SAO PAULO – Eighteen Brazilians were left blind after surgeons apparently used unsterilized instruments during a cataract treatment campaign in an industrial suburb of Sao Paulo, officials said Thursday.
Sao Bernardo do Campo’s city hall said 27 people were operated on Jan. 30 as part of the campaign, and 22 of them came down with an eye infection called endophthalmitis. It said 18 of them were left blind.
“Everything was fine when I left the hospital on the Saturday I was operated on. All was fine on Sunday. I could see perfectly well,” Expedito Batista told the Globo TV network. “But when I woke up on Monday, it was all dark. I couldn’t see a thing.”
The city government said in an emailed statement that an investigation concluded that contamination took place during surgery “because of flaws in the disinfection and sterilization of the surgical instruments used.”
ISTANBUL – The Turkish army says it has no plans to stage a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and has threatened legal action against anyone who suggests otherwise.
The rare statement aims to quash speculation over the possibility of a coup while Erdogan visits the United States. The military said on its website such “baseless news” was hurting morale in its ranks without naming specific publications.
The Turkish army, historically seen as a defender of secular principles, has ousted three elected governments and one prime minister.
The army’s power was reduced through a series of measures after Erdogan became prime minister in 2003. Erdogan is due to return to Turkey on Sunday.
JERUSALEM – The Palestinian president has reached out to Israel, saying he opposes near-daily Palestinian attacks on Israelis and suggesting the violence would stop if the defunct peace process resumes again.
Mahmoud Abbas made the remarks in an interview Thursday with Israeli Channel 2 TV’s “Uvda” program. Israel has accused him of failing to condemn the wave of attacks that erupted in mid-September.
The Palestinian attacks, mostly stabbings but also shootings and car-ramming assaults, have killed 28 Israelis and two Americans.
Abbas says if peace talks resume, it would “give my people hope and nobody would dare go and stab or shoot.” U.S mediated Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014.
BUDAPEST, Hungary – Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian writer who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature for a body of fiction largely drawn from his experience as a teenage prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, died Thursday. He was 86.
Book publishing firm Magveto Kiado said Kertesz died at 4 a.m. at his Budapest home after a long illness. Hungarian President Janos Ader said Kertesz’s life was a “gift” to all those who loved, knew, read and understood him.
Born in Budapest on Nov. 9, 1929, Kertesz was 14 when he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland in June 1944. He later was transferred to the Buchenwald camp from where he was liberated in 1945.
Associated Press
