Flight MH370: Chinese relatives arrive in Malaysia to demand answers
Two dozen family members fly into Kuala Lumpur to meet 'highest officials' as huge search continues to draw blanks
More than two dozen Chinese relatives of passengers on Flight 370 arrived in Malaysia on Sunday to demand to meet top officials for more information about what happened to the airliner that has been missing for more than three weeks.
Two-thirds of the 227 passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared 8 March en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur were Chinese, and Beijing has urged Malaysia to be more open about the investigation.
As the 29 family members arrived in Kuala Lumpur, the search for the missing airliner was continuing with 14 aircraft from seven different countries scouring an area in the southern Indian ocean about the size of Norway.
Concern as Brunei brings in system of Islamic law with punishments that include the dismemberment of limbs and stoning to death
Ebola 'a regional threat' as contagion spreads
Guinea's capital Conakry is on high alert after a deadly Ebola epidemic that has killed dozens in the southern forests, spread to the port city.
Eight cases have been confirmed in the capital, the Guinean health ministry said on Friday, including one fatality.
All those infected have been put into isolation at the capital's biggest hospital to avoid the highly contagious virus from getting into the population.
Aid organisations have sent dozens of workers to help the poor west African country combat the outbreak of haemorrhagic fever.
"The total number of suspected cases recorded from January to 28 March 2014 is 111 cases of haemorrhagic fever including 70 deaths ... or a fatality rate of 63%," said the ministry.
Most of the cases were recorded in southern Guinea but in the past two days it has spread to the capital.
"Intensive case investigations are underway to identify the source and route of these patients' infection, record their travel histories before arrival in Conakry and determine their period of infectivity for the purposes of contact tracing," the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement.
In Amsterdam, web archaeologists excavate a digital city
Dutch researchers are trying to reconstruct a social-media platform from 1994, raising questions over how to preserve humanity's digital heritage.
Imagine yourself walking into a public library in Amsterdam on a weekend. You sit down at a computer and, with a click of a mouse, join other users of a virtual community. After catching up on recent postings, you chat with other members, update your image, and share a couple of links.
Sounds perfectly mundane – minus the fact that the year is 1994, long before the Internet became a fixture of daily life.
This rudimentary social-media platform, launched in Amsterdam twenty years ago and known as the Digital City (or by its Dutch acronym DDS), was one of the earliest virtual public domains and a precursor to the modern Internet. But the software that kept it buzzing with activity until 2000 is now virtually lost. The challenge of retrieving and preserving this and other web artifacts has given rise to a new profession: web archaeologist.
Horrific Taboo: Female Circumcision on the Rise in U.S.
When Marie was two years old, a woman in her village in Africa cut off her clitoris and labia. Now 34 and living thousands of miles away in New York, she is still suffering.
“I have so many problems, with my husband, with sex, with childbirth,” she told NBC News, withholding her real name to protect her identity. “The consequences on my life are all negative, both physically and psychologically."
The practice of Female Genital Mutilation is common across much of Africa, where it is believed to ensure sexual purity before marriage. But Marie says FGM is also “very common” in some communities in America.
“The pressure to get daughters cut is great,” she said.
30 March 2014 Last updated at 01:24
Sri Lanka: Displaced in north long for home
"Would you like to go home?" The men chorus "Yes!" as my question is translated into Tamil. "We're waiting for that date. There's enough land. We'll farm it. We'll fish."
They cannot do that here in the Konapalam camp, the cramped home to 240 displaced families where children play in the dust.
There are 31,524 people still in camps around Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka because their land is held by the military.
Saharayani Thangarajah, a 42-year-old mother of two, wants to return to her birthplace at Kankesanthurai on the northernmost coast. "Some officials have told us we'll be resettled by mid-April," she says. "Is that true, do you know?"
She longs for normality because she has been through trauma - forced from her home in 1990 and then losing her father, brother and sister in the war that ended in 2009 with the final defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
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