Rescue comes after a boat believed to be used for human smuggling capsized with only one of 40 passengers surviving
Ten Cuban migrants in a sinking vessel were rescued off the Florida coast, according to the US Coast Guard.
A Coast Guard boat spotted the vessel on Thursday about 40 miles (about 64km) off Key Largo, the Coast Guard said in a tweet.
Continue reading...Rayan Oram, five, was found dead after four-day operation to rescue him from shaft 32 metres deep
Tributes have been paid to Rayan Oram, the five-year-old Moroccan boy whose body was recovered from a well on Saturday, and whose plight had moved his country and the world.
News of Rayan’s death after a massive four-day rescue operation pitched Morocco into deep grief and prompted condolences and expressions of gratitude to the search teams.
Continue reading...Worsening Sino-US ties, strict Covid rules and the crackdown on dissent have dented the territory’s fabled allure as a business hub, say expats
In July 2018, Tara Joseph, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, wrote an article in the best-known local English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, stressing to Americans the territory’s unique position as an Asian business hub.
“The US is forgetting the differences between Hong Kong and China. Let’s remind them,” she wrote. “Hong Kong continues to have a robust and hearty infrastructure of values, practices and institutions that could not contrast more starkly with those of the mainland system.”
Continue reading...White House believes Moscow has amassed at least 70% of firepower needed for mid-February invasion
Russia has enough troops in place to seize Kyiv or another Ukrainian city but not yet for a full takeover and occupation of the country, Ukraine’s former defence minister has said, as Washington warned that an invasion could take place at any time.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk said in an interview with the Guardian that the situation looked “pretty dire”. “Russia could now seize any city in Ukraine. But we still don’t see the 200,000 troops needed for a full-scale invasion,” he said.
Continue reading...Journalist Fahad Shah detained on Friday under terrorism and sedition laws in disputed Indian region
A prominent journalist has been arrested under terrorism and sedition laws, as a crackdown on the press in Indian-administered Kashmir continues to escalate.
Fahad Shah, the founder and editor of the widely read local news website The Kashmir Walla, was arrested on Friday evening when he was summoned to a police station in the southern district of Pulwama.
Continue reading...The warm living room of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s otherwise neat Parisian home has a coffee table in the middle of it piled high with keepsakes – a mountain of black and white pictures, letters and handwritten diaries. It’s an archive of one remarkable man’s intrepidly adventurous and unconventional life to date. Balanced on top of the overloaded files and folders sits a tattered book, its pages faded. On its cover is a portrait of an Inuit in a sealskin jacket, standing next to an icy shore. The title reads Les Esquimaux du Groenland à l’Alaska (The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska). It’s a 1947 work of nonfiction authored by French anthropologist Robert Gessain.
Decades may have passed since the day Kpomassie first set his teenage eyes upon this image in his native Togo, but the 80-year-old remembers the precise moment as if it had happened just minutes before. How could he not? What he found inside has, since that day, consumed him entirely, shaping every chapter of his own story. He ran away from home at 16 to embark on an epic cross-continental mission that delivered him to Greenland, the world’s northernmost country. He was the first African man to set foot there. The adventure resulted in a travelogue, return visits and countless speaking invitations, and, more recently, a rather acrimonious divorce. Now, his very own sealskin jacket hangs by the door to his home in pride of place.
Continue reading...About half the country’s population is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine, despite availability
In a vaccination centre in El Alto, Bolivia, the staff bagged up in protective gear far outnumbered the few people sitting in plastic chairs waiting for their injection. A young doctor reeled off a list of all the vaccines available: Sinopharm, Sputnik, Pfizer, Moderna. What’s lacking is demand. They see 100 people on a good day.
South America, once the region most afflicted by the pandemic, is now the most vaccinated in the world. But this turnaround doesn’t extend to Bolivia, where roughly half the population is yet to receive a single dose – even though the state has had all the vaccines it needs since October.
Continue reading...Hlaing Thayar was at the centre of Myanmar’s protests, but brutal crackdowns and the collapse of the local garment industry have taken their toll
As Thitsar* walked through her neighbourhood one December morning, she was struck by its emptiness. The bamboo shacks that line the streets of Hlaing Tharyar, an industrial township on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, lay in tatters, overgrown with weeds. The vendors who once weaved through traffic had vanished, as had many of the informal settlements where they lived and the roadside tea shops where they gathered.
Streets that had once resounded with chants for democracy were now eerily silent.
Continue reading...Tub-thumping talk of all-out war in Ukraine seems overblown but the White House knows the fledgling Sino-Russian axis is a real threat, in Taiwan and elsewhere
If, as seems increasingly probable, Russia decides not to launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine, tub-thumping US and British politicians who have spent weeks scaring the public with loose talk of looming Armageddon will have some explaining to do.
The military build-up directed by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is real enough. But suspicion grows that the actual as opposed to the hypothetical threat of a large-scale conventional attack is being mis-read, misinterpreted, over-estimated or deliberately exaggerated.
Continue reading...Network Ten to pause filming after Channel 5 announces it will stop airing the show in August
The Australian soap Neighbours, which launched the international careers of countless local stars including Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Margot Robbie and Guy Pearce, has been axed in the UK in a move likely to sound the death knell for the iconic show.
The UK’s Channel 5 announced it would no longer air the program and unless it is picked up by another UK broadcaster the show will end its record-breaking 36-year run in August.
Continue reading...The singer who defined music and melody for generations in India has died in Mumbai
Lata Mangeshkar, one of India’s biggest cultural icons and considered one of the country’s most influential singers, has died in Mumbai aged 92.
Prime minister Narendra Modi lead tributes for the “nightingale of Bollywood”, saying: “She leaves a void in our nation that cannot be filled. The coming generations will remember her as a stalwart of Indian culture, whose melodious voice had an unparalleled ability to mesmerise people.”
Continue reading...Fears an attack could lead to 50,000 casualties as US troops arrive in Poland and French and German leaders prepare to visit Kyiv and Moscow
Russia has assembled at least 70% of the military firepower it intends to have in place by the middle of February to give President Vladimir Putin the option of launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, US officials have said.
On Saturday, officials warned that a full Russian invasion could lead to the quick capture of Kyiv and potentially result in as many as 50,000 civilians killed or wounded, according to the New York Times and Washington Post. A US official confirmed that estimate to the Associated Press but it is not clear how US agencies determined those numbers.
Continue reading...Secretary general says he expects Xi Jinping to allow ‘credible’ visit to troubled region during meeting on Winter Olympics sidelines
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres told leaders in Beijing he expects them to allow UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet to make a “credible” visit to China including a stop in the Xinjiang region, his spokesman said on Saturday.
Guterres met with Chinese president Xi Jinping and foreign minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Winter Olympics, according to a readout of their talks.
Continue reading...In a pre-recorded address, the New Zealand prime minister says while people cannot come together on the Treaty grounds this year due to Covid restrictions, 'the day remains of great importance to us as a nation'. Ardern acknowledges the government still has a way to go in turning around poverty, housing inequality and poor health outcomes for Māori. 'If we are to make progress as a nation, we have to be willing to question practices that have resulted over and over in the same or even worse outcomes', she says
Continue reading...Héctor Valer confirms resignation just four days after being named for the post
The Peruvian prime minister Héctor Valer confirmed on Saturday that he will step down just four days after being named for the post, after allegations that he beat his daughter and late wife.
On Friday, President Pedro Castillo said he would reshuffle the cabinet again, after just three days, amid widespread condemnation of his appointment of Valer as prime minister.
Continue reading...Majority of outages occur in Tennessee, after storm that spanned 2,000 miles dumped up to 17in of snow
Over 150,000 homes across the US are without power after a winter storm tore through the country and was followed by freezing temperatures that created icy conditions.
By Saturday, over 100,000 homes had their power restored after outages on Friday, though some states were still experiencing service interruptions. The bulk of the outages took place in Tennessee, where over 93,000 homes were experiencing outages, according to PowerOutage.us. Another 43,000 homes in New York and 30,000 in Ohio were without power.
Continue reading...Rescuers failed to save a boy who fell into a well in northern Morocco. The boy's body was recovered from the well late on Saturday. Workers with mechanical diggers had worked round the clock to try to rescue five-year-old Rayan after he fell into a well 32 metres (105ft) deep in the hills near Chefchaouen on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Angry residents have rallied to a campaign against the ‘trashing’ of the capital. Some blame mayor Anne Hidalgo while others see the protests as a far-right ploy
In the middle of Paris’s third Covid lockdown last March, a hashtag appeared on Twitter with a photo of a lock on the Canal Saint-Martin that runs through the north of the city clogged with litter, plastic bags and bottles.
Images of Paris looking worse for wear are nothing new but, within days, dozens of pictures of overflowing bins, broken pavements and graffiti-covered walls appeared with the same hashtag – #SaccageParis – which roughly translates as Trashed Paris.
Continue reading...Total of 60,578 cases reported which includes reinfections in England and Northern Ireland; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and wife have mild symptoms
Hong Kong reported 351 cases of coronavirus on Saturday, a record daily high since the outbreak of the pandemic, reports Reuters.
This adds further pressure on the government’s “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy as other major cities opt to live with the virus.
Continue reading...Lawyers say delay in case against three defendants including a Briton is to avoid embarrassing China
The trial in Greece of activists who protested against Beijing holding the Winter Olympics has been postponed amid accusations that proceedings were delayed to avoid embarrassing China on the eve of the Games.
The highly anticipated hearing had been due to take place on Thursday in the town of Pyrgos, with human rights lawyers travelling from the UK and Athens to attend. The activists, who included a Briton, an American and a Tibetan-Canadian, were arrested when they briefly disrupted the Olympic flame lighting ceremony in October.
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