Six In The Morning Thursday 24 February 2022

 Zelensky updates country on fighting

James Waterhouse

Kyiv correspondent, BBC News

President Zelensky has again spoken to the people of Ukraine this afternoon, swapping his dark suit for a military uniform.

In his latest address he compares the fighting to the "sound of the new iron curtain that’s falling and closing Russia from the civilised world", adding "our task is for that curtain not to fall on Ukrainian territory."

He's spoken about an operational pause and claims Ukrainian forces have been successfully defending the eastern Donbas region, as well as fighting near Kharkiv.

Zelensky says the most problematic area is in Kherson in the south of the country, where Russian troops have moved north from annexed Crimea.

In the north, he says the enemy is continuing to push into region, and he's described heavy fighting at Chernobyl.

Moldova braced for Ukrainian arrivals

Nick Thorpe

BBC Eastern Europe Correspondent

More than 4,000 people, mostly women and children, have so far fled across the border from Ukraine into Moldova. It’s not yet clear whether they intend stay there or cross into Romania.

One explanation for the high number of women and children is that the Ukrainian authorities are preventing the departure of men of military age, but there is no independent confirmation of that.

“We expect much larger numbers,” Roland Schilling, regional representative of the UN Refugee Agency, told the BBC from Chisinau.

“We are aware of large queues forming at border crossings. We are preparing our humanitarian response together with other UN agencies.”

The UN has previously warned that an invasion of Ukraine could trigger a large-scale refugee crisis.

Tycoon’s son sentenced to death in Pakistan in high-profile rape and murder case

Zahir Jaffer tortured and beheaded Noor Mukadam, in July last year, in case that sparked outrage over violence against women

Haroon Janjua Islamabad

@JanjuaHaroon

Thu 24 Feb 2022 13.40 GMT

A court in Islamabad has sentenced to death the tycoon’s son who raped and murdered Noor Mukadam, a case that sparked outrage in Pakistan.

Mukadam, 27, the daughter of a former Pakistani diplomat, was held captive, tortured and beheaded in July last year by Zahir Jaffer, a member of a well-known industrialist family.

Jaffer, 30, a Pakistani-American citizen, is thought to have attacked Mukadam after she refused his marriage proposal. Two household employees of Jaffer, a guard and a gardener, were both sentenced to 10 years for abetting the murder. The court heard they had blocked the young woman’s attempts to leave the luxury mansion. Jaffer’s parents, who had faced charges in connection with covering up the killing, were acquitted by the court.

What really happened at Chernobyl? How the world’s worst nuclear accident happened

Decades after the catastrophe, now a byword for state secrecy, crucial elements remain a mystery, Andy Gregory writes

For most residents of Pripyat, Saturday 26 April 1986 seemed a relatively unremarkable day.

Some would have been aware of an incident at the nearby Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, around which the town had sprouted up in the decade prior, but, in the words of one off-duty engineer: “There was no panic. The city lived a normal life. People were sunbathing on the beach.”

But the warning signs were there.

Waters choppy for cruise companies as pandemic continues

The cruise industry has run into rough waters. After boom years, the sector was suddenly forced into an almost-complete standstill due to the pandemic. Has it managed to recover?

Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, cruise holidays were the fastest-growing sector of the tourism industry. Major operators including TUI Cruises, MSC and Aida recorded solid earnings. But when the pandemic hit, the industry almost came to a complete standstill: Out of the 400 large cruise ships ordinarily operated by travel companies though the world, some 90% were docked.

Today, the industry has recovered somewhat, with two-thirds of vessels back at sea. TUI Cruises was one of the few companies to continue offering trips from July 2020 onwards. It says that currently, five out of seven of its flagship cruise ships are in operation. But planning ahead is difficult, as holidaymakers are now opting for last-minute bookings, says company spokeswoman Friederike Grönemeyer.

France violated rights of children held in 'inhuman' Syria camps, UN watchdog says

France has violated the rights of French children by leaving them for years in inhuman and life-threatening conditions in Syrian camps for family members of suspected jihadists, a UN watchdog said Thursday. 

The UN child rights committee ruled that "France has the responsibility and power to protect the French children in the Syrian camps against an imminent risk to their lives by taking action to repatriate them."

It stressed in a statement that "the prolonged detention of the child victims in life-threatening conditions also amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment."

Covid-19 is killing more people now than during most of the pandemic. Here's who's still at risk

By Deidre McPhillips, CNN

Updated 1122 GMT (1922 HKT) February 24, 2022

Plummeting Covid-19 case counts across the United States are leading to lifted mask mandates and more conversations about steps toward normalcy -- but more people are dying of the coronavirus now than during most points of the pandemic.

More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported in the United States each day for the past month. Average daily deaths are falling, but from a very high point. They dipped just below that mark in recent days, to about 1,900 on Monday; the federal holiday may have delayed reporting.

Before Omicron became the dominant coronavirus strain in the US, there were only about 100 other days when there were more than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.