Category Archives: World News

Tigray ceasefire: aid workers demand telecoms be restored

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Lack of phone and internet hampering humanitarian efforts in war-torn Ethiopian province, UN warns

Humanitarian organisations in Ethiopia are demanding that phone lines and internet are restored to the troubled northern province of Tigray, warning that the ceasefire declared by Addis Ababa this week will only help alleviate famine if aid workers can operate safely.

Since the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) withdrew from Mekelle, Tigray’s capital, on Monday, all telecommunications have been down, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha). Unicef said ENDF personnel had entered its office and dismantled crucial satellite equipment.

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Coronavirus live: South Africa reports daily case record; Brazil prosecutor agrees to investigate Bolsonaro

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President Bolsonaro linked to allegations of irregularities over $316m vaccine contract; Latest figures from South Africa show 24,270 new infections

Reuters has more on the story from earlier (see 20:24) that at least 26,000 doses of expired Covid jabs were used in Brazil.

Cities and regions have denied giving out the jabs, with one, the southern city of Maringá saying the out-of-date jabs only appeared on public databases due to delays in them being registered on the health ministry’s system.

In its latest global vaccination distribution, the US will donate 4 million doses of the Moderna Covid jab to Indonesia.

According to Reuters, the US national security adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed the news to the Indonesian foreign minister in a call earlier on Friday.

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‘It feels good’: Kashmir folk singer’s rise from dusty street to music star

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Noor Mohammad Shah has given traditional Sufi music a new lease of life after a chance encounter

Noor Mohammad Shah had always happily lived a life of obscurity. Born in a small village in the conflict-ridden state of Kashmir in India, Shah had been introduced to the mystical world of Sufi music as a child and for decades since had made a meagre but fulfilling living singing traditional songs and performing on his rabab, a lute-like music instrument, at weddings and village festivals.

Yet it was a chance encounter between Shah and a group of young men, who happened to pass by as the god-fearing musician was playing his instrument on a dusty street corner, that would propel him into becoming one of Kashmir’s most famous modern rabab musicians.

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New Zealand lawyers sue climate change body over alleged failure to meet targets

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Lawyers say commission’s emissions budgets are inconsistent with aim of limiting global warming to 1.5C

Hundreds of top New Zealand lawyers are suing the Climate Change Commission for what they say are substantial errors in its advice to the government over reducing carbon emissions.

Lawyers for Climate Action is a group of more than 300 solicitors, barristers and academics seeking to ensure Aotearoa New Zealand meets its international climate obligations.

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Israel hits Gaza with airstrikes after more incendiary balloon launches

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Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Israeli-blockaded Gaza, said the strikes hit training sites

Israel hit Islamist militant sites in Gaza with airstrikes on Friday in retaliation for incendiary balloon launches from the Palestinian enclave, in the latest unrest since a ceasefire ended May’s conflict.

Security sources with Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Israeli-blockaded Gaza, said the strikes hit training sites. There were no injuries reported.

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Indonesia triples oxygen supplies as Covid-19 outbreak worsens

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Hospitals in Jakarta unable to cope with demand as Delta variant accounts for more than 60% of cases

Indonesia is tripling its oxygen supplies to hospitals as data suggests the Delta variant of coronavirus is now driving the country’s worsening outbreak, accounting for more than 60% of recent cases.

Indonesia’s health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, told the Guardian that three-quarters of the national oxygen production used for industry would be redeployed to hospitals for the next two weeks.

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Hundreds of dead turtles wash ashore in Sri Lanka after cargo ship wreck

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Environmental experts say the case is the country’s worst man-made environmental disaster

Hundreds of turtles have washed ashore after a ship caught fire and sank off the west coast of Sri Lanka in June in the country’s worst-ever marine disaster, a court in the capital Colombo has heard.

A fire erupted on the Singapore-registered MV X-Press Pearl on 20 May, carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tonnes of nitric acid along with other chemicals and cosmetics. It sank on 2 June as a salvage crew tried to tow the vessel away from the coast.

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Great Barrier Reef: leading scientists praise Unesco’s ‘in danger’ warning

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Group of reef and climate scientists say world heritage warning merited and Australia has not ‘pulled its weight on emissions’

Five of the world’s leading reef and climate scientists have thanked Unesco for recommending the Great Barrier Reef be listed as world heritage “in danger”, saying it was the right decision in part because Australia had not “pulled its weight” in reducing emissions.

The group of scientists, including the Australian professors Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Terry Hughes, wrote to the UN body on Thursday saying the recommendation to downgrade the 2,300-km reef system’s world heritage status was “the right decision”.

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Tempers are frayed, we’ve become a nation divided over Fortress Australia and the Covid-19 response | Tim Soutphommasane

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For a while Australia seemed to be on top of Covid-19, but we have lost our way – and an ideology is to blame

Has Australia lost the plot? It’s the question many of us are asking. Our pandemic response, for so long admired as world-leading, is rapidly unravelling before our eyes. And as a nation, it feels like we are unravelling too.

Our tempers are frayed, our patience thin. We all want someone to blame. We’ve become a nation divided: by politics, by state, by age, even by vaccine.

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Canada heatwave: resident films escape from wildfire as flames engulf Lytton village – video

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Buildings, cars and trees are shown ablaze in footage taken by a resident fleeing a wildfire in the British Columbia village of Lytton. Flames tore through the settlement 95 miles north-east of Vancouver so fast that officials did not even have time to issue evacuation orders. Within hours, most of the village's buildings had been consumed by flames.

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to help people who have lost their homes

This video has no sound.

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Trump Organization tax-crime charges: what it all means

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The charges against the company and Allen Weisselberg seem small in scope – but experts say this could be just the beginning

After three years of investigations by New York’s top prosecutors against Donald Trump, many people in his circle and the sprawling Trump Organization business empire, it is perhaps no surprise to see charges finally laid in a New York courtroom.

Related: Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg pleads not guilty to tax crimes – live

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‘Lytton is gone’: wildfire tears through village after record-breaking heat

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Officials didn’t have time to issue evacuation orders while dry conditions make suppressing wildfires in Canada impossible

After three days of unrelenting heat, the people in the British Columbia village of Lytton were hoping for a modest respite.

Temperatures which had shattered longstanding national records – at one point reaching a blistering 49.6C (121.28F) – eased slightly on Wednesday, raising hopes that the worst was over.

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Cosby’s prison release is a ‘battle cry’ for victim rights movement, advocates say

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Procedural issue prompted release of a man more than 60 women have accused of rape or sexual assault

Sexual assault advocates and survivors said Bill Cosby’s release from prison should be a “battle cry” amid concerns the decision could have a chilling effect on survivors seeking to hold their abusers accountable.

Cosby was freed on Wednesday after the supreme court of Pennsylvania reversed his 2018 convictions on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned the conviction because a previous district attorney had promised in 2005 that Cosby would not be charged.

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Trump gonna Trump: ex-president diverts and deflects as legal woes mount

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The former president appeared to mount a typically Trumpian bid to focus attention away from the growing scandal at his company

No one could accuse Donald Trump of lying low when the long arm of the law finally caught up with him.

On Wednesday the former US president visited the Mexico border, highlighting his favourite campaign issue, then held an hour-long televised town hall with Sean Hannity, his favourite Fox News host.

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Coronavirus live: expanded crowd size for Euro 2020 matches at Wembley ‘recipe for disaster’, say MEPs

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Uefa and the British government urged to reconsider decision to allow 60,000 fans at Euro semis and final; WHO: 10-week decline in Covid cases in Europe has come to an end

German interior minister Horst Seehofer has described as “absolutely irresponsible” Uefa’s decision to hold the Euro 2020 semifinals and finals in the UK due to the prevalence of the Delta variant.

“I suspect that once again it’s all about commercial [interests],” Horst Seehofer told reporters in Berlin, according to the FT. “But commercial interests should not override the need to protect people from infections.”

Italy’s justice minister Marta Cartabia has ordered a report into conditions in the country’s prisons after the release of video footage showing guards brutally beating inmates at a jail near Naples who had demanded better coronavirus protections.

Related: Italian prisons under fire as video footage shows guards beating inmates

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Italian prisons under fire as video footage shows guards beating inmates

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Italy’s justice minister orders an investigation after images from the 2020 incident are published

Italy’s justice minister, Marta Cartabia, has ordered a report into conditions in the country’s prisons after the release of video footage showing guards brutally beating inmates at a jail near Naples who had demanded better coronavirus protections.

The shocking scenes of prisoners being kicked, slapped and beaten with truncheons at Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison in Caserta were caught by surveillance cameras on 6 April 2020, the day after a riot erupted in the prison as inmates demanded face masks and Covid-19 tests in reaction to an outbreak of the virus. The footage was published this week by the newspaper Domani.

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‘History’s on our side’: Turkish women fighting femicide

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As Turkey quits the Istanbul convention, Gülsüm Kav’s group We Will Stop Femicide is helping keep women alive amid a rise in gender-based violence

“History is on our side,” says Gülsüm Kav. She leans in and speaks intensely. She has a lot to say: Kav helped create Turkey’s We Will Stop Femicide (WWSF) group, and has become one of the country’s leading feminist activists even as the political environment has grown more hostile.

Amid protests, Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul convention, the landmark international treaty to prevent violence against women and promote equality, on Thursday. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has long attacked women’s rights and gender equality, suggesting that feminists “reject the concept of motherhood”, speaking out against abortion and even caesarean sections, and claiming that gender equality is “against nature”.

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European region Covid cases jump 10% as WHO calls for Euro 2020 monitoring

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All eyes on Israel, as countries look to see if 85% vaccination rate there will prevent deaths during surge

New Covid cases in the World Health Organization’s 53-country European region rose 10% last week after falling for 10 straight weeks, the body has said, warning of a possible new surge before autumn and calling for more monitoring of Euro 2020 matches.

Infection numbers continue to fall in many parts of the region, including the EU, but Katy Smallwood, WHO Europe’s senior emergencies manager, said some – such as Russia – were recording their highest daily death tolls of the pandemic.

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How residential schools in Canada robbed Indigenous children of their identity and lives – video

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In Canada, more than 1,000 unmarked graves have been discovered on the grounds of three former church-run residential schools, where an estimated 150,000 First Nations children were sent as part of a campaign of forced assimilation for more than a century until 1996. 

On Wednesday, the remains of 182 people were found at a former school in British Columbia – weeks after 215 unmarked graves were found at an institution in the province and 751 in Saskatchewan.

A historic truth and reconciliation commission was conducted in the 2000s. In 2015 it concluded that the residential school system amounted to cultural genocide and that unmarked graves would be found in the former school grounds, but the recent findings still shocked many Canadians and prompted calls for a new investigation. Leyland Cecco explains how the discovery is just the tip of the iceberg in uncovering Canada's traumatic colonial past

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‘Poverty divides us’: gap between rich and poor poses threat to China

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Xi Jinping himself has warned China’s wealth gap is not only economic but political and could threaten party’s legitimacy

When Wang Zhenyu moved out of his small village in central Henan province to the coastal city of Dalian at 18, he was astonished. “It was like a culture shock for me, even though it was just a big city in my country, not a foreign land.” A few years later when he was enrolled in Peking University as a graduate student, he found much fewer students in the country’s top university coming from a similar background to his.

Growing up in a small village of 2,000 farmers, many of Wang’s childhood friends dropped out of school after finishing their nine years of compulsory education. Now with a decent academic job, Wang begins to experience “reverse culture shock” every time he goes back to his village for the annual lunar new year.

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