Author: DW

Some 3,000 pregnant women in Haiti’s capital could be cut off from essential healthcare if the ongoing security crisis continues, with gang violence surging as armed gangs control most of Port-au-Prince. “If greater Port-au-Prince remains at a standstill in the coming weeks, almost 3,000 pregnant women could be denied access to essential health care,” the UN’s office in Haiti (BINUH) said in a statement on Friday. Abortion is illegal in Haiti. Hospitals have issued warnings regarding staff, bed and blood shortages. What did the UN say? The office also warned that almost 450 women could face life-threatening obstetric complications if…

British boxer Anthony Joshua has defeated former UFC title-holder Francis Ngannou in Saudi Arabia.The former two-time world champion demolished the ex-MMA star by knockout in the second round with a huge right hand. Cameroonian fighter Ngannou toppled to the canvas after the destructive final punch from 34-year-old Joshua, as the crowd in Riyadh’s Kingdom Arena erupted.Dazed and hurt, Ngannou managed to recover and exchanged words with Joshua, as the victor urged him “not to leave” boxing despite his crushing defeat.Joshua praised his opponent on his October bout with Tyson Fury – a clash which the Cameroonian narrowly lost – saying:…

“It’s like we just all of a sudden found ourselves in this horror film and we can’t get out. It’s become our life. It’s not something you can describe in words, you have to see it with your own eyes,” says Valentyna Lisnycha, who cares for some of the most critically ill patients that the war in Ukraine has produced. Lisnycha heads a trauma unit that treats patients with infected wounds at Dnipro’s Mechnikov Hospital. Most are soldiers from the nearby battlefields of southern and eastern Ukraine but frequent Russian missile strikes mean civilian victims are common, too. It’s early morning in the…

Authorities in India have detained members of a trafficking network, sending citizens of the country to fight for Russia in Ukraine. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) issued a statement saying it had conducted raids on Thursday across 13 locations, detaining “suspects.” ‘A major trafficking ring’ The raids come after dismantling “a major human trafficking ring across the country that targeted gullible youths with the promise of lucrative jobs abroad”, the CBI said in a statement. “These traffickers have been operating as an organized network and were luring Indian nationals through social media channels and also through their local contacts/agents for highly paid jobs…

US President Joe Biden has said reaching a six-week ceasefire deal in Gaza before the start of Ramadan is “looking tough”.His comments come after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said it was up to Hamas to make further progress on the truce.”The ball is in their court,” he said.”We’re working intensely on it, and we’ll see what they do,” Mr Blinken added ahead of a meeting with Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan on Friday.He said the US remains “intensely focused” on securing a ceasefire.Hamas left negotiations in Cairo on Thursday without a deal, dampening hopes an agreement will…

The clearest thing about India’s political funding system is that it is opaque to the public, with both politicians and electoral officers repeatedly and openly acknowledging their failure to achieve transparency.  In mid-February, the Supreme Court of India struck down the electoral bonds scheme , which allowed donors to send unlimited funds to their parties of choice, and to do so anonymously. The tool was set up six years ago. Many have since called it unconstitutional, with the Supreme Court eventually agreeing and proclaiming it eroded people’s right to information. The landmark ruling defies the stance taken by the government of…

In central Tehran, a woman and her friends are harassed by a group of armed men on motorcycles. Their first thought: “Put on your hijab.” “Since that day, every time I hear the sound of a motorcycle behind me, my body freezes,” one of the women recalls. The incident from last year has been burned into her memory. “That’s why I don’t go for walks anymore. When I do, I have my headphones on the whole time.” Scenes like this are everyday life in Tehran. This story was shared with Ghoncheh Ghavami, an Iranian feminist activistand editor in chief of…

A woman whose partner was on the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing in 2014 has claimed there was an “intentional effort to cover up what happened”.Ten years ago, Sarah Bajc woke up to the news that MH370 had disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 had 239 people on board when it disappeared, including her partner Philip Wood.While satellite data analysis suggested that the plane had likely crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, off the coast of western Australia, two major searches failed to make any breakthroughs.Speaking to Sky News on Friday, Ms…

If only politicians could learn to empathize with other people and their lives, they would get to fixing the world’s problems. Ever heard that idea before? We have. The question is: Can people learn empathy? A new study suggests we can indeed learn empathy, but that we can learn to be both more and less empathetic.   Published in the journal PNAS, the study found that watching people respond empathetically to other people in pain boosts your own sense of empathy, but it also found that we learn from non-empathetic people to feel less empathy. It was already known that children learn empathy, but…

A distant, dull roar accompanies a family as they go to sleep. It booms, hisses, fizzles and bangs: the sounds of a factory running day and night. Only this factory doesn’t produce goods — it produces corpses. The family whose life these noises accompany is that of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex. The family’s house is directly next to the walls of the camp. The idyllic garden is flanked by chimneys spewing thick smoke. Flames rise into the sky at night. As the children play in the garden, the sounds of barking dogs, shouting…