 days into hunger strike
Mother of jailed Egyptian democracy activist hospitalized after resuming hunger strike (AP)
LONDON: The mother of Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah has been hospitalised 242 days into a hunger strike protesting her son's continued imprisonment in Egypt, her family said Thursday.
Laila Soueif, 69, has been on hunger strike since September 29, 2024, the day her son was expected to be released after completing a five-year prison sentence.
She resumed a full hunger strike last week after two months of easing her protest to a partial hunger strike.
The academic and veteran activist was taken to a London hospital Monday with a "critically low" blood sugar level, her campaign group said in a brief statement.
It is her second hospitalisation since February.
Soueif's son Abdel Fattah was arrested in September 2019 and sentenced to five years for "spreading false news" after sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.
A United Nations panel of experts on Wednesday determined his detention was arbitrary and illegal and called for his immediate release.
Abdel Fattah, who has spent most of the past decade behind bars, has been on hunger strike himself since March 1 after learning his mother was hospitalised with dangerously low blood sugar and blood pressure, and given a glucose drip.
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Following her February hospitalisation, Soueif decided to ease her strike after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had pressed for her son's release in a call with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
She began consuming 300 calories a day through a liquid nutritional supplement, still going without food until last week, when she returned to only consuming rehydration salts, tea without sugar and vitamins.
Her family says she has lost over 40 percent of her bodyweight since September.
Soueif has also since last week returned to protesting outside Downing Street for an hour every week day, demanding the British government do more to secure her son's freedom.
Last week, Starmer's office again said the prime minister pressed for Abdel Fattah's release in a call with Sisi.
Abdel Fattah, a 43-year-old writer and activist, has become a symbol of the plight of Egypt's political prisoners.
A key figure in the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, he has been detained under successive administrations since.
Since 2022, Sisi's administration has released hundreds of detainees and pardoned several high-profile dissidents, including Abdel Fattah's lawyer Mohamed al-Baqer, but the activist's name has been repeatedly excluded.
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The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
A scatological past of toilets of Madras
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Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
27 heading to aid site killed by Israeli forces, say Gaza officials
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India Today
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That level comes with health warnings of emergency conditions where everyone is more likely to be affected, according to Minnesota officials warned on Monday that conditions in the northwest part of the state could reach the maroon category on Tuesday, conditions there were generally yellow, or moderate. There were a few scattered locations in the Twin Cities area that temporarily hit maroon on Tuesday morning. But by midday Tuesday, most of the remaining maroon spots in the region were on the Upper Peninsula of are seeing more patients with respiratory symptomsHennepin Healthcare, the main emergency hospital in Minneapolis, has seen a slight increase in visits by patients with respiratory symptoms aggravated by the dirty Rachel Strykowski, a pulmonologist, said there is usually a bit of a delay before patients come in, which is unfortunate because the sooner those patients contact their doctors, the better the outcome. Typical symptoms, she said, include 'increase in shortness of breath, wheezing, maybe coughing a bit more, and flares of their underlying disease, and that's usually COPD and asthma.'What happens, Strykowski said, is that the fine particulate matter from the wildfire smoke triggers more inflammation in patients' airways, aggravating their underlying medical noted that this is usually a time those patients can go outside and enjoy the summer weather because there are fewer triggers, so the current ones forcing them to stay inside can feel 'quite isolating."People can protect themselves by staying indoors or by wearing N95 masks, she said. Strykowski added that they must be N95s because the cloth masks many people used during the COVID-19 pandemic don't provide enough Canadian fire situationCanada is having another bad wildfire season, and more than 27,000 people in three provinces have been forced to evacuate. Most of the smoke reaching the American Midwest has been coming from fires northwest of the provincial capital of Winnipeg in Canadian Press reported that Winnipeg hotels were opening up Monday to evacuees. More than 17,000 Manitoba residents have been displaced since last week, including 5,000 residents of the community of Flin Flon, nearly 400 miles (645 kilometers) northwest of Winnipeg. In neighboring Saskatchewan, 2,500 residents of the town of La Ronge were ordered to flee Monday, on top of more than 8,000 in the province who had been evacuated Saskatoon, where the premiers of Canada's provinces and the country's prime minister met Monday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said all of Canada has come together to help the Prairie provinces, The Canadian Press people were killed by a wildfire in mid-May in Lac du Bonnet, northeast of worst-ever wildfire season was in 2023. It choked much of North America with dangerous smoke for smoke reaches EuropeCanada's wildfires are so large and intense that the smoke is even reaching Europe, where it is causing hazy skies but isn't expected to affect surface-air quality, according the European climate service first high-altitude plume reached Greece and the eastern Mediterranean just over two weeks ago, with a much larger plume crossing the Atlantic within the past week and more expected in coming days, according to Copernicus.'That's really an indicator of how intense these fires are, that they can deliver smoke,' high enough that they can be carried so far on jet streams, said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the fires also are putting out significant levels of carbon pollution — an estimated 56 megatonnes through Monday, second only to 2023, according to Copernicus.
