Month: October 2022

At least three people have been killed by Russian strikes in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as Moscow continues to target key infrastructure across the country. Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said that the victims of the latest Russian attacks were employees of "critical infrastructure", adding that two facilities in the city had been hit. Meanwhile, thousands of towns and cities across the country have been left without power and President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian strikes had destroyed about 30% of Ukraine's power stations over the past eight days. The latest attacks came 24 hours after "kamikaze" drones - believed to have been supplied by Iran - killed at least nine people in Kyiv and Sumy, in the north-east. Ukraine has identified the dr...

Despite historic gains in the past two congressional elections, women hold just 27% of the seats. As Americans prepare to reshape Congress in the midterms, could Bolivia inspire change? Bolivia is one of the few countries in the world where roughly 50% of lawmakers at every level of government are women. This is no accident, but the result of an electoral law which requires half of all party nominees must be female. Quotas were introduced in 1997 when just 9% of Bolivia's national parliament were women. Later on it was made part of the constitution. "Lately we've seen certain countries backslide on women's rights," said Adriana Salvatierra, who was a senator from 2015 to 2019, and became the youngest ever president of Bolivia's Senate. ...

A Russian analyst who worked on a discredited dossier linking Donald Trump to Russia has been found not guilty of lying to the FBI. The Department of Justice charged Igor Danchenko, 43, as part of a probe into the FBI's inquiry into whether Mr Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016. The so-called Steele dossier was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants on a top Trump aide. Mr Danchenko was accused of lying to agents about the dossier's sources. Special counsel John Durham, who brought the charges, was appointed by Mr Trump's attorney general in 2019 to look into the FBI's inquiry of ties between Russia and Mr Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The Steele dossier, published by news website Buzzfeed 10 days before Mr Tr...

Jim Watson was testifying at a public inquiry looking into whether it was warranted for Canada to invoke emergency powers to end the protests. The so-called Freedom Convoy protests began at the end of January and gridlocked Ottawa for three weeks. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on 14 February. The Public Order Emergency Commission began six weeks of hearings last week to examine the Trudeau government's decision to invoke the federal act, the circumstances that led to that declaration, and the measures put in place by Ottawa to clear the anti-vaccine mandate and anti-government protests. Invoking the law requires that a formal inquiry be held. The hearings have given a behind-the-scenes look at the confusion ...

Hyenas scavenging on the corpses of villagers, cities and towns hit in air strikes, elderly men and young women conscripted into armies - these are the horrific accounts emerging from a war that has left tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead in Ethiopia's historic region of Tigray. The region was once a tourist attraction, with visitors drawn to its rock-hewn churches, Muslim shrines and ancient scripts in the Ge'ez language. Now Tigray is the site of a vicious war, as the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies on the one side, and the army of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) on the other, fight for control in a region that has long been seen as the key to power in Ethiopia - or what was historically part of Abyssinia. It has been under a blockade ...

Russia has exchanged 108 Ukrainian women held as prisoners of war for 110 Russian captives held by Ukraine, officials on both sides say. Of the women, 37 were reportedly captured after surrendering at the siege of the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, which ended in May. Most of the Russians freed are sailors from merchant ships held in Ukraine. They also include members of pro-Russian separatist military units from the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Daylight photos were released of the Ukrainian women boarding coaches in an unspecified area and later of them arriving after dark in government-held territory in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS Image caption, The freed Ukrainians were taken to safety in coaches...