Cold Air Is Harmful in China By Patricia Alaka JIEGU, China rescue teams joined shovel-wielding monks in this devastated county seat a day after an earthquake that killed more than 600 people, as frigid temperatures threatened to claim hundreds more who remained missing, trapped beneath debris for more than a day. Scores of thousands who [...]
Less Women Are Dying By Patricia Alaka For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980. The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of [...]
47 world leaders meet in Washington to discuss nuclear proliferation By Dylan Mooney The primary objective of this week’s meeting was to persuade African, Latin American, Asian and European nations to agree on steps to deny terrorist groups the two materials necessary to make a bomb: plutonium and highly enriched uranium. During the meeting, Obama [...]
American mother returns 7-year-old son to his native Russia, declaring him ‘mentally unstable’ By Dylan Mooney The Russian Foreign Minister Sergev Lavrov responded in outrage this morning, demanding that all Russia-to-United States adoptions be frozen This declaration leaves hundreds of American families devastated to find that their extensive efforts to adopt may ultimately prove fruitless. [...]
Why Did He Really Quit? By Patricia Alaka The sudden withdrawal on Wednesday night of the leading challenger in Sudan’s imminent presidential election has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the vote and almost instantly raised the prospects for violence — or possibly diminished them. Yasir Arman, who was the candidate of the Sudan People’s [...]
Can India Handle It? By Patricia Alaka In New Delhi, the upper house of India’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday that would amend the Constitution to reserve one-third of the seats in India’s national and state legislatures for women, after the measure stirred two days of political chaos that could whittle the governing coalition’s majority [...]
Cities Await Disaster By Patricia Alaka As he surveys the streets of Istanbul this sprawling mega-city, Mustafa Erdik, the director of an earthquake engineering institute here, says he sometimes feels like a doctor scanning a crowded hospital ward. It is not so much the city’s modern core, where two sleek Trump Towers and a huge [...]
Beijing Police too Harsh? By Patricia Alaka Nearly two dozen artists protesting the forced demolition of their homes and studios marched through the ceremonial heart of the capital before the police intervened and prevented them from reaching Tienanmen Square, the artists said Tuesday. The protesters said they decided to take to the streets on Monday [...]
80 Billion in Profit By Patricia Alaka Toyota said Thursday that it posted a net profit in the final three months of last year, a period before the Japanese auto giant was hit by its current global recall of millions of vehicles for faulty gas pedals. Despite the recent recalls, Toyota said it expects to [...]
5 to 14 Years in Jail By Patricia Alaka In Blantyre, Africa, Malawi Tiwonge Chimbalanga resembled a man but said he was a woman. He helped with the cooking and dressed in feminine wraparound skirts. Steven Monjeza was a quiet, sullen man often intoxicated and has said he had never been happy until he finally [...]