Beijing's smog: A tale of two cities
Updated 0658 GMT (1458 HKT) January 16, 2017
The first thing Jiang Wang does when she wakes up in the morning is check on her daughter to make sure she's breathing clean air.
Next, it's time to start making breakfast. She's already made sure all the groceries come from an organic farm.
She'll wash her produce with tap water filtered through a separate treatment system under her sink.
But that water isn't for drinking -- there's imported bottled water for that.
This is how Wang typically starts her day, trying to minimize the effects of the toxic environment in Beijing.
World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%
A new report by Oxfam warns of growing and dangerous concentration of wealth
The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population, according to a charity warning of an ever-increasing and dangerous concentration of wealth.
In a report published to coincide with the start of the week-long World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam said it was “beyond grotesque” that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people.
The development charity called for a new economic model to reverse an inequality trend that it said helped to explain Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
Hamza bin Laden: al Qaeda poster boy
He has established himself as an al Qaeda leader. Now the USA has declared Osama bin Laden's son a "global terrorist."
The few photos of Hamza bin Laden that are publicly available won't likely be of much help to investigators: They stem from the time around the turn of the millennium. At that time, the son of Osama bin Laden was 12 years old. The images show a serious, perhaps even threatening, young boy. Wearing a turban and a camouflage military vest, the youth reads a communique - a pose in which he already presents himself as a voice for al Qaeda. Other photos from the time show him in the driver's seat of an off-road vehicle with a bullet-riddled windshield, or crouching on a stony plane with a machine-gun in his hands.
These photos document the young man's journey to jihad - a career that would eventually lead him to the highest ranks of international terrorism: in early January, the US State Department declared him an "international terrorist." It is a title once held by his father.
Inmates beheaded in new Brazil prison riot
Latest update : 2017-01-16
Twenty-seven inmates were killed in a Brazilian prison riot that broke out on Saturday, adding to chaos in a penitentiary system in which some 140 inmates have died in gang warfare since the start of the year.
Members of a drug gang started the clash by invading a pavilion in the Alcaçuz prison that housed rivals, officials with Rio Grande do Norte state said in a Sunday news conference in the city of Natal. Forensic investigators will begin identifying the corpses on Monday, they added.
Organ trafficking: doctors, police and middlemen
A vast network of players sustains the kidney trade racket.
NAZIHA SYED ALI
Sometime last October, Allah Wasaya, a labourer in Karachi, sold his only valuable possession, a small house in Future Colony, Landhi, for Rs1,700,000 to buy a kidney for his eldest son, 32-year-old Mohammed Afzal. The young man had been suffering from kidney problems for some years. Allah Wasaya himself had high blood pressure and his wife had a different blood group which made them unfit as donors. Their other son, who had refused to donate his kidney to his brother, was so angered by the sale of the house that he severed his ties with his family.
Around Nov 14, Mohammed travelled by train to Rawalpindi. There he was met by Amir, an ‘agent’ or middleman of the kidney trade, who drove him in a Suzuki van with tinted windows to a house about 30 minutes away where he was to stay for the next few days. “No one else seemed to be living there,” said Mohammed. “Amir would bring me my meals. He’d say ‘don’t go out, don’t talk to anyone, there’s a lot of sakhti by the government. If you get caught, it’ll be difficult to get out of it’.”
Photos show Japanese whaling off Antarctica, group says
Australia has sharply criticised Japan after photos emerged allegedly showing it had resumed whaling off Antarctica.
Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd released the images, which it said showed a dead minke whale on a Japanese vessel on Sunday.
It comes two days after Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Sydney to bolster defence ties with Australia.
Australia's Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg said it was not necessary to kill whales for study.
"The Australian Government is deeply disappointed that Japan has decided to return to the Southern Ocean this summer to undertake so-called 'scientific' whaling,'" he said on Monday.
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