Hurricane Patricia: Risk of floods and landslides
Mexico's president has warned that Hurricane Patricia still poses a threat of floods and landslides as it brings heavy rain to parts of the country.
President Enrique Pena Nieto said Patricia - the strongest storm recorded in the Americas - had so far caused less damage than feared.
The US National Hurricane Centre said the hurricane hit as a Category Five storm - the highest classification.
It has since been downgraded to a Category Two tropical storm.
The storm touched down in western Mexico on Friday, bringing destructive winds and rain, but heavy damage appears to have been avoided.
The NHC said winds had decreased to 155 km/h (100 mph) as the storm weakened over land.
While still over the ocean, Patricia had winds of 325 km/h (200 mph) at its peak, which made it the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Western hemisphere.
Sam Pa: The fall of China’s trailblazer in Africa
In its search for new markets and key commodities, Chinese investment in the continent has soared to more than $200bn a year. This month, the elusive deal maker credited with spearheading this drive was arrested
The secretive Chinese businessman Sam Pa doesn’t enjoy the limelight. His arrest in Beijing earlier this month, reportedly in connection with a major corruption inquiry involving China’s state-owned oil company Sinopec, is one of the rare occasions the spotlight has fixed firmly upon him.
Despite the best efforts of journalists and other investigators to discover more about the controversial businessman credited with spearheading China’s spectacular drive into Africa over the last two decades, he has remained elusive.
Even basic details such as his name and nationality are the subject of speculation. He was born in Hong Kong but different accounts of his life have him raised in the former British colony or on the Chinese mainland.
'Every dark skin in Israel is now a target'
The recent escalation in violence between Israelis and Palestinians has conjured up an old demon from Israel's past: racism and discrimination against Jews, by Jews.
The recent wave of violence between Palestinians and Israeli Jews has already left at least 49 Palestinians dead, including the alleged attackers. Eight other Israelis have been killed in the attacks, but two additional casualties generated extreme reactions among the Israeli public.
One of them was an Eritrean asylum seeker, who was killed after being mistaken for an assailant. He was shot by an Israeli security guard while crawling on the floor, after an Arab gunman opened fire in a central bus station, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding nine others.
A crowd of people, thinking he was the culprit, surrounded him and began beating him, while several others rushed to his side in an attempt to protect him.
Another Israeli Jew, a 28-year-old Yeshiva student of religious texts and a veteran of an ultra-Orthodox IDF unit, was killed by Israeli soldiers in a different incident in Jerusalem, after he reportedly tried to steal the weapon of one of the soldiers.
Taking the mickey out of terrorism
October 24, 2015 - 12:15AMRuth Pollard
Middle East Correspondent
Beirut: Imagine this for a moment – two Islamic State recruits are keeping guard on a remote outpost in Iraq when a spaceship lands and two aliens get out.
"Sadly for everyone involved, Abu Abdullah's career as a drug dealer-turned-Muslim-turned ISIS fighter didn't prepare him for the complexities of a theological discussion with visiting aliens. Then he remembers his copy of Islam for Dummies …"
There are few sacred cows in the robust, rollicking world of Arab satire and certainly no one – no sect, no dictator and no country – escapes the sharp eye of blogger Karl Sharro, author of the above passage about a foreign ISIS fighter who's not sure about the difference between the Sunni and Shiite sects of Islam.
Sharro, or @KarlreMarks as he is known to his 60,000 Twitter followers, is a London-based Lebanese architect whose biting satirical blog takes on some of the Middle East's – and Western journalism's – most well-worn cliches.
Despite tuition victory, deep grievances linger among South African students
Demonstrations this week surfaced long-simmering national issues of access and inclusion that many students still want addressed.
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — After more than a week of intensive protests that shuttered every major public university in South Africa, student activists here have scored a startling and unprecedented victory.
After meeting with student leaders and university heads, President Jacob Zuma announced Friday afternoon that he would freeze university fee hikes for the coming year, responding to demonstrations that managed in a matter of days to transform a relatively isolated problem -- rising college tuition -- into a national moral imperative.
For many of the young people who took to the streets this week, however, the victory now seems hollow. Not 15 minutes after the announcement, a cloud of tear gas and a hailstorm of rubber bullets forced the thousands of protesters who had gathered outside Mr. Zuma’s office in Pretoria's Union Buildings hours earlier to abruptly disperse.
The Most Destructive Wave in Earth’s (Known) History
Geologists have discovered evidence of an ancient 560-foot mega-tsunami.
Rising from the Atlantic ocean, hundreds of miles off the coast of West Africa, there’s a volcano with a 73,000-year-old scar swiped across its face. This is the mark of an ancient catastrophe, etched into the rock when a huge chunk of the volcano’s eastern flank rushed all at once into the sea.
That particular flank collapse displaced enough water to generate a powerful tsunami—one that, new evidence shows, might have been much, much bigger than geologists previously believed. “Our work provides evidence that the well-known collapse at Fogo volcano produced a very large tsunami that impacted the nearby island of Santiago,” said Ricardo Ramalho, an Earth-sciences research fellow at the University of Bristol.
“Very large,” even by tsunami standards, seems like an understatement here.
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