Category: Foreign

The British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has criticised the Myanmar military after the country’s ambassador to Britain was locked out of the London embassy.

“We condemn the bullying actions of the Myanmar military regime in London yesterday, and I pay tribute to Kyaw Zwar Minn for his courage,” Dominic Raab tweeted on Thursday.

“The UK continues to call for an end to the coup and the appalling violence, and a swift restoration of democracy,” he added.

The move comes after Zwar Minn spoke out against the military’s Feb. 1 coup.

He called for the release of civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was detained by the military in the February coup, after her party won an election by a landslide.

The military’s actions have prompted widespread protests, to which soldiers have responded with a violent crackdown on the population.

READ ALSO: Myanmar junta blames protesters as EU, U.S. impose sanctions

Zwar Minn was denied entry to the building on Wednesday night in what he described as a “coup” by the “Myanmar military.”

“They are refusing to let me inside.

“They said they received instruction from the capital, so they are not going to let me in,” he told the Telegraph newspaper.

Dpa understands the British Foreign Office had initially received no formal notification of the termination of the ambassador’s position through the appropriate diplomatic channels.

However, those have since been received.

No formal notification of a replacement for Zwar Minn is thought to have yet been received by the British Foreign Office.

Sources told dpa that Britain is in contact with the embassy’s charge d’affaires.

(dpa/NAN)

By Ekaete Bassey with agency reports

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell Productions is producing a new series for Netflix about The Invictus Games, the tournament for wounded veterans Harry founded in 2014.

The Invictus Foundation announced the docu-series with the working title “Heart of Invictus,” will follow a group of Invictus Games competitors “all service members who have suffered life-changing injuries or illnesses” as they prepare for the games, which will be held in 2022.”

Harry will reportedly appear on camera and serve as an executive producer.

READ ALSO: Prince Harry gets a new job at BetterUp

The producers of the Oscar-winning short documentary, ”The White Helmets” will direct and produce the series.

Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, started their own nonprofit foundation, Archewell, after moving to the U.S. when they left their roles as senior royals.

They also created Archewell Audio and Archewell Productions and signed deals with Spotify and Netflix to create content for those platforms.

By Ekaete Bassey with agency reports

New Zealand’s Parliament has passed legislation giving mothers and their partners the right to paid leave following a miscarriage or stillbirth becoming the second country in the world to provide such benefits.

The bereavement allowance, passed unanimously in parliament late on Wednesday, gives employees three days of paid leave when a pregnancy ends with a stillbirth without having to tap into sick leave.

READ ALSO: Woman prays court to compel ex-husband to leave her house

The bill will give women and their partners time to come to terms with their loss without having to tap into sick leave. Because their grief is not a sickness, it is a loss. And loss takes time.

The leave provisions apply to mothers, their partners as well as parents planning to have a child through adoption or surrogacy, she said.

According to reports, one in four New Zealand women has had a miscarriage.

India is the only other country with similar legislation.

Sarah Obama, the matriarch of former United States (U.S.) President Barack Obama’s Kenyan family has died, relatives and officials confirmed yesterday. She was at least 99 years old.

Mama Sarah, as the step-grandmother of the former U.S. president was fondly called, promoted education for girls and orphans in her rural Kogelo village. She passed away around 4 a.m. local time while being treated at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city in the country’s west, according to her daughter Marsat Onyango.

“She died this morning. We are devastated,” Onyango told the Associated Press on a phone call.

“Mama was sick with normal diseases she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman Sheik Musa Ismail said, adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

President Barack Obama had been informed of the death and has sent his condolences, he said.

She will be buried today before midday and the funeral will be held under Islamic rites.

Read Also: Biden reopens Obamacare enrolment

“The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman, a matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

She will be remembered for her work to promote education to empower orphans, Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o said while offering his condolences to the people of Kogelo village for losing a matriarch.

“She was a philanthropist who mobilized funds to pay school fees for the orphans,” he said.

Sarah Obama, was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The family is part of Kenya’s Luo ethnic group.

President Obama often showed affection toward her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond. She attended his first inauguration as president in 2009. Later, Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly.

For decades, Sarah Obama has helped orphans, raising some in her home. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents — providing school supplies, uniforms, basic medical needs and school fees.

 Pierce fighting for control of Mozambique’s strategic northern town of Palma left beheaded bodies strewn in the streets yesterday, with heavily armed rebels battling army, police and a private military outfit in several locations.

Thousands were estimated to be missing from the town, which held about 70,000 people before the attack began last Wednesday.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility yesterday for the attack, saying it was carried out by the Islamic State Central Africa Province, according to the SITE extremist monitoring group.

The rebel claim said the insurgents now control Palma’s banks, government offices, factories and army barracks, and that more than 55 people, including Mozambican army troops, Christians and foreigners were killed. It did not provide further detail on the dead.

Earlier this month the United States declared Mozambique’s rebels to be a terrorist organisation and announced it had sent military specialists to help train the Mozambican military to combat them.

Palma is the centre of a multi-billion dollar investment by Total, the France-based oil and gas company, to extract liquified natural gas from offshore sites in the Indian Ocean. The gas deposits are estimated to be among the world’s largest and the investment by Total and others is reported to be $20 billion, one of the largest in Africa.

The battle for Palma forced Total to evacuate its large, fortified site a few miles (kilometres) outside of the city.

The fighting spread across the town yesterday, according to Lionel Dyck, director of the Dyck Advisory Group, a private military company contracted by the Mozambican police to help fight the rebels.

“There is fighting in the streets, in pockets across the town,” Dyck told The Associated Press. The Dyck group has several helicopter gunships in Palma which have been used to rescue trapped civilians and to fight the rebels.

“My guys are airborne and they’ve engaged several little groups and they’ve engaged one quite large group,” Dyck said. “They’ve landed into the fight to recover a couple of wounded policemen. … We have also rescued many people who were trapped, 220 people at last count.”

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He said those rescued were taken to Total’s fortified site on the southern African country’s Afungi peninsula, where chartered flights flew many south to Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado province.

The rebels are well-armed with AK-47 automatic rifles, RPD and PKM machine guns and heavy mortars, Dyck said.

“This attack is not a surprise. We’ve been expecting Palma to be whacked the moment the rains stopped and the fighting season started, which is now,” he said.

By Ekaete Bassey with agency reports 

The Ever Given ship stuck in the Suez Canal is now fully afloat. The vessel was finally pulled free, allowing the crucial trade route to reopen to traffic.

Earlier on Monday, it was reported that Ever Given had been 80 percent refloated, with the stern of the ship pulled away from the shore by roughly 334 feet.

However, currently, Ever-Given, the 224, 000 and 400m (440 yards) long ship which ran aground in the Suez Canal on Tuesday, March 23rd, blocking vessels passing through one of the world’s most important waterways is not just fully afloat but also has resumed its journey along the canal and moving north from where it was grounded.

Two passenger trains collided in the south of Egypt yesterday, causing dozens of casualties, the health ministry said.

The incident took place in the village of al-Sawamaa in Sohag governorate in Upper Egypt, according to initial  reports. State television reported 32 instant deaths and injuries to 66 people, citing the health ministry.

The spokesperson of the health ministry, Khaled Mogahed, said the number was ”expected to rise”. Thirty-nine  ambulances were immediately deployed to  the scene.

A health ministry source told Cairo 24 news earlier: “The number of injuries has exceeded dozens so far, and they have been transferred to Maragha Hospital, Tahta Hospital and Sohag Hospital.”

The governorate’s hospitals declared “a state of emergency” to receive casualties, the source added. Egypt’s railway authority said that the crash took place when emergency brakes were triggered by “unknown individuals”.

The brakes caused one of the trains to stop and the other to crash into it from behind. The authority is conducting further investigations, it said.

Videos and images shared by social media users showed graphic scenes of attempts to rescue some injured passengers from inside the carriages, with victims screaming for help.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi commented on the collision on Facebook.

“I am closely following the tragic incident… The pain in our hearts today will only increase our determination to end such a pattern of catastrophes,” he wrote.

He pledged “deterrent punishment” for those responsible for the accident.

“I have issued directives to the concerned agencies to take all necessary measures and provide adequate compensation to the families of the martyrs and victims,” he added.

In his first statement on the incident later on Friday, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said he has instructed the relevant authorities to swiftly transfer the injured to hospitals for urgent care.

“The prime minister ordered the relevant officials to move immediately to the scene, to provide the necessary support, and to quickly deal with the situation there,” local media cited the cabinet as saying.

Egypt’s railway network has a long history of deadly collisions and has routinely been criticised for its poor safety standards.

The country’s worst rail disaster occurred in 2002 when at least 370 people were killed after a fire broke out in seven third-class carriages in a passenger train south of Cairo.