Canaries volcano streams slow down, homes destroyed, thousands flee
La Palma, SpainReuters Lava flowing from Spain’s Canary Islands’ first volcanic eruption in 50 years has forced the evacuation of 5,500 people and destroyed around 100 houses but the streams were advancing slower than originally predicted, authorities said on Monday. The flow of molten rock will not reach the Atlantic Ocean on Monday evening as […]
UN chief, UK PM increase pressure on leaders for climate change funds
United Nations/Washington DC, USReuters UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged leaders of the world’s major economies including the United States to deliver on their commitments toward a $US100 billion per year climate fund with less than six weeks to go before a UN climate summit. Johnson and UN Secretary-General António Guterres hosted a roundtable of […]
Updated: Six killed in Russian university shooting, gunman in hospital
Updated: 10.20pm (AEDT)Moscow, RussiaReuters A student armed with a hunting rifle opened fire at a university in the Russian city of Perm on Monday, killing at least six people and wounding many others, investigators said. Video shown on news websites showed panicked students leaping from first-floor windows to escape Perm State University, around 1,300 kilometres […]
Expelled from Texas, returned Haitians lament lost American dream
Port-au-Prince, HaitiReuters More than 300 Haitians were returned home on Sunday after the United States ejected them from Texas, leaving many of the would-be migrants demoralised and angry that their search for a better life far away from their impoverished country was over. US border agents began removing groups of mostly Haitian migrants over the […]
Cambodia bat researchers on mission to track origin of COVID-19
Stung Treng, CambodiaReuters Researchers are collecting samples from bats in northern Cambodia in a bid to understand the coronavirus pandemic, returning to a region where a very similar virus was found in the animals a decade ago. Two samples from horseshoe bats were collected in 2010 in Stung Treng province near Laos and kept in […]
Study: Religion soothed US evangelicals at start of COVID. Politics put them at risk.
RNS Religion provided great comfort to evangelical Christians in the US in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But according to a study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, their politics made them less likely to see the virus as a threat. Researchers Landon Schnabel of Cornell University and Scott Schieman of […]
Lava pours out of volcano on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands
La Palma, Spain Reuters A volcano erupted on the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma on Sunday, sending lava shooting into the air and streaming in rivers towards houses in two villages from the Cumbre Vieja national park in the south of the island. Authorities had begun evacuating the infirm and some farm animals from […]
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ election kicks off
Hong Kong, ChinaReuters Fewer than 5,000 Hong Kong people from mostly pro-establishment circles began voting on Sunday for candidates to an election committee, vetted as loyal to Beijing, who will pick the city’s next China-backed leader and some of its legislature. Pro-democracy candidates are nearly absent from Hong Kong’s first election since Beijing overhauled the […]
Traumatic legacy: In Peru’s Andes, Shining Path leader’s death stirs buried memories of terror
MARCELO ROCHABRUN, of Reuters, reports how memories of a traumatic time in the history of Peru have been stirred by the death last week of Abimael Guzman, the professor who founded the Shining Path, while he was serving a life sentence…
Warming-hit nations get closer to creating UN climate rights envoy
London, UK/Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaThomson Reuters Foundation A long-standing push by climate-vulnerable nations for a new United Nations’ special envoy on climate change and human rights is making headway, as leaders call for stepped-up measures to deal with the “biggest threat to human rights this century”. Since 2019, the call for a new UN special rapporteur – a […]