Barack Obama in Cuba at start of historic visit
- 21 March 2016
- Latin America & Caribbean
President Barack Obama has arrived in Cuba for a historic visit to the island and talks with its communist leader.
He is the first sitting US president to visit since the 1959 revolution, which heralded decades of hostility.
Speaking at the reopened US embassy in Havana, he called the visit "historic". He also spent time in the old city.
Mr Obama will meet President Raul Castro, but not retired revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, and the pair will discuss trade and political reform.
The US president emerged smiling from Air Force One with First Lady Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia.
Holding umbrellas, the party walked in light drizzle along a red carpet to be greeted by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez.
'Living in hell': mentally ill people in Indonesia chained and confined
Lack of mental health care and community support leaves nearly 19,000 Indonesians vulnerable to outlawed practice, finds Human Rights Watch
Almost 40 years after Indonesia banned the practice of shackling people with mental health conditions, nearly 19,000 are still living in chains, or are locked up in institutions where they are vulnerable to abuse, according to a new report fromHuman Rights Watch (HRW).
The study says that although pasung – shackling or confining people with psychosocial disabilities – was banned in 1977, enduring stigma and a chronic lack of mental health care and community support services mean its use remains widespread.
People subjected to pasung can have their ankles bound with chains or wooden stocks for hours, days, months or even years. They are often kept outside, naked and unable to wash.
Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko found guilty over killing of two Russian journalists, court finds
Prosecutors had asked for a 23-year prison sentence for Savchenko
A Russian court has found Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko guilty of complicity to murder two Russian journalists in war-torn eastern Ukraine.
The judge who began reading the verdict on Monday said in his opening that Savchenko, who served in a volunteer Ukrainian battalion at the time, called in the coordinates for shelling that killed the two journalists and several civilians in July 2014, and that she was driven by "political hatred."
Migrant crisis: Australia to launch anti-human trafficking and slavery strategy
March 21, 2016 - 6:33PMJewel Topsfield
Indonesia Correspondent, Fairfax Media
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop will announce a strategy on human trafficking and slavery to "counter this terrible trade in human beings" at a regional summit on people smuggling and transnational crime on Wednesday.
Last year hundreds of Rohingya and Bangladeshis were killed crossing the Bay of Bengal in a surge of human smuggling and trafficking across South-East Asia.
"Some 370 people are believed to have died in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea during the year – not from drowning but from mistreatment and disease brought about by smugglers who abused and in many cases killed passengers with impunity," UN Refugee Agency spokesman Andreas Needham said recently.
Belgium: Europe's front line in the war on terror
Updated 0657 GMT (1457 HKT) March 21, 2016
Brussels: It's a quaint but bustling city, famed for its picture postcard squares, it's chocolate and its beer. But it is rapidly becoming infamous, too, as a fertile recruiting ground for jihadi fighters.
According to police, the carnage of the Paris attacks was plotted here, and it was in these streets that fugitiveSalah Abdeslam hid out in an apartment after abandoning his mission, dumping his suicide belt in a Parisian street and calling friends for help, after apparently driving his co-conspirators to their deaths.
That Abdeslam was caught at all appears to have been an enormous stroke of luck. Despite a massive security operation, the trail appeared to have gone cold, until police, initiating a search for evidence at Abdeslam's safe house on Tuesday, encountered a barrage of gunfire which tipped them off that something -- or someone -- important was inside.
Rare good news from Syria: some people are rising up against al-Qaeda
Updated by Jennifer Williams
Something important is happening in Syria: In a few isolated places, Syrians have begun to rise up against the rule of Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in the country. It's not anything like a major shift, but it suggests that some Syrians haven't necessarily bought into Nusra's salafi-jihadist vision for the future of the country.
What's happening
This starts with Syria's recent ceasefire, which over the past two weeks brought relative calm to parts of the country. In some towns, now that the streets are a bit safer, some Syrians have held peaceful protests to renew their calls for Bashar al-Assad to step down.
Nusra opposes Assad as well and is fighting to topple his government. But the group nonetheless wanted to stop the protesters, who were waving flags from the Free Syrian Army (which Nusra opposes as too secular) and calling for democracy.
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