Migrants arrive in Austria after Hungary provides buses
Thousands of migrants have crossed into Austria, after Hungary's surprise decision to provide buses to take them to the border overnight.
For days, the Hungarian government had blocked them from travelling by train to northern and western Europe.
About 4,000 exhausted people, many of whom had initially fled Syria, crossed the Austrian border and are being received in a Red Cross Centre.
Austria says they can claim asylum or carry on to Germany if they wish.
The move comes as European Union countries are struggling to agree on how to deal with an unprecedented surge of asylum seekers.
Israeli settlers say no to separation wall
Benyamin Tropper
Aviv Tatarsky
Work on Israel’s controversial separation wall is back underway in Beit Jala, a Palestinian village south of Jerusalem. But it’s not only the region’s Palestinians rising up against the wall. In a surprising twist, Israeli settlers are relying on ecological arguments to oppose the ongoing construction work. But according to our Observer, their chief motivation is to strengthen their presence in the West Bank.The wall’s route (in blue) has been slightly modified in order to prevent a convent and a monastery from being separated. Source.
To the dismay of more than 70 Palestinian villagers who had spent ten years trying to avoid having their land confiscated, construction work on the wall began on August 17 in Beit Jala, a Palestinian village with a majority Christian population.
Contacted by France 24’s sister station RFI, Beit Jala’s mayor slammed the operation. "The Israelis came with ten huge bulldozers, more than 70 soldiers, and they pulled down over 45 olive trees. They’re doing it to link up two settlements. They want to take over our valley in order to build in it."
Malawi moves away from child bride tradition
African nation’s new Bill tries to fight highest rate of underage marriage in the world
in Malawi
It’s the Fathers and Daughters’ “chat day” at a village in the Chiradzulu district of southern Malawi, initiated by grassroots activists and village authorities to bridge the communication gap between girls and their fathers.
“I promise not to marry my daughter off, and I will support her dreams of becoming a teacher as much as I can,” says the father of a teenage girl, holding his daughter’s hand.
He then signs a piece of paper and hands it to village authorities, to ensure he is kept accountable for his promise.
Cheered and applauded by village members gathered under a majestic baobab tree, dozens of fathers follow the same ritual and publicly pledge to not marry their daughters off.Palestine's only female taxi driver has big plans
Nadia Ahmad is planning to start her own fleet of taxis in the occupied West Bank - driven by women, for women.
Sheren Khalel |
Hebron, occupied West Bank - Nadia Ahmad prefers to drive in manual. She laughs, motioning with one hand as if she is changing gears while the other one rests on an imaginary wheel.
Ahmad has been preoccupied with cars since she was a young girl, but she never thought she would end up making a living out of her love for being behind the wheel.
For the past two years, Ahmad has been driving a taxi through the streets of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
While she never planned to make a political statement with her career, there is no getting around it: Ahmad is believed to be the only female taxi driver in all of Palestine.
Why people are fleeing Syria: a brief, simple explanation
Updated by Zack Beauchamp
With the refugee crisis worsening as many Syrians attempt to flee to Europe, many people may find themselves wondering just how the war in that country got so bad, and why so many are fleeing now. Here, then, is a very brief history of the war, written so that anyone can understand it:
Syria is a relatively new country: Its borders were constructed by European powers in the 1920s, mashing together several ethnic and religious groups. Since late 1970, a family from one of those smaller groups — the Assads, who are Shia Alawites — have ruled the country in a brutal dictatorship. Bashar al-Assad has been in power since 2000.
This regime appeared stable, but when Arab Spring protests began in 2011, it turned out not to be. The country's Sunni Arabs, the largest demographic, were clearly sick of their second-class status, and of the country's corruption, brutality, and inequity. Protests began that spring.
Is Iraq too broke to fight ISIS?
Iraq’s ability to fight Islamic State extremists who control roughly a third of the country is hampered by a financial crisis that’s left the Baghdad government operating “hand to mouth,” Iraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily warned this week.
The inability to pay salaries on time to the soldiers and militiamen fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has hurt morale and hindered progress in operations to retake key hubs that were captured by the jihadists, Faily said in an interview Thursday. And belt-tightening measures such as consolidating government ministries threaten to exacerbate ethnic and sectarian tensions by upsetting the delicate power-sharing quota system that’s been in place since the U.S.-led occupation authority took charge following the invasion of 2003.
THE AMERICANS WHO WORK ON IRAQ UNDERSTAND WE’RE DESPERATEIraqi Ambassador Lukman Faily
“This goes back to not making your support conditional,” he added, referring to Iraqi officials’ frustration with the Obama administration’s reluctance to bail them out last year unless Baghdad first made reforms to address the corruption and ingrained sectarianism that softened the ground for the extremist takeover of Mosul in the north and most of Anbar province in the west.
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