OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadians say they are concerned political strife in the United States will undermine security and economic growth at home, according to a new poll, as an anti-vaccine mandate protest praised by former U.S. president Donald Trump gripped the capital and affected the border. The anxiety captured in the Angus Reid Institute survey provides a backdrop to protests across the country, at the international border, and especially in Ottawa, the capital, where police say Americans have provided a “significant” amount of money and organizational support.

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SYDNEY (Reuters) - A day after Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison apologized in parliament for the treatment of women who had suffered sexual abuse there, a prominent campaigner said she wanted to see action more than words. Former political staffer Brittany Higgins, who says she was raped in a parliament office by a fellow staffer, said she was concerned workplace sexual abuse was in danger of becoming a “political perception problem neutralised and turned into a net positive”. A review sparked by Higgins going public with details of her alleged sexual assault in a ministerial office found half of parliamentary staff had experienced harassment, bullying or sexual assault.

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ANTANANARIVO (Reuters) - The death toll from Cyclone Batsirai in Madagascar rose to 80 from a previously reported 29, the state disaster relief agency said on Wednesday as information continued to filter in from areas of the country that were badly affected. The cyclone slammed into the large Indian Ocean island late on Saturday, knocking down houses and electricity lines as it battered the southeastern coast until it moved away late on Sunday, leaving 91,000 people with destroyed or damaged homes.

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LONDON (Al-Jazeera) - The World Health Organization (WHO) is urging wealthier countries to step up and end the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency by helping low and middle-income nations obtain tests, treatments and vaccines. The appeal, launched on Wednesday, asks 55 of the world’s richest nations to provide $23bn in funding. The money will go to the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator program, a global initiative set up to develop and equitably distribute tests, treatments and vaccines. “Supporting the rollout of tools to fight COVID-19 globally will help to curb virus transmission, break the cycle of variants, relieve overburdened health workers and systems, and save lives,” the WHO said in a statement.

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NEW YORK (Al-Jzeera) -The UN’s top court on Wednesday ordered Uganda to pay the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) $325mn in reparations over a brutal war between the African neighbors that began in the late 1990s. “The court notes that the reparation awarded to the DRC for damage to persons and to property reflects the harm suffered by individuals and communities as a result of Uganda’s breach of its international obligations,” the court’s president, US judge Joan E Donoghue, said. The compensation order came more than 15 years after the UN court ruled in a complex, 119-page judgement that fighting by Ugandan troops in DRC breached international law. In 2005 the ICJ ruled that Uganda had to pay reparations, but they were never paid.

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MEXICO CITY (Global Times) - Ambassadors from six Latin American countries have denounced an upcoming auction of pre-Hispanic artifacts in France, reviving a long-standing grievance of the region. The joint statement came a day after Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador denounced the practice as “immoral” after a recent major auction. The Paris ambassadors of Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru and the Dominican Republic condemned “in the strongest terms” the sale of pre-Hispanic artefacts organized by a number of auction houses in the coming days. In their joint statement they called for the auctions to be halted. They denounced what they said was the “continuation of practices linked to the illicit trade in cultural property, which damage the heritage, history and identity of our native peoples.”