Six In The Morning Saturday 26 February 2022

 

Kyiv warns of sabotage groups as curfew imposed

Women making firebombs to defend their city

Sarah Rainsford

reporting from Dnipro, eastern Ukraine

In the centre of this major Ukrainian city, we just found crowds of women crouched on the grass making Molotov cocktails. These are homemade weapons, to defend their homes and their streets in Dnipro against the advance of Russian troops.

There were teachers, lawyers and housewives surrounded by glass bottles, rags and fuel. They said they were trying not to think too hard about what they were actually doing because, as one woman told me, it was "too terrifying".

But they do want to be ready for anything. This city has not come under attack, but it’s already feeling the cost of this war. The military hospital has 400 beds, and they’re full of wounded soldiers from all over eastern Ukraine.

‘A flashy theme park’: outcry over Modi’s plans for the Gandhi ashram

The site Mahatma Gandhi lived at during 1917-30 is getting a very costly makeover many think is meant to distort his legacy

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Ahmedabad

Like most things in Mahatma Gandhi’s life, his ashram in the Indian city of Ahmedabad was simple and austere. Yet between 1917 and 1930, these modest white bungalows, set on the bank of the Sabarmati river in the state of Gujarat, were the beating heart of Gandhi’s non-violent freedom struggle against British rule and his experiments in upending India’s oppressive caste system.

Gandhi – who would eventually lead India to independence and remains a global icon for peace – left the Sabarmati ashram in 1930, never to return, and in the years since, it has become one of India’s most sacrosanct sites. It is where Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and most recently Donald Trump all paid a visit to during their trips to India.

France intercepts Russia-bound cargo ship ‘Baltic Leader’ in the English Channel and ‘escorts’ it to Boulogne

The ship has been suspected of belonging to a firm targeted by EU sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine

Lamiat Sabin

The French navy has intercepted a Russian cargo ship in the English Channel that was bound for Saint Petersburg, the BBC has reported.

French officials told the broadcaster that the ship was intercepted according to new European Union sanctions imposed on Russian entities and individuals after Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine.

The ship, named ‘Baltic Leader’, had been stopped in Honfleur, in the Normandy region of northern France, and has been “escorted” to a port in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, the BBC added citing an official.

Saudi Arabia: Many activists remain in jail

Family and activists hope that Raif Badawi will be released soon. However, the well-known blogger is not the only activist behind bars for expressing dissenting views.

If everything goes well, the imprisoned Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi will be released next week after almost a decade in jail.

After years of campaigning for his release, human rights activists and his wife Ensaf Haider are pinning their hopes on a release by early March.

Badawi has spent almost ten years behind bars for publishing a blog called Free Saudi Liberals. He was sentenced to a decade in prison in 2014 for "insulting Islam" because he had discussed the separation of religion and state in Saudi politics on his blog.

Drugmaker Shionogi applies for oral COVID pill approval in Japan

Japanese pharmaceutical firm Shionogi & Co said Friday it has applied for approval of its oral COVID-19 drug, after mid-phase clinical trials showed efficacy in reducing the coronavirus in the body.

It is the first such pill developed by a Japanese drugmaker and will be administered to mild-to-moderate coronavirus patients, regardless of whether they are at risk of hospitalization, to prevent the virus from multiplying in the body.

The Osaka-based firm said it had filed with the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry for conditional early approval of the drug known as S-217622, following the results of phase-2 clinical trials.

America's disdain for Black men and boys hasn't diminished in the years since Trayvon Martin was killed

Analysis by Brandon Tensley, CNN

Updated 1311 GMT (2111 HKT) February 26, 2022

Police officers' aggressive handling of a Black teenager in New Jersey wasn't anomalous -- it was part of an age-old pattern of treating Black men and boys as threats to be subdued.

In a video that went viral last week, two Bridgewater Township officers break up a fight at a mall between two boys: one White, the other Black. While the White teenager is pushed onto a nearby couch, the Black teenager is pinned to the ground and then handcuffed. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who's representing the family of the Black teenager, said in a recent statement that the incident pulled into focus "the kind of racial bias that we need to root out of our system of policing."

But it's not only the country's policing system that fails to recognize the humanity of Black boys. The impulse in the US to treat them not as children but as brutes, as villains, extends far beyond law enforcement.