Health systems overwhelmed as Delta variant sweeps across south-east Asia
Indonesia has reported more daily Covid-19 infections than India and Brazil as the Delta strain sweeps across south-east Asia, placing intense pressure on health systems.
Most countries in the region are experiencing their worst outbreaks since the pandemic began, fuelled by the emergence of more aggressive variants and a lack of vaccines.
Continue reading...Military build-up continues ‘like never before’ on both sides of 2,100-mile border despite high-level talks
It was described as a dialogue, the first high-level meeting in months between the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers to address the ongoing border aggressions that have pushed the two nuclear-armed countries to the brink of war.
But those hoping Wednesday’s meeting would help break a year-long stalemate during which 200,000 troops have built up on both sides of the Himalayan frontier were to be left unsatisfied.
Continue reading...As women and children lose out on programmes that could change their lives, Britain’s reputation has been diminished
Bukola Onyishi was delighted when she found out that the British government was going to help her realise a dream in one of the poorest parts of Nigeria. With a grant agreement that was meant to last for three years, she was finally going to be able to launch a female empowerment programme for the women of Bauchi state in the country’s north-east, many of whom had fled the militant Islamist group Boko Haram and were now living in abject poverty in camps for the internally displaced.
“The grant made us very happy,” says Onyishi, country director for Women for Women International. “[Bauchi] was the right place to be.” Setting it up was not easy: Onyishi and her colleagues had a job to persuade community elders of the project’s value, encountering deep-seated patriarchal beliefs that surprised even her in their obstinacy. But they came round in the end, and the first 12-month empowerment programme began, teaching 1,200 carefully selected women about everything from their basic human rights to numeracy and business skills.
Continue reading...General Sir Nick Carter has been arranging meetings with contacts in Kabul and Pakistan to try to prevent a descent into civil war
Britain’s top general, Sir Nick Carter, has been using his personal connections with Afghan and Pakistan leaders in a behind-the-scenes effort to stop Afghanistan sliding into full-blown civil war, and help bolster stalling US-brokered peace talks in Qatar.
At the weekend a senior Afghan delegation arrived in Doha to try to restart the virtually dormant negotiations, after months which have seen the Taliban sweep across much of rural Afghanistan, although they still do not hold any cities.
Continue reading...Silsila Alikhil, 26, was badly beaten and held for over five hours in Islamabad, according to diplomatic sources
The daughter of Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan was abducted in the middle of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, held for several hours and brutally attacked, officials in both countries said on Saturday.
No one has been arrested in connection with Friday’s assault on Silsila Alikhil, 26. The Afghan foreign ministry issued a statement demanding a quick investigation, saying she was “severely tortured”.
Continue reading...Some pay smugglers to take them to Istanbul as withdrawal of US troops rekindles fears of civil war
Twenty-eight days into their journey out of Afghanistan, a woman and her five children are sitting in the shade near a bus station in Tatvan, a town on the shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey.
She is waiting for a smuggler, who was paid in advance, to take the family to Istanbul. Tired and dirty, the younger children are playing in the dust and laughing; the youngest boy wants a piggyback. The smuggler is two days late.
Continue reading...Health workers fear deaths could reach levels not seen this century as up to 90% miss check-ups and many opt for home births
Earlier this month, 21-year-old Lakhu BK decided to have her baby at home in her village in the far west of Nepal. She had feared contracting Covid-19 if she went to a health centre. She lost her life giving birth.
“I thought my daughter-in-law will die from [the] virus but did not think she would die from being unable to give birth,” said her mother-in-law, Pamfi BK, 50.
Continue reading...Militants say they have made what could be their most significant advance in a nationwide offensive
The Taliban have claimed to have seized control of a crucial border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan, as their forces continue to rapidly advance in the wake of US troops pulling out, fuelling fears of the conflict spilling into Pakistan.
In one of their most strategic gains yet, on Tuesday night Taliban forces descended on the district of Spin Boldak in Afghanistan, just a few miles from the Pakistan border, and attacked several posts of Afghan troops, who reportedly surrendered immediately.
Continue reading...Outbreak could not have come at a worse time, after military coup caused hospitals to collapse and threw vaccination campaign into chaos
Khin Nwe Soe* went in a taxi, from factory to factory across Myanmar’s main city of Yangon, desperately searching for oxygen tanks for her 21-year-old son. A home test had shown he had Covid-19. He was in pain, able only to lie down, and his oxygen levels had dropped as low as 90%.
“She tried very hard, queuing at every place she could find, because her child needed it,” said Aye Myat Noe*, her daughter, who lives abroad but had called oxygen suppliers to help her mother. “She has a lot of health issues too, including diabetes and heart problems. She is very scared herself … She was seriously risking her life to find oxygen.”
Continue reading...Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United World Schools, which has opened schools in the country.
All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS
*All girls’ names have been changed
Continue reading...As scorching temperatures spread, the search for ways to protect against heat stress is becoming ever more urgent
William Martínez, who as a child worked on a sugarcane plantation in rural Nicaragua, learned the hard way what many in the US and Canada are now realising: that rising temperatures are costing lives and livelihoods.
Martínez, along with fellow villagers in La Isla, found himself getting sicker as he worked long, gruelling days in the fields under the beating Nicaraguan sun two decades ago. Workers at the nearby mill, which supplies molasses to alcohol companies, began to suffer kidney failure, and would be forced out of the workforce and into expensive and time-consuming dialysis. His father and uncles, addled with the same affliction, had died when Martínez was a boy, forcing him to join the workforce.
Continue reading...Desperation grows for those unable to access subsidised food, as worst hunger in two decades reported
When India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 struck in April, Nazia Habib Khan’s second marriage abruptly came to an end after a year of beatings and abuse. The 28-year-old daughter of migrants from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh returned to live with her mother, brothers and a sister-in-law in Mumbai.
Their 40 sq metre (400 sq ft) home in Kurla East stands huddled among the 800 or so brick, tin sheet and tarpaulin houses of Qureshi Nagar, the entire shanty town trembling when a train roars past on a nearby railway line.
Continue reading...At 17, Priyanka Bairwa refused her arranged marriage. Instead, she started Rajasthan Rising to help thousands of others and call for free education
Priyanka Bairwa was 15 when her family began to look for a husband for her. The pandemic sped up the process, as schools shut and work dried up. By October 2020, her parents had settled on a suitable boy from their village of Ramathra in the district of Karauli, Rajasthan.
But Bairwa, now 18, wouldn’t hear of it. “During the pandemic, every family in the village was eager to marry off their girls. You’d have to invite less people, there were fewer expenses,” says Bairwa. “But I refused to be caught in a child marriage. There was a major backlash – constant fights. I finally threatened to run away and, fearing I would do something drastic, my family called it off. My mother convinced them to let me study and I joined a college.”
Continue reading...More than 1,000 have fled across the border, and hundreds more have handed over weapons to the Taliban
Last autumn, with the departure of American troops from Afghanistan looming after the US signed a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, several of the most senior security officials in Kabul urged President Ashraf Ghani to make some hard choices.
The Afghan army and police needed to retrench, figures including the then defence minister, Assadullah Khalid, told Ghani. Remote outposts, and rural areas where troops held little more than the cluster of government and security buildings that make up a “district centre”, should be abandoned.
Continue reading...Eight-hour series about Nursultan Nazarbayev criticised for stoking cult of personality of 30-year ruler
Oliver Stone has interviewed Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev for a new eight-hour film series which has been attacked as a hagiography that contributes to the leader’s cult of personality.
In the film, Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, Stone employs the same non-confrontational approach to interviewing autocrats that has made him a favourite of Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych and others seeking to polish their reputations by sitting down with the Oscar-winning director of Platoon and JFK.
Continue reading...Police chief says entrance was padlocked; separate inquiry looks into use of child labour at food plant
Bangladeshi police have arrested the owner of a factory where at least 52 people died in an inferno, as it emerged that children as young as 11 had been working there.
Police said the owner of the food factory and four of his sons were among eight people detained over the fire that broke out on Thursday and raged for more than a day. The blaze began in the evening at the five-storey Hashem Foods factory in Rupganj, just outside Dhaka.
Continue reading...Officials say many victims were trapped inside the food factory near Dhaka by an illegally locked door
A fire engulfed a food and drink factory in Bangladesh killing at least 52 people, many of whom were trapped inside by an illegally locked door, according to fire officials.
The blaze began on Thursday night at the five-storey Hashem Foods factory in Rupganj, just outside Dhaka, sending huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky. Police initially gave a toll of three dead, but on Friday afternoon discovered piles of bodies after the fire was extinguished.
Continue reading...Kelsey Devlin’s family in Burnley had concerns for her welfare and want transparency over how she died
The prime minister of Pakistan and Boris Johnson have been asked to intervene in the case of a British woman who died in Pakistan, with MPs and her family calling for transparency over the circumstances.
Kelsey Devlin, a 27-year-old carer and mother of two from Burnley in Lancashire, died on 30 June in a hospital in Rawalpindi. A death certificate says the previously healthy young woman died of sepsis, a stroke and cardiopulmonary arrest, but her family in Burnley say they were concerned about her welfare in Pakistan before her death.
Continue reading...Fears grow for Kabul government after militant group seizes two key border crossings
The Taliban has swept through western Herat province, seizing two key border crossings to Iran and Turkmenistan, and much of the countryside beyond city limits.
It was the latest part of Afghanistan to collapse in the face of a rapid militant advance, during which they have taken control of areas far beyond their original southern strongholds. Their speed has fuelled fears the government in Kabul could fall within months.
Continue reading...Pan-Asian labour rights group launches groundbreaking attempt to hold global labels accountable for alleged rights violations during pandemic
Legal complaints are being filed against some of the world’s largest fashion brands in major garment-producing countries across Asia in a groundbreaking attempt to hold the global fashion industry legally accountable for human rights violations in the countries where their clothing is made.
The Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), a pan-Asian labour rights group, says it is using legal challenges to argue that global clothing brands should be considered joint employers, along with their suppliers, under national laws and be held accountable for alleged wage violations during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continue reading...