Six In The Morning Thursday 18 March 2021

 

Atlanta shootings: Suspect charged with murder as victims identified

A man has been charged with murder over the killing of eight people at massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia.

Officials cannot yet confirm if the attack, in which six Asian women were killed, was racially motivated. Four victims were named on Wednesday.

The suspect, named as Robert Aaron Long, faces multiple counts of murder as well as aggravated assault.

Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said the suspect may have been a patron and claimed to have a "sex addiction".

UK's Cop26 president calls for world to get on track to hit net zero by 2050

Alok Sharma sets out UK’s aims as host of climate talks, including new emissions targets for 2030

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent

Thu 18 Mar 2021 14.30 GMT

The world must be put on a path to reaching net zero by 2050 if the goal of holding global temperature rises below 1.5C is to be kept within reach, the UK host of this year’s climate talks has said.

Alok Sharma, the president of the UN Cop26 climate summit, said that for the talks in Glasgow in November to be judged a success, governments must urgently set out their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade including announcing an end to new coal power plants and commitments to phase out existing ones. Sharma is also urging countries to end the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles.

Denmark plans to restrict number of ‘non-Western’ residents in neighbourhoods

The bill aims to enforce the restriction within ten years

Clea Skopeliti

Denmark has announced plans to restrict the number of residents of “non-Western” origin living in neighbourhoods across the country to 30 per cent of the area’s population.

The bill is part of a raft of controversial legislation aiming to reduce “parallel societies” in the Scandinavian country, proposing a cap of 30 per cent in all local areas within ten years, according to reports in Danish outlets.

The interior minister, Kaare Dybvad Bek, said the legislation was meant to aid “integration”.

Tanzania's Magufuli was both revered and reviled

Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli has died after weeks out of the public eye. He will we be remembered for reasons both good and bad, says DW's Mohammed Khelef.

Tanzania's government says President John Pombe Magufuli died as a result of a heart condition.  

This follows weeks of speculation that his absence from public view would prove to be as ironic as it was tragic: that having ignored and laughed in the face of international guidelines published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the 61-year-old might have contracted COVID-19 himself.

Whatever the cause of death, his passing highlights the painful division that runs through the heart of Tanzania.

Lebanon: Anger mounts over economic crisis as politicians dawdle

Pharmacies shutting and petrol stations rationing scarce fuel supplies as the country plunges deeper into economic collapse.

Pharmacies went on strike and petrol stations rationed scarce fuel on Thursday across Lebanon as public anger over an accelerating economic collapse intensified with little sign of an end to a high-level political standoff.

Politicians have since late 2019 failed to agree on a rescue plan to unlock foreign cash that Lebanon desperately needs.

“We are really looking at the abyss, seeing it very clearly, and I think it’s either now or never,” Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center said, alluding to the protracted failure to form a viable new government able to launch reforms.

Covid-19 drove hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou. A generation of mixed-race children is their legacy

By Jenni Marsh, CNN

Updated 1026 GMT (1826 HKT) March 18, 2021

When the coronavirus pandemic ground China to a near-halt in early February last year, Youssouf Dieng jetted back to Dakar for, he thought, a brief sojourn.

In reality, it was a year before Dieng -- who had worked as a goods trader in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou in southern China for two decades -- could return, on an air ticket three times the usual cost, and a complicated business visa. By then, the pandemic had driven hundreds of Africans out of Guangzhou, sparked the most severe anti-Black racial clashes in China in decades, and remade business operations, with Chinese factories connecting with African customers directly over e-commerce platforms.

"Now it is very, very quiet," Dieng says of Little Africa, a nook of Guangzhou informally named after the swell of thriving African businessmen who once lived, ate and prayed there in huge numbers. "Not many foreigners now, and all the small shops are closed. Small business around here? No more."