Mexico confirmed the first reported monkeypox case on Saturday.

Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said on Twitter that a 50-year-old man, a permanent resident of New York City, was probably infected in the Netherlands. The man is currently being treated in Mexico City, where he is reportedly stable and in isolation.

On Wednesday, Mexico’s National Committee for Epidemiological Surveillance shared a series of preemptive measures, quoting that the presence of the virus in the country was “inevitable.”

Lopez-Gatell also assured that the emergent virus has a slight infection rate and the probability of a full-blown epidemic is low.

“Smallpox is transmitted from person to person by direct contact. It is not spread by air, water, or food. The transmission efficiency is low, so there are usually isolated cases or small outbreaks, not generalized epidemics,” he said.

According to the World Health Organization, 244 cases have been reported worldwide till May 23, from which 160 were confirmed and 184 under suspicion. The WHO first reported a series of cases among 12 member states on May 13.

The virus is now present in over 20 countries, with the European region being the most affected. In the Americas and the Caribbean, monkeypox cases have been confirmed in the US, Canada, and Argentina./aa

The US’ biggest gun lobby gathered Friday for its annual meeting in Houston, Texas, just days after a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde stoked a fervent push to reduce gun violence and enforce firearms laws across the country.

Former President Donald Trump and some other prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, spoke at the event hosted by the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) lobbying arm.

Some other Republican Party leaders, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick canceled expected in-person appearances at the NRA meeting, according to CNN.

Trump delivered a headline speech in support of gun rights at the NRA convention.

“The existence of evil in our world is not a reason to disarm law-abiding citizens,” Voice of America quoted Trump as saying. “The existence of evil is one of the very best reasons to arm law-abiding citizens.”

Cruz, for his part, said: “Gun bans do not work. Look at Chicago. If they worked, Chicago wouldn’t be the murder hellhole that it has been for far too long.”

“As for so-called assault rifles, which the left and the media love to demonize, these guns were banned for 10 years from 1994 to 2004. And the Department of Justice examined the effect of the ban and concluded it had zero statistically significant effect on violent crime,” Cruz added.

Christopher Koper, the lead author of the Justice Department study Cruz was referring to, has disputed the Republican senator's characterization of his findings.

"My work is often cited in misleading ways that don’t give the full picture," Koper was previously​​​​​​​ quoted by The New York Times. "These laws can modestly reduce shootings overall."

The NRA event came three days after an 18-year-old gunman – wielding an AR-15-style long rifle that he had purchased legally – opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers.

The massacre was recorded as the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a Thursday news conference that the NRA opted against delaying the convention until after the funerals for the victims in Uvalde, the Washington Post reported.

Gun safety advocates who have called for new measures in response to mass shootings this month in Texas and Buffalo, New York, including President Joe Biden, have reiterated their criticism of the NRA for rejecting repeated efforts to tighten firearm regulations to attempt to curb the carnage across the country.

Biden criticized the “gun lobby” in a speech on Tuesday night.

“Another massacre. Uvalde, Texas. An elementary school. Beautiful, innocent second, third and fourth graders. And how many scores of little children who witnessed what happened – see their friends die, as if they’re in a battlefield, for God’s sake. They’ll live with it the rest of their lives,” CBC News cited the president as saying.

“What struck me on that 17-hour flight – what struck me was these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why?” the president questioned. “They have mental health problems. They have domestic disputes in other countries. They have people who are lost, but these kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency they happen in America. Why? Why are we willing to live with this carnage?

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden said. “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Biden will travel to Uvalde with first lady Jill Biden on Sunday, the White House said./aa

For the first time, a team of researchers managed to sequence the genome of a man who died 2,000 years ago in Pompeii, according to a fresh study.

In a study published on Thursday, scientists from the University of Copenhagen analyzed two Pompeians -- a man and a woman -- found inside a building in the ancient town that was destroyed and buried under ash by the eruption of the nearby Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

The team said the man was between 35 and 40 years old and stood about 164 centimeters (5 feet 4 inches) tall, with his DNA pointing to shared heritage with people living today in central Italy, as well as the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

The work also suggests that the man's lineage likely arrived on the Italian peninsula through Anatolia during the Neolithic era and that he may have been suffering tuberculosis at the time of his death.

Another set of remains that they found belonged to a woman over 50 years old and stood about 153 cm tall.

Underlining that the findings provide a foundation to promote further study of "well-preserved Pompeian individuals," the team said that it demonstrated "the power of a combined approach to investigate ancient humans and confirms the possibility to retrieve ancient DNA from Pompeii human remains."/agencies

The West African country Togo has eliminated the eye disease trachoma as a public health problem, the World Health Organization (WHO) Africa office announced Saturday.

The news makes Togo one of 13 countries worldwide and fourth in Africa to eliminate the illness, which can lead to blindness.

Trachoma is the world's leading cause of preventable blindness and is easily spread through direct personal contact, shared towels and cloths, and flies that have come in contact with the eyes or nose of an infected person, according to the US Center for Disease Control (CDC).

It is a public health problem in 44 countries and is responsible for the blindness or visual impairment of about 1.9 million people, according to the WHO, adding that sustained control measures, screening and treatment of people, and community participation are "critical” to eliminating the disease./aa

Inspired by a mother who managed to be reunited with her son, hundreds of families have joined a protest in southeastern Turkiye in hopes of again seeing their children, who were abducted by the terror group PKK or its Syrian branch the YPG.

On Aug. 22, 2019, Kurdish mother Hacire Akar staged a protest outside the offices of the opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in the city of Diyarbakir, saying her son had been taken to the mountains after being brainwashed by members of the party, which has been accused of ties with the terrorist PKK.

Her struggle thankfully bore fruit, as her son was brought back within a few days.

However, her son was only one of those abducted and forcibly recruited by the PKK/YPG. Akar’s achievement turned into a glimmer of hope for other families, and on Sept. 3, 2019, three other mothers gathered at the same location and launched their own sit-in protest in an effort to bring back their children.

The protest quickly caught the attention of other mothers and fathers and transformed into a massive demonstration that has up to now lasted 1,000 days, and is still going strong.

In the protests, the mothers, fathers, siblings, and other relatives call on their missing loved ones to lay down their weapons and surrender to Turkish authorities.

While dozens of families are currently actively protesting, to date almost 300 families have taken part. The families' efforts have not gone unnoticed by their children, as 35 of them have so far surrendered to Turkish security forces after fleeing the terror group PKK/YPG.

Taken young

The sit-in protests have also spread to several other Turkish provinces such as Van, Mus, Sirnak, and Hakkari in the east and Izmir in the far west. A mother living in Germany also launched her own protest in Berlin to convince her daughter to leave the terrorist group.

Families say many of their sons and daughters were younger than 18 when they were forcibly abducted and sent to the PKK/YPG training camps in northern Iraq and Syria to be trained and then sent to be used against Turkish ground forces as “cannon fodder.”

According to data from security forces, 16% of the children were younger than 15 at the time of their abduction and 39% were below 18.

In its more than 35-year terror campaign against Turkiye, the PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Turkiye, the US, and EU – has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants. The YPG is its Syrian offshoot.

State prosecutors have filed a case with Turkiye's top court to close down the HDP due to its reported ties with the terrorist PKK, which many officials say the HDP is only a front group for. The ties between the two groups have been documented in many reports and news stories./aa

US stocks ended with gains this week following signals that price increases could be slowing.

Personal incomes increased by 0.4% in April, while consumer expenditures rose by 0.9%, both exceeding expectations.

The rise in expenditures showed that consumption remained strong despite rising prices, and spending could support economic growth.

The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up 1.76%, or 575.77 points, at 33,212.96.

The S&P 500 rose 100.40 points, or 2.47%, to close at 4,158.24 points.

Meanwhile, tech-heavy Nasdaq increased 390.48 points, or 3.33%, to reach 12,131.13.

Major stock exchanges in Asia and Europe also finished the week on the positive side, while Turkiye’s benchmark stock index was down at Friday’s close./aa

Russia's military campaign against Ukraine is aimed at annihilating its eastern European neighbor's culture, US President Joe Biden said on Friday.

Biden said that not only is Russian President Vladimir Putin "trying to take on Ukraine, he is really trying to wipe out the culture and identity of the Ukrainian people."

Putin is "attacking school, nurseries, hospitals, museums with no other purpose than to eliminate a culture; a direct assault on the rules-based international order," Biden said during a graduation ceremony at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

The comments come as Russia mounts its offensive on eastern Ukraine in the hopes of capturing the country's industrial heartland. The Kremlin previously withdrew from northern Ukraine amid stiff resistance from Kyiv's forces, and sought to recalibrate its assault on the eastern Donbass.

Ukraine said on Thursday that Russian troops are attempting to gain full control over Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which collectively comprise the Donbass, but their efforts have been unsuccessful.

That comes as the Pentagon warns that Moscow's forces have been making "incremental gains" in the region. Spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Friday that "in the Donbass it gets a little bit more messy."

"Every day there's literally ground that's trading hands," he said in an indication of the territorial back-and-forth taking place as Ukraine mounts a "stiff resistance."

At least 4,301 civilians have been killed and 4,735 injured since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24, according to UN estimates. The true toll is believed to be significantly higher.

Over 6.6 million people have fled to other countries, while more than 7.7 million have been internally displaced, according to the UN refugee agency. That represents roughly one-third of Ukraine's pre-war population of 43 million people./aa