More than 1,600 people have died following the devastating earthquake in Myanmar, with locals in some areas telling the BBC they had been left to dig through rubble for survivors with their bare hands.
The quake has flattened much of Mandalay – the ancient capital and second-largest city which is home to about 1.5 million people.
An acute lack of equipment, patchy communication networks and wrecked roads and bridges have hampered the search.
Myanmar’s military government or junta, which seized power in 2021, is also no longer in control of much of the country after a four-year civil war against rebel groups and an anti-coup resistance.
Although rescue efforts have been under way since Friday and international aid has begun to enter the country, help is yet to reach the worst-hit areas and ordinary people have been trying to dig survivors out by hand.
Widely shared footage shows two men moving rubble to pry out a young woman trapped between two concrete slabs.
The BBC has spoken to locals who said that people were screaming for help from under the debris.
Rescuers also pulled a woman alive from the wreckage of a 12-storey apartment block in Mandalay some 30 hours after it collapsed, but the Red Cross says more than 90 people may still be trapped there.
In a nearby township, authorities found the bodies of 12 preschool children and a teacher under a building housing a kindergarten.
Cracks and surface distortions to the main highway between the biggest city Yangon, the capital Nay Pyi Taw and Mandalay had caused severe transport disruptions, UN humanitarian agency OCHA said. (BBC)
Utah has become the first US state to ban the use of fluoride in its public water, following concerns raised by health secretary Robert F Kennedy that the mineral poses potential health risks.
Governor Spencer Cox signed the ban into law this week, which will go into effect on 7 May. Other states, including Florida and Ohio, are weighing similar legislation.
Fluoride has been added to US drinking water since 1945 to prevent cavities.
Utah’s move to remove the mineral has been criticised by experts, who worry it will have consequences for oral health, especially for children.
The bill, signed by Cox on Thursday, prohibits communities from adding fluoride to their public water supplies.
The law does not mention any public health concerns related to the mineral, but Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius – who introduced the bill in the state legislature – has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children.
Gricius has said that her bill would give citizens a choice whether they want to consume fluoride or not.
This concern over fluoride was previously raised by Kennedy, the US health secretary, who said in November that “the Trump White House will advise all US water systems to remove fluoride from public water”.
He alleged the chemical found in toothpaste and regularly used by dentists “is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease”.
Most public health experts have rejected these claims and alleged that Kennedy had cited data from studies conducted in countries with far higher levels of fluoride in their water systems than the US has.
The American Dental Association sharply criticised Utah for its decision, saying that it shows “wanton disregard for the oral health and well-being of their constituents”.
“It is disheartening to see that a proven, public health policy, which exists for the greater good of an entire community’s oral health, has been dismantled based on distorted pseudoscience,” the association’s president, Denver dentist Brett Kessler, said in a statement.
Many public health groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have long supported adding small amounts of fluoride to drinking water.
The US Public Health Service reduced the amount of fluoride it recommended adding to water in 2015, but the federal government has encouraged states since the 1960s to add small amounts of the chemical to water to help prevent cavities and aid oral health. (BBC)
A mother, 37, and her two-year-old daughter have died from injuries they sustained in Thursday’s car attack in the German city of Munich, police say.
At least 37 people were injured when a car was driven into a crowd of people at a trade union rally.
The driver was a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, police said, identified in local media as Farhad N.
He was arrested at the scene and prosecutors say he has admitted to carrying out the attack. He appeared to have a religious motivation, officials said.
The mother and child were among those taken to hospital with serious injuries following the attack.
Authorities have said the suspect arrived in Germany in 2016 and, although his application for asylum was turned down, he was allowed to stay in Germany as he faced risks being deported back to Afghanistan. He had a valid residence and work permit.
He had no previous criminal record, and police said there was no evidence of a link to a jihadist group. He also appears to have acted alone, German authorities say.
On Friday, police said the suspect told officers during questioning that he had driven his Mini Cooper car intentionally into the crowd.
Munich public prosecutor Gabriele Tilmann told reporters that the suspect had said “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest in Arabic – when he was detained. She suggested he “may have had an Islamist motivation”.
Campaigning around Germany’s election on 23 February has for weeks been embroiled in a fevered debate about migration. It was called due to the collapse of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government last year.
A number of violent incidents linked to migrants over the past year have led to increased support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In December, six people were killed and at least 299 injured after a man drove a car into a German Christmas market.
The suspect was a 50-year-old Saudi asylum seeker who had been an outspoken critic of Islam.
And in January an attack that shocked the country saw a two-year-old child and a passer-by who attempted to intervene killed after a group of children were stabbed in a park in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg.
The suspect in that attack is a 28-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. (BBC)
Campaigners have welcomed the release of a Saudi PhD student at Leeds University who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for posting tweets in support of women’s rights.
Salma al-Shehab, 36, is understood to have left the prison in Saudi Arabia where she was being held and has been reunited with her two young children.
“It is fantastic news,” said Lina al-Hathloul, head of monitoring and advocacy at the Europe-based Saudi rights group ALQST. “She has not seen her children during her whole four years of imprisonment.”
Al-Shehab was arrested while on holiday in Saudi Arabia in January 2021. Campaigners say she was kept in solitary confinement for more than nine months before she was brought before Saudi Arabia’s specialised criminal court.
She was initially sentenced to serve three years in prison for the “crime” of using a website to “cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security”.
An appeals court later handed down the new sentence– 34 years in prison followed by a 34-year travel ban – after a public prosecutor asked the court to consider other alleged crimes.
The additional charges included the allegation that al-Shehab was “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets.
Amnesty International said her “crime” was no more than “posting tweets in support of women’s rights”.
Last March an open letter was signed by more than 300 academics, students and employees at Leeds University calling for al-Shehab’s immediate release. It said she had been jailed “on the basis of peaceful tweets”.
Al-Hathloul said al-Shehab had had a hard time in prison. “It has been difficult for her,” she said. “Not seeing her kids, not knowing whether she could complete her PhD. She was originally sentenced to six years, then it was increased to 34 years and then it was reduced to 27 years and then 4 years. It has been a nightmare really not to even be able to trust the judiciary and its decisions
“She is very strong. Salma is a very brave woman. She went on hunger strike to complain about the conditions.”
In June 2023 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) found her detention to be arbitrary and called for her immediate release.
Al-Hathhoul said al-Shehab was not an exception. “She is symbolic of a pattern. She was released because of this pressure but many more others still remain in prison for the same charges.”
The battle now was to get al-Shehab’s travel ban lifted so she could return to Leeds where she is a dental student, al-Hathhoul said. (Guardian)
Brazil’s president this week amped up pressure for a major oil project to go ahead at the mouth of the Amazon River, despite criticism from environmentalists as the country prepares to host UN climate talks in November.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 79, aspires to make Brazil a leader in the fight against global warming, but has fiercely defended oil exploration as key to the growth of Latin America’s biggest economy.
“We want oil because it will be around for a long time,” Lula said Wednesday, arguing that the windfall from the black gold should be used “to finance the energy transition, which will be very expensive.
He was speaking as Brazil’s environmental protection agency IBAMA, an autonomous public body, is mulling whether to grant state-owned oil giant Petrobras an exploration license in an offshore area known as the Equatorial Margin.
That maritime area extends over 350,000 square kilometers (135,000 square miles) across northern Brazil and lies some 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the mouth of the Amazon River.
Petrobras estimates the potential reserves in the basin at 10 billion barrels.
Brazil’s proven reserves amounted to 15.9 billion barrels in 2023, according to the government.
However, the project has been highly criticized, given that fossil fuels such as oil are the main cause of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
The first two years of Lula’s third presidential mandate saw multiple environmental successes, with a sharp reduction in deforestation and the upward revision of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
But experts say the looming oil project tarnishes Lula’s environmental ambitions, just a few months before COP30 — the 30th session of the UN climate change conference — is held for the first time in the Amazon, in the city of Belem.
“You can’t be a climate leader and at the same time aim to increase the production of fossil fuels,” said Suely Araujo, from Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory.
Araujo, a former IBAMA president, said the argument that the energy transition can be financed with oil revenues “is tantamount to saying that we want to wage war to obtain peace.”
“Opening the Amazon to fuel exploration goes against the (government’s) discourse on preserving the Amazon to help regulate the climate,” said Ilan Zugman, Latin America director of the 350.org climate NGO.
Almost half of the energy consumed in Brazil comes from renewable sources, more than three times the global average, according to official data.
But the country is also Latin America’s largest oil producer and the eighth largest in the world, producing an average of 3.4 million barrels of oil per day in 2024.
Lula has pointed out that countries like Guyana and Suriname were already “exploring oil very close to our Equatorial Margin.”
“We need to find a solution in which we guarantee the country, the world and the people that we will not blow up any trees, nothing in the Amazon River, nothing in the Atlantic Ocean,” Lula said this week.
Toya Manchineri, from the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, warned that the project also threatened Indigenous peoples and could cause “irreversible environmental damage, destroying forests and polluting rivers.” (Vanguard)
Saudi Arabia has condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that the kingdom’s land be used to establish a Palestinian state.
In a statement on Sunday, the Saudi Foreign Ministry accused Netanyahu of attempting to “divert attention” from Israel’s ongoing “crimes” in Gaza, including “ethnic cleansing”.
“The kingdom affirms that the Palestinian people have a right to their land, and they are not intruders or immigrants to it who can be expelled whenever the brutal Israeli occupation wishes,” said the Foreign Ministry.
On Thursday, Netanyahu responded to an interviewer on Israel’s Channel 14 who misspoke by saying “Saudi state” instead of “Palestinian state”.
“The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there,” Netanyahu said.
The interviewer replied that it was an idea worth exploring.
The exchange drew angry reactions from Arab states, including Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq, as well as the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
“These dangerous and irresponsible statements confirm the approach of the Israeli occupation forces in their disrespect for international and UN laws and treaties and the sovereignty of states,” said GCC Secretary-General Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi.
The Saudi Foreign Ministry thanked the “brotherly countries” for denouncing Netanyahu’s remarks.
Discussions of the fate of Palestinians in Gaza had already been upended by an earlier shock proposal from United States President Donald Trump for the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling Palestinians elsewhere in a move that would amount to ethnic cleansing. That suggestion, amid a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, has also been roundly condemned by Arab leaders.
Trump has also said Saudi Arabia would not require the formation of a Palestinian state as a precondition to normalise ties with Israel, a claim Riyadh has repeatedly denied.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,700 Palestinians including about 18,000 children, and wrecked much of the enclave’s infrastructure. More than 14,000 more people are missing and are presumed to be dead.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 that sparked the war killed 1,139 people and seized more than 250 captives, dozens of whom are still believed to be in the enclave. (AlJazeera)
The Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Alban Bagbin, has suspended four lawmakers for two weeks following a violent altercation during a ministerial screening session on Thursday.
The suspended lawmakers, Rockson Dafeamakpor, Frank Annor-Dompreh, Alhassan Tampuuli, and Jerry Shai, were on Friday penalised for what Bagbin described as a “gross affront to the dignity of parliament and a blatant contempt of the House”.
It was gathered that the speaker also announced a two-week suspension of four lawmakers for “contemptus parlamenti in facie parlamenti”.
The clash occurred during the vetting of ministerial nominees from the ruling National Democratic Congress.
Lawmakers from the opposition New Patriotic Party accused the vetting committee of rushing the process, while NDC members alleged that the opposition was deliberately stalling proceedings with prolonged questioning.
Tensions reached a breaking point when NPP’s leader in parliament, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, questioned Samuel George, the nominee for communications minister, for over five hours.
The prolonged interrogation led to frustration among committee members, triggering the brawl.
Furniture was overturned, microphones were destroyed, and lawmakers exchanged blows.
A special seven-member committee has been tasked with investigating the incident and is expected to submit its report within 10 days.
Additionally, the cost of repairs for damaged parliamentary property will be deducted from the allowances of those found responsible.
This marks the third time in four years that Ghana’s lawmakers have resorted to physical confrontations during legislative proceedings.
Similar incidents occurred in 2021 during the election of a new speaker and later that year during debates on the electronic transaction levy bill. (Punch)
Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel has criticised her own party leader for passing a motion in parliament with support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
In a statement, Merkel accused CDU leader Friedrich Merz of turning his back on a previous pledge not to work with AfD in the Bundestag.
The parliament descended into heckles on Wednesday after votes from the far-right party meant a non-binding CDU motion on tougher immigration rules was passed.
This is a highly unusual intervention by the woman who led Germany for 16 years, stepping in to criticise the actions of her former political rival.
Merz, who is tipped to be Germany’s next chancellor due to CDU’s lead in the polls, said on Wednesday that a policy was not wrong just because the “wrong people back it” and that he had not sought nor wanted AfD’s support.
But Merkel accused him of breaking a pledge he made in November to work with the Social Democratic Party and the Greens to pass legislation, not AfD.
This was to ensure “neither in determining the agenda nor in voting on the matter here in the House will there be a random or actually brought about majority with those from the AfD,” read a quote from Merz in Merkel’s statement.
The former chancellor said she fully supported this earlier “expression of great state political responsibility”.
“I think it is wrong to no longer feel bound by this proposal and thereby knowingly allow the AfD to gain a majority in a vote in the German Bundestag on 29 January 2025 for the first time.”
She said “all democratic parties” needed to work together “to do everything they can to prevent such terrible attacks in the future as those that took place shortly before Christmas in Magdeburg and a few days ago in Aschaffenburg”.
This is a rare intervention from Merkel.
To openly criticise her own party’s candidate for chancellor – just weeks out from an election – is a big move and will add rocket fuel to a an already explosive story in German politics.
Merkel and Merz go back a long way – and not as the best of friends.
He was famously side-lined by Merkel in the early 2000s after she won out in a CDU power struggle.
Merz would go on to quit front-line politics for many years before making his return. (BBC)
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