Six In The Morning Sunday 3 October 2021

 

Outcry in Brazil over photos of people scavenging through animal carcasses

Pictures of destitute Brazilians searching scraps for food lay bare scale of economic and social crisis

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

Sun 3 Oct 2021 10.48 BST

Heart-wrenching photographs of destitute Brazilians scavenging through a heap of animal carcasses for food have laid bare the hunger crisis blighting Latin America’s most populous nation, where millions have been plunged into deprivation by the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation.

The images, taken in Rio last week by the prize-winning photojournalist Domingos Peixoto, show the group rummaging for scraps in the back of a lorry that had been transporting the discarded offal and bones to a factory that makes pet food and soap.

“Some days … I want to cry,” the lorry’s driver, José Divino Santos, told the reporter Rafael Nascimento de Souza, who was covering the story with Peixoto for the Rio newspaper Extra.

Lagos in NigeriaA Week in the World’s Most Chaotic City

Lagos is poised to become the world’s biggest city. The Nigerian megacity is a massive experiment – unregulated and wild, with endless traffic jams, waterfront slums and an impressively resilient population.

Every now and then, children slip through the cracks between the wooden planks or fall over the edge and disappear into the sea. "Just yesterday, I got my head stuck at the bottom of the sea,” says a three-year-old girl, laughing aloud. Aliate Ajagun, her mother, laughs along: "Then I just bend down and pull them back up.”

There is nothing out of the ordinary here about toddlers disappearing into the sea and then reappearing. Indeed, Lagosians, the people of Lagos, consider very little to be out of the ordinary.

‘French psychiatry has gone downhill in part because of American influence’

As the French government launches a new mental health drive including reimbursing the cost of therapy sessions, psychiatry professionals are scrutinising a sector that they say has gone from “pioneering and innovating” to faltering – and that American hegemony is partly to blame for the French decline.   

"The state of French psychiatry is catastrophic," Marie-José Durieux, a children’s psychiatrist at a Paris hospital, says bluntly. It’s a diagnosis shared by many others in her profession, and one reason why the French government held a two-day conference on mental health and psychiatry this week with industry professionals (l’Assises de la santé mentale et de la psychiatrie) in an attempt to rejuvenate a failing branch of the French medical establishment.  

“Just 30 years ago, psychiatry was practised with a lot of interest and excitement,” Durieux says. “We associated psychiatry with imaginative sciences like philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and literature, and we pushed the field further.”

Japanese abductees' families urge Kishida to resolve issue with N Korea

Family members of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s have urged Fumio Kishida, the new president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who is set to become the next prime minister, to work hard for the swift repatriation of the victims.

With little progress on the abductions, the need to resolve the issue has become more urgent in recent years as the victims' family members are aging.

"I'm not sure how many prime ministers came and went, but nothing has changed," Sakie Yokota, the 85-year-old mother of an abductee, told reporters in Kawasaki. Her husband died at the age of 87 last year without seeing their daughter again.

Blast kills at least two civilians near Kabul mosque

A spokesperson from the interior ministry says at least two civilians were killed after bomb hit the entrance of a mosque in the Afghan capital.

 

An explosion outside a mosque in the Afghan capital killed at least two people on Sunday, senior Taliban officials said.

A spokesman from the interior ministry, Qari Sayed Khosti, told AFP: “Our initial information shows two civilians were killed and three wounded in the blast.”

The blast on Sunday struck near the entrance of the Eid Gah Mosque in Kabul where a memorial service was being held for the mother of Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

Why a hand gesture has South Korean companies on edge

By Jake Kwon, CNN Business

Updated 1037 GMT (1837 HKT) October 3, 2021

It took three years for players to notice the "offensive" hand gesture lurking in one of South Korea's most popular multiplayer games.

When players made their avatars laugh, talk or give the "OK" sign in "Lost Ark," they clicked an icon featuring a gesture that might have appeared benign to many: an index finger nearly touching a thumb.

But some of "Lost Ark's" users began claiming in August that the gesture was a sexist insult against men, and they demanded its removal.

What happened next underscores a trend in South Korea among anti-feminists, who have been increasingly pushing companies to repent for what they see as a conspiracy within the government and private companies to promote a feminist agenda.