Good morning. We’re masking Russia’s floor advance, South Korea’s new strategy to the virus and Cambodia’s crackdown on opposition leaders.
Russian assaults hit civilians
In Ukraine, staff struggled to rescue survivors from a theater in Mariupol that had been sheltering as much as 1,000 civilians, together with kids, and was largely destroyed in an assault. It was unclear how many individuals survived.
Russia’s advance has slowed, and the Russian navy continues to undergo heavy losses: The Pentagon estimated that in three weeks of combating, 7,000 Russian troopers died — larger than the variety of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However as Russians more and more intention bombs and missiles at cities, the toll on civilians in Ukraine is worsening: Folks face the danger of demise within the streets and deprivation — of meals, water, warmth, safety — in bomb shelters. Right here’s the most recent.
Stop-fire talks between the 2 sides continued right into a fourth day, with unsure prospects. The U.N. Safety Council held an emergency assembly to debate the worsening humanitarian state of affairs and the standing of the greater than three million refugees.
Particulars: “No water, no gasoline, no mild”: Intense combating drove residents of Irpin, a Kyiv suburb, to evacuate.
Injury: Unable to take management of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis, Russia has resorted to destroying it.
Debate: In nations pleasant to Russia, some assume Putin has some extent.
Divided: Ukrainian and Russian vacationers are stranded in an elegant Egyptian resort as one in every of their nations tears the opposite aside.
Different updates:
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A Russian courtroom prolonged the detention of the basketball star Brittney Griner to Might 19.
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The battle for the skies above Kyiv raged in a single day by means of Thursday. The Ukrainian navy claimed to have shot down 10 Russian planes and missiles, the particles of which killed at the very least one individual.
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Indian officers stated the nation’s wheat exports had been rising as world costs shot up within the invasion’s aftermath.
South Korea shrugs at Covid outbreaks
Circumstances are skyrocketing in South Korea, which as soon as had one of many world’s most aggressive coronavirus insurance policies. On Thursday, the nation reported its highest day by day an infection variety of your complete pandemic: 621,328 instances in a rustic of fifty million individuals.
However the nation remains to be pushing forward with plans to ease social distancing measures, loosen up border restrictions and be taught to reside with the virus’s danger in an effort to permit small companies to get well and regular life to renew.
Particulars: Medical doctors fear that hospitals might be overwhelmed in the course of the surge. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s grownup inhabitants is vaccinated, and about 90 p.c of these age 60 and older have obtained a booster. Their danger of changing into significantly ailing is low.
Listed below are the most recent updates and maps of the pandemic.
In different developments:
Cambodia convicts opposition leaders
A high courtroom convicted 19 members of Cambodia’s important opposition occasion on Thursday on costs of “incitement” and “conspiracy.” That they had already been discovered responsible final yr of what the authorities stated was a plot to topple the federal government.
Critics referred to as the trial a “witch hunt” and the most recent effort by Prime Minister Hun Sen to get rid of the final vestiges of dissenting political voices in what has turn into basically a one-party state. He has additionally eradicated just about all unbiased voices within the information media.
The Cambodia Nationwide Rescue Social gathering, which had been the only real credible opposition, was dissolved in November 2017 by the nation’s Supreme Courtroom. For the previous twenty years, Hun Sen has been whittling down the democratic processes that the U.N. put in place within the early Nineties.
Particulars: The courtroom handed down sentences between 5 and 10 years, with the longer phrases imposed on seven leaders of the political opposition who had fled the nation to keep away from arrest.
Inhabitants: Two-thirds of Cambodians are youthful than 30. They had been born a long time after the Khmer Rouge’s terror and the American carpet-bombing marketing campaign within the Vietnam Struggle. However land mines proceed to disrupt lives, and corruption and inequality develop stronger.
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World Information
In August, a pair in New Zealand discovered an enormous development which they named Doug, of their backyard. It appeared, tasted and felt very very similar to a potato. However Doug wasn’t a potato in any respect.
Russia-Ukraine Struggle: Key Issues to Know
ARTS AND IDEAS
Australia’s scary-smart magpies
The Australian magpie is likely one of the most intelligent birds on earth. It has a stupendous tune of extraordinary complexity. It may well acknowledge and keep in mind as much as 30 totally different human faces.
Its newest brainy feat: outwitting scientists who wish to examine it.
In 2019, researchers got down to examine magpie social conduct. They spent round six months perfecting a harness that may unobtrusively carry miniature monitoring units and can be almost unattainable for magpies to take away from their very own our bodies.
They didn’t depend on teamwork. In a exceptional act of cooperation, one chicken snipped the clasp of one other chicken’s harness — serving to one other with none obvious tangible profit to itself. Inside half-hour, the primary tracker was off; the birds eliminated all 5 inside three days.
The magpies’ conduct was, the lead researcher stated, “a particular mixture of serving to but in addition drawback fixing, of being actually social and having this cognitive means to unravel puzzles.”
“It’s in all probability partly why they’re so profitable in our altering setting on farms and in city areas,” she stated. “They’ve managed to determine issues out in a brand new means.”
PLAY, WATCH, EAT
What to Prepare dinner
Let this gradual cooker Guinness beef stew bubble all day lengthy.
What to Take heed to
Rosalía, the Spanish pop singer recognized for her reinvention of flamenco, has smashed collectively new sounds from the Latin world and past on “Motomami,” out right this moment.