Two clans brutally evicted to make way for tea plantations owned by white settlers are seeking reparations for rights violations
The British government has been criticised by the UN for a lack of resolution over colonial-era crimes committed in Kenya.
Six UN special rapporteurs have written to the government expressing concern over its failure to provide “effective remedies and reparations” to the Kipsigis and Talai peoples.
Continue reading...After Havana shut down online access for 72 hours, the battle is on to keep the country connected
Cubans used to joke about Napoleon Bonaparte chatting to Mikhail Gorbachev, George W Bush and Fidel Castro in the afterlife. “If I’d have had your prudence, I’d never have fought Waterloo,” the French emperor tells the last Soviet leader. “If I’d have had your military might, I’d have won Waterloo,” he tells the Texan. Turning last to Castro, the emperor says: “If I’d have had Granma [the Cuban Communist party daily], I’d have lost Waterloo but nobody would have known.”
The joke no longer does the rounds. With millions of Cubans now online, the state’s monopoly on mass communication has been deeply eroded. But after social media helped catalyse historic protests on the island last month, the government temporarily shut the internet down.
Continue reading...As two women are rescued in Syria after being kidnapped by Isis years earlier, Yazidis renew calls for international help to find the thousands still unaccounted for
For seven years, their families waited and hoped for news. In July, they finally received it. Two young women, kidnapped by Islamic State as teenagers, had been found alive in Syria.
Salma*, now 25, was located in Deir el-Zour province, in the east of the country. She had “suffered all kinds of injustice”, said the Yazidi House in the Al-Jazira region, an organisation that assisted with the rescue of both women.
Continue reading...It is more than three months since Mauro Morandi left Budelli after living alone there for 32 years
Every morning, Mauro Morandi woke up to the uninterrupted sea view that only he was privy to. Immersed in nature, he was intimately in tune with the dawn sounds and habits of the wildlife that surrounded his home, a former second world war shelter on Budelli, the Mediterranean island where he had lived alone for more than 30 years.
Now the 82-year-old is adjusting to life in a one-bedroom apartment next to a shop with a Sky TV sign outside, surrounded by neighbours and with only a glimpse of the ocean in between the gaps separating the buildings opposite on nearby La Maddalena, the largest of an archipelago of seven islands off the north coast of Sardinia, Italy.
Continue reading...The World Bank and IMF should step in to finance a recovery of children’s learning chances devastated by the pandemic
“Education,” wrote Nelson Mandela, “is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” One wonders what he would have made of the response to the education crisis triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. A crisis threatening to derail social and economic progress, trapping millions of children in poverty. The UN secretary general has warned of a “generational catastrophe”, yet the international response has been marked by staggering complacency.
That lack of concern was on public display at last week’s Global Education Summit in London. Fresh from cutting UK aid to education by 40%, Boris Johnson – a self-styled champion for universal girls’ education – opened proceedings by declaring that education was “the single best investment we can make in the future of humanity”.
Continue reading...Yakei took top spot after roughing up Sanchu, the alpha male who had been leader of ‘troop B’ on the island of Kyushu for five years
In a rarely seen phenomenon in the simian world, a nine-year-old female known as Yakei has become the boss of a 677-strong troop of Japanese macaque monkeys at a nature reserve on the island of Kyushu in Japan.
Yakei’s path to the top began in April when she beat up her own mother to become the alpha female of the troop at the Takasakiyama natural zoological garden in Oita city. While that would have been the pinnacle for most female monkeys, Yakei decided to throw her 10kg weight around among the males.
Continue reading...Kidnapped by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels as a girl, Victoria Nyanjura has pushed through major reforms for victims of abduction and rape
When Victoria Nyanjura was abducted from her Catholic boarding school in northern Uganda by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, she prayed to God asking to die.
She was 14 when she was taken, along with 29 others, in the middle of the night. During the next eight years in captivity she was subjected to beatings, starvation, rape and other horrors that she cannot talk about even 18 years later. Five of the girls who were taken prisoner with her died, and Nyanjura gave birth to two children.
Continue reading...Outbreak forces millions into lockdown in the sunshine state as New South Wales races to administer 6m doses amid Covid surge
Hundreds of critical health workers in the Australian state of Queensland have gone into isolation as the country battles a growing Delta outbreak, while New South Wales raced to administer 6m vaccine doses before the scheduled end of lockdown in less than four week’s time.
Queensland’s chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, said health workers in quarantine included all the cardiac surgeons at the Queensland Children’s hospital, leading to delays in surgery and outpatient work.
Continue reading...CDC director issues new warning as cases rise: ‘Covid-19 is clearly not done with us’
At least 70% of adults in the US have now received at least one Covid-19 vaccination shot, the White House announced on Monday, reaching a target Joe Biden originally said he had hoped to achieve by 4 July.
The administration reported the news in a tweet hailing “Milestone Monday” by Cyrus Shahpar, the government’s Covid-19 data director, who said the seven-day average of people receiving their first dose – 320,000 – was the highest since the Independence Day holiday.
Continue reading...Biden administration lacks authority to extend moratorium because supreme court said in June Congress would have to act
The White House said Monday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was “unable to find legal authority for a new, targeted eviction moratorium” and asked instead that states and local governments put in policies to keep renters in their homes.
Related: US states brace for ‘avalanche’ of evictions as federal moratorium ends
Continue reading...Hong Kong research suggests less time outdoors and more doing ‘near work’ accelerates short-sightedness
Spending more time indoors and on screens because of Covid restrictions may be linked to an increased rate of short-sightedness in children, researchers say.
The study, which looked at two groups of children aged six to eight in Hong Kong, is the latest to suggest that lockdowns and other restrictions may have taken a toll on eyesight: data from more than 120,000 children of a similar age in China, published earlier this year, suggested a threefold increase in the prevalence of shortsightedness, or myopia, in 2020.
Continue reading...Study says pigments on cave stalagmites were applied through ‘splattering and blowing’ more than 60,000 years ago
Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.
The issue had roiled the world of paleoarchaeology ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct “cousin” species.
Continue reading...Gunther Hashida, 44, was found dead at home on 29 July, the Metropolitan police department said
A third police officer who defended the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump has taken his own life, Washington DC’s Metropolitan police department confirmed on Monday.
Officer Gunther Hashida, who was assigned to the emergency response team within the special operations department, was found dead at home on 29 July, the department said.
Continue reading...Ashraf Ghani comments come as government forces battle to prevent Lashkar Gah falling to the Taliban
Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, has blamed the speedy withdrawal of US-led troops for the worsening violence in his country, as government forces battled to prevent provincial cities from falling to the Taliban in a major escalation in fighting.
Taliban fighters assaulted at least three provincial capitals overnight – Lashkar Gah, Kandahar and Herat – after a weekend of heavy fighting that resulted in thousands of civilians fleeing the advancing militants.
Continue reading...Tokyo Games wins in 100m and high jump in space of 11 minutes prompt outpouring of national pride
Stunned and ecstatic after claiming two gold medals in the space of 11 minutes, as Lamont Marcell Jacobs won the 100m final and Gianmarco Tamberi shared first place in the high jump, Italians have been celebrating a golden Sunday at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
“It is Italian sport’s most beautiful day,” said Giovanni Malagò, the president of the Italian Olympics Committee. “They have made history. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will talk about it. This is better than the Eurocup,” he added, referring to Italy’s Euro 2020 football victory last month.
Continue reading...‘He died as he lived, resisting’, says mother of young artist killed in Cali, as report claims authorities used systematic ‘pattern of violence’ in city
Nicolás Guerrero, a 26-year-old artist from the Colombian city of Cali, took to the streets on 2 May to protest against the lack of opportunities he saw in his country. He had a family in Spain that he had hoped one day to bring to South America. But later that night, after riot police launched a brutal crackdown, he was found lying on the pavement, seriously wounded. He died hours later in hospital.
Continue reading...Judge proposes compromise to settle dispute over home ownership with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah
Palestinian residents of the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah facing forcible eviction from their homes have been offered a compromise deal with Jewish settlers by Israel’s supreme court, in an unexpected development in the high-profile case.
The session on Monday, which was supposed to reach a final decision on whether to accept an appeal from four Palestinian families over eviction orders in the decades-old legal battle, was instead met with a surprise entreaty from the judges for the two sides to accept a “practical solution”.
Continue reading...Wildfires break out across much of southern Europe, with temperature reaching 45C in Greece
Turkey has launched an international appeal for help in taming fires raging across the country that have killed eight people in recent days, as what has been described as one of the worst heatwaves in decades intensifies in south-east Europe.
Following criticism of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after it emerged that Turkey has no firefighting planes, authorities in Istanbul were promised water-dropping planes from the European Union. The country is battling deadly wildfires along its coastline for a sixth day.
Continue reading...Krystsina Tsimanouskaya has not directly criticised her government but her parents warned her not to return
Just two years ago, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya was greeted by smiling Belarusian athletics and academic officials as she brandished a gold medal from the 2019 Summer Universiade, the young star’s greatest victory for her native Belarus yet.
Now that same bureaucracy is threatening to tear her life apart, as her coach and a delegation official warned a crying Tsimanouskaya on leaked audio that she was “caught in a spider’s web” and suggested that cases of “excessive pride” often lead to suicide.
Continue reading...Man deemed fit to stand trial in Germany and is accused of complicity in murder of more than 3,500 people
A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard will stand trial in Germany in October accused of complicity in 3,518 murders, public prosecutors have announced.
The prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin, which first brought the charges in February, received a medical assessment that confirmed the man was “fit to stand trial” despite his advanced age.
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