They queued for hours waiting for Ivory Coast to reopen its land border with Ghana as divided families and traders rejoiced after a three-year Covid closure kept them apart or put them out of business.. Ivory Coast shuttered its land, sea and air borders on March 22, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe.
Syrian refugees living in Turkey sought to get back to their war-torn country on Friday after swathes of their adopted home were destroyed by last week's earthquake.. Nearly four million Syrians have settled in Turkey after fleeing a civil war that has devastated swathes of the country over the past 12 years, killed nearly half a million people and displaced millions more.
A Japanese justice ministry panel on Friday proposed raising the country's age of consent, currently among the world's lowest at just 13, as part of a major overhaul of sex crime legislation.. The move to raise the age of consent to 16 is part of a package of reforms that would also clarify rape prosecution requirements and criminalise voyeurism.
When Yuko Honda, a professor at Japan's Sapporo University, tried to start a scholarship for Ainu Indigenous students and a club to celebrate their culture, she ran into fierce resistance.. When she started the scholarship and club at Sapporo, only an estimated 20 percent of people with Ainu heritage received a university education, and Honda hoped recipients would learn about and teach their traditions through the new group.
Moeko Heshiki is no ordinary tattoo artist: she is one of the few people keeping the once-banned tradition of hajichi body art alive for the Indigenous Ryukyu people of Japan's Okinawa region. . Heshiki, born to a father from Okinawa and a mother from Japan's main island Honshu, stumbled across hajichi while researching possible tattoos.
Colin Farrell had many people to thank following his best actor win at the Golden Globes for "The Banshees of Inisherin".. "For the last month an awful lot of people are travelling to the island just to see the sights of the movie," he explained.
Get out the glitter, drums and jewel-encrusted bikinis: Rio de Janeiro will dance through the night at its famed carnival this weekend, a reembrace of samba spirit after the turmoil of Covid-19 and Brazil's bitterly divisive elections.. - Raking it in - Beyond sociopolitical messages, this year's carnival will be "a great expression of joy," said Adair Rocha, head of cultural programming at Rio de Janeiro State University.
The protection against Covid-19 from being previously infected lasts at least as long as that offered by vaccination, one of the largest studies conducted on the subject said on Friday.. "In the long run, most infections will occur in people with strong protection against severe disease because of previous infection, vaccination, or both," said Cheryl Cohen, an epidemiologist at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
US biotech company Moderna said Thursday it had mixed results from a large-scale trial of its mRNA flu shot, based on the same technology used in its successful Covid-19 vaccine.. The Massachusetts-based company said that its flu shot generated an immune response against influenza A strains that was equal or superior to that of already licensed vaccines.
The death toll from the earthquake that has devastated parts of Turkey and Syria exceeded 41,000 on Friday as the United Nations appealed for $1 billion to address a growing humanitarian crisis.. Turkey has suspended rescue operations in some regions, and the government in war-torn Syria has done the same in areas under its control.
