Paris, France | AFP | Three bombs hidden in a hedge that exploded when the Borussia Dortmund Champions League team passed by proved that no sporting event is now safe from a militant attack, experts said. With the Boston marathon looming on Monday — four years after it was the …
Read More »Two billion people drinking faecal-contaminated water: WHO
Geneva, Switzerland | AFP | Dramatic improvements are needed in ensuring access to clean water and sanitation worldwide, the World Health Organization said Thursday, warning that nearly two billion people currently use faecal-contaminated water. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year because they are forced to drink contaminated water, …
Read More »COMMENT: From Great Britain to little England?
Britain chose to leave the EU because it had an outsized opinion of itself, it now has to follow a small-country model By Michael O’Sullivan & David Skilling British Prime Minister Theresa May blinked more than once as she prepared to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon …
Read More »White House’s Spicer stumbles over Hitler reference, apologizes
Washington, United States | AFP | White House press secretary Sean Spicer apologized Tuesday for “insensitive” remarks during a press briefing in which he asserted that Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons on his own people. “Frankly, I mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive comment about the Holocaust and there …
Read More »Trump cuts money to UN population fund
International family planning agency, which will lose all future US funding, says its mission was ‘to ensure every pregnancy is wanted and every child birth is safe’ By Liz Ford and Nadia Khomami The US state department said on April 03 it was ending funding for the UN population fund …
Read More »Pulitzer Prizes honor US election coverage
New York, United States | AFP | Campaign reporting that exposed misleading claims by now US President Donald Trump about charitable giving and commentary about last year’s divisive US presidential campaign won Pulitzer Prizes on Monday. David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post won the national reporting award for what the board …
Read More »Beijing offers big bucks for foreign spy tip-offs
Beijing, China | AFP | Budding Chinese sleuths could start stalking foreigners as suspected spies in Beijing after authorities in the city on Monday offered a cash bonanza for information on overseas agents. Members of the public can report suspected espionage through a special hotline, by mail or in person and …
Read More »China’s Xi praises normalisation of ties with Norway
Beijing, China | AFP | Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday praised the normalisation of relations with Norway, six years after a dispute over the Nobel Peace Prize, as Norway’s prime minister said she was glad to be back. The visit by Erna Solberg is the first high-level exchange since December, …
Read More »Sex workers protest in Paris against penalising clients
Paris, France | AFP | Sex workers protested in central Paris on Saturday, marking the first anniversary of a French law which made it illegal for their clients to pay for sex. The protesters, mostly young women but including some men, held up banners saying “Stop the fines, our aggressors, AIDS, …
Read More »Huge asteroid to fly close but ‘safely past’ Earth on April 19
NASA, April: A relatively large near-Earth asteroid discovered nearly three years ago will fly safely past Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. Although there is no possibility for the asteroid …
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