Case of Noor Jehan in Karachi draws criticism of conditions and renewed accusations of neglect at country’s facilities
Pakistan’s zoos have faced criticism and calls for their closure after the death of a 17-year-old elephant in Karachi.
Noor Jehan, an African elephant, which have an average lifespan of 60 to 70 years, was already in poor health when she fell into a pond last month and was unable to get up. She later died.
Continue reading...Yevgeny Prigozhin drops plans to withdraw from devastated city after receiving promises of extra arms
The head of Russia’s Wagner group appears to have ditched plans to withdraw his forces from Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after receiving promises overnight that they would get all the arms needed to capture the devastated city.
Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on Friday that his fighters, who have spearheaded the months-long assault on Bakhmut, would pull out because he said his men had been starved of ammunition and taken “useless and unjustified” losses as a result.
Continue reading...Back on the campaign trail just days after giving birth, Paetongtarn Shinawatra is confident of a landslide victory
Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s face beamed from the side of a campaign truck as she addressed crowds of her supporters. “I am happy I have the chance to talk to you, Chiang Mai people,” she said last month. “It’s too bad I could not be there in person.”
Then eight-and-a-half months pregnant, Paetongtarn, 36, who is running to become Thailand’s next prime minister, has been unable to travel during the final leg of election campaigning. Instead, in a red jacket, the trademark colour of her Pheu Thai party, she video-called her supporters in Chiang Mai, in the north, from a hospital in Bangkok.
Continue reading...Petr Pavel sounds cautious note, saying Kyiv no longer has element of surprise that led to military successes last year
The Czech president, Petr Pavel, a decorated retired general who was previously Nato’s principal military adviser, has privately warned Ukraine’s leadership against the disaster of a rushed counteroffensive.
In recent meetings in Kyiv with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, Pavel cautioned that they no longer had the element of surprise that aided successful assaults on the eastern city of Kharkiv and southern region of Kherson last year.
EU member states agreed this weekend to source ammunition for Ukraine from outside the bloc, including the UK and the US, despite initial objections from France, a decision he said would increase the scope for helping Ukraine in the next weeks and months.
Europe did not have the capacity to produce the armaments it needs but it could buy it in and Zelenskiy had said he would provide qualified technicians for new ammunition factories if the EU defence industry fell short. “He said: ‘Yeah, we can do that.’”
The EU should source ammunition for Ukraine from all over the world, including countries that might not want to admit to being involved in the conflict with Russia, or with whom European capitals might feel some diplomatic embarrassment in dealing with – “there are ways how we can do it”.
Claims from the Kremlin that Ukraine had sought to assassinate Vladimir Putin through a drone strike in Moscow were “nonsense” given the defensive shield around the Russian capital, and could instead be a “pretext, for a bigger air attack on Ukraine”.
China has made a “first step” that could help the west put diplomatic pressure on Putin by backing a UN resolution describing Russia as the “aggressor”, though Pavel said he remained doubtful that Beijing could be a trusted mediator. “Does China have a real interest to push hard on Russia and to make for Russia to make concessions? I don’t think so.”
The west must be prepared for an outcome in the war short of all-out victory. “I think we should do anything at what is at our disposal to encourage Ukrainians and to support them to be successful. But internally, we should also be ready for other contingencies.”
Continue reading...Shoppers flee in panic after gunman steps out of silver sedan and opens fire at Premium Outlets mall
Witnesses have described a scene of terror and chaos after a gunman killed eight people and wounded seven others at a shopping mall outside Dallas, Texas on Saturday.
Hundreds of terrified shoppers fled in panic after a man stepped out of a silver sedan and opened fire at the Premium Outlets mall, a sprawling outdoor shopping centre in Allen, a community of about 100,000 people.
Continue reading...President of Wrestling Federation of India accused of sexually harassing seven young female wrestlers
They were the first women to bring Olympic glory in the wrestling ring to India. But last week several of India’s top female wrestlers threatened to hand back their medals, accusing the authorities of ignoring their allegations of sexual harassment against the sport’s top official.
For the past 15 days, top wrestlers including Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik have staged a protest in the centre of Delhi, sacrificing their rigorous training schedules, sleeping in the rain and facing beatings by police.
Continue reading...Many of the 40 people forced to flee after a local stabbing are still traumatised by Andalucían town’s ‘blackest day’
Almost 10 months on, Ricardo García Carmona still shudders at the way he spoke to his mother when she appeared on his doorstep with an urgent warning a little after 9am on Sunday 17 July last year. “She said: ‘Let’s go! We need to get out!’”
A few hours earlier, his mother told him, a young doorman called Álvaro Soto had been stabbed to death after an argument at the pub where he worked in the small Andalucían town of Peal de Becerro. The alleged killers, like García Carmona’s family, were members of Peal’s Gypsy community, and his mother could not shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.
Continue reading...More than 3,500 refugees are said to have been forcibly deported over the border in recent weeks
When fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group in Khartoum in mid-April, Eritrean brothers Abdel and Dahlak* said goodbye to each other in the Sudanese capital.
Dahlak, the younger of the two, had some savings, so could afford to flee the city on a bus with other Eritreans. He headed east towards refugee camps in the vicinity of Kassala, a town near the Eritrean border that is home to a large Eritrean community.
Continue reading...Jaws star went on to defend Laurence Olivier’s performance in blackface in the 1965 adaptation of Othello
Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss has harshly criticized the Oscars’ new diversity and inclusion standards, saying “they make me vomit.”
In an interview with PBS’s Firing Line, the co-star of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jaws told host Margaret Hoover that he disagreed with the new set of rules that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has imposed for films to qualify for best picture nominations.
Continue reading...One person killed in incident in Nizhny Novgorod region, according to Russia’s interior ministry
A prominent Russian nationalist writer has been wounded in a car bombing that killed his driver, an attack that Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the west.
Zakhar Prilepin’s Audi Q7 was blown up in a village in the Nizny Novgorod region, about 250 miles (400km) east of Moscow, said the state investigative committee, which is treating the incident as an act of terrorism. It said Prilepin had been taken to hospital.
Continue reading...The former Italian prime minister was speaking for the first time since he was hospitalised a month ago
The former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has given his first address to the public since being hospitalised a month ago, delivering a video message to party members from his hospital room.
“Here I am, here for you, wearing a shirt and jacket for the first time in a month,” the 86-year-old billionaire media mogul said, in a pre-recorded address to a convention of his right-wing Forza Italia party.
Continue reading...Shootings in a school in Belgrade and a day later in a rural area left 17 people dead and 21 injured
Funerals are being held in Serbia for some of the victims of two mass shootings that happened in just two days this week, leaving 17 people dead and 21 injured, many of them children.
The shootings on Wednesday in a school in Belgrade and on Thursday in a rural area south of the capital city have left the nation stunned with grief and disbelief.
Continue reading...Habib Farajollah Chaab allegedly behind attack that killed dozens of people in southern province of Khuzistan in 2018
Iran has executed a man who was allegedly behind an attack that killed dozens of people at a military parade in the southern province of Khuzistan in 2018, state media have reported.
Habib Farajollah Chaab had been sentenced to death for being “corrupt on Earth”, a capital offence under Iran’s strict Islamic laws.
Continue reading...Zakhar Prilepin wounded in explosion in the region of Nizhny Novgorod, Russian state news agency says. This blog is now closed
A prominent Russian nationalist writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was wounded in a car bombing in the region of Nizhny Novgorod on Saturday, the Russian state news agency Tass said, in an attack that Russia immediately blamed on Ukraine and the West.
Tass quoted a source in the emergency services as saying the writer’s car was blown up. “He survived, but was wounded and is conscious,” the source was quoted as saying.
The fact has come true: Washington and Nato fed another international terrorist cell – the Kyiv regime.
Continue reading...Scheme on certain streets including near beach makes it as costly to park for 10 minutes as for whole day
Whether for 10 minutes or a whole day, it now costs a flat fee of €50 (£43) to park in certain streets in The Hague, including roads around the popular Scheveningen beach.
The pilot scheme in the Dutch city on the North Sea coast, which will last a year, aims to discourage tourists and visitors from blocking up the historic centre and seaside roads, particularly on sunny days.
Continue reading...Fugitive Mehul Choksi claims UK-based group was part of alleged conspiracy to abduct him in 2021
A fugitive Indian-born businessman has won the first round of a court battle to prove that a UK-based group including a younger woman was part of an Indian intelligence service plot to lure him to a Caribbean villa to be kidnapped and extradited to his home country.
The high court of Antigua and Barbuda has found that Mehul Choksi has an “arguable” case in relation to his civil claim against the country’s attorney general and chief of police over the response to his alleged abduction and illegal rendition to Dominica in May 2021.
Continue reading...US and Riyadh confirm talks amid reports of more airstrikes and gun battles in Khartoum despite threat of sanctions
Sudan’s rival factions have arrived in Saudi Arabia for direct talks, after three weeks of clashes in the capital, Khartoum, and the south-western region of Darfur that have killed at least hundreds and wounded many more.
Representatives of the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were in Jeddah on Saturday for “pre-negotiation talks” aimed at establishing a durable ceasefire that would allow aid to reach millions of desperate civilians trapped by the fighting.
Continue reading...Wagner chief says his forces will pull out of Bakhmut while Ukraine says they are reinforcing positions; Zaporizhzhia villages near frontline evacuated
The leader of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force has said that his forces will leave Bakhmut, which they have been trying to capture since last summer. Yevgeny Prigozhin said they would pull back on Wednesday 10 May – ending their involvement in the war’s longest battle – because of heavy losses and inadequate ammunition supplies and asked defence chiefs to put regular army troops in their place. But Ukraine said Wagner fighters were reinforcing positions to try to seize the eastern city before that date.
Prigozhin earlier released a video showing him standing in a field of Russian corpses and blaming defence chiefs for the losses suffered by his fighters in Ukraine, appearing to reignite his simmering feud with Russian top brass.
Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has carried out an inspection of troop readiness for forces engaged in the war, in an apparent coded response to Prigozhin’s criticism.
Ukraine said two people have been killed and nine wounded in the eastern Donetsk region and electricity distribution networks have been damaged by shelling in the Donetsk and the Kherson regions.
Some residents left Kherson city in cars and buses on Friday, and others stocked up on groceries, ahead of a 56-hour curfew due to begin on Friday evening. The announcement of the curfew prompted speculation in Kherson that the city is about to be used as a launch point for the long-anticipated Ukrainian counterattack.
Authorities in the Russian-occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia have begun evacuating villages near the frontline. The Russian-installed governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, announced the move in anticipation of a Ukrainian offensive aimed at retaking the area, claiming Kyiv’s forces had “stepped up shelling of settlements close to the frontline” in the past few days.
Engineers have reduced the risk of a dam bursting and damaging the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, a senior Russian official was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying on Friday. Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the general director of energy engineering firm Rosenergoatom, said specialists had begun discharging water from the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.
A Moscow court has ordered the arrest of a theatre director and a playwright on charges of “justifying terrorism” over an award-winning play about Russian women recruited online to marry radical Islamists in Syria. Director Yevgeniya Berkovich and author Svetlana Petriychuk were placed in custody until 4 July, Russian news agencies reported.
Ukraine’s air force said it downed one of its own drones after it lost control over Kyiv. Andriy Yermak, Ukraine presidential chief of staff, initially said an enemy drone that had been shot down, but the air force later clarified it was Ukrainian and had been destroyed on Thursday.
The White House has dismissed as “ludicrous” claims by Russia that Washington orchestrated drone strikes on Moscow, saying the US was not involved in Wednesday’s incident and accusing Russia of lying.
Finnish power utility Fortum has notified the Kremlin it strongly objects to what it said was Russia’s “unlawful” seizure of its subsidiary in the country. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the seizure was in accordance with Russian legislation.
Bill Clinton has said he knew in 2011 it was just “a matter of time” before the Russian president attacked Ukraine. “Vladimir Putin told me in 2011 – three years before he took Crimea – that he did not agree with the agreement I made with Boris Yeltsin,” the former US president recalled. “He said … ‘I don’t agree with it. And I do not support it. And I am not bound by it.’ And I knew from that day forward it was just a matter of time.”
Continue reading...Revelation raises questions about whether US and Europe should have been more prepared for 2014 invasion
Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton three years before his 2014 attack on Ukraine that he was not bound by the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing the country’s territorial integrity, according to the former US president.
The revelation raises questions about whether the US and its European allies should have been more prepared for the 2014 attack, when Russia annexed Crimea and attacked the Donbas.
Continue reading...At least 176 die after heavy rainfall in South Kivu province causes rivers to overflow
At least 176 people have died in flash floods in an eastern territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a regional governor said on Friday, as heavy rain destroyed buildings and forced aid workers to gather mud-clad corpses into piles.
The rainfall in Kalehe territory in South Kivu province caused rivers to overflow on Thursday, inundating the villages of Bushushu and Nyamukubi.
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