Six In The Morning Wednesday 10 February 2021

 

Covid: WHO backs Oxford vaccine against new variants

By James Gallagher
Health and science correspondent

The World Health Organization recommends using the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.

Their experts said it should be used even in countries where variants of coronavirus that make the vaccine less effective are circulating.

The WHO also says the vaccine can be used in people aged over 65.

And that spacing out the two doses, as is happening in the UK, makes the vaccine more effective.

Climate action could save 'millions of lives' through clean air, diet and exercise

Meeting Paris goals would bring health benefits aside from tackling global heating, research says

PA Media

Wed 10 Feb 2021 12.53 GMT

Thousands of lives lost to air pollution, inactivity and unhealthy diets could be saved each year if the UK takes the action needed to tackle climate change, researchers have said.

Across the world, millions of lives could be saved if countries raise ambitions on cutting emissions to limit global heating to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, as they have committed to in the global Paris climate accord.

The researchers said the findings highlighted the added incentive of improvements to human health from tackling climate change.

‘It’s your turn to shake’: Woman who claims 20 firefighters raped her in France condemns her alleged attackers

'She was aged between 13 and 15, and she had very fragile health at that moment,' claims alleged victim's mother

Maya Oppenheim

Women’s Correspondent

@mayaoppenheim

“I have a message for my rapists,” Julie* says in her first ever statement to the public. “You thought that you killed me, but now it’s your turn to shake.”

Some 20 firemen from a range of fire stations across Paris are accused of raping Julie when she was aged between 13 and 15 years old in a case which has sent waves of rage crashing across France.

Julie, the fake name the French press have assigned to the young woman to protect her identity, has accused all of the firefighters of raping her between 2008 and 2010 after a fireman known as Pierre helped her when she had a severe anxiety seizure back in 2008.

Ethiopian Red Cross says 80 percent of Tigray cut off from aid

The Ethiopian Red Cross said Wednesday that 80 percent of the country's conflict-hit Tigray region was cut off from humanitarian assistance and warned tens of thousands could starve to death.

The grim assessment underscores fears of a humanitarian catastrophe three months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel Peace laureate, announced military operations aimed at toppling the region's former ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

"Eighty percent of the Tigray is unreachable at this particular time," the president of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, Abera Tola, told a press conference.

Measure of the man who stole Myanmar’s democracy

Min Aung Hlaing fits the mold of past military despots but is behind the democratic times in picking a fight with nearly the entire nation

By DAVID SCOTT MATHIESONFEBRUARY 10, 2021

On the outskirts of the Shan state city of Lashio, the community cemetery is divided by faith: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and other denominations.

But symbolizing the distance between civilian and soldier in modern Myanmar, across a small gulley is a graveyard full of hundreds of white crosses, casualties of the bloody 2009 campaign waged between the military, or Tatmadaw, and ethnic Chinese Kokang rebels.

The commander of that lethal operation was General Min Aung Hlaing, then-commander of the Bureau of Special Operations-2 encompassing northern Myanmar and Shan state, a region rife with multiple armed groups, drug production and lucrative legal and illegal border trade.

Twitter is stuck between a rock and a hard place in India

India's efforts to crack down on dissent have left Twitter with an impossible balancing act: protecting free speech, or risking its employees and business in one of the company's most vital markets.

The company said in a blog post Wednesday that it was "served with several separate blocking orders" by the Indian government against hundreds of Twitter accounts in the past 10 days.

Early last week, it briefly suspended many of those accounts at the government's behest but reinstated them a few hours later after a public outcry, including one handle with over 200,000 followers supporting the ongoing protests by farmers against new agricultural reforms and another belonging to one of the country's most prominent magazines.