UN has asked the government to investigate latest allegations of abuse against migrants crossing on Balkan route from Bosnia
Croatian police are allegedly spray-painting the heads of asylum seekers with crosses when they attempt to cross the border from Bosnia.
The Guardian has obtained a number of photographs of what has been described by charities as the “latest humiliation’’ perpetrated by the Croatian authorities against migrants travelling along the Balkan route.
Continue reading...In Mosul, sourcing essential medication can be an expensive struggle – but entrepreneur Ameen Hadeed may have found the solution
When Ameen Hadeed’s father had heart surgery in 2015, the tricky part was not the operation but finding the drugs to aid his recovery.
The clinic had no medicine, so Hadeed was told to hustle around his home city Mosul to find the prescriptions. It took hours and cost a small fortune, as he visited store after store.
Continue reading...With violence against women endemic in the country, new initiatives are desperately needed but slow to arrive
Lucas da Silva* sits in a cell while he waits to hear from the court what will happen to him.
The 33-year-old is not in a prison, but at Casa da Mulher Brasileira (“house of the Brazilian woman”), a centre for survivors of violence in Campo Grande, central Brazil, that is open 24/7.
Continue reading...Coronavirus highlights weakness of food and health systems, as Global Nutrition Report finds one in nine of world’s population is hungry
An overhaul of the world’s food and health systems is needed to tackle malnutrition, a “threat multiplier” that is now the leading cause of ill health and deaths globally, according to new analysis.
The Global Nutrition Report 2020 found that most people across the world cannot access or afford healthy food, due to agricultural systems that favour calories over nutrition as well as the ubiquity and low cost of highly processed foods. Inequalities exist across and within countries, it says.
Continue reading...Outbreak in northern Nigerian city highlights difficulties faced by authorities in detecting and controlling the virus
Musa Abubakar used to dig two or three graves a day at the main cemetery in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. Then overnight it became 40.
“I have never witnessed mass deaths like this,” the 75-year-old said, his white kaftan muddied from his work at the Abbatuwa cemetery, where he has dug graves for 60 years. “From the first day of Ramadan to date, over 300 people have been buried.”
Continue reading...An effective response to the pandemic means tackling the violence and inequality faced by women
After a week in which people in some parts of the world have been given cause for optimism that they may have passed the peak of the pandemic, we have seen how extraordinary actions of individuals can change the trajectory for a whole nation.
Retired doctors putting themselves back on the frontline, nurses making their own face masks, parents voluntarily separated from their children so they can care for the sick.
Continue reading...Group including teenagers Walid and Mustafa will be reunited with relatives after grim odyssey
Until last week, Walid and Mustafa had never met. Owing to their disparate backgrounds, they might not have had anything in common, bar their age: both turned 18 this year.
But the fresh-faced, bright-eyed teenagers have been brought together by a common desire to escape danger in their respective homelands – Syria and Somalia – and rebuild lives shattered by war.
Continue reading...A new generation of poets in Afghanistan is exploring the physical side of love – and isolation is their inspiration
It has been weeks in lockdown for Hoda Khamosh, but the 23-year-old has managed to stick to a routine. This includes sitting down in the afternoons to write poetry, mostly with an erotic spin to it.
In the absence of touch and seeing friends and loved ones, she – along with many others – has turned to erotic poetry, convinced that, “it will help to get through these difficult days”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Greek PM intervenes to help 50 asylum seekers reach UK despite ban on direct flights
An unprecedented family reunion rescue flight is due to leave Athens, bringing 52 vulnerable migrants, including several minors, to join family in the UK.
The flight on Monday is the result of intense efforts by refugee families in the UK with the support of campaign group Safe Passage and the peer Alf Dubs. It was organised with collaboration from the UK and Greek governments after direct flights between Greece and the UK were suspended in March.
Continue reading...Jaston Khosa was one of 600,000 men from African countries who fought for Britain. He was quietly buried on VE Day after a life of abject poverty
In a crowded, Zambian slum on VE Day, a family gathered to bury one of the last veterans of Britain’s colonial army. Jaston Khosa of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment was laid to rest on the day the world commemorated the end of the war in which he fought.
The 95-year-old great-grandfather was among 600,000 Africans who fought for the British during World War Two, on battlefields across their own continent as well as Asia and the Middle East. Although their service has largely been forgotten, the mobilisation of this huge army from Britain’s colonies triggered the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade.
Continue reading...Campaigners warn Shafiqul Islam Kajol faces a lengthy sentence as his family worries about his exposure to Covid-19 in prison
Fifty-three days after he disappeared, Bangladeshi journalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol turned up on Sunday in police custody at a border town 150 miles from where he had last been seen.
“I am alive,” he told his son by phone, the first time the family had heard his voice since his disappearance in early March, a day after a case was filed against him and 31 others under the country’s controversial new Digital Security Act.
Continue reading...While men and women can go out on alternate days, trans people in the Colombian capital face increasing risk of violent attacks
A policy of making men and women leave their homes on alternate days during lockdown in Bogotá is fuelling violence towards the transgender community by the police and the public, activists say.
The mayor of the Colombian capital, Claudia López, announced last month that women were permitted to go outdoors for essential tasks on even-numbered days and men on odd-numbered days, in an effort to limit numbers on the streets.
Continue reading...First the asylum seekers were used to further Turkey’s regional ambitions, now they are made to suffer in quarantine camps
At the beginning of March, thousands of refugees gathered in the shadow of the Pazarkule border gate in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he would “open the gate” to Europe.
The move was a reaction to the killing of 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib province on 28 February and designed to exert pressure on the EU and Nato to support its military operation in northern Syria.
Continue reading...India’s ‘champagne of teas’ among those affected as country’s tea board estimates output could drop 9%, amid strain in China and Sri Lanka
Trouble is brewing for the world’s tea producers as the coronavirus lockdown shut down the harvest in several important regions, including the picking of India’s “champagne of teas”.
Despite forecasts of increased demand from drinkers stuck at home across the world, producers have become frustrated by the enforced quarantining of their workforce, with India’s output expected to drop by 9% in 2020.
Continue reading...Iquitos, still reeling from a dengue fever outbreak and plagued by poverty, relies on air deliveries for medicine, equipment and oxygen
In the final hours before Covid-19 claimed her life, Cecilio Sangama watched helplessly as his eldest sister Edith gasped for breath.
Hospitals across Peru’s largest Amazon city had run out of oxygen, and the shortage had pushed the black market price of a cylinder well above $1,000 (£810).
Continue reading...From jungle stakeouts to burning drug dealers’ property, a group of mothers is willing to do whatever it takes to free their community from addiction
Sister Ester keeps several small plastic bags of colourful methamphetamine – or meth – tablets beside her bed, along with a pistol and a plastic box of bullets.
“All of these items were seized by our group in raids on houses selling drugs over the past few weeks,” she says.
Continue reading...As the coronavirus lockdown clamps down on the informal economy and tourism dries up, Egypt’s most vulnerable are left without protection or food security
Continue reading...Critical reporting under threat as revenue losses leave independent news outlets hostage to government subsidies or whims of billionaires
Fake news laws and political interference along with growing financial pressures has left many independent media groups in developing countries fighting to survive during the pandemic.
News outlets around the world have faced measures to muzzle critical reporting in an environment that has already seen dozens of journalists harassed, arrested and censored by governments, according to editors and press freedom groups.
Continue reading...With limited access to abortion and antenatal care, many young mothers are falling prey to the country’s human traffickers
Two months after 17-year-old Ebere fell pregnant last year, she considered having an abortion. But she was told by a doctor that such a process – eight weeks into her pregnancy – could lead to complications.
Going home to her parents after visiting the doctor wasn’t an option for Ebere, who feared her strict father would beat her and shame her in their neighbourhood. The father of the baby had denied all responsibility and threatened to kill her if she ever tried to contact him again.
A nurse, who saw the troubled young girl sitting in the hospital, approached her to find out what was wrong. Ebere explained her situation and the nurse showed her a Facebook page of a man she said was a social worker who helped pregnant women in her position. She told her to call the phone number.
“When I called and explained my situation, he asked me to meet him at a popular restaurant in town,” says Ebere, speaking to the Guardian in her home city of Enugu, in south-eastern Nigeria. “When we met, he offered to take me to his home and care for me until I gave birth, but only if I was willing to sell the baby to him.”
Researchers link exposure to mining pollutants to greatly increased risk of conditions such as spina bifida and limb abnormalities
Thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are being exposed to dangerous levels of toxic pollution that is causing birth defects in their children as they mine for cobalt used to make rechargeable batteries for smartphones, laptops and electric cars, a new medical study has found.
Research published in the Lancet last week found that local people working in mines in the African “copperbelt”, a mining region stretching across Zambia and the DRC, are at significantly higher risk of having children born with serious birth defects.
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