Indian doctors call off protest hunger strike over medic’s murder
“Our movement for justice and a healthy, secure health care system will continue,” Halder said, adding that the doctors would track progress on her assurances and orders for change
Updated 1 min 4 sec ago
Reuters
KOLKATA: Junior doctors in India’s eastern city of Kolkata called off on Monday a 17-day-old hunger strike launched in protest against the rape and murder of a colleague, they said, in response to an appeal by the victim’s parents. Protesters also met the chief minister of the opposition-led state, which has drawn scrutiny for its handling of sex crimes, to press their demand for better security and conditions at government hospitals, as well as justice for the woman. A police volunteer was arrested for the crime, which sparked nationwide protests in August and September, after the woman’s body was found at the city’s R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital on Aug. 9. “They (the victim’s parents) expressed their worries about the fasting junior doctors’ health as well as the defunct health care services that must have affected hundreds of ordinary citizens,” said Dr. Debasish Halder, a spokesman for the doctors. Some strike participants suffered severe dehydration and had to be admitted to hospital. The doctors said Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee agreed to most of their demands when she met them on Monday. “Our movement for justice and a healthy, secure health care system will continue,” Halder said, adding that the doctors would track progress on her assurances and orders for change. Government hospitals across India lack basic amenities such as restrooms for doctors, security personnel, and closed circuit television cameras (CCTV), doctors say. India’s Supreme Court also took up the matter, but junior doctors say its efforts have not been sufficient to ensure justice. Reuters has reported that the government of West Bengal state has been slow to set up new tribunals for such crimes, while failing to deliver on its promises of better safety measures, made to doctors in 2019. India adopted tougher laws to protect women after the horrific gang rape and murder of a woman in its capital New Delhi in 2012, but activists say women are still prey to sexual violence.
China holds live-fire drills opposite Taiwan, a week after large-scale exercise
The live-fire drills were being held near the Pingtan islands off Fujian province
China has increased its presence in the waters and skies around Taiwan
Updated 24 sec ago
AP
TAIPEI: China is holding live-fire drills off the coast of its southern Fujian province facing Taiwan, just a week after a massive air-and-sea drill it called punishment for Taiwan’s president rejecting Beijing’s claims of sovereignty. The live-fire drills were being held near the Pingtan islands off Fujian province from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., according to a notice from the Maritime Safety Administration. It warned ships to avoid the area. It did not offer additional details. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said China’s drills were part of an annual exercise and was tracking them. “It cannot be ruled out that it is one of the ways to expand the deterrent effect in line with the dynamics in the Taiwan Strait,” the statement added. Taiwan is a self-ruled island that Beijing claims is part of China. Tensions around the issue has flared in recent years. China has increased its presence in the waters and skies around Taiwan. It now increasingly sends large amounts of warplanes and navy vessels in military exercises near Taiwan and its coast guard carries out patrols. Last week, China held a one-day military exercise aimed at practicing the “sealing off of key ports and key areas.” Taiwan counted a record one-day total of 153 aircraft, 14 navy vessels, and 12 Chinese government ships. In response to Chinese moves, the US has continued to host what it calls “freedom of navigation” transits through the Taiwan Strait. On Sunday, the destroyer USS Higgins and the Canadian frigate HMCS Vancouver transited the narrow band of ocean that separates China and Taiwan. Germany sent two warships through the Taiwan Strait last month as it seeks to increase its defense engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
Rwanda orphans build hope from horror 30 years after genocide
Updated 3 min 4 sec ago
PARIS: Jeanne Allaire Kayigirwa was sure she was going to die three times during the Rwandan genocide in which most of her friends and family were massacred. She and her sister hid in the bush for six weeks as the slaughter went on around them, moving on all the time as Hutu extremists hunted Tutsis like them “down with dogs.” “I don’t know how we survived,” she said. Much about that time she does not want to remember. “Otherwise I won’t be able to go on.” Jeanne learned to live with her demons, but “you cannot wipe a genocide from your memory. It comes back went it wants.” Then one day she took stock. “Am I going to let the killers who wanted to wipe me out also take my second life? “Or am I going to live it?” said the 46-year-old, who went on to be a top local government official in Paris. More than a million people died in the genocide organized by the extremist Hutu regime in 1994. Men, women, children from the Tutsi minority systematically exterminated between April and July 1994 — often with machetes — by Hutu forces, and sometimes even by their neighbors, colleagues and even friends. Three decades after the horror, AFP set out to find Tutsi children who survived the killing and who were adopted or grew up in France. They talked of the weight of what they witnessed, their feeling of injustice and about living for those who were slaughtered. Some have remained abroad, while others have been drawn back to Rwanda. Jeanne lost her father, sister, friends, cousins, aunts and uncles — “I try not to count.” “They put the guns to our temples the day they came to kill us,” she said. Leaving home Moving to France “gave me the chance to study,” but more than anything it “helped me because I didn’t have to see the killers every day.” Soon after arriving, Jeanne helped found the Ibuka group, a survivor group which keeps the memory of the genocide alive, going out into schools to speak about what happened. Jeanne grabbed her “second life” in both hands, began a family and worked for the mayor of Paris. “I feel that by talking about it I am not shutting up the dead who have been silenced.” A heavy silence, however, hung over Manzi Rugirangoga’s childhood. Now living back in the Rwandan capital Kigali, Manzi survived the unthinkable as a baby. He was just 15 months old when his family took refuge in a school with other Tutsis in the southern town of Butare. On April 29, 1994, Hutu militia attacked. His mother, who was carrying him on her back, was killed along with his aunt and uncle. But he and his sister and brother, who were four and seven, were not. “The killers didn’t spare us, they just said that they didn’t want to waste their bullets on us.” Instead they were left to “die from hunger and grief.” Manzi’s father found him in an orphanage in Burundi three months later. Shattered lives The children survived thanks to an extraordinary rescue operation by the Swiss charity Terre des hommes (Tdh), which has only come to light recently thanks to a book called “The Convoy” by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, one of 1,000 survivors its aid workers got out of the country. “Dozens of members of my family” were killed in the genocide, said Manzi, now 31. “My father is the only survivor on his side.” A vet, he was in France on a training course when the genocide began. He brought the children to France “because he had very little hope of finding anything in Rwanda.” “I still feel this huge feeling of injustice about what happened,” said Manzi. Little was ever said at home. “People would ask you where you came from, and I knew very little.” It was only after the “shock” of returning to Rwanda for the first time when he was 10 that he felt “an instinctive need” to go home. “I finally knew where I came from,” he said. After some difficult teenage years, Manzi went back to Kigali on his own when he was 15 to stay with his aunt, and then boarded at high school in the east of the country, where he had to learn Rwandan. After university in France, he moved back to Kigali. “Back then, I didn’t see my future in France,” he said. Sandrine Lorusso grew up in the same silence. The youngest of nine, she lost both her parents and three siblings in the massacres. Adopted by her eldest sister and her husband who were living in France, her interview with AFP was the first time the soft-spoken mother-of-two has ever talked publicly about what she went through in Kigali. “It wasn’t something we talked about,” said the nurse. “The killers gathered in front of our house. They took my mother, but they left me and my sister Aline. We ran to our neighbors and a few minutes later we heard gunfire,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. Mourning victims She still doesn’t know how her father died. He was found in a mass grave. Growing up, “my brain worked hard to hide” the memories. But things got “complicated” as Sandrine approached adulthood. It all got too much “between the ages of 17 and 24 and I had depression.” The trauma came back with a vengeance when she was pregnant with her first child. “I had inexplicable panic attacks. You try to keep it down but sooner or later it comes out,” she said. When she left for France, Jeanne thought she was also “leaving the genocide” behind her. “I thought I was going to live a good life, I hoped to never have to see the images of the bones and the ruins. But even if you move 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), you bring the genocide with you,” she said. She described how it followed her down French streets where she would notice “spots where people might be able to hide,” or be spooked by the “sound of shooting” when she went to the cinema. “The nightmares have lasted a long time,” she said. Gaspard Jassef’s memories would not leave him alone either. As a six-year-old, he hid out from the genocide alone in the forest for five months. “The commemoration of the 30 years (since the genocide) touched me intensely... and I want to sort out of all the unknowns in my head about what happened to me,” he told AFP in a Paris cafe. His little sister and his mother — a Tutsi married to a Hutu — were poisoned by their Hutu relatives at the start of the genocide. Fearful for his “mixed” child, his father told him to hide in the forest. But he never came to find him. He too had been killed, according to information Gaspard has been able to piece together. In October 1994 — three months after the genocide ended — a French nurse called Dominique Jassef, who had been working in a local dispensary, found him in the forest with advanced malnutrition. “I ate what I could. I hunted small animals. I stayed in the trees,” he said. “When my second mother found me, I probably had a week to live,” he said. The doctors thought “there was no hope” but the French nurse refused to give up on him, got him treatment and later adopted him, changing his life. Living the trauma Gaspard still has trouble sleeping and is haunted by the day when he had to bury his mother and his sister. But in “my sadness I have had the great good luck to have had two very loving mothers,” he added. Despite the trauma, he was a brilliant student and worked for several years for a think tank and co-founded the support group, The Adopted of Rwanda. Even so, “everyday life can be a struggle, and sometimes I feel very old,” he admitted. A deeply social party animal, Gaspard loves nothing more than talking French politics for hours on end. “My blood and my skin is Rwandan and I also feel fully French,” he said. Yet France’s role in the genocide of the Tutsi has been an extremely touchy subject. Paris, which had close relations with the murderous Hutu regime, was for a long time accused by Kigali of “complicity” in the genocide. A commission of historians in 2021 found that France under the late president Francois Mitterrand had “heavy and overwhelming responsibility” for the genocide but had not been complicit. The writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse makes a distinction between “the absolutely fantastic French people who welcomed her” and “the French politicians and military whose actions should be condemned.” Her host family “really looked after me” and even took her to a psychologist. Despite the trauma, she was able to “reconstruct” her life. “Of course, you feel fragile,” she admitted. “When you have been excluded from humanity... it’s a long road back from that,” she said. She chose a career where she “fights against death,” working for NGOs dealing with AIDs and addiction. Surviving the genocide The 30th anniversary of the genocide has been a big moment for many of the survivors. Last year Jeanne moved back to Rwanda with her husband and young son. “I felt I was missing something in France,” she told AFP from Kigali. “I wanted to live with my family and my mother again. She is now over 80. I wanted to show my son my homeland and my language and maybe help rebuild the country.” Gaspard said he has finally found a “form of stability” and wants to go back to his village and understand what happened to his father. Manzi has a heap of projects on the go in Kigali. He has written an “African futurist” novel, founded a publishing house and has invested in farms growing peppers, beans and watermelons. “Reconnecting with my roots, my family and my history has helped me,” he said. But “the idea that we can totally reconstruct ourselves, and that we don’t think about what happened, that is unobtainable,” Manzi added. Back in France, Sandrine wants to get more involved in a group keeping alive the memory of what was done. She has also thought about going to a therapist. “There are things about what happened in 1994 that I can’t remember — and the genocide has also robbed me of my memories of what went before, of my early childhood.” Since she went back to Rwanda, Beata has found happiness in its particular “light and landscapes” and the spirit of the place. “Every time I return, I reconnect with who I was,” she said.
Harvey Weinstein diagnosed with bone marrow cancer: US media
His diagnosis comes after a string of health issues for the once-powerful entertainment mogul
Updated 11 min 50 sec ago
AFP
NEW YORK: Disgraced Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein has been diagnosed with a form of bone marrow cancer, US media reported Monday, a month after he was indicted on a new sex crime charge.
Weinstein, 72, has chronic myeloid leukemia and is undergoing treatment in a New York prison, according to NBC News and ABC News, citing sources.
His diagnosis comes after a string of health issues for the once-powerful entertainment mogul, who appeared pale and visibly frail during a brief court appearance in September.
He underwent emergency heart surgery last month, after which his representative said he was “out of danger at the moment.”
Weinstein is serving a 16-year prison sentence after being convicted on rape charges in California.
He was also convicted in New York in 2020 of the rape and sexual assault of an actress and of forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant.
He was sentenced to 23 years in prison in that case.
Allegations against Weinstein helped launch the #MeToo movement in 2017, a watershed moment for women fighting sexual misconduct.
More than 80 women accused him of harassment, sexual assault or rape, including prominent actors Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd.
King Charles caps first Australia trip by reigning British monarch in 13 years
Updated 22 min 25 sec ago
AP
MELBOURNE, Australia: King Charles III ends the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch in 13 years Tuesday with anti-monarchists hoping his journey is a step toward an Australian citizen becoming head of state.
Controversy interrupted the visit on Monday when Indigenous independent senator Lidia Thorpe yelled at Charles during a reception that he was not her king and Australia was not his land.
Esther Anatolitis, co-chair of the Australian Republic Movement, that campaigns for an Australian citizen to replace the British monarch as Australia’s head of state, said while thousands turned out to see the king and Queen Camilla at their public engagements, the numbers were larger when his mother Queen Elizabeth II first visited Australia 70 years ago.
An estimated 75 percent of Australia’s population saw the queen in person during the first visit by a reigning British monarch in 1954.
“It’s understandable that Australians would be welcoming the king and queen, we also welcome them,” Anatolitis said. “But it doesn’t make any sense to continue to have a head of state appointed by birth right from another country.”
Anatolitis acknowledged that getting a majority of Australians in a majority of states to vote to change the constitution would be difficult. Australians haven’t changed their constitution since 1977.
“It’s tricky, isn’t it? We’ve got that hurdle, of course,” Anatolitis said.
Constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey said an Australian republic was not something that Charles, 75, need worry about in his lifetime.
She said the failure of a referendum last year to create an “utterly innocuous” Indigenous representative body to advise government demonstrated the difficulty in changing Australia’s constitution.
“It’s just that on the whole people aren’t prepared to change the constitution,” Twomey said.
“So a republic, which would be a much more complex constitutional question than the one last year, would be far more vulnerable to a scare campaign and to opposition,” she said.
“So unless you had absolutely unanimous support across the board and a strong reason for doing it, it would fail,” she added.
Philip Benwell, national chair of the Australian Monarchist League, which wants to maintain Australia’s constitutional link to Britain, said he was standing near Thorpe at the Canberra reception when she started yelling at the king and demanding a treaty with Indigenous Australians.
“I think she alienated a lot of sympathy. If anything, she’s helped to strengthen our support,” Benwell said.
Thorpe has been criticized, including by some Indigenous leaders, for shouting at the king and failing to show respect.
Thorpe was unrepentant. She rejected criticism that her aggressive approach toward the monarch was violent.
“I think what was unacceptable is the violence in that room, of the King of England praising himself, dripping in stolen wealth, that’s what’s violent,” Thorpe told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “The violence is from the colonizer being in that room asserting his authority, being paid for by every taxpayer in this country.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants Australia to become a republic but has ruled out a referendum during his first three-year term. But a referendum remains a possibility if his center-left Labour Party wins elections due by May next year.
Australians decided in a referendum in 1999 to retain Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. That result is widely regarded to have been the consequence of disagreement about how a president would be chosen rather than majority support for a monarch.
Sydney University royal historian Cindy McCreery suspects Australia is not yet ready to make the change.
“There’s interest in becoming a republic, but I think what we may forget is that logistically speaking we’re not going to have a referendum on that issue any time soon,” McCreery said.
“I, as a historian, think that it’s probably not realistic to expect a successful referendum on a republic until we’ve done more work on acknowledging our ... complicated history,” she said.
“Becoming a republic doesn’t mean that we’ve somehow thrown off British colonialism. It hopefully has meant that we’re engaging with our own history in an honest and thoughtful way,” she added.
Charles’s trip to Australia was scaled down because he is undergoing cancer treatment. He arrives in Samoa on Wednesday.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are scheduled to join the summit
Moscow has made expanding the BRICS group a pillar of its foreign policy
Updated 20 min 51 sec ago
AFP
KAZAN, Russia: Two dozen world leaders are gathering in Russia on Tuesday for the opening of a summit of the BRICS group, an alliance of emerging economies that the Kremlin hopes will challenge Western “hegemony.”
The summit is the biggest such meeting in Russia since it ordered troops into Ukraine and comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to demonstrate that Western attempts to isolate Moscow over the two-and-a-half-year offensive have failed.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — all key partners for Russia — are scheduled to join the summit, hosted in the city of Kazan from October 22 to 24. Xi was en route to the meeting, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported Tuesday.
Moscow has made expanding the BRICS group — an acronym for core members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — a pillar of its foreign policy.
The main issues on the agenda include Putin’s idea for a BRICS-led payment system to rival SWIFT, an international financial network that Russian banks were cut off from in 2022, as well as the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The Kremlin has touted the gathering as a diplomatic triumph that will help it build an alliance to challenge Western “hegemony.” US-Moscow tensions
The United States has dismissed the idea that BRICS could become a “geopolitical rival” but has expressed concern about Moscow flexing its diplomatic muscle as the Ukraine conflict rages.
Moscow has been steadily advancing on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine this year while strengthening its ties with China, Iran and North Korea — three of Washington’s adversaries.
By gathering the BRICS group in Kazan, the Kremlin “aims to show that not only is Russia not isolated, it has partners and allies,” Moscow-based political analyst Konstantin Kalachev told AFP.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Putin in 2023 over the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine, and the Russian leader abandoned plans to attend the previous summit in ICC member South Africa.
This time round, the Kremlin wants to show an “alternative to Western pressure and that the multipolar world is a reality,” Kalachev said, referring to Moscow’s efforts to shift power away from the West to other regions.
The Kremlin has said it wants global affairs to be guided by international law, “not on rules that are set by individual states, namely the United States.”
“We believe that BRICS is a prototype of multipolarity, a structure uniting the Southern and Eastern hemispheres on the principles of sovereignty and respect for each other,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
“What BRICS is doing is gradually — brick by brick — building a bridge to a more democratic and just world order,” he added. Attending delegates
In Kazan, Putin is set to meet individually with Modi and Xi, as well as the leaders of South Africa and Egypt on Tuesday, followed by separate talks with Erdogan and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is also undertaking his first trip to Russia since April 2022 to attend the summit. He will sit down with Putin on Thursday, according to a program shared by Ushakov.
Ahead of the summit, AFP journalists in the city reported heightened security measures and a visible police presence.
The surrounding Tatarstan region, which is some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the border with Ukraine, has previously been hit by long-range Ukrainian drone attacks.
Movement around the city center is being limited, residents advised to stay home, and university students moved out of dormitories, local media reported. Russia-Ukraine war
The West believes Russia is using the BRICS group to expand its influence and promote its own narratives about the Ukraine conflict.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned other countries could feel emboldened if Putin wins on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Starting with four members when it was established in 2009, BRICS has since expanded to include several other emerging nations such as South Africa, Egypt and Iran.
But the group is also rife with internal divisions, including between key members India and China.
Turkiye, a NATO member with complex ties to both Moscow and the West, announced in early September that it also wanted to join the bloc.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva canceled his planned trip to the summit at the last minute after suffering a head injury that caused a minor brain haemorrhage.
