Category Archives: Society

Coronavirus: more cases and second death reported in China

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Experts fear numbers affected may be higher than first thought as US begins screening passengers arriving from Wuhan

More cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the Chinese city of Wuhan and a second person has died, according to local authorities. It comes as disease-modelling experts warned that far more people may have been affected by the previously unknown virus than thought.

The Wuhan municipal health commission said in a statement that four patients diagnosed with pneumonia on Thursday were in a stable condition, taking the total number of cases to nearly 50. The statement released in the early hours on Saturday is the first confirmation of new cases by the commission in nearly a week.

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UN sounds alarm over unprecedented levels of hunger in southern Africa

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Women and children bear brunt as drought and extreme weather leave tens of millions short of food

Southern Africa is in the throes of a climate emergency, with hunger levels in the region on a previously unseen scale, the UN has warned.

Years of drought, widespread flooding and economic disarray have left 45 million people facing severe food shortages, with women and children bearing the brunt of the crisis, said the World Food Programme (WFP).

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Mobile phones cause tumours, Italian court rules, in defiance of evidence

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Judges find prolonged use can cause tumours, going against mass of scientific opinion

An Italian court has ruled that prolonged use of mobile phones can cause head tumours despite scientists overwhelmingly agreeing there is no evidence to back this up.

The Turin court of appeal on Tuesday upheld a ruling issued by a lower court in 2017 in relation to a man with neurinoma of the acoustic nerve, a benign but disabling tumour. The decision was based on studies provided by two court-appointed doctors that showed an increased risk of head tumours among those who talked on their phones for 30 minutes a day over a 10-year period.

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Exclusive: CPS seeks longer sentence for rapist Reynhard Sinaga

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Crown Prosecution Service asks attorney general to review 30-year term for student who raped up to 195 men

A man described as Britain’s most prolific rapist could have his sentence increased after the Crown Prosecution Service wrote to the attorney general saying Reynhard Sinaga should serve longer than 30 years in prison.

Sinaga, a 36-year-old mature student from Indonesia, was given a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 30 years by a judge at Manchester crown court last week. Suzanne Goddard QC told him it was “borderline” whether he should be given a whole-life term but decided that he should not be considered for release until he was 66, having been unanimously convicted by four juries of drugging and abusing 48 men while they lay comatose in his Manchester flat.

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Nigeria’s child development crisis is a tragedy. Here’s how we can end it

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Investment in health and education and an end to early marriage could transform Africa’s most populous country

If you want a window on the condition of children in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, there is no better vantage point than the Katanga health centre in the impoverished northern state of Jigawa.

In a hut that passes for a nutrition clinic, a group of 25 women wait with their children. Tiny bodies bearing the hallmarks of acute malnutrition – distended stomachs and twig-thin limbs – are lifted into a weighing harness and their arms measured to check for signs of wasting. Ali, who has just reached his first birthday, weighs only 5kg – the average age of a two-month-old in the UK. His mother is 14.

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Food for thought: the school lunch scheme linking London and Liberia

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By providing free school meals to some of the poorest children on Earth, a UK charity is also ensuring they get an education

It’s breakfast time in Domagbamatma (population: 63) in the depths of the Liberian rainforest, but there’s no food in evidence in the home of Massa Kamara. The eight-year-old has been up since dawn, collecting firewood, fetching water.

Now she’s ready for school in a crisp white shirt and navy-blue skirt in her family’s muddy, two-room shack.

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Belgian doctors go on trial for murder for helping woman end life

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Medics accused of poisoning Tine Nys, 38, in country’s first euthanasia criminal case

Three Belgian doctors go on trial for murder on Tuesday for helping a woman end her life in the country’s first criminal case concerning euthanasia.

The doctors, whose names have not been made public, are accused of unlawfully poisoning 38-year-old Tine Nys on 27 April 2010. Prosecutors say Nys did not fulfil the conditions under Belgian law to be euthanised.

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Organ donation: new technique can preserve human livers for a week

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Week-long storage boosts time organs are usable and distances over which they can be moved

Human livers from organ donors can now be preserved for a week, researchers have revealed, a dramatic improvement on previous techniques, which could only keep the organs usable for a matter of hours.

The technology could boost the number of livers available for transplantation and offer new approaches to treating diseases such as liver cancer.

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Raising the bar: Hashi Mohamed’s journey from child refugee to top lawyer

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He defied a life of poverty and hardship to reach Oxford and become a barrister. Now Hashi Mohamed has written a book which aims to rethink the stalled project of social mobility


• Read an extract from Hashi Mohamed’s People Like Us

Hashi Mohamed is a 36-year-old barrister. He has the accent, a mentor once told of him, of someone who’s “been to Eton” and the confidence of a natural orator. If you had to place him within the complex matrix of the British class system, you’d probably say he was the son of wealthy Africans who attended an independent school and Oxbridge.

In fact, Mohamed is a Somali who was born in Kenya, where he lived in a rundown part of Nairobi with his four siblings (another having died), his mother (who also had six children from a previous marriage) and his travelling salesman father. When his father died in a car accident in 1993, Mohamed and three of his siblings were sent to England as refugees.

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Uganda’s thirst for hydropower raises fears for environment

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Murchison Falls is a magnet for tourism but energy projects, not least a possible dam, threaten the wildlife haven

Along the road that takes you into Murchison Falls national park, animals once roamed freely. Narrow roads provided the perfect environment for them, so “they [didn’t] feel like they are in a foreign land”, says tour operator Everest Kayondo.

But not any more. The park’s lush forest is being uprooted and red trucks and yellow diggers stand ready to pave the road – and the way for new energy projects.

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Ballooning debt forces poor countries to cut public spending

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Congo-Brazzaville and Chad among hardest hit as campaigners warn spiralling repayments could trigger disaster

Poorer countries are cutting public spending in response to a “growing debt crisis”, campaigners have warned.

Debt in some countries has trebled according to new figures that calculate debt reimbursements, and their impact on government expenditure, in 60 countries.

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Police in Bangladesh make arrest in connection with alleged rape of student

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Dhaka University demonstrators demand prompt action following reported rape of 21-year-old woman

Police in Bangladesh have arrested a man in connection with the alleged rape of a student at Dhaka University amid angry protests on campus.

More than 2,000 students and human rights activists – some brandishing placards asking: “Tell me, am I next?” – demonstrated this week following the alleged rape of the 21-year-old student. They demanded the death penalty for anyone found guilty of rape.

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China’s Sars-like illness worries health experts

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China’s viral pneumonia outbreak may have jumped species barrier, raising fears of pandemic

The finding that the outbreak of viral pneumonia in China that has struck 59 people may be caused by a coronavirus, the family of viruses behind Sars, which spread to 37 countries in 2003, causing global panic and killing more than 750 people, means that health authorities will be watching closely.

China says the illness is not Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), nor Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome), both of which are caused by coronaviruses, and so far it appears milder than both. Unlike Sars, it does not appear to spread easily between humans and unlike Mers, which has a mortality rate of about 35%, nobody has died.

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Brazilian judge orders Netflix to remove ‘gay Jesus’ comedy

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Rio judge’s ruling follows complaint that the ‘honour of millions of Catholics’ was hurt by The First Temptation of Christ

A Brazilian judge on Wednesday ordered Netflix to stop showing a Christmas special that some called blasphemous for depicting Jesus as a gay man and which prompted a bomb attack on the satirists behind the programme.

The ruling by a Rio de Janeiro judge, Benedicto Abicair, responded to a petition by a Brazilian Catholic organisation that argued the “honour of millions of Catholics” was hurt by the airing of The First Temptation of Christ. The special was produced by the Rio-based film company Porta dos Fundos, whose headquarters was targeted in the Christmas Eve attack.

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The Cyprus rape case is a chilling reminder of the price women pay for speaking up | Gaby Hinsliff

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It is impossible to feel the British teenager convicted of lying about what happened to her in Ayia Napa has received justice

All she wanted was one last summer adventure before buckling down to the beginnings of adult life.

If all had gone to plan, the 19-year-old would have flown home from Cyprus with nothing more than a few lively gap year stories to show for it, and by now would presumably have been happily settled into university life.

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Vivian Suter: the rainforest-dwelling artist who paints with fish glue, dogs and mud

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She was ignored for decades, but now Suter has been rediscovered as a pioneering eco-artist. We meet her, and her 97-year-old collagist mum, in the wilds of Guatemala

A large dog romps across a blue and white canvas, leaving a trail of brown paw prints. “Oh well,” shrugs Vivian Suter. “They’re part of the work now. I don’t think anyone will mind.” I realise Bonzo – one of three Alsatian crossbreeds that shadow the artist wherever she goes in her Guatemalan home – has just put the finishing touches to an artwork that will shortly be on public display thousands of miles away.

The painting lies on the floor of her “laager” – a storage barn open to the elements, apart from a metre-high stone wall, which you have to clamber over with the help of a rickety chair. The wall is to guard against mudslides, she explains, gesturing at a ghostly tideline that rings the interior. Most of her works hang from a rack; the piles on the floor are for three upcoming exhibitions in Berlin, London and Madrid. Having just opened a 53-piece installation at Tate Liverpool, Suter is halfway through choosing the 200 works that will feature in her Camden Arts Centre exhibition, which opens next week.

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Severe childhood deprivation reduces brain size, study finds

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Brain scans of Romanian orphans adopted in UK show early neglect left its mark

Children who experience severe deprivation early in life have smaller brains in adulthood, researchers have found.

The findings are based on scans of young adults who were adopted as children into UK families from Romania’s orphanages that rose under the regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

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Appeal by Cyprus rape claim teenager may take three years

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Foreign Office under pressure to get Cypriot authorities to move case to front of queue

The British teenager allegedly gang-raped in Cyprus could face a three-year wait to exhaust the legal process relating to her conviction for lying. The long delay increases pressure on the Foreign Office to lobby Cyprus to expedite the appeal process.

The student, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was ruled to have “wilfully indulged in public mischief” by claiming that she was raped by a group of male Israeli tourists while on holiday in Ayia Napa last July.

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‘It’s a food forest’: Amazon villagers face down Bolsonaro threat

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Project part-funded by Global Greengrants Fund UK provides economic incentive to protect forest

  • Please donate to our appeal here

From space, the Amazon rainforest resembles a giant dark-green lung veined with blue rivers that is steadily succumbing to the disease-like spread of grey fires, orange roads and square-cut farms. What the satellite images cannot show is how most of the remaining bands of verdant, healthy foliage are defended on the ground by forest dwellers who act as antibodies to drive out malignant invaders.

Among the most impressive of these is the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve in the state of Para in northern Brazil, where residents are trying to bolster their economic resistance with a series of new agro-forestry and solar power projects.

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