Toddler from Mali has died in hospital after being resuscitated on a dock last week
A two-year-old girl from Mali who was rescued from a migrant boat and resuscitated on a dock in the Canary Islands last week has died in hospital, becoming the latest victim of the perilous Atlantic route from Africa to Europe.
The girl was one of 52 people travelling on a boat that had left the city of Dakhla in Western Sahara bound for the Spanish archipelago.
Continue reading...UN finds pandemic is widening education inequality with millions of girls unlikely to return to school
More than half of all children who turn 10 this year will reach their milestone birthday without being able to read a simple sentence, according to a new analysis of UN data.
Of those 70 million 10-year-olds, 11.5 million of them could be unable to read as a direct result of the impact on education of the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...Apartheid-era South African president calls for justice for female victims of violence in Guardian article but some say his own record needs scrutiny
South Africans don’t give much thought to FW de Klerk these days. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, his fellow Nobel peace laureate, the last apartheid president is more highly regarded outside his own country than in it.
But some South Africans were taken aback to see De Klerk putting himself forward in a Guardian article on 10 March as an advocate of protecting women from violence and asserting that “holding perpetrators accountable, irrespective of how long ago the crime was committed, is essential to stamping out impunity and preventing future atrocities”.
Continue reading...Government could face judicial review if it does not reinstate its spending commitment, advice adds
The government will be in clear breach of the law and exposed to a judicial review if it presses ahead with a multibillion-pound cut in the UK’s foreign aid programme, according to legal advice given to Tory backbenchers.
Advice issued by the QC and peer Ken Macdonald said No 10 had acted outside the law when it abandoned its commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid.
Continue reading...One refugee’s terrifying story illustrates how ‘pushbacks’ are creating a crisis for the right to asylum at Europe’s borders
“We were all forced on to the boat. If we looked up they shouted at us and hit us in the head. Then they stopped at a place in the sea where there were no other boats, they left us.”
Mustafa, his wife and two young children had only been on the Greek island of Lesbos a few hours when, they say, they were driven in a van to the coast, beaten by masked men and then taken out to sea on a raft and abandoned there.
Continue reading...Homicides in the city have risen 314% and while some back shifting resources to prevention and healing, others want alternatives in place to keep Black and brown people safe
Since the visceral video of George Floyd pinned beneath a police officer’s knee sparked massive uprisings in US cities last summer, movements to defund police departments have grown from siloed local campaigns into a national movement. But in multiple cities, this work is being done amid a disturbing rise in gun violence that is affecting the same Black and Latino communities most affected by police misconduct.
While some crime survivors support shifting resources from police and into prevention and healing services, others who have lost loved ones to shootings and live in high-crime areas worry that depleting police budgets without proven alternatives to fill any gaps will make Black and brown communities less safe.
Continue reading...Two years of torrential rains have left 1.6m people in Jonglei province without crops and with their homes flooded. But, with extraordinary resilience, people in Old Fangak are working together to rebuild their lives.
After the unprecedented floods last summer, the people of Old Fangak, a small town in northern South Sudan, should be planting now. But the flood water has not receded, the people are still marooned and now they are facing severe hunger.
Unusually heavy rains began last July, and the White Nile burst its banks, destroyed all the crops and encroached on farms and villages, affecting Jonglei and other states, leaving people to scramble for a few strips of dry land.
Continue reading...Number of people diagnosed and treated in worst-affected countries has fallen to 2008 levels as resources diverted
Twelve months of Covid-19 has reversed 12 years of global progress against tuberculosis, worse than previously estimated.
The pandemic has resulted in nearly a 25% decrease in diagnosis and treatment around the world, according to research published on Thursday by a coalition working to end TB.
Continue reading...President Paul Kagame – long feted by leaders in the west – is accused of serial human rights abuses in expansive new book
A devastating new book will accuse Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame – long feted by his prominent international supporters as the model of visionary new African leadership – of being a serial human rights abuser, including for his role in a sustained campaign of assassinating his rivals in exile.
Written by Michela Wrong, the author who covered the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when more than 800,000 people – largely ethnic Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus – were killed by Hutu militias over 100 days, Do Not Disturb represents one of the most far-reaching historical revisions of Kagame and his regime.
Continue reading...Life-saving techniques fall out of favour on maternity wards in developing countries over Covid fears
Small and sick babies are at increased risk of dying due to disruptions in care caused by coronavirus, a survey of health workers across 62 mainly developing countries has found.
Every year, 2.5 million babies die within 28 days of birth, and more than 80% of them have low birth weight. A technique for premature and small babies known as kangaroo mother care (KMC), involving early prolonged skin-to-skin contact with their mothers and breastfeeding, can help reduce mortality.
Continue reading...Policeman accused of sex trafficking, while 12,000 women and girls vanish in ‘shadow pandemic’
Judith Machaca was last seen on her way home from work in her home town of Tacna in southern Peru. The environmental engineering student had been working part-time at a mobile phone shop and would always send a message if she was going to be late.
The last text message from her phone was sent at 11pm on 28 November and the next day her distraught father reported the 20-year-old’s disappearance to the police. They sent him away, saying that she was probably with a boyfriend and would show up soon enough.
Continue reading...The attacks are common in northern Argentina against women and children – including one victim who was just four years old
Ana* was on her way home from school with her young cousin when it happened. “She managed to run away, but I didn’t,” she said, her voice trembling. “They put me in a car. They were white men. And they raped me.”
Ana’s ordeal wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a horrific pattern of brutal sexual violence inflicted on indigenous children and women in northern Argentina by non-indigenous men, often in groups.
Continue reading...With medical resources diverted to the pandemic, years of progress in children’s healthcare are under threat
Nurse Magdalene Fornah was on duty at Freetown’s Connaught hospital when she heard that Sierra Leone had its first confirmed coronavirus case. It was five years after Ebola had killed about 4,000 people in the small country, ravaging the fragile health system. Soon after that initial case was announced last March, the UN estimated that 3.3 million people across Africa could die of Covid-19.
Like the rest of her medical colleagues, Fornah had no idea this nightmare scenario would not come to pass. “When I saw the first patients, I was scared,” she says.
Continue reading...The 13 new constables have overcome society’s prejudice to win a place at Chhattisgarh’s training academy
The top police officer in Chhattisgarh state, Durgesh Awasthi, has nothing but praise for his new recruits. He suspects, he says, some of them will prove to be “the best cops” the force has ever enlisted.
“They are sensitive, have a high emotional quotient and know not just how the other half lives but what it’s like being on the other side of the law,” said Awasthi.
Continue reading...Rodrigo Londoño led the leftwing Farc guerrillas, while Salvatore Mancuso was head of a rightwing death squad during the civil war
Two of Colombia’s most notorious warlords will appear together before a truth commission on Thursday, in the latest move to shed light on crimes committed during decades of bloody civil war.
Rodrigo Londoño, better known by his wartime alias Timochenko, once led the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), in a bloody struggle against the Colombian state that left 260,000 dead.
Continue reading...As tourism plummets and fishing nets go empty, more are attempting the treacherous 1,000 mile journey to the Canaries
In the old Senegalese port city of Saint Louis, 12 women step off the sun-baked street and through a doorway draped with pink silk into a dim room beyond.
After greetings are over, one by one they recount their stories. Recent memories of husbands, sons and brothers they have lost at sea, revealing precious pictures on smartphones of moments when they last cradled children or kissed their families.
Continue reading...Latest updates: PM says UK’s greatest ally will be US as he makes statement to MPs on defence review
In his Sky News interview Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chair of the Commons defence committee, said the security and defence review said that the UK could use nuclear weapons to respond to an attack with chemical or biological weapons. That was a “big change” in policy, he said.
He was referring to this passage on page 77 of the document (pdf).
The UK will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 1968 (NPT). This assurance does not apply to any state in material breach of those non-proliferation obligations. However, we reserve the right to review this assurance if the future threat of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical and biological capabilities, or emerging technologies that could have a comparable impact, makes it necessary.
Here is the Scottish government’s summary of the latest plans for easing lockdown restrictions in Scotland. And here is a graphic summarising what it says.
Scotland’s indicative route out of lockdown. If we all stick with it and get the virus more under control as the vaccines do their work, there is hope for a much better summer on the horizon ☀️ pic.twitter.com/gTKHtJTNn5
Continue reading...The African state was already struggling to cope with TB, HIV and Covid before latest response to demands for equal pay
Lesotho has sacked hundreds of its nurses over the past few days in a row over pay. The small southern African country’s main hospital in the capital, Maseru, fired 345 nurses and nursing assistants, who have been on strike for the past month, with immediate effect.
The nurses went on strike to press the government-owned Queen Mamohato Memorial Hospital (QMMH) to give them the same salaries as their counterparts in other government and private institutions. Opened in 2011, QMMH is state-owned but run by the Tšepong Consortium, comprising five companies, namely Netcare Healthcare Group and Afri’nnai of South Africa, and Excel Health, Women Investment, and D10 Investments of Lesotho.
Continue reading...Harare’s drug dealers say business is booming as more young people, some at school, use mutoriro
Inside a tiny room in Kuwadzana, a township in Harare, Solomon Sigauke* and his friends talk animatedly about football and listen to loud music. The misty vapour from the crystal meth fills the room as they take turns on a fluorescent pipe.
Sigauke, 25, has no cigarette lighter so he is improvises, holding a burning candle while his friend Kudzo puffs the smoke from the burning substance, known locally as mutoriro. .
Continue reading...Government appears to backtrack on decree after women take to social media to sing in defiance under #IAmMySong hashtag
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education appears to be backtracking on a decision to impose a nationwide singing ban on schoolgirls.
In a letter to school boards last week, which was leaked to the media, Kabul’s Education Department said girls aged 12 and above would no longer be able to sing at public events, unless the events were attended solely by women. The letter also stipulated that girls couldn’t be trained by a male music teacher.
Continue reading...