Category: Humanitarian
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The toll from Colombia’s 7.4-magnitude earthquake has reached 281 dead and nearly 4,000 injured, with more than 12,000 homes destroyed. Rescue has given way to recovery, and the missing-persons figures need careful reading.
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A slick from a stranded tanker in the Arabian Sea now covers an estimated 500 square miles and has reached the Omani mainland. Iran is demanding compensation. Basic facts about the spill remain unknown.
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Nurses and contact tracers at the centre of Congo’s Ebola outbreak walked out in Bunia demanding wages unpaid since the epidemic was declared in May. The failure isn’t medical — it’s that the money never reached the people doing the work.
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Former Ukrainian prisoners have described torture in Russian detention. Why survivor testimony is gathered, why prosecutions take decades, and what documentation achieves anyway.
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A pattern runs through several Gulf royal cases: confinement in a home rather than a prison, doctors employed by the household, and a psychiatric label attached to the woman who objects. An explainer on why that pattern is so difficult for courts, police and the UN to touch.
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Eighteen years before her sister’s escape by sea, Sheikha Shamsa ran from her family’s Surrey estate and spent weeks living quietly in England. She was found in Cambridge in August 2000. A British court later found she was abducted. She has not been seen in public since.
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Alanoud Al Fayez left Saudi Arabia in 2003 and has lived in London ever since. Her four daughters by the late King Abdullah say they were confined for years in a Jeddah compound. UN experts were told they were medicated without consent. Two of the sisters are now dead.
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Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum tried to flee Dubai by sea in 2018 and was seized off the coast of India. A London court later found her father ordered it. She has since been photographed abroad — but has never spoken publicly about any of it.
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The earthquake’s epicentre was in Chocó — Colombia’s poorest region, reachable mostly by boat or plane. Why the toll from the worst-hit places always arrives last.
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At least 16 migrant workers were killed in a Riyadh factory fire. Why these fires keep happening, how sponsorship ties safety to job security, and what follows for families abroad.