Category Archives: World News

‘People are dying on the floor’: healthcare workers tell of Covid devastation in Solomon Islands

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The Pacific country was coronavirus-free until last month but an outbreak of thousands of cases is overwhelming the health system

Frontline health workers in Solomon Islands have warned that its health system is on the brink of collapse as the country struggles to deal with a devastating outbreak of Covid-19.

A senior doctor and two nurses at the National Referral Hospital (NRH) in the capital of Honiara have told of how there are no beds for Covid patients – leading to people dying on the floor of the wards – as well as a lack of facilities and staff shortages that have led to Covid-positive nurses being recalled to work and probationary nurses tending to critically ill patients solo, when they should be supervised by a more senior nurse.

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Mauritius asks Google to label Chagos Islands as part of its territory

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Row breaks out over Google Maps definition as UK insists it still maintains sovereignty

When you are searching online for some of the remotest islands on the planet, it helps to get the name right. But a row has broken out over the labelling of the Chagos Islands on Google maps.

The UK maintains that it still holds sovereignty over what it terms British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) – one of the smallest of red dots on the traditional cartographic globe.

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Journalists’ group ‘dismayed’ by treatment at Beijing Winter Olympics

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Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China says reporters tailed and manhandled by security despite assurances from Games officials

Reporting conditions for journalists covering the Beijing Winter Olympics fell short of international standards despite assurances from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCCC) of China has said.

The club said it was “dismayed” that at a time when global attention was trained on China more than ever the government and Olympic officials still failed to uphold their own rules on accredited foreign media. Instead “government interference occurred regularly during the Games”, both inside and outside venues, when journalists tried to interview athletes and local residents.

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Accidental killing of hiker fuels bitter debate over hunting in France

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Woman hit by stray bullet during wild boar hunt sparks row over stricter regulations before presidential election

The accidental killing of a hiker by a teenager who was hunting wild boar has rekindled a bitter debate over stricter regulations of France’s hunting tradition before the presidential election in April.

The 25-year-old woman was walking with a friend along a marked trail near Aurillac in the heavily forested Cantal region when she was hit by a stray bullet on Saturday. She died instantly.

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Switzerland at risk of EU blacklist after Credit Suisse leak

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Apparent due diligence failures by Swiss bank prompts centre-right calls for EU to review relationship with Switzerland

The fallout from a huge leak of Credit Suisse banking data threatened to damage Switzerland’s entire financial sector on Monday after the European parliament’s main political grouping raised the prospect of adding the country to a money-laundering blacklist.

The European People’s party (EPP), the largest political grouping of the European parliament, called for the EU to review its relationship with Switzerland and consider whether it should be added to its list of countries associated with a high risk of financial crime.

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‘The police don’t care’: gun violence engulfs Israel’s Arab community

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Number of Palestinians killed rises year on year as firearms stolen from Israeli military proliferate on streets

There has been a break in the rain, and the sun is shining on the orange groves of Bir al-Maksur, a quiet Bedouin village near Nazareth in Israel’s north.

Three-year-old Ammar would have loved splashing in the winter puddles outside the Hujarat family’s home, his aunt said. But two days before, the little boy was shot and killed in a playground by a stray bullet fired during a car chase, and the grieving family is trying to make sense of the way his life ended.

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Zimbabwe’s striking teachers told to return to work or lose their jobs

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Government sets deadline for 135,000 teachers to end pay strike, ignoring court order, after year of school closures due to Covid

The classrooms of Kambuzuma high school are deserted, with no staff to be seen and Tanaka Mupasiri*, 16, and his friends are milling around the school yard. It is 9am on a Thursday, normally a time when the school, in a high-density suburb or township on the outskirts of Harare, would be a hive of studious activity but Zimbabwe’s national teachers’ strike has thrown the education system into crisis.

Teachers in state schools have not been at work since 7 February and face a government deadline of Tuesday to return or lose their jobs.

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Final piece of 17th-century tapestry stolen 42 years ago found by Spanish police

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Flemish work taken by notorious art thief ‘Erik the Belgian’ tracked down by officer doing academic research on art thefts

Spanish police have recovered the final piece of a 17th-century tapestry that was stolen 42 years ago by a notorious art thief.

The 4-metre by 6.5-metre tapestry, known as La apoteosis de las artes (The Apotheosis of the Arts), was one of six Flemish tapestries taken from the church of Santo Domingo in the town of Castrojeriz in northern Spain, in the early hours of 7 November 1980.

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Germany hopes protein-based Covid vaccine will sway sceptics

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About 1.4m doses of Nuvaxovid to arrive in country this week, after EU approval in December

Germany will offer its population a new protein-based Covid-19 vaccine comparable to conventional flu jabs this week, in the hope of swaying a sizeable minority that remains sceptical of the novel mRNA technology used in the most commonly used vaccines.

About 1.4m doses of the Nuvaxovid vaccine developed by the US biotech company Novavax are to arrive in Germany this week, the country’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, confirmed last Friday. A further million doses are to arrive the week after, with the German government’s total order for the year 2022 amounting to 34m doses.

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Kabul to California: how the ‘hip-hop family’ mobilised for young Afghans

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With breakdancers, artists and parkourists facing a bleak future under the Taliban, a global network stepped in to help, drawing on the activist spirit of rap culture

A veteran of the hip-hop scene and internationally celebrated breakdancer, Nancy Yu – AKA Asia One – has her fair share of people contacting her looking for advice. But the message she received in 2019 from a young Afghan was a little different.

Frustrated by his breakdancing crew’s inability to get visas to perform internationally, Moshtagh* was wondering if Asia could help. “He felt they were really good, but they felt, like, invisible to the world,” she says. “I liked him. He wasn’t trying to bug me or say ‘we need this right now’ … He seemed rather humble and honest.”

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Myanmar junta takes place of Aung San Suu Kyi at Rohingya hearing

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Military, which seized power in February 2021, seeks to throw out UN case alleging it committed genocide

Myanmar’s military junta has appeared in place of the detained Aung San Suu Kyi at the UN’s top court, where it sought to throw out a case alleging that it committed genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority.

The decision to allow the junta to represent the country in court, after it seized power in a coup last year, was strongly criticised by advocacy groups and a former UN special rapporteur, who warned that it risked delaying justice.

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Kurdish transgender woman shot by brother had been hiding from family

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Friends of Doski Azad said the 23-year-old makeup artist had received repeated death threats from male family members

The Kurdish transgender woman Doski Azad shot dead by her brother last month, had been living in hiding from her family after repeated death threats, friends have said.

According to friends, Azad had had to move home regularly after several death threats by male members of her family.

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Disinformation for profit: scammers cash in on conspiracy theories

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Some accounts claiming to support the Canada trucker protests are run by con artists abroad

When Facebook removed dozens of groups dedicated to Canada’s anti-government “Freedom Convoy” protests earlier this month, it didn’t do so because of extremism or conspiracies rife within the protests. It was because the groups were being run by scam artists.

Networks of spammers and profiteers, some based as far afield as Vietnam or Romania, had set up the groups using fake or hacked Facebook accounts in an attempt to make money off of the political turmoil.

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New Zealand will lift Covid restrictions only when ‘well beyond’ peak, Jacinda Ardern says

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Prime minister says now is not the time to ‘remove our armour just as the battle begins’ despite pressure from protesters

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has said Covid-19 restrictions, including mandates and vaccine passes, will begin to lift once the country gets “well beyond” the Omicron outbreak’s peak.

At a post-cabinet press conference on Monday, Ardern said case numbers were likely to peak in mid-to-late March, or three to six weeks away. Case numbers were expected to double every three to four days.

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As New Zealand police face criticism over parliament protests, Canada could provide lessons | Dominic O’Sullivan

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Ottawa police have abandoned their policy of de-escalation against anti-Covid mandate demonstrators

Today’s action to cordon off the occupation of parliament’s grounds and prevent it growing might go some way to restoring public confidence in the police, which has appeared to be eroding since the protests began a fortnight ago.

So far, police have pursued a de-escalation strategy, but there have been calls for firmer action. The whole event has raised important questions about the relationship between the police and government, and about police independence and accountability.

The police are an instrument of the crown […] but in the two principal roles of detecting and preventing crime and keeping the Queen’s peace they act independently of the crown and serve only the law.

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Macron paves way for potential Putin-Biden summit on Ukraine crisis

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Flurry of phone calls by French president leads to ‘in principle agreement’, as US warns war is imminent

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has invited Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden to attend a summit aimed at de-escalating the Ukraine crisis, and the leaders have agreed in principle, Macron’s office has announced, amid further US warnings that war is imminent.

The Élysée Palace put out a statement on Sunday evening following last-minute diplomatic efforts by the French president to try to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine.

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We all have different expectations of behaviour as Omicron spreads in NZ – being considerate is key | Sarb Johal

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Life can be tough for everyone and we never know what another person may be experiencing – take a breath to consider before you speak

We like predictability. We function best when we know what is going to happen. The irony here is that after all this uncertainty, predictability in this phase of the pandemic in New Zealand is increasing. As the Omicron wave gathers strength, we can most likely expect a version of what happened in other countries: a steep increase in case numbers, exerting pressure on the health and social care system.

New Zealand’s successful management of the primary health impacts of the pandemic may have contributed to a sense of “kiwi exceptionalism”. This may be responsible for the jolt we may feel when we realise that what has happened elsewhere might actually happen in New Zealand, when, for most of this pandemic, our experience has been very different.

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Bernie Madoff’s sister and her husband found dead in apparent murder-suicide

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Palm Beach county sheriff says Sondra Wiener, 87, and 90-year-old husband Marvin Wiener found dead on Thursday

The sister of the Wall Street fraudster Bernie Madoff and her husband were found dead in Florida in what investigators said was an apparent murder-suicide.

The Palm Beach county sheriff’s office on Sunday identified the couple as 87-year-old Sondra Wiener of Boynton Beach and her 90-year-old husband, Marvin Wiener.

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Canadian police secure downtown Ottawa as truckers’ protest ends

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Three-week occupation over Covid precautions and Trudeau government ends with 76 vehicles towed and 191 arrests

Canadian police on Sunday secured the downtown core of Ottawa with fencing, as city workers cleaned up trash and snow plows cleared streets after two days of tense standoffs and 191 arrests ended a three-week occupation.

Demonstrators used hundreds of trucks and vehicles to block the city center since 28 January, prompting the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to invoke rarely used emergency powers.

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