Donald Trump unleashed his Immigrations ghouls on innocent legal immigrants who are obeying the law!

Red Alert: 

Trump Administration is Disappearing Legal Foreign Nationals
including our Canadian Neighbors! 

So many of us in Maine and New England have friends and relatives who live in Canada. We often visit back and forth. 

Echo opinion published in the Topsham Scoop electronic newsletter

at this site here.

We are neighbors. At first our Canadian friends curtailed their travel to Maine and elsewhere in the US in protest of Trump's bullying tariffs and threats of annexation. Rightly so. But now, ominously, tourists and other legal residents and travelers from Canada and Europe are being randomly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), thrown into cement cells, often transported to for-profit prisons, provided virtually no access to communication, phones, lawyers, or even told of alleged errors or wrongdoing.

It happened to Canadian Jasmine Mooney, who was held in detention for 12 days, apparently, because she goofed and went to a border crossing, instead of a consulate, to arrange for her U.S. work permit.

It happened to a Welsh tourist, Rebecca Burke,  held for 19 days in Tacoma, Washington, because, she thinks, some at ICE thought, erroneously, that she might be trying to work here without the right visa. It happened to three German citizens as well, one a permanent resident in the United States. (Axios, 3/20/25).

These brutal detentions without a hearing are happening to other immigrants too. Lawful permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil is still being held without charge because he peacefully protested for Palestinian rights. Over 200 Venezuelans were hurriedly arrested and boarded on planes with no process at all to a notorious prison in El Salvador, dubiously contracted for use by the Trump Administration. A District Court has held they were denied due process. 

On appeal, before a three judge panel, one judge noted during oral argument that Nazis had more due process being deported in WWII than these Venezuelans. (ABC, 3/24/25)

These situations are harrowing❗ Naturally, who would want to risk crossing our borders, even legally❓ Tourism is falling, but, most distressingly, so is the Constitution of the United States.

This is not who we are. We are not a brutal authoritarian gulag state - are we❓ Not by law. The 5th Amendment of the Constitution says we shall not deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. 

It applies to anyone, whether or not a citizen, in the United States. No one should be held in detention in this country or stripped of legal status without a fair hearing so they can state their case - due process of law. Period.💢

If the Administration either decides to ignore court orders or gets a corrupted Supreme Court to see the law their way, they will be able to sweep up virtually anyone and disappear them. Citizens or immigrants, legal or not, who knows❓ For there will never be a right to a hearing to figure out who they were. That is the power of abusing the 5th Amendment of the Constitution. We must protest it here.

In the meantime, I'll visit my family in Canada, so my relatives need not risk coming here and meeting a dangerously brainwashed ICE agent. Indeed, Canada, maybe you could save us and annex Maine❓ We ordinary people would surely be more secure.

Tragic anniversary to remember November 9 in the year 1938 Berlin

Echo report published in The  Guardian

‘Never again is now’: 1938 Nazi pogrom anniversary marked in Germany.✡️

‘Antisemitism is poisoning our society’ says Olaf Scholz at Berlin synagogue that was destroyed 85 years ago and is again target of firebombing.

There could hardly have been a more powerfully symbolic setting for a ceremony to mark the 85th anniversary of the 1938 November pogroms than the Beth Zion synagogue.

The place of worship in the heart of Berlin was largely destroyed in the violence that exploded on the night of 9 November that year, when Nazi thugs carried out murderous, state-sponsored attacks on Jewish property and homes.

Wearing a kippah, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, gave an emotional speech in which he condemned the spate of antisemitic attacks across the country and pledged to protect the nation’s Jews from a “shameful” wave of “intolerance and inhumanity”.

His insistence that Germany would uphold its decades-long promise to protect Israel and ensure the Holocaust was never repeated felt fragile. Referring to the fear Jewish people have increasingly reported feeling on the streets of Germany in recent years, he said: “Something is surely coming apart at the seams.”

“Antisemitism,” he added, “is poisoning our society. If Jews in Germany have to live behind ever bigger protective shields, then that is intolerable.”

He condemned people who had celebrated the recent murder of Israeli citizens at pro-Palestinian gatherings in Berlin, saying that “nothing, absolutely nothing – not your origins, not your political conviction, not your cultural background, no supposed post-colonial view of history – can be offered as justification for reveling in the murder, the savage slaughter of innocents”.

In an apparent warning to the far-right, which has adopted a brazenly Islamophobic stance, he added: “At the same time, we must not be taken in by those who are now seeing an opportunity to deny the place of more than 5 million Muslim citizens in our society.”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, said anyone seeking to understand why the attack on Israel had caused such trauma among German Jews had to be aware of “what is going on in Jewish souls 85 years after the Reichspogromnacht when Stars of David are painted on Jewish houses and Jewish businesses are attacked once more, when arson attacks are carried out on synagogues again like they were here [at Beth Zion] just weeks ago”.

Sometimes referred to as Kristallnacht, the orchestrated attacks that rocked Berlin 85 years ago fuelled the subsequent systematic slaughter of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust.

In the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, this year’s anniversary has been enveloped by a mood of fear and despair and given a raw and shocking new dimension, incomparable to events in previous years.

Incidents among the approximately 2,000 antisemitic attacks reported in Germany since 7 October have included the painting of Stars of David on Jewish homes and institutes and the spreading of antisemitic slogans.

The resulting pessimism has prompted many organisers of events around this anniversary to adopt the slogan “‘Never Again’ is Now”, an adaptation of Nie Wieder (‘never again’), the postwar slogan drummed into every German.

Across the country at synagogues and Jewish institutes, and at sites of former destroyed synagogues, politicians, Jewish leaders and other Germans held commemorations on Thursday.

Berlin senator Franziska Giffey greets 102-year-old Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer after the ceremony at Beth Zion synagogue to mark the 85th anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogrom. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

The building was painstakingly rebuilt and completed in 2014, on the original site. And then, three weeks ago, it was firebombed, attacked with Molotov cocktails by two masked men as Germany witnessed a rise in antisemitic incidents in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas.

On Thursday, with police marksmen and armoured vehicles guarding the synagogue, 102-year-old Margot Friedländer took her place in the congregation alongside family members of some of the 240 Israeli hostages currently being held captive by Hamas.

As a teenager, Friedländer experienced the 1938 attacks, which led to her and her family’s deportation to concentration camps. She was the only one to survive.

In a solemn Bundestag debate focused on marking the anniversary in the context of the current war, interior minister Nancy Faeser said she was “ashamed” and “heartbroken” to see how German Jews were fearful of revealing their identity in public.

At a Jewish community hall on Fasanenstrassse, in a district of western Berlin where approximately 100 Jewish businesses were attacked that night, the names of 55,696 victims of the pogrom – those either murdered that night, at the concentration camps to which they were deported, or who killed themselves – were read out through the day.

An image of the synagogue which was destroyed that night was projected on to the building.

At the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Nobel prize winning laureate Herta Müller was one of several intellectuals to recite from the works of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and other Jewish writers.

Despite fears of anti-Israel protests being held during the commemorations, police reported no major incidents, although the state library was investigating how someone managed to smuggle projection equipment on to its premises and beam anti-Israel slogans on to the walls.

Friedländer, née Bendheim, recalled returning home after the pogrom to scenes of desecration. “We didn’t have radio or telephone, but we were aware of the extent of what was happening, and that the synagogues were burning,” she said.

She was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, while other family members, including her parents, were deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

She returned this week to her former Berlin home and bent down to polish the brass stolpersteine – memorial plaques set into the pavement – marking her and her relatives’ names and the dates of their flights, deportations and murders.

Friedländer found refuge in the US but returned to live in Germany in 2010 at the age of 88, after the death of her husband, calling it her “fourth life”.

“Many people didn’t understand,” she said. “‘How can you return to the perpetrators?’

“I told them: ‘I’m not going to the perpetrators, I’m going back to talk to the third and fourth generations.’”

Friedländer said the rise in antisemitism was not a surprise to her. “What is happening now reminds me exactly of how it started back then. I’m just disappointed and sad,” she said.

January 6: A grave warning to American democracy

#RepublicansAreTheProblem: "Captives to misinformation"

Sean Illing

“The central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party”, Sean Illing published in Vox.com

A political scientist explains why the GOP has to reform if we want to fix American democracy.

"Democracy teetering on the precipice," Sean Illing

After January 6th, when the US Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists, American democracy is teetering on the precipice.

Democratic politics, at its core, has always been about navigating the tension between stability and progress. If a society resists change for too long, it becomes inert; if it changes too quickly, it becomes unstable. Traditionally, conservative parties have privileged stability and left-leaning parties have privileged change. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the point.

But what happens to democratic societies when conservative parties become radical in their defense of the status quo?

It’s a question we have to ask given the current state of the Republican Party. Even after the events of last week, even after at least five people were killed at the seat of American democracy, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers formally objected to the results of the 2020 election anyway. And even if that vote was performative, that so many GOP officials are still willing to play chicken with American democracy in this way speaks volumes about the state of the party.

Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt (most recently co-author of How Democracies Die) argued in a 2017 book that the importance of conservative parties in democratic systems has been largely underappreciated. Democracies tend to evolve in the direction of more equality, and how a society responds to those changes determines how healthy and stable it is over time. Since it’s often the conservative parties that dictate this response, how they’re organized and what they do (or don’t do) is hugely consequential.

I reached out to Ziblatt to talk about his level of concern and how he views the GOP in historical terms. We discussed why democracies have buckled when conservative parties were too weak to control their more radical elements, why the Republican Party has become such an outlier, and why major constitutional reforms might be the only way to fix the problem.

Much of this conversation occurred before the US Capitol was besieged, so I contacted Ziblatt again after January 6th, to get his thoughts on what transpired and what it means for the future of the country. 

After processing the attack, Ziblatt says it’s become clear that we’re facing “a regime-threatening moment” and a real tipping point for American democracy.

You can read a lightly edited transcript of our entire conversation below.
Sean Illing

Well, here we are, just a few days after the riot at the US Capitol. What were you thinking when you watched this unfold? Do any historical analogues spring to mind?
Daniel Ziblatt

I think what was so striking for everyone watching this is just how unfamiliar it all felt and looked — to American eyes. There is a record of these sorts of uprising across US states in recent years and in the past, but having this happen at the seat of power was so disorienting. Hence the proliferation of names to describe it: ”coup,” “putsch,” “riot,” “insurrection,” and so on. We just don’t know how to make sense of it.

But in the days since, it has become clear this was a regime-threatening moment. Not only because of the violence but also because the aim was to disrupt the constitutional transfer of power. This is serious business, and most worrying is that it has, at the very least, the tacit support of some leading figures in the Republican establishment.

As I saw the video of Sen. Lindsey Graham being harassed at the Washington, DC, airport for having failed to sufficiently support the #FormerGuy Trump, I was reminded of Churchill’s definition of an appeaser — as one who feeds a crocodile, hoping he will be the last one eaten. We have a rotten sore in the midst of our political system, infecting the whole system, that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Sean Illing

Why are properly functioning conservative parties so essential to the health of democratic systems?

Daniel Ziblatt- I’m not sure if they’re more important than liberal or progressive parties, but their importance is definitely underappreciated by most liberals and progressives.

If you look at the history of democracy in Western Europe, and the US, to a degree, a pattern emerges: When economically powerful groups aren’t well-organized into parties that can compete and win in a democratic process, then those groups tend to go outside of the political process and undermine democracy. In places where you’ve had strong center-right parties, like Britain in the 19th century, there was a much more stable constitutional order, and in places where conservative parties were weaker, like Weimar Germany, democracy was much less stable.

Sean Illing- Can you clarify what you mean by “well-organized” conservative parties? Because in the case of the Republican Party, they’re still winning elections but they’re not strong or organized by your standard.

Daniel Ziblatt-The key thing is that conservative parties are governed by professional politicians who have a stake in the continuation of the political system. That’s more important than whether conservatives win elections or not. So you can imagine a situation like late 19th-century Spain or late 19th-century Germany, where conservatives do really well in elections, but it’s because the elections are rigged, and you have state officials tampering with the election and repressing the vote so that conservatives win. That’s a strong conservative party but not in the sense that I mean it.

It’s critical that conservatives discover the power of political organization within the democratic context. Sometimes people will say, “Well, what about the Nazi Party? This was a strong party. This wasn’t good for democracy.” And that’s certainly the case, but that’s sort of the end of a long process under which conservatives hadn’t been particularly well-organized. And what happens, when conservatives aren’t well-organized, is they can’t control their most radical base — and that might be the clearest parallel to our current period.

Sean Illing- If you look across the democratic world today, how much of an outlier is the GOP?

Daniel Ziblatt- I don’t really have to guess at this. There’s an organization called Varieties of Democracy that we used in our book to categorize parties as abiding by democratic rules or not. And they’ve taken that and applied it to every major political party in almost every democracy since 1970. And what you see, based on the expert evaluations, is that in the mid-1970s, the Republican Party is basically in the same grouping as other major center-right parties throughout Europe.

Beginning in the 2000s, however, it goes dramatically off course in terms of its commitment to democratic norms. The American Republican Party now looks like a European far-right party. But the big difference between the US and a lot of these European countries is that the US only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the GOP only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic — but they basically control half of it.

So I think the central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party. We had what was basically a center-right party and over time it’s become more ideologically extreme while still doing well electorally, and that opens the system to further extremism and risks a kind of spiral in which both parties become more radicalized in response to the other.

Sean Illing- There aren’t any perfect historical parallels, but what are the most instructive examples in your mind?

Daniel Ziblatt- It’s a tough question, but I’ll go back to the German example. When I wrote the book on German conservatives, I was writing between 2010, and 2015 and I saw the Republican Party losing control in ways that reminded me of 19th-century Germany. 

It kind of freaked me out.

I remember Romney running for the GOP nomination, and so many people assumed he would win the primary because the party has all the control and he was the establishment incumbent guy. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, that’s true right now, but historically there are lots of cases where the grassroots gets control of the party, and when they do, it’s bad news for democracy.” Fast-forward to 2016, and #FormerGuy Trump and you can see how that played out.

I do want to be cautious about this comparison, because there are a couple major differences. One is that Germany had a proportional system, so it was much harder to hold the conservative base together in a highly fragmented system. Also, the conservative party in Germany was very young, didn’t have deep roots or a deep history. We’re not talking about the party of Lincoln, going back 150 years or whatever. The Republican Party is more substantial as an organization than the German conservative party ever was.

So there are real differences, and I’m always careful when making these Weimar comparisons. But as dangerous as it is to go wild with the Weimar comparisons, it’s just as dangerous to foreclose that comparison, because it ended so badly.

Sean Illing- There do seem to be problems today that are unique to our time, or maybe it just seems that way. I’m thinking of the media landscape and the fact that so much of the GOP base has been captured by misinformation and false narratives.

Are there any examples of parties being subsumed by alternative realities in this way, or is this something that wasn’t really possible until the digital age?

Daniel Ziblatt

One of the most uncanny parallels to the Weimar era is that the leading figure in the German nationalist scene in the mid-1920s, was this guy named Alfred Hugenberg, who had no political career. He was an adviser and a businessman. But slowly, he built up a media empire. He owned movie theaters and newspapers and even the official German wire service, which provided news to local newspapers.

As this new media infrastructure was developing, he was pushing a total nationalist agenda, infusing nationalist themes into newspaper stories. And he then got himself selected as the head of the German Conservative Party in 1928. He was uncharismatic and a failure as a politician, but he helped turn the political debate in a more nationalist direction.

Today, it’s more complicated because the media infrastructure is so all-encompassing. But I’ve seen people draw parallels to the end of World War I where you had this narrative emerge in Germany that basically said that Germans were stabbed in the back by liberals and Jews and communists, that they didn’t really lose the war. This myth was perpetuated after 1918, and it slowly spread throughout the political system. You could say that as people retreated more into mythology, they started to believe what today we’d call “alternative facts.”

But I do think our situation is much better because in the case of Germany, the entire national political system had experienced this humiliating defeat. The country was decimated by a major war. We’re not there. So whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s on a much smaller scale.

Sean Illing- Given everything you’ve said here, how alarmed are you, not just about the Republican Party, but the overall trajectory of American democracy?

Daniel Ziblatt- The need for major institutional reforms has become much clearer in my mind. The Republican Party is supposed to moderate in order to win votes. You’re not supposed to be able to go too far to the extremes and keep winning votes in a two-party system. That’s the puzzle in front of us. Two-party systems are supposed to be self-correcting. When it goes too far away from an average voter, you get punished and you moderate and go back to the middle.

This isn’t happening because our constitutional system is filled with all of these counter-majoritarian crutches (like the Electoral College) for any party that does well in rural areas, and that allows Republicans to win office without winning a majority of the electorate. So we have to reform our institutions to compel the GOP to compete in more urban, more diverse areas — that’s the path to moderation.

Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, we can’t engineer our way out of this problem. There needs to be deep societal change.” They say it’s naive to think we can reform our institutions. I say it’s naive to think we can get out of this without reforming our institutions. We simply have to change the basic incentives governing our political system.

It’s hard to imagine a realignment like the one that eliminated the Whigs in the 1850s. And that didn’t end well. The big dilemma is whether it makes more sense to keep the white nationalist anti-system elements within our system outside of the party. But that only works if their isolation can be accompanied by their weakening. My concern is that the electoral base for Trumpism is, at this point, real, broad, and deep.

More broadly, we should begin to think about the idea that Germans in the postwar period called “wehrhafte Demokratie” — this is a “defensive democracy” — one that embraces the inclusion, competition, and civil liberties of liberal democracy but one that doesn’t take democracy for granted.

In Germany, the theory of “defensive democracy” had two main thrusts — one is the attempt to bolster a democratic political culture through education, and the other is an aggressive willingness to isolate and exclude from political debate those views that endorse violence and that actively engage in violence. This doctrine was invented in the 1930s in response to Nazism. We may, ultimately, need a “wehrhafte Demokratie” for the social media age.

World War II heroines and Paper Bullets

How Two French Introverts Quietly Fought the Nazis

By Jeffrey H. Jackson, Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

An echo essay published in the History News Network newsletter:

Whenever Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe went into town to do some shopping, they also snuck their resistance messages to the Nazi occupation forces.

Suzanne pulled a small note typed on a piece of thin colored paper from inside the pocket of her Burberry overcoat and stuck the message onto the windshield of a German staff car. Lucy gingerly placed another on a café table as they walked down the street. Working together, they tucked one inside a magazine for a soldier to discover. Sometimes, Suzanne snuck up alongside a German and, with a trembling hand, slipped a note into his pocket knowing that a bump or a misstep could lead to time in a prison camp.

In 1937, Lucy and Suzanne had left Paris and moved to the island of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands, just off the coast of Normandy. Both were in the their late 40s and ready to start a new chapter of life on the beautiful island after living for so long at odds with the world around them. 

They fell in love as teenagers, but being lesbian partners in a conservative turn-of-the-century France was sometimes painful. Lucy’s father’s family was Jewish at a time of growing anti-Semitism. By the 1920s, they achieved some success in Paris as avant-garde artists; they are known today for their Surrealist photography. New gender-neutral artistic names Claude Cahun (Lucy) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne) allowed them to create new identities that crossed the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. They associated with communists and flirted with radical politics.

But Lucy and Suzanne were always the quiet sort. Although they opened their apartment to creative friends and socialized in Parisian cafés, they remained most closely connected to one another. When Paris became too noisy and politically polarized, the women decided to leave it all behind.

The Nazis took control of the Channel Islands in July 1940. This archipelago in the English Channel was the only British soil the German army ever conquered. It was also strategically important because it became the leading edge of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall,” a series of fortifications along the European coastline designed to prevent Allied attack. No dissent could be tolerated there.

Working together in the dim light each evening, Lucy and Suzanne wrote subversive messages by pushing cigarette paper, pages torn out of a ledger, or scraps they found on the side of the road into their Underwood typewriter. They tapped out songs and imaginary dialogues designed to undermine morale. Sometimes they made fun of Nazi leaders with bawdy jokes or included a simple summary of forbidden BBC news reports. Written in German in the voice of an anonymous soldier, the notes proclaimed that the troops would pay the ultimate price for Hitler’s futile war.

Then Lucy and Suzanne crammed the notes down deep into the pockets of their overcoats and headed out on another mission. They always worked alone.

As the war escalated, the women became more extreme. Lucy snuck out at night and dashed through the cemetery near their house to place crosses with the pacifist message, “For him the war is over” onto the graves of soldiers who had died during the occupation. Inside a church where soldiers worshipped, they hung a banner claiming that Hitler believed he was greater than Jesus.

Back in Paris, Lucy had formulated a vision of resistance she called “indirect action.” Art that tried to be revolutionary would not work, but a thoughtful poem, provocative story, or surprising photograph could have a profound effect on its audience, burrowing inside the mind and germinating into a new perspective. This was not propaganda, she claimed, but an attempt to challenge people to think. It was the introvert’s way of fighting.

The German secret police hunted them for four years, and during their trial, the chief judge told them why. He accused them of being guerrilla warriors who were more dangerous than soldiers. “With firearms,” he claimed, “one knows at once what damage has been done, but with spiritual arms, one cannot tell how far reaching it may be.” It was a perfect summary of Lucy’s “indirect effect.”

These notes might have seemed small and insignificant, but they demonstrated that the Nazis could not colonize the human heart. And Lucy and Suzanne’s story shows that quiet, persistent rewriting of the narrative of oppression can be a powerful means of fighting back.

Medical workers infected by Ebola virus are infection control experts!

I'm a registered nurse who is well aware of how to implement infection control procedures. Although I've certainly never cared for a person infected with the deadly Ebola virus, I have cared for people who've had syphilis, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and pneumonia to name a few infectious diseases. I don't know of any health care workers, nurses or physicians who've been infected with these infections by caring for a person who carries the vector of the illnesses. To imagine care givers who obviously use their infection control training to care for Ebola victims, but then become ill with the virus, is simply unfathomable.

Now a United Nations German medical care giver has died from Ebola he contracted while working in Liberia.

Something is obviously extremely strange about how Ebola is transmitted. Although the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) assures the public that the Ebola virus can only be transmitted by direct contact with the bodily fluids of a person who is exhibiting symptoms of the disease, the virus is sneaking through infection control processes and protective clothing. Obviously, the virus must be a micro "nano" size viral organism to get through these barriers and to evade the infection control process. Undoubtedly, a cure for this disease must be discovered and soon. Blood plasma obtained from people who have survived the disease are being used to bolster the immune systems of some victims, but this intervention won't be a permanent cure. Eventually, the antibodies in the blood of survivors will become less effective over time.  

German hospital: UN worker dies of Ebola: The Washington Post

By Associated Press October 14 at 6:04 AM

BERLIN — A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said Tuesday.

The St. Georg hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has not been released, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer telephone calls.

The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place 41 staff members who had possibly been in contact with him under “close medical observation.”

He arrived in Leipzig for treatment on Oct. 9. The hospital’s chief executive, Dr. Iris Minde, said at the time that there was no risk of infection for other patients, relatives, visitors or the public.

The man was kept in a secure isolation ward specially equipped with negative pressure rooms that are hermetically sealed and can only be accessed through a number of airlocks. All air and fluids are filtered and all equipment is decontaminated after use, Minde said.

The Ebola patient was the third to be flown to Germany for treatment.

The first, a Senegalese man infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone was brought to a Hamburg hospital in late August for treatment. The man was released Oct. 3 after recovering and returned to his home country, the hospital said.