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Zimbabwe holds special elections after court rules to remove 9 opposition lawmakers from Parliament

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabwe is holding special elections Saturday for nine seats in Parliament after opposition lawmakers were removed from their positions and disqualified from running again. The opposition called it an illegal push by the ruling ZANU-PF party to bolster its parliamentary majority and possibly change the constitution. This may allow President Emmerson Mnangagwa, 81, who was reelected for a second and final term in August amid international and regional criticism, to run for another term.All nine opposition lawmakers from the Citizens Coalition for Change party that were removed were elected in the national vote in August. But an official claiming to be the secretary-general of the party recalled them from their positions in the weeks after that election.CCC leader Nelson Chamisa said the official, Sengezo Tshabangu, held no position with the party and his instructions should be ignored. But Zimbabwean courts recognized Tshabangu’s authority, ruled to rem...

Fields of anxiety: Overcoming stigma to address mental health struggles of farmers

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

Christi Friesen remembers her husband saying he knew that the cloud of depression over her was finally lifting when he saw her smile at the end of the gruelling 2016 harvest season.That October had been brutal, with three storms dumping about 20 centimetres of snow on the couple’s Peace River, Alta., grain farm. On the morning of the third snowstorm, Friesen felt the wind knocked out of her when she looked out the window to see a blanket of white covering crops she had hoped they would harvest that day.“Oh my God. I just sat on the bed and I just cried, and I held my head in my hands,” she said in a recent interview. “I just cried and cried and cried …. It was an awful year.”Most Canadian farm families are familiar with the stresses that come with agriculture. Their livelihoods can be affected by the vagaries of nature, crop or animal disease and even distant wars, but often they find themselves silenced by the stigma surrounding mental illness.An...

Israel strikes north and south Gaza after US vetoes a UN cease-fire resolution

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

Israel pounded areas of the Gaza Strip with airstrikes and artillery on Saturday, a day after the United States vetoed a U.N. resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the first time invoked Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, which enables a U.N. chief to raise threats he sees to international peace and security. He warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. But U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood said on Friday that halting military action would allow Hamas to continue to rule Gaza and “only plant the seeds for the next war.”The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, in which militants from Gaza killed about 1,200, most of them civilians and took more than 240 people hostage.The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the territory has surpassed 17,400 over the past two months, with more than 46,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant...

US and Philippines condemn the Chinese coast guard’s water cannon blasts on fisheries vessels

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippines and its treaty ally, the United States, separately condemned a high-seas assault Saturday by the Chinese coast guard together with suspected militia ships that repeatedly blasted water cannons to block three Philippine fisheries vessels from a disputed shoal in the South China Sea.The noontime assault by Chinese ships off the Scarborough Shoal, one of the most aggressive this year, caused “significant damage” to the communication and navigation equipment of one of the three Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources ships, Filipino officials said.They said without elaborating that suspected militia vessels accompanying Chinese coast guard ships used a long-range acoustic device that could impair hearing, causing “severe temporary discomfort and incapacitation to some Filipino crew.”It’s the latest flare-up of the long-seething territorial disputes in the South China Sea, a flashpoint in Asia that has put the U.S. and China on a c...

Protests during UN climate talks have “shocking level of censorship”

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Activists designated Saturday a day of protest at the COP28 summit in Dubai. But the rules of the game in the tightly-controlled United Arab Emirates meant sharp restrictions on what demonstrators could say, where they could walk and what their signs could portray.At times, the controls bordered on the absurd. A small group of demonstrators protesting the detention of activists — one from Egypt and two from the UAE — were not allowed to hold up signs bearing their names. Demonstrators were banned from “marching” from one venue to the other, though the could walk between events. And a pro-Palestinian protester said he was told demonstrators could not say “from the river to the sea.” In the aftermath of a brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October and subsequent bombing of the Gaza Strip, that phrase has been used by pro-Palestinian rallies to call for single state on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Some Jews hear a clear...

ATCEMS: 1 dead following north Austin traffic incident, road closures expected

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

AUSTIN (KXAN) — One person died Saturday following a traffic incident in north Austin, according to Austin-Travis County EMS.Officials said the incident occurred at approximately 5:50 a.m. at North Interstate 35 near Rutherford Lane.ATCEMS said to expect extended closures for the investigation.As of 6:17 a.m., no further information was available.

Nicholas Kristof: So many child deaths in Gaza, and for what?

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

Consider this: The most dangerous place to be a child in the world today is the Gaza Strip.That’s the assessment of Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, who is not a bleeding-heart radical but a former ambassador and veteran lawyer who worked for Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.Already it appears that more than twice as many children have died in Gaza just since the war started Oct. 7 than in all the conflicts worldwide in 2022, according to United Nations figures.“Almost 1 out of every 150 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed in just two months,” noted Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of MedGlobal, an aid group working there. “That is the equivalent of half a million American children.”Sahloul warned that many others may “die from infections, waterborne diseases or dehydration,” while others will suffer from lifelong physical disabilities.We can and should despise Hamas, a repressive, misogynist and homophobic force that uses Palestinian civilians as human sh...

Mixed weekend weather: clouds, showers, and a cold snap for St. Louis metro

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

ST. LOUIS -- We had a few showers and rumbles of thunder roll through overnight, but most of the rain stayed north of the metro. The cold front continues moving through the region and a few sprinkles or maybe some drizzle will be possible early this morning, southeast of St. Louis.Clouds should decrease over the course of the day from west to east, leaving a mix of clouds and sun this afternoon. Temperatures will range from the upper 40s to the low 50s. Breezy conditions are also expected, with winds and clouds increasing again this evening into tonight. Overnight lows will range from the upper 20s to the low 30s. While we'll have some clouds around Sunday morning, I expect partly cloudy skies by the afternoon. It will be a chilly day, however, with highs struggling to make it into the low 40s. The winds will gradually ease over the course of the day. After the brief cooldown on Sunday and the cold start on Monday morning, temperatures rebounded to near-normal levels by Monday after...

Big Tech muscles in: The 12 months that changed Silicon Valley forever

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

At 1 p.m. on a Friday shortly before Christmas last year, Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, summoned four of his employees and ruined their weekend.The group worked in SL1001, a bland building with a blue glass facade betraying no sign that dozens of lawyers inside were toiling to protect the interests of one of the world’s most influential companies. For weeks they had been prepping for a meeting of powerful executives to discuss the safety of Google’s products. The deck was done. But that afternoon Walker told his team the agenda had changed, and they would have to spend the next few days preparing new slides and graphs.In fact, the entire agenda of the company had changed — all in nine days. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, had decided to ready a slate of products based on artificial intelligence — immediately. He turned to Walker, the same lawyer he was trusting to defend the company in a profit-threatening antitrust case in Washington, D.C. Walker knew he would need to persua...

Grading The Week: If Deion Sanders wants more “privacy,” CU Buffs coach needs to ditch his Amazon, YouTube film crews

Published Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:31:17 GMT

Based on your emails, especially the ones we can’t print in a family newspaper, y’all feel the Grading The Week staff can be a tad harsh on Deion Sanders.There are reasons for it coming across that way, one of which we’ll get into shortly. But let’s say this, too: To be fair to the GTW peanut gallery, not a single soul on our crack team said Coach Prime couldn’t recruit. Or that he couldn’t sell, as confirmed by the commitment of mega high school tackle Jordan Seaton, the latest feather in the man’s talent-building cap, earlier this week.But GTW’s overall stance hasn’t changed. Yes, 4-8 is a heck of a lot better than 1-11. Yes, Boulder is back on the national college football map. But as to other parts of The Great Deion Sanders Experiment? Jury’s still out.Coach Prime wants … “privacy?” — FAnd Prime hasn’t exactly engendered our sympathies when he stiff-arms local media outlets in favor of vid...