Many still struggling 6 years after quake, nuclear disaster
(Mainichi Japan)
Survivors pledged to reconstruct their hometowns Saturday on the sixth anniversary of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters in northeastern Japan, with many still struggling to rebuild their lives.
"I never imagined I would be living in temporary housing for six years," said Hirotoshi Masukura, a 61-year-old evacuee from an off-limits area near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where radioactive decontamination work could take decades.
Although the evacuation order will be lifted in part of his hometown of Namie in Fukushima Prefecture at the end of this month, Masukura has decided not to return due to illness.
World faces worst humanitarian crisis since 1945, says UN official
Twenty million people face starvation without an immediate injection of funds in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria, warns Stephen O’Brien
The world faces the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war with more than 20 million people in four countries facing starvation and famine, a senior United Nations official has warned.
Without collective and coordinated global efforts, “people will simply starve to death” and “many more will suffer and die from disease”, Stephen O’Brien, the UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the security council in New York on Friday.
He urged an immediate injection of funds for Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and northeast Nigeria plus safe and unimpeded access for humanitarian aid “to avert a catastrophe.”
Trump’s revised travel ban suffers first legal blow
A federal judge in Wisconsin dealt the first legal blow to President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on Friday, barring enforcement of the policy to deny US entry to the wife and child of a Syrian refugee already granted asylum in the US.
The temporary restraining order, granted by U.S. District Judge William Conley in Madison, applies only to the family of the Syrian refugee, who brought the case anonymously to protect the identities of his wife and daughter, still living in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.
But it represents the first of several challenges brought against Trump’s newly amended executive order, issued on March 6 and due to go into effect on March 16, to draw a court ruling in opposition to its enforcement.
Thailand authorities end 23-day siege of Dhammakaya, nation's largest temple
Authorities have ended a 23-day siege of Thailand's largest temple, where worshippers and monks defied repeated attempts to arrest a prominent monk wanted on charges of money laundering and accepting stolen assets.
Worshippers wept on Saturday as they re-entered the 400-hectare Dhammakaya temple complex on the outskirts of Bangkok, which thousands of police and soldiers had blockaded in an operation to arrest 72-year-old Phra Dhammajayo, the temple's honorary abbot.
"Welcome home. It's great to see everyone again," the temple tweeted.Israel wants Arab neighbors to turn down volume on call to prayer
Arab Israelis say a bill being reviewed by Israel's parliament would take unfair aim at the Muslim call to prayer.
A draft bill that would force mosques to lower the volume of their call to prayer passed in Israel’s parliament on Wednesday, rousing indignation from Arab lawmakers who see it as an affront to Muslim Israelis.
One version of the bill would prohibit all places of religious worship from using loudspeakers between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., reported the BBC, while an alternative version would enact a round-the-clock ban on loudspeakers considered "unreasonably loud and likely to cause disturbance." Both versions passed the Knesset, but the bill will have to go through further readings before becoming law.
Some Arab-Israeli parliament members tore up copies of the proposal during debate, with one of them, Joint List party leader Ayman Odeh, ejected from the chamber after doing so.
South Korea: The day Park Geun-hye was ousted
Thousands celebrate removal of South Korean leader, while supporters storm court leaving two protesters dead.
As we walked the last couple of kilometres to the Constitutional Court, the extraordinary nature of this day was clear from the start.
The streets around it were cordoned off with more police buses I can remember seeing in a concentrated area in Seoul – and that's saying something for a police force that knows how to precision park buses by the score.
We were stopped for ID checks half a dozen times.
The sound of President Park Geun-hye's supporters several streets away boomed in the background.
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