xiao

Aid workers and experts told AFP that there were still many obstacles to getting desperately needed supplies to Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip's north. Not only are there disputes over the actual volume of aid being allowed in, but agencies are often unable to reach people under constant bombardment, meaning it does not always make it where the dire humanitarian needs are greatest.

How does aid enter Gaza?

• Most trucks carrying humanitarian supplies enter through the Kerem Shalom crossing on the border between Israel and the southern Gaza Strip.

• The shipments are inspected by the Israeli military for security reasons, a process cited by humanitarian groups as the main factor behind the slow delivery of aid.

• Once the aid enters Gaza, deliveries are subject to coordination with COGAT, an Israeli defence ministry agency that oversees civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories. Many aid groups regularly report difficulties in communicating and coordinating with COGAT.

The distribution of aid is further complicated by shortages of fuel for trucks, war-damaged roads and looting, as well as fighting in densely populated areas and the repeated displacement of much of Gaza's 2.4 million people.

Some foreign countries have opted for dropping aid from the air. COGAT said 81 packages were parachuted into the narrow coastal territory on Saturday.

Sarah Davies, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said that even if aid deliveries are boosted, the fighting makes it "very difficult to effectively distribute things to all those who need it".

A humanitarian worker whose group has a large presence on the ground said that some crucial items are banned by Israel. "We're having great difficulty bringing in oxygen concentrates, generators and reconstruction equipment because the Israeli authorities consider them to be dual-purpose items that have both military and medical uses," he said. "Some clinics are even running out of paracetamol," the common painkiller, the aid worker added.

To Lam took over as Communist Party general secretary in August after the death of his predecessor and was making his first speech Monday as top leader to National Assembly delegates.

A major anti-graft purge begun by the late Nguyen Phu Trong has swept up dozens of business leaders and senior government figures, including two presidents and three deputy prime ministers since 2021.

Lam has enthusiastically pursued the drive, although analysts say he has weaponised anti-corruption investigations to take down political rivals.

Over the past year, more than 10,000 people were tried in around 4,800 trials as part of the anti-corruption fight, Vietnam's chief judge Le Minh Tri said last week, according to state media.

An unusual period of political upheaval in the ruling Communist party saw Nguyen Xuan Phuc resign from the presidency in January 2023 and his successor Vo Van Thuong relinquish the role in March 2024. Both admitted to "violations and mistakes that badly influenced the prestige of the party and state".

With many fearful of being caught in its crosshairs, everyday transactions within business and government alike have slowed.

While India does not permit “active” euthanasia, which involves use of substances such as lethal injections or external force to end life, court rulings have permitted clinicians to withhold life-prolonging treatment in certain cases.

Now the government has drafted guidelines to standardise such decisions and is seeking expert feedback on the proposals. According to the Health Ministry’s draft, published on 30 September, doctors must take considered decisions in a patient’s best interest in cases involving an incurable condition from which death is inevitable in the foreseeable future.

Association president RV Asokan warned that “the guidelines could expose doctors to legal scrutiny and increase stress in their decision-making”. “The perception and assumption that machines are unnecessarily used to prolong lives is wrong. It exposes doctors to legal scrutiny,” he told news agency PTI.

Meanwhile many Christian activists are opposed to any form of euthanasia, which they argue is ripe for abuse. “Relatives may want to get rid of an old patient who they take to be a burden on them and their freedom,” John Dayal, former president of the All India Catholic Union, told RFI. “In a land where kidneys are stolen from beggars and rickshaw-pullers when they have been drugged into sleep, can we trust the medical profession and the law and justice system to be the watchdog guardian?”

But others involved in frontline care said the guidelines would help close a regulatory gap.

“We have been doing this for years,” said Sushma Bhatnagar, a professor of palliative care at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, whose experts helped formulate the guidelines. “Once we know that a patient is terminal, we counsel them and their family members to withdraw care. They are usually made comfortable and sent home. However, there was no guideline or legal procedure for the same,” she told the Indian Express.

Except in cases of medical emergency, she said, many patients prefer to spend their final days with their family rather than in intensive care.

By next year, 189 million people will be over 60 years of age and fuel demands for 175 million additional hospital beds in India, where 32 million people fall below an official poverty line every year because of medical bills.

A Malagasy business has been developing the porridge, prepared daily by local vendors, to avoid the irreversible cognitive and physical damage that malnutrition causes during the first 1,000 days of a child's life.

Six days a week, Tantely walks the streets carrying two five-kilogram thermoses of porridge. Tantely hands out portions in exchange for 500 ariary, or about 9 euro cents. “My job is to mix all the ingredients: peanuts, maize, rice, soy, sugar, minerals, calcium, vitamins and iron,” says Tantely. It takes about 45 minutes to cook.

For many of her customers, this is the only nutritious meal they will eat all day.

Changing the eating habits of these communities, however, wasn't easy. It took at least five years for sellers like Tantely to convince families to switch from their traditional rice soup to Koba Aina ("flour of life" = porridge). Through persistent awareness-raising, Tantley was able to break down misconceptions about the supposed nutritional benefits of rice soup. Now, some 42,000 children in Malagasy cities eat Koba Aina every day.

Nutri’Zaza, which has been distributing Koba Aina since 2013, says the flour addresses a critical public health issue. Founded to build on child nutrition projects, Nutri’Zaza reinvests profits to sustain its mission. The company also collaborates with NGOs and government agencies across Madagascar. Nutri’Zaza hopes that by making its porridge widely available at an affordable price, stunted growth among children in Madagascar’s cities will be dramatically reduced, breaking the cycle of poverty that malnutrition perpetuates.

Cases of buildings caving in are not uncommon in the country, often a result of shoddy construction and flouted regulations.

The eight-storey building in Kahawa West, a densely-populated neighbourhood north of the capital, had been condemned for demolition, Nairobi county officials said. One woman who was standing outside the building when it collapsed was hurt, Nairobi governor Johnson Sakaja told AFP, adding that casualties were "expected to be minimal".

According to a Nairobi county document seen by AFP and dated October 16, the building had been constructed and occupied without the requisite approvals.

The East African nation is undergoing a construction boom, but corruption has allowed contractors to cut corners or bypass regulations.

Five people were killed when a six-storey building collapsed in a town on the outskirts of Nairobi in September 2022. In April 2016, 49 people were killed when a six-floor apartment building crumbled in the northeast of the capital after days of heavy rain caused floods and landslides.

The building, constructed two years earlier, had been scheduled to be demolished after being declared structurally unsound.

Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but with the G7's dirtiest energy mix, it is seeking to cut emissions, and atomic energy is making a steady comeback, in part because of AI.

Before the 2011 quake and tsunami, which killed around 18,000 people, nuclear power generated about a third of Japan's electricity, with fossil fuels contributing most of the rest. All of Japan's 54 reactors were shut down afterwards, including those at KK. To keep the lights on, resource-poor Japan has hiked imports of natural gas, coal and oil while increasing solar power. But fossil fuels are expensive, with imports last year costing Japan about $510 million a day.

The government is striving for "carbon neutrality" by 2050 and to cut emissions by 46 percent by 2030 from 2013 levels. It wants to increase the share of renewables to 36-38 percent from around 20 percent and cut fossil fuels to 41 percent from around two-thirds now.

Japan aims for nuclear power to account for 20-22 percent of its electricity by 2030, up from well under 10 percent now. Japan in late 2022 decided to accelerate reactor restarts and to extend operating time for nuclear reactors to 60 years from 40.

Nine of Japan's 33 still-operable reactors are currently online.

Business groups remain worried about power shortages, particularly as Japan seeks to go big in energy-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI).

Making Fukushima fully safe, meanwhile, has also barely begun. Japan last year started to release into the Pacific Ocean some of the 540 Olympic pools' worth of treated cooling water amassed since 2011.

Armed groups operating in Colombia's Amazon are tightening their grip on the region, and that's stalling government efforts to tackle deforestation, according to a think tank report on Thursday.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents, known as EMC, have the ability to slow or accelerate deforestation at will, said the report by The International Crisis Group.

"This group is the most directly responsible for deforestation in the last five years," said Rodrigo Botero, director of The Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS). "More than half a million hectares have been lost in their control zones."

More than 40 percent of Colombia is in the Amazon-an area roughly the size of Spain. Colombia has the world's largest bird biodiversity. Fifteen percent of the Colombian Amazon has already been deforested, according to FCDS.

"The system was left without power nationwide" after the unexpected shutdown of the Antonio Guiteras power plant, Lazaro Guerra, director general of electricity at the Ministry of Energy and Mines, told state television.

When the power plant shut down, "the system collapsed," he said, adding that the government was working to restore service as soon as possible to the island's 11 million people.

He blamed the situation on Cuba's difficulties in acquiring fuel for its power plants, which he attributed to the tightening of a six-decade-long US trade embargo under former president Donald Trump.

The island's electricity is generated by eight aging thermal power plants, some of which have broken down or are under maintenance, as well as seven floating plants leased from Turkish companies and a raft of generators.

Ghana is being swamped by millions of unwanted clothes from the West, creating an environmental disaster as textile waste piles up across the country.

About 15 million items of second-hand clothing arrive in Ghana each week. Nearly half cannot be resold. The unsellable clothes end up in informal dumps or are burned in public washhouses, contaminating the air, soil and water.

The report shows how Ghana has become a dumping ground for the world's unwanted textiles, with devastating consequences for local ecosystems. "What we're seeing is environmental racism. The Global North is using Ghana as its trash can," said Helen Dena of Greenpeace Africa.

A driver who ran over a cyclist following an altercation in central Paris has been charged with murder in a case that shocked the capital.

The 52-year-old driver of the SUV is accused of having deliberately targeted the cyclist, who was named as Paul Varry, 27.

According to witnesses, the driver, trying to make progress on the congested road, steered his car onto the adjacent cycling path for about 200 metres (650 feet), where he drove over the cyclist's foot, prosecutors said.

Varry, the cyclist, banged his fist on the bonnet of the car to alert the driver, who backed up at first. Varry then stood in front of the car expressing his anger at the driver, who started driving towards him.

-_-...

An autopsy showed that Varry's lethal injuries had been caused by the car.

No joke !

CCTV footage showed the vehicle rising once when the left front tyre rolled over the body, and then again when the back tyre went over.

A test for alcohol and drugs came back negative.

The man's lawyer, Franck Cohen, told AFP that his client "has no explanation for what happened".

lol, good defense.

Hey now look at that 👇

A judge will now rule whether he should be held in custody ahead of trial.

-_-

You wanna commit murder ?!

Forget about gun, just by a big shitty car.

Society will forgive you faster.

Fuck cars forever

Prosecutor Mohammad Tajul Islam called it a "remarkable day", while a relative of one of the hundreds who died in the uprising against her autocratic rule said they were "looking forward" to the trial.

Hasina's 15-year tenure saw widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents.

"The court has... ordered the arrest of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, and to produce her in court on November 18," Islam, chief prosecutor of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), told reporters. "Sheikh Hasina was at the helm of those who committed massacres, killings and crimes against humanity in July to August," Islam said.

The court also issued an arrest warrant for Obaidul Quader, the fugitive former general secretary of Hasina's Awami League party, as well as 44 others, who were not named. Dozens of Hasina's allies were taken into custody after her regime collapsed, accused of culpability in a police crackdown that killed more than 700 people during the unrest that deposed her.

Her presence in India -- her government's biggest benefactor -- has infuriated the interim administration in Bangladesh that replaced her. Dhaka has revoked her diplomatic passport, and the countries have a bilateral extradition treaty which would facilitate her return to face criminal trial.

Hasina was replaced by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. The 84-year-old microfinance pioneer is leading a temporary administration, to tackle what he has called the "extremely tough" challenge of restoring democratic institutions. Yunus said he had inherited a "completely broken down" system of public administration and justice that needs a comprehensive overhaul to prevent a future return to autocracy.

No Japanese premier has visited Yasukuni Shrine since 2013 and Ishiba's predecessor Fumio Kishida would also regularly send offerings for its biannual spring and autumn festivals.

Yasukuni in central Tokyo is dedicated to 2.5 million war dead, mostly Japanese, who have perished in conflicts since the late 19th century.

Every year, dozens of lawmakers pay their respects during the spring and autumn festival and in August for the anniversary of the emperor announcing Japan's surrender in 1945. But a Japanese prime minister has not appeared there since 2013, when Shinzo Abe sparked fury in Beijing and Seoul and earned a rare diplomatic rebuke from close ally the United States.

Seoul expressed "deep disappointment and regret that responsible leaders in Japan have once again offered tribute or visited the Yasukuni Shrine," South Korea's foreign ministry said Thursday. When asked about the matter at a regular briefing, Beijing's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning called Yasukuni "a symbol of Japan's militaristic war of aggression".