JUDY WOODRUFF: The World Health Organization demanded today that
rich nations hold off giving COVID-19 booster shots until next year, at the earliest.
The agency's head had already called for a moratorium through this month.
Today, he said that appeal has been ignored, despite
severe vaccine shortages in poor countries.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS, WHO Director General: We have been calling for vaccine
equity from the beginning, not after the richest countries have been taken care of.
I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply
of vaccines think the world's poor should be satisfied with leftovers.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Also today, the global vaccine alliance COVAX
lowered its target for shipping doses to needy nations for the second time. The
new goal is 1.4 billion doses this year. It started at two billion.
The overall death toll from Hurricane Ida rose to 76 today. Officials added 11 fatalities
in New Orleans, mostly from excessive heat during an extended power outage.
But with power largely restored now, the city today lifted its overnight curfew.
However, five parishes to the south and west of New Orleans remain almost entirely in the dark.
A new tropical storm has formed this evening in the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico.
It's named Mindy and has minimal sustained winds of 40 miles an hour.
The storm could reach the Florida Panhandle later tonight.
A long-awaited trial opened in Paris today
on the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in 2015.
James Mates of Independent Television News has our report.
JAMES MATES: Almost six years after the worst terrorist attack in French history,
they finally bring the one surviving attacker to court.
Central Paris around the Palais de Justice locked down, so that Salah Abdeslam and 13 others
can face hundreds of victims and accusers over the next nine months, 130 dead, 350 others wounded,
hundreds more who survived that terrible night, but with their lives changed forever.
They were coordinated attacks right across the French capital,
planned and executed with calculated savagery.
Olivier Laplaud, who escaped with his wife through a rear entrance of the Bataclan,
will go to the trial and give evidence, if asked.
OLIVIER LAPLAUD, Witness: The best answer you can give to those people who attacked us is a fair
and also exemplary trial, being judged by mankind, and not by their God or whatever,
whatever excuse they find, whatever justification they find to those attacks.
JAMES MATES: But for others who will be represented here by their lawyers,
even six years later, this trial is not something they could go through.
FRANCOIS ZIMERAY, Attorney: Some don't want to come. Some are themselves denying their
own condition of victims. Some don't dare come to Paris because it brings a lot of reminiscences.
JAMES MATES: The French will become acutely aware of this trial with the
security disruption here affecting the center of the city for many, many months.
But most believe it a price worth paying to establish
that the last word will be had by their justice system.
Establishing guilt or otherwise will be just part of the task here.
The court will also want to know who masterminded these attacks from afar
and how much more could the French state have done to stop them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: That report from James Mates of Independent Television News.
In Indonesia, a fire at a crowded prison near Jakarta killed at least 41 inmates
today and injured 80. Officials suggested an electrical short circuit was the cause.
State TV showed the charred prison compound
after the flames swept through. The victims were taken away for identification by family members.
The United States pressed Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers today to let more evacuees leave.
Hundreds of people are waiting to fly out of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on charter planes.
Today, in Germany, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Taliban
claims it's a document problem. He said the U.S. is doing all it can.
ANTONY BLINKEN, U.S. Secretary of State: While there are limits to what we can do without
personnel on the ground, without an airport with normal security procedures in place, we are
working to do everything in our power to support those flights and to get them off the ground.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Separately, U.S. officials said 60,000 people arrived here from
Afghanistan since August 17. About 17 percent were American citizens.
More than 150 aftershocks have rattled Southern Mexico after an overnight earthquake that left
one person dead. The quake was centered near the resort city of Acapulco and
rocked buildings 200 miles away in Mexico City. Authorities say there was no major destruction
in Acapulco. The tremor did damage some buildings and vehicles and sent people into the streets.
Back in this country, work crews in Richmond, Virginia, removed a towering statue of Confederate
General Robert E. Lee today. Onlookers cheered and chanted as the bronze monument was hoisted
off its pedestal in the former capital of the Confederacy. It had stood since 1890.
RUSSELL TEE, Virginia: You know, this isn't the end, but
this signifies that we're accepting the past for what it really is. We can't hold the Confederacy
and people like Robert E. Lee on statues anymore.
CHARLES OTEY, Richmond Resident: I'm a
native of Richmond. I have been here all my life. I'm 60-some years old. And so I have been passing
through and seeing this. For it to finally come down, man, it's a moment of joy for me.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Virginia's Democratic Governor Ralph Northam ordered the statue's removal,
amid nationwide protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In economic news, the U.S. Federal Reserve reports overall activity
slowed in July and August amid the COVID surge.
A separate report found job openings hit a record high of 10.9 million in July.
And on Wall Street today, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 69 points
to close at 35031. The Nasdaq fell 87 points. The S&P 500 slipped six.
Still to come on the "NewsHour": the governor of California faces a reckoning in a critical
recall election; the founder of the once-lauded tech company Theranos goes on trial for fraud;
we examine the changes brought on by the MeToo movement four years later; plus much more.