At least seven people have died and nine were seriously injured when a wall of rock collapsed on top of motor boats below a waterfall in southeastern Brazil on Saturday, the fire department said. A tower of rocks suddenly broke away from the canyon wall and came crashing down...
WORLD
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has urged U.S. President Joe Biden to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba which has been operational for 20 years this month. The camp stands for arbitrariness, injustice and torture, Amnesty’s U.S. expert, Sumit Bhattacharyya, told dpa in Washington. Bhattacharyya urged Biden...
Ethiopian government says it will begin dialogue with political opposition figures after announcing a list of prominent opposition leaders to be released from prison. “The key to lasting peace is dialogue,” said the statement issued by the government communications office. “One of the moral obligations of a victor is...
At least 14 people were killed and 17 injured Saturday when a coach and a minibus smashed into each other at high speed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, security officials said. The minibus and the coach, which had come from the capital Cairo and was heading for the Red Sea...
Three white men convicted of murdering African American jogger Ahmaud Arbery after chasing him in their pickup trucks were sentenced to life in prison Friday in a case that highlighted US tensions over racial justice. Travis McMichael, 35, and his father Gregory McMichael, 66, were sentenced to life without...
Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader says he has ordered security forces to “fire without warning”, amid a violent crackdown on anti-government protests. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev also said “20,000 bandits” had attacked the main city of Almaty, the epicentre of protests sparked by a fuel price hike. He has blamed foreign-trained “terrorists”,...
The key to the prison cell on Robben Island once occupied by Nelson Mandela is going to be returned to South Africa rather than be auctioned in the US, a minister says. The auction had been due to take place in New York on 28 January until South Africa’s...
Three suspected pirates detained for six weeks on board a Danish naval frigate off West Africa have been released at sea, after Denmark’s justice minister waived charges of attempted manslaughter against them. The men were detained in November, after an exchange of fire with the Danish military in the...
Three Eritrean’s living in a refugee camp in Ethiopia’s Tigray region were killed in an airstrike on Wednesday, the UN says. Two of the dead were children. Several other people were injured in the attack on the Mai Aini camp. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said...
Tanzania’s parliamentary speaker Job Ndugai has resigned days after clashing with the president over foreign debts. The speaker said his resignation was a personal and voluntary decision taken in the interests of the nation. But it came after he said Tanzania was at risk of being auctioned off following...
At least 20 people were trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building after an explosion on Friday in the Chinese city of Chongqing, according to state media. The blast at 12:10 pm (0410 GMT) was caused by a “suspected gas leak” and led to the collapse of a...
Fresh violence erupted in Kazakhstan’s largest city on Thursday as Russia rushed in paratroopers to put down a countrywide uprising in one of Moscow’s closest former Soviet allies. Police in the main city Almaty said they had killed dozens of protesters. The authorities said at least 18 members of...
UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says 55 journalists and media professionals were killed in 2021, noting that impunity against journalists is alarmingly widespread. “Once again in 2021, far too many journalists paid the ultimate price to bring truth to light,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said on Thursday....
President Muhammadu Buhari has received a Special Envoy from Col. Assimi Goita, the Transitional President of Mali. Mr Femi Adesina, the president’s spokesman in a statement on Thursday in Abuja, said President Buhari promised that Nigeria would do her level best for the sister country, within the requirements of...
A catastrophic fire tore through a row house in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighbourhood before sunrise on Wednesday. The fire which had killed 12 people, including eight children, in one of the nation’s deadliest residential fires in decades. The victims were yet to be identified by the authorities, but relatives and...
Pope Francis has criticised couples who choose not to have children. The 85-year-old told scores of the faithful at a general audience in the Vatican audience hall on Wednesday. “Too many couples don’t have children because they don’t want any, or they have only one because they don’t want...
North Korea fired what appeared to be a ballistic missile into the sea on Wednesday, South Korea and Japan said, in the first such launch by Pyongyang this year. In the decade since Kim Jong Un took power, North Korea has made rapid progress in its military technology at...
The police authorities in India have arrested three suspects in an investigation into an online app that shared pictures of more than a hundred Muslim women for an “auction” in another case of hatred towards the minority community. In recent days, several Indian Muslim women said on social media...
More than 200 people were arrested amid clashes at protests against high gas prices in Kazakhstan, the country’s Interior Ministry said on Wednesday morning. The ministry said 95 police personnel were injured. The president’s office announced Prime Minister, Askar Mamin, had resigned, meaning the entire government would leave office...
A set of twins born 15 minutes apart in California have very different birthdays — one in 2021 and the other in 2022. Alfredo Antonio Trujillo came into the world at 11:45 pm on New Year’s Eve in the city of Salinas. A quarter of an hour later, on...