Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
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.
There was confusion about whether the wider evacuation orders were sparked by a renewed leak at the LG Chem factory in Andhra Pradesh, or by the fear that rising temperatures at the plant could lead to another leak.
Decades after Bhopal, lack of law enforcement and political will plagues Indian industry
The gas leak at a chemical factory in Visakhapatnam will immediately remind many in India and beyond of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, widely considered the world’s worst industrial disaster.
So far, the scale of the tragedies are very different. Eleven people are confirmed to have died in Visakhapatnam – but with hundreds hospitalised and thousands affected, there are fears the toll will rise. In Bhopal, 4,000 people died within days of the toxic gas leak from a pesticide plant and thousands more in the following years.
Styrene gas leaked from the LG Polymers plant, part of the Korean conglomerate LG, in Andra Pradesh state
A gas leak at a chemical factory in southern India has killed at least nine people and led to hundreds being taken to hospital, amid fears that the death toll could climb higher.
Styrene leaked from the Korean-owned LG Polymers plant during the early hours of Thursday morning when families in the surrounding villages were asleep, a local official in Andra Pradesh state said.
Riyaz Naikoo was member of region’s largest indigenous militant group, Hizbul Mujahideen
Indian government forces have killed a top rebel commander and his aide in disputed Kashmir, and shut down mobile phone and mobile internet services during subsequent anti-India protests.
Riyaz Naikoo, 35, was the chief of operations of the region’s largest indigenous rebel group, Hizbul Mujahideen, which has spearheaded an armed rebellion against Indian rule.
The spread of Covid-19 in India has been catastrophic for millions of its poorest and marginalised residents who are bearing the brunt of the world's biggest shutdown. Hannah Ellis-Peterson tells us how coronavirus and the lockdown is further dividing the country along class and religious lines
Civil society has outperformed the state in helping to feed India’s poorest. It should be seen as ally not enemy
The highways connecting India’s overcrowded cities to the villages had not seen anything like it since the time of partition 73 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of workers were on the move, walking back to their villages with their possessions bundled on their heads.
On 24 March, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a nationwide 21-day lockdown to contain the coronavirus pandemic. States sealed their borders, and transport came to a halt. With no trains or buses to take them home, India’s rural-to-urban migrant population, estimated at a staggering 120 million, took to the roads. On 5 April a statement from the home ministry said 1.25 million people moving between states had been put up in camps and shelters.
Spain has ruled out any early reopening of its tourism sector and Germany is set to extend a travel warning for all leisure trips outside the country until mid-June, casting further doubt on when would-be holidaymakers will be able to venture abroad again.
With airline fleets mostly grounded, cross-border train traffic slashed and many EU countries, including France, requiring all arrivals bar their own citizens to formally justify their journey, leisure travel within Europe is at a near standstill.
Irrfan Khan, the Indian-born actor who achieved considerable success in both Bollywood and the west, has died aged 53. He had been admitted to the intensive care unit of Mumbai’s Kokilaben hospital on Tuesday with a colon infection.
In March 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour, but after extensive treatment he recovered well enough to shoot Angrezi Medium, the film which would turn out to be his last, and whose release this March was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Exclusion from government Covid-19 relief has left many reliant on private food donations, as fears raised over protection from transmission after lockdown
Rasheeda Bibi has five rupees to her name. A worker in India’s sex industry, she lives in the narrow lanes of Kolkata’s Kalighat red light area with her three children in a room she rents for 620 rupees (£6) a month.
As a thunderstorm rages through the city, Bibi worries about the leaky roof of her small room.
Commission says religious minorities face ‘increasing assault’ under Narendra Modi but state department unlikely to take action
A US government panel has called for India to be put on a religious freedom blacklist over a “drastic” downturn under the prime minister, Narendra Modi, triggering a sharp response from New Delhi.
The US commission on international religious freedom recommends but does not set policy, and there is virtually no chance the state department will follow its lead on India, an increasingly close US ally.
The global toll from Covid-19 passed 200,000 on Saturday, with over 2.8 million people infected, as the WHO warned against issuing “immunity passports” because there is no evidence people who recovered from the disease are protected against a second infection.
It took more than three months after the coronavirus first emerged for deaths from the disease to pass 100,000, a grim milestone that was reached on 10 April. It took just over two weeks for that toll to double, and worldwide the number of confirmed infections is creeping towards 3 million.
Lawyers say pair were peacefully protesting against Indian citizenship act
Delhi police have been accused of slapping two Muslim student activists with “bogus” charges of conspiring to incite the recent riots, the worst religious violence in India’s capital for decades, and in which the police were accused of being complicit.
Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, students at Delhi’s Muslim-majority Jamia Millia Islamia University, were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which is usually reserved for terrorist activity and means they can be held for six months.
Multimillionaire ‘king of the good times’ Vijay Mallya faces allegations of £1bn fraud
The Indian multimillionaire businessman Vijay Mallya has lost his appeal against a decision to extradite him to India to face allegations of a £1bn fraud at his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines.
High court judges on Monday rejected Mallya’s appeal against a 2018 decision granting his extradition, ruling that there was a “prima facie case of fraud by false representation”.
A low-tech washing machine offers a way to wash where there is limited access to power and running water
With a plastic drum, plywood and a few secret components, a London-based engineer has created a rudimentary washing machine that he says will ease the workload for families with little power or water.
Nav Sawnhey has designed a £24 crank-handled machinefor people in places without reliable, affordable power.
In India, politicians from the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party have been touting cow urine as a cure for Covid-19. In Tanzania the president has promised that taking communion in church would “burn” the virus away. In Brazil a congressman claimed a day of fasting would halt its spread.
And the leader of the most powerful country in the world, Donald Trump, has been touting as a miracle cure an unproven anti-malarial drug that has contributed to at least one death.
Kandahar province went into full lockdown on Wednesday morning as Afghanistan reported its second biggest daily rise of new coronavirus cases in a week, triggered by a surge of infections in Kabul.
Afghanistan’s health ministry has reported 70 new positive cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours, pushing the total number of infections to 784.
Most of the new cases were in Kabul, which has so far recorded 201 cases, 31 today.
Kabul went into full lockdown last week, as all roads to the city of six million were blocked and 1,600 police officers were appointed to monitor movement inside the city.
Of the new Covid-19 cases, 22 were confirmed in the western province of Herat, the worst affected area in Afghanistan so far with 313 cases.
The southern province of Kandahar went into full lockdown on Wednesday morning in a bid to contain the spread of coronavirus in one of Afghanistan’s most populated areas.
Germany’s government will extend restrictions on movement introduced last month to slow the spread of the coronavirus until at least 3 May, Handelsblatt business daily reported on Wednesday, citing the dpa news agency.
The chancellor, Angela Merkel, is holding a video conference on Wednesday, first with cabinet ministers and later with the leaders of Germany’s 16 states, who will try to agree on whether to ease the measures given some improvement in the situation.
For millions of young people, coronavirus restrictions have made access to food, water and shelter even more precarious
Timothy, a teenager on the streets of Mombasa, wonders how he will eat. “Rich people can stay home … because they have a store well stocked with food,” he says. “For a survivor on the street your store is your stomach.”
However, says another, if the rumours are true and street children are arrested in the city during the Covid-19 crisis, he’d be happy to go to Shimo women’s prison, because there “you are sure to get free food, shelter and medical services”.
The coronavirus pandemic has led to an unprecedented global surge in digital surveillance, researchers and privacy advocates around the world have said, with billions of people facing enhanced monitoring that may prove difficult to roll back.
Governments in at least 25 countries are employing vast programmes for mobile data tracking, apps to record personal contact with others, CCTV networks equipped with facial recognition, permission schemes to go outside and drones to enforce social isolation regimes.