Opium poppy production in Myanmar ramped up dramatically following the 2021 military coup, the UN's drugs office said Thursday, as political and economic turmoil drove farmers to cultivate the crop.. The area of land used for opium poppy cultivation expanded by a third to just over 40,000 hectares in 2021-22 -- the first full growing season since the coup -- according to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report released Thursday.
Thousands protested Australia's increasingly divisive national day Thursday as the public debates whether the country's Indigenous population should be recognised in the constitution.. The demonstrations have an added significance this year as Australia's centre-left government pushes to change the country's constitution to better recognise Indigenous Australians.
As Rahul Gandhi trekked across India on a march that even critics say has improved his image, the descendant of three past premiers was followed all the way by online disinformation.. Online, it has been smeared with disinformation.
Five months spent traversing his country on foot helped the scion of India's most famous dynasty shed his playboy image -- but the road to reviving his dismal political fortunes will be a tougher journey.. His 3,500-kilometre (2,175-mile) journey -- not all by foot -- concludes on Monday in the frosty Himalayan foothills of Kashmir, after months spent finessing both his common touch and a voter pitch capitalising on widespread economic insecurity.
Relatives of passengers who died in the twin Boeing 737 MAX crashes are scheduled to confront the airplane maker Thursday in a US court, some four years after the tragedies in Ethiopia and Indonesia.. In unveiling the agreement, DOJ said Boeing was being held accountable for "fraudulent and deceptive" conduct towards Federal Aviation Administration regulators during the MAX certification when the company omitted key facts about the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a flight handling system that badly malfunctioned in both crashes.
The number of daily Covid-19 deaths in China has fallen by nearly 80 percent since the start of the month, authorities have said, in a sign that the country's unprecedented infection surge may have started to abate.. The CDC last week said nearly 13,000 people had died from Covid-related illnesses between January 13 and 19, adding to a previous announcement that around 60,000 people had succumbed to the virus in hospitals in just over a month.
Israeli soldier Nathan Saada is busy at his computer on an army base in Tel Aviv, where he is part of a specialised programme designed for military personnel with autism.. Once a week, Saada is visited on his base by a fellow soldier, Liri Shahar, who has been tasked with following up with what the army terms its "special" groups.
Oumar left home in Guinea five years ago in search of a better life in Europe, but today he inhabits a daily purgatory of hunger, cold and police violence in Morocco.. Bakary, also from Guinea, said he had been living here for three years.
Prosecutors in Argentina on Wednesday asked for life imprisonment for eight rugby players on trial over the killing of a teenager outside a nightclub three years ago, a crime that shocked the nation.. In a nation marked by wide social inequality, rugby is traditionally played and watched by the wealthy.
A church official was killed and a priest seriously wounded late Wednesday when a man wielding a machete stormed two churches in southern Spain, the government said. . "Just after 7:00 pm (1800 GMT) this evening, a man entered the church of San Isidro in Algeciras, where, armed with a machete, he attacked the priest, leaving him seriously wounded," an interior ministry statement said.
