News in Brief

Date: 18 March 2023 - 21:56

News ID: ۱۱۳۵۱۵

SYDNEY (Al Jazeera) – Millions of dead and rotting fish have clogged up a vast stretch of river near a remote town in the Australian outback as a searing heatwave sweeps through the region. Videos posted on social media showed boats ploughing through a blanket of dead fish smothering the water, with the surface barely visible underneath. On Friday, the New South Wales government said “millions” of fish had died in the Darling River near the small town of Menindee, in the third mass kill to hit the area in the recent past. The incident follows fish deaths in the same area in 2018 and 2019 where up to a million fish died from poor water flow, poor water quality and sudden temperature changes. “It’s horrific really, there’s dead fish as far as you can see,” Menindee resident Graeme McCrabb told AFP news agency. “It’s surreal to comprehend,” he said, adding this year’s fish kill appeared to be worse than previous ones.

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LONDON (Middle East Eye) – British Home Secretary Suella Braverman arrived in Rwanda on Saturday to discuss an agreement between the two countries to deport asylum seekers who arrive in the UK to the east African country. The talks come as the UK faces legal challenges and sharp criticism from campaigners over the deal, while Rwandan President Paul Kagame is under international pressure over his government’s support of the M23 rebel group, which is accused of perpetuating summary killings and rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Braverman will meet Kagame on her first visit to Rwanda, and said that the removal of migrants could be put into action shortly. The Rwandan president is also subject to pressure from the United States over the rendition, trial and conviction of Paul Rusesabagina, hero of the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda. The UK agreed to deport tens of thousands of migrants and refugees more than 4,000 miles away to Rwanda as part of a $146mn deal last year, but no flights have taken off as the policy is being challenged in the courts.

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NEW DELHI (Reuters) – The situation between India and China in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh is fragile and dangerous, with military forces deployed very close to each other in some parts, Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday. At least 24 soldiers were killed when the two sides clashed in the region in mid-2020, but the situation has been calmed through rounds of diplomatic and military talks. Violence erupted in the eastern sector of the undemarcated border between the nuclear-armed Asia giants in December but did not result in any deaths. “The situation to my mind still remains very fragile because there are places where our deployments are very close up and in military assessment therefore quite dangerous,” Jaishankar said at an India Today conclave. India-China relations cannot go back to normal, he said, until the border row is resolved in line with the September 2020 in-principle agreement he reached with his Chinese counterpart. “The Chinese have to deliver on what was agreed to, and they have struggled with that.”

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LONDON (AP) – Security guards at London’s Heathrow Airport will walk off their jobs for 10 days over the Easter break, the latest in a wave of strike action to affect the UK. The union Unite said more than 1,400 security guards employed by Heathrow Airport, one of Europe’s busiest, will strike from March 31 to Easter Sunday, April 9, to demand better pay. Unite said those striking include guards who work at the airport’s Terminal Five, which is used exclusively by British Airways, as well as those responsible for checking all cargo that enters the airport. The strikes will coincide with the two-week Easter school holidays, traditionally a peak time for travel for many in Britain. The union said workers are forced to take action because they cannot make ends meet as a cost-of-living crisis continues to affect millions of Britons.

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GENEVA (AFP) – Ten million children in West Africa’s central Sahel region are now in “extreme jeopardy” and desperately need humanitarian help due to worsening violence, the United Nations has warned. The number of children in dire need of aid in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger is twice as many as in 2020, the children’s agency UNICEF said. Meanwhile a further four million children are at risk in neighboring countries as battles between armed groups and security forces spill across the borders. “Children are increasingly caught up in the armed conflict, as victims of intensifying military clashes, or targeted by non-state armed groups,” Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF’s regional director for west and central Africa, said. “The year 2022 was particularly violent for children in the central Sahel. All parties to the conflict need to urgently stop attacks both on children, and their schools, health centers, and homes.”

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TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisian President Kais Saied has named Kamal Feki as his new interior minister, hours after Taoufik Charfeddine resigned from the post amid a crackdown on prominent opposition figures. Saied issued two decrees, the first removing Charfeddine and a second appointing Feki, the former governor of Tunis, as head of the Ministry of Interior, the presidency said in a press release overnight. Feki, one of Saied’s staunchest supporters, refused to grant a protest permit to the opposition Salvation Front coalition, saying that its leaders were involved in plotting against state security. However, the Interior Ministry allowed them to protest. A former lawyer, Charfeddine was a key figure in the election campaign that propelled the previously little-known Saied to the presidency in 2019.