Iraq receives Russian fighter jets to fight rebels
29 June 2014 Last updated at 07:13
BBC
Iraq says it has received the first batch of fighter jets it ordered from Russia to help it as it fights an offensive by Sunni rebels.The defence ministry said five Sukhoi Su-25 attack aircraft would enter service in “three to four days”.
The insurgents control large swathes of the north and west after a string of attacks over the past three weeks.
On Saturday, the government said it had retaken the northern city of Tikrit, but rebels dispute this.
Syria charity blames red tape for closure of Aleppo hospital
Staff at much-needed hospital given a month’s notice because charity needs established funding partner to keep facility open
Tracy McVeigh
The Observer, Sunday 29 June 2014
All staff at a hospital serving the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo have been given a month’s notice after a British medical charity blamed red tape for its closure.Half a million people in the war-torn country will lose access to desperately needed healthcare when Atareb hospital, operated by the British-based aid agency Hand in Hand for Syria (HIHS), closes within the next few days.
If King Canute had a roads policy… North Carolina’s Highway 12 is at the centre of a ferocious and politically charged dispute
Out of America: One of the US’s most scenic roads is under threat, but the chorus of climate-change deniers prevents action
RUPERT CORNWELL Sunday 29 June 2014
Is there a more amazing road in the US than North Carolina’s Highway 12? I’m not talking about the high season, when it’s jammed with holidaymakers heading for their beachfront homes on the Outer Banks.
But in autumn and winter, when the tourists and summer residents are gone, when the ocean lowers and a cold, hard wind cuts through the dunes, the road reverts to its original purpose – a precarious nature-defying lifeline, 120 miles long and linking some of America’s most exposed and isolated communities to the mainland and civilisation beyond. And today there’s even more to it. Highway 12 is front and centre in one of the country’s most ferocious and politically charged disputes over climate change.
India’s uranium mines expose villages to radiation
India plans to source a quarter of its energy from nuclear power by 2050. But this ambitious goal could come at a cost. Radioactive waste from uranium mines in the country’s east is contaminating nearby communities.
DW
It’s a hot summer afternoon in Jadugoda, a small town in eastern India. Four women wearing saris sit in a circle in front of a mud house, with smooth white walls and pink borders decorated with small shards of mirror.
Nearby, a woman pumps up water from a tube well. She then beats a miner’s uniform that belongs to her brother. He works nearby, in the uranium mines.
Suddenly a gust of wind blows black dust from the mines into the courtyard. The women cover their faces and rush to cover the pots of water so they don’t get contaminated.
‘She had too much ABCD’: the tale of one divorced Nigerian girl
June 29, 2014 – 4:47PM
Michelle Faul
Kaduna, Nigeria: By the time she ran away, Maimuna bore the scars of a short but brutal marriage.Her battered face swelled so much that doctors feared her husband had dislocated her jaw. Her back and arms bristled with angry welts from the whipping her father gave her for fleeing to him. She was gaunt from hunger, dressed in filthy rags. And barely a year after her wedding, she was divorced.
It would be a tragic story for a woman of any age. But for Maimuna Abdullahi, it all happened by the time she was 14.
History divides Bosnia once again, this time over World War I centenary
Officials of Bosnia’s two regions disagree over how to view the man who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand. One young worker observed that Bosnians have enough current-day problems to worry about without fighting over history.
By Kristen Chick, Correspondent
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA – On Saturday, Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination that began World War I. But in a sign of the deep divisions that persist nearly two decades after the end of the war here, the country will not do so in unity.The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the two autonomous entities that make up the country, will commemorate the centenary with events in Sarajevo, where Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife. The Serbian Republic, meanwhile, has declined to participate in the Sarajevo events, holding its own commemoration instead in Visegrad, a town in the Serb-dominated entity.