UN report accuse Republican lawmakers of fuelling ‘tyranny’ of world growing hotter, emerging ‘climate divorce’
That so many states in the US have been passing legislation to curb climate change is anything but a fluke. Like other retrograde measures enacted in Republican-controlled states, those bills are based on “model legislation” drafted for legislators by an outfit called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). One of...
Discovering planets is now routine: From 1992, over 5200 have been found and 9,000 pending confirmation
Over 300 years ago, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that ours was the best of all possible worlds. The word “world” comes from Old English, originally meaning Earth, and later extending to the physical world in the broadest sense, or the universe. Leibniz was trying to address the...
Why health experts in US want physical exercise dropped from long Covid recovery regimen
Patients and patient advocates are calling on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to reconsider its decision to include exercise trials in its RECOVER initiative, which aims to study and find treatments for long Covid. They argue that a large proportion of people with long Covid have reported experiencing...
Diverse culture of people who lived along East African coast point to strong bias in ancestry for African women
One thousand years ago, East Africa’s Swahili coast was a key node in a trade network that linked merchants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, propelled by the monsoon winds. Out of this melting pot emerged hints of a new culture, as prosperous ‘stone towns’, with mosques and...
Questions raised over UK’s new refugee policy after it granted two Sri Lankans ‘third country’ asylum
Two Sri Lankan asylum seekers who were transferred to Rwanda earlier this month after attempting suicide on the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia were approved by UK authorities on Thursday last week to receive asylum in a third country. Documents notifying the man and woman of the decision, which...
How criminal gangs weaponised arson to terrorise Rohingya in Myanmar, who are stateless and without citizenship rights
One week after a fire broke out in a Cox’s Bazar refugee camp earlier this month, Bangladesh government investigators ruled it a “planned act of sabotage” – just the latest among scores of such arson incidents in recent years. The sprawling Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camps house more than 630,000 Rohingya refugees...
While UN rights body advocates for compensation for sexual violence, UN’s own rules prohibit reparations
Even when sex abuse and rape cases are referred to local authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where they occurred, it’s often an uphill battle when it comes to allegations involving UN personnel. Take the alleged 2017 rape of a 16-year-old Congolese girl by a British man working...
UN indifference to women in DRC sheds light on why Ebola sex abuse victims may never find justice
Ketsia* said she was working as a part-time cleaner for the World Health Organization during the 2018 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when a doctor invited her to his house and offered her a promotion in exchange for sex. He tried to rape her, but she...
Zimbabwe president accused of retaining proxies to smuggle gold to evade punitive US trade sanctions
Zimbabwe’s government is using smuggling gangs to sell gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars, skirting some of the consequences of tough Western sanctions imposed on the country over human rights abuses, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) can reveal. The smuggling feeds into an enormous money-laundering operation, all facilitated by...
Britain transfers Tamil refugees who attempted suicide to Rwanda Military Hospital for treatment
Five Tamil asylum seekers who attempted suicide on the British-held Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia have been sent to Rwanda for medical treatment, it has been established. The news follows a recent backlash against the British government’s immigration deterrence policies and a scandal that involved 200 unaccompanied minors who...
