Nepal quake: Airport customs holding up aid relief - UN
- 3 May 2015
- Asia
The United Nations has urged Nepal to relax customs controls which it says are holding up deliveries of aid to survivors of last week's earthquake.
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said Nepal had a duty to provide faster customs clearance for relief supplies.
Many people are yet to receive the aid, which is piling up at Kathmandu airport, a week after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on 25 April.
More than 7,000 have died. Authorities have ruled out finding more survivors.
'Administrative issues'
On Saturday, Baroness Amos said she had reminded Prime Minister Sushil Koirala that Nepal had signed an agreement with the UN in 2007 for simpler and faster customs clearance for relief aid in a disaster.
The rebellion in Baltimore is an uprising against austerity, claims top US academic
Gentrified cities, the fall of manufacturing, the filling of jails with black men - all fuelled the violence that followed the killing of Freddie Gray
For Baltimore to be the setting for the latest in a recent spate of high-profile police murders and riots in America – after Ferguson, New York and North Charleston – is especially compelling in the public imagination because the city was also the location for David Simon’s brilliant TV series The Wire.
Baltimore is the city from which Simon wrote for this newspaper in 2013 about “two Americas” in the “horror show” his country has become, one crucial element of which is that the US is “the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons”.
The Wire, he said, “was about people who were worthless and who were no longer necessary”, most of them black, and who become the assembly-line raw material for “the prison-industrial complex”. At an event hosted by the Observer that year, Simon said: “Once America marginalised the black 10% of the population it no longer needed, it set out TO MAKE MONEY
out of them by putting them in jail.”
out of them by putting them in jail.”Heartbreaking letter reveals the cost of a rejected asylum application
It revealed that the man - Hajy Khalil - had been shot dead in Iraq three years after he was denied asylum in the UK.
The inscription, written by the Kurdish artist Behjat Omer Abdulla, read:
Hajy Khalil was killed by a gunman on 12 February 2013 in Baghdad on his way home. He was refused for his asylum application in the UK. He went to Sweden and was deported from Sweden to Iraq.
Abdulla said that the message was “a kind of signature”, and he was glad the curators of the Southbank exhibition “Adopting Britain: 70 Years of Migration”, had found it.
Mr Khalil’s story was “tragic” he said, and the portrait was born of an earlier tragedy. Just days after he was deported to Iraq in 2010, Mr Khalil’s three grandchildren were killed by a car bomb.
The mullahs’ quiet victory
Amid the conflict and chaos of the region, Iran has pursued a cool and coherent foreign policy; but at home there’s impatience for the economy to look up.
by Shervin Ahmadi
The interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme is above all a victory for Tehran. The Iranian government has had to back down on a few issues it had previously said were non-negotiable: the number of centrifuges it will keep and the ratio to which it will enrich uranium. But in exchange it has gained recognition as a country the West, in particular the US, can negotiate with. Now Iran sees the potential for further cooperation with its former detractors — initially economic, and then perhaps in the longer term military and political — even though nothing has yet been settled, and there are still major differences over the interpretation of the Lausanne agreement, especially as to how fast sanctions will be lifted.
Contrary to expectations, the interim agreement did not result in any great euphoria among Iran’s leaders, though they displayed guarded satisfaction. Senior regime figures, from the commander of the Revolutionary Guards and the armed forces chief of staff to the speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, were full of praise for the negotiators.
Who is Farkhunda? Why 49 men are on trial for her death in Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, 49 people, including 19 policemen, are on trial for the brutal mob killing of an Afghan woman.
KABUL — The trial of 49 suspects, including 19 police officers, on charges relating to the brutal mob killing of an Afghan woman began in the capital, Kabul, on Saturday.
The opening of the trial at Afghanistan's Primary Court was broadcast live on nationwide television. The suspects all face charges relating to the March 19 killing of a 27-year-old woman named Farkhunda.
A prosecutor read charges against 10 of the defendants, including assault, murder and encouraging others to participate in the assault. The policemen are charged with neglecting their duties and failing to prevent the attack, although some are suspected of actually participating.
Group presses Paraguay to allow abortion for raped girl, 10
An international rights group is pressing the Paraguayan government to allow an abortion for a 10-year-old girl who allegedly was impregnated by her stepfather -- a procedure that health officials in the South American country have so far blocked.
At issue is Paraguayan law, which bans abortions except in cases where the pregnancy endangers the mother's life. The Paraguayan Ministry of Health says there's no indication that the health of the girl -- now 22 weeks' pregnant -- is at risk.
But the girl's family is asking for an abortion, and Amnesty International is backing them, saying her age should trigger the health exception. The group also asserts the law is too restrictive, noting that it doesn't provide additional exceptions for rape.
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