LONDON (Reuters) -- Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike during a phone call in the run up to the invasion of Ukraine. Johnson, speaking to the BBC for a documentary, said the Russian leader had asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO, to which he had responded it would not be “for the foreseeable future”. “He threatened me at one point, and he said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute’ or something like that. Jolly,” Johnson said, recalling the “very long” and “most extraordinary” call in February 2022 which followed a visit by the then prime minister to Kyiv. Relations between Moscow and London had sunk to their lowest level in decades even before the Ukraine war, on the back of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in 2018.

 

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GENEVA (AFP) -- Three years to the day after the World Health Organization sounded the highest level of global alert over Covid-19, it said Monday the pandemic remains an international crisis. “The WHO director-general concurs with the advice offered by the committee regarding the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and determines that the event continues to constitute a public health emergency of international concern,” the UN health agency said in a statement.

 

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NEW DELHI (Dispatches) -- India’s Supreme Court will consider petitions next week against a government order blocking the sharing of clips of a BBC documentary that questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership during riots in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat. The government has dismissed as a biased “propaganda piece” the film released last week, titled “India: The Modi Question”, and blocked the sharing of any clips from it on social media. The Supreme Court will take up the petitions next week, Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud said in court on Monday. A New Delhi-based lawyer, M L Sharma, opposed the government’s move in one of the petitions to the Supreme Court. Modi, who aims for a third term in elections next year, was chief minister of Gujarat in February 2002, when a suspicious incident sparked one of the worst outbreaks of religious bloodshed in independent India. In attacks across the state at least 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslim, as crowds roamed the streets for days, targeting the religious minority. But activists put the toll at more than twice that, at about 2,500.

 

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TOKYO (AFP) -- A Japanese former soldier who was sexually assaulted by her colleagues said Monday she is suing the government and the perpetrators over the “superficial” apologies and mistreatment she received. Last year, Rina Gonoi went public about the assaults she was subjected to, after an investigation was dropped on the grounds of insufficient evidence. The military subsequently acknowledged the assaults and harassment that occurred in 2021, but only after public pressure by Gonoi, including a petition signed by over 100,000 people demanding an investigation. In December, five Japanese soldiers were dismissed over the case, but Gonoi said Monday the apologies she has received were “superficial” and lawyers for the assailants continued to trivialise the incidents in discussions over a settlement. While Japan may rank high on education and healthcare for women, its male-dominated society has long lagged behind industrial peers in placing women in boardrooms and in high public office. Government data shows just four percent of rape victims report the crime to police. 

 

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JOHANNESBURG (AFP) -- Gunmen opened fire on a group of people celebrating a birthday at the weekend in a township in South Africa, killing eight and wounding three others, police said Monday. The birthday celebrant was among those gunned down in the mass shooting in the southern port city of Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth. The motive of the attack is yet unknown. Shootings are common in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, fuelled by gang violence and alcohol. South Africa last year saw string of shootings that killed nearly two dozen at separate bars in working class suburbs in Johannesburg and in the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg.

 

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MELBOURNE (Reuters) -- Rio Tinto Ltd apologized on Monday for the loss of a tiny radioactive capsule that has sparked a radiation alert across parts of the vast state of Western Australia. The radioactive capsule, believed to have fallen from a truck, was part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore feed which had been entrusted to a specialist contractor to transport. The loss may have occurred up to two weeks ago. Authorities are now grappling with the daunting task of searching along the truck’s 1,400 kilometer (870 mile) journey from north of Newman - a small town in the remote Kimberley region - to a storage facility in the northeast suburbs of Perth - a distance longer than the length of Great Britain. The incident is another headache for the mining giant following its 2020 destruction of two ancient and sacred rock shelters in the Pilbara region of Western Australia for an iron ore mine.