Category Archives: World News

Fruits of shared labour: the Indian women joining forces for food security

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Rural women in Tamil Nadu are mostly excluded from land ownership, but collective farms can offer self-sufficiency

When all the shops closed due to the coronavirus lockdown, small collectives were key to remaining self-sufficient for marginalised farmers in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“We had sufficient grains and vegetables at home, while others in the village were seeking government support,” says 46-year-old Poongani, one of the widowed Dalit women among the nine members of the Sivanthi Poo farming collective in the village of Thottampatti.

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Trench warfare, drones and cowering civilians: on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh

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The battle over Nagorno-Karabakh, waged on and off for a century, has flared anew and civilians once again suffer the consequences

Over the road from the 8-metre-deep crater left by a medium-range missile, Sergei Hovhnnesyan and three of his neighbours are hunkering down in the basement storage space of their local grocery shop in Stepanakert, a mountain town in the heart of the Nagorno-Karabakh territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

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Covid-19 prompts ‘enormous rise’ in demand for cheap child labour in India

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Charities warn that seven months of the pandemic has set the country back decades on child exploitation

Over 70 children were crammed into a bus, heading from Bihar to a sweatshop in the Indian city of Rajasthan, when the authorities pulled it over. Among the faces half hidden behind colourful masks was 12-year-old Deepak Kumar.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Kumar had been enrolled in grade four at the school in his small district of Gaya in the impoverished Indian state of Bihar. But when Covid-19 hit and the country went into lockdown, the school gates shut across India and have not opened since. With his parents, both daily wage labourers, unable to make money and put food on the table, last month Kumar was sent out to find work.

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Stop CO2 emissions bouncing back after Covid plunge, says IEA

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Governments are not doing enough to prevent rapid rebound, says agency’s report

The coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause a record 7% decline in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, but governments are not doing enough to prevent a rapid rebound, according to an influential report.

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy use are expected to fall to 33.4 gigatonnes in 2020, the lowest level since 2011 and the biggest year on year fall since 1900 when records began, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual world energy outlook.

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Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim to meet king in decades-long push to become PM

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Opposition leader, who has been on the brink of power several times, claims to have enough support to lead, but doubts persist

Malaysia’s opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, will at last be granted an audience with the king on Tuesday, a meeting his supporters hope could lead to the culmination of his decades-long quest to lead the country.

Anwar stated last month that he had majority support from lawmakers required to form a new government, but an earlier meeting was postponed because the king was in poor health.

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Peru opens Machu Picchu ruins for one tourist

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Japanese tourist waited almost seven months to enter Inca citadel while trapped in country during coronavirus pandemic

Peru has opened the ruins of Machu Picchu for a single Japanese tourist after he waited almost seven months to enter the Inca citadel, while trapped in the Andean country during the coronavirus outbreak.

Jesse Takayama’s entry into the ruins came thanks to a special request he submitted while stranded since mid-March in the town of Aguas Calientes, on the slopes of the mountains near the site, said the minister of culture, Alejandro Neyra, on Monday.

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Amy Coney Barrett: US supreme court nominee delivers opening statement – video

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US supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in during Monday's opening confirmation hearing before the Senate judiciary committee and told senators she was humbled to be considered to fill the seat left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

President Donald Trump formally nominated Barrett on 26 September.

Trump's nomination of Barrett to a vacancy created by the death last month of Ginsburg just weeks before the election enraged Democrats, still furious about Republicans' refusal to consider a nominee from Barack Obama some 10 months before the 2016 election.

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Norway grants asylum to man claiming persecution by Polish government

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Rafał Gaweł’s prison sentence for fraud was retaliation by rightwing regime, Norway says

Norway has granted asylum to a Polish man who was facing prison for fraud and forging of documents, saying the sentence was a form of political persecution under Poland’s rightwing government.

Observers say that Rafał Gaweł’s case is the first time political asylum has been granted to a Pole in more than 30 years since the fall of communism in Poland. They see it as another sign that international trust in Poland’s justice system has been undermined by the government, which is putting it under political control.

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Covid in Europe: second wave gathers pace across continent

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France may impose new lockdowns as Italy plans ban on private parties

France has said it may be forced to impose new lockdowns, Italy is expected to ban private parties and the Czech Republic announced that it would close bars and shift most schools to distance learningas Europe’s Covid-19 second wave continues to gather pace.

The moves came as the World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that allowing coronavirus to spread in the hope of achieving so-called herd immunity would be “scientifically and ethically problematic”.

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Bangladesh approves death penalty for rape after protests

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Move comes after nationwide demonstrations sparked by series of sexual assaults

Bangladesh will introduce the death penalty for rape cases, after several high-profile sexual assaults prompted a wave of protests across the country in recent weeks.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, cabinet secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam confirmed that the cabinet had approved a bill ruling that anyone convicted of rape would be punished with death or “rigorous imprisonment” for life.

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‘Scent of democracy’: nice hand sanitiser ticks box for New Zealand’s early voters

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As far as polling booth drama goes, Aotearoa’s election has so far yielded none – but early voters are quite keen on the fragrant hand sanitiser

They arrive carrying their own pens. They stop for a dollop of pleasantly lemon-scented hand sanitiser as they enter and exit polling places. And they are turning up to vote ahead of election day in record numbers.

As far as polling booth drama goes, New Zealand’s election has so far yielded none: just the calm, orderly process of 1.15 million people casting early votes – nearly double the number who had voted by this time in advance of the 2017 election.

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Cabin fever: tickets for meal onboard Singapore parked plane sell out

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Diners paid up to £360 to eat onboard in latest sign of public appetite for aircraft experience

Diners have rushed to pay up to £360 per head to eat a meal on a stationary plane, in the latest sign of public appetite to recreate the onboard experience without travelling.

Singapore Airlines launched a waiting list after tickets rapidly sold out for two weekends of sittings onboard two stationary A380 superjumbos, with meals at seats and the chance to watch a movie, albeit no longer in-flight.

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Beatified millennial: Pope sets late tech whiz on path to sainthood

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Carlo Acutis helped spread Catholic teaching online before his death aged 15 in 2006

Pope Francis said the beatification of an Italian computer whiz-kid was a sign to young people that “true happiness comes from putting God first”.

Carlo Acutis, who is on a path to sainthood after being beatified in the Umbrian town of Assisi, helped spread Roman Catholic teaching online before his death from leukaemia aged 15 in 2006. He is the youngest contemporary person to be beatified.

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What Amy Coney Barrett’s likely confirmation means for America

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Barrett’s expected elevation will give conservatives a bulletproof court majority, and many progressive causes are under threat

Senate Republicans have begun hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett as a supreme court justice. If confirmed as expected, Barrett would become the third justice on the court to be appointed by Donald Trump.

Here’s what it means:

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Failures at Austrian ski resort ‘helped speed up spread’ of Covid-19 in Europe

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Commission report into Ischgl outbreak identifies ‘momentous miscalculations’ made by authorities

An independent commission has found that Austrian national and local authorities made “momentous miscalculations” by first hesitating and then rushing to evacuate an Alpine ski resort that has been described as the “ground zero” of the coronavirus first wave in Europe.

Ischgl, a town of 1,600 inhabitants in the Tirolean Paznaun valley and one of Europe’s premium skiing destinations, has been in the spotlight since the middle of March, after thousands of tourists, including at least 180 Britons, caught the virus there during the spring holidays and carried it back to their home countries.

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Firefighters battle to contain blaze on Kilimanjaro

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Fears for climbers who may have been in area of fire on slopes of Africa’s tallest mountain near Tanzanian border with Kenya

A huge fire has broken on Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak and a key attraction for tourists in Kenya and Tanzania.

According to Tanzanian national park authorities, the fire broke out on Sunday afternoon and is yet to be contained.

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JCB challenged over machinery used to demolish Palestinian homes

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Foreign Office quango says some of NGO’s claims against machinery firm ‘merit further examination’

The British heavy machinery firm JCB’s sale of equipment used in the destruction of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is being examined by a UK government body to determine whether its due diligence process complies with human rights guidelines set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The case is likely to test the degree to which multinationals are responsible if their export goods are sold by local distributors in ways that infringe human rights.

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Nigerian president speaks on dissolution of notorious police unit – video

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Muhammadu Buhari has given a speech after the Nigerian government dissolved a controversial police unit alleged to have carried out extrajudicial killings. The announcement came after days of protests against police brutality. Outrage had been fuelled over the last week by the emergence online of graphic footage and shared experiences of abuses by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, commonly called Sars

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Black man led on rope by Texas police on horseback sues for $1m

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  • Donald Neely says officers’ conduct ‘extreme and outrageous’
  • Lawsuit accuses Galveston and city’s police force of negligence

A Black man who was led by a rope by two white officers on horseback has sued a south-east Texas city and its police department for $1m, saying he suffered humiliation and fear during his arrest.

Related: Texas police apologise after officers on horseback led black man by rope

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China, Russia and Saudi Arabia set to join UN human rights council

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Rights campaigners voice concerns as Cuba and Pakistan also expected to be elected

China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elected to the board of the UN human rights council on Tuesday, leaving human rights campaigners in the countries aghast and pleading with EU states to commit to withholding their support.

The Geneva-based monitoring NGO UN Watch described the situation as the equivalent of allowing five convicted arsonists to join the fire brigade.

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