Life

‘Sacred job’: Iraq Kurds digitise books to save threatened culture

By Khazan Jangiz Huddled in the back of a van, Rebin Pishtiwan carefully scans one yellowed page after another, as part of his mission to digitise historic Kurdish books at risk of disappearing. Seen as the world’s largest stateless people, the Kurds are an ethnic group of between 25 and 35 million mostly spread across modern day Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. In Iraq, the Kurds are a sizeable minority who have been persecuted, with […]

Paris Picasso Museum reopens with new selection

By Sandra BIFFOT-LACUT PARIS, March 10, 2024 (AFP) – The Picasso Museum in Paris, which houses the world’s biggest collection of the Spanish artist’s works, is reopening on Tuesday with an overhauled display and a first-ever tribute to his ex-partner, the renowned painter Francoise Gilot. The new permanent collection will present a fresh selection of 400 works by Pablo Picasso across the museum’s 22 rooms. They have been drawn from some 200,000 items stored in […]

For ‘difficult’ creator, ‘Dragon Ball’ success provided acceptance

TOKYO, March 8, 2024 (AFP) – Akira Toriyama was already famous to comic fans in the early 1980s with “Dr. Slump” but he won manga immortality with the global sensation and Japanese success story that is “Dragon Ball”. But as his creation and his fame exploded when his creation won over kids the world over, Toriyama, who has died in Japan aged 68, shunned the limelight and preferred to focus on drawing. “‘Dragon Ball’ is […]

Few women know alcohol linked to breast cancer: WHO Europe

Just one in five women in Europe are aware that alcohol is a risk factor for developing breast cancer, a “major” health concern in the region, the World Health Organization warned Friday. “Only 21 percent of women across 14 European countries were aware of the connection between alcohol consumption and the risk of developing breast cancer,” the European branch of the WHO said in a statement, noting that awareness was even lower among men. “Just […]

‘Irreplaceable’ Colombian bird collection at risk

By Juan Sebastian SERRANO BOGOTÁ, March 8, 2024 (AFP) – Under a cracked and leaky ceiling, Andres Cuervo works on a colorful, dead hummingbird for the ornithological collection of the National University of Colombia, the country with more bird species than any other. Condors, eagles and even extinct birds receive a “second life” at the table of the biologist, who preserves them for science and posterity. But rather than a pristine setting with regulated temperature […]

Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama passes away at 68

  By Tomohiro OSAKI, Natsuko FUKUE TOKYO, March 8, 2024 (AFP) – The creator of Japan’s hugely popular and influential “Dragon Ball” comics and anime cartoons, Akira Toriyama, has died aged 68, his production team said Friday. First serialised in 1984, “Dragon Ball” is one of the best-selling manga franchises of all time and has spawned countless anime series, films and video games. Toriyama died on March 1 because of a blood clot on his […]

Great Barrier Reef hit by seventh ‘mass bleaching event’ since 1998

By Laura CHUNG SYDNEY, March 8, 2024 (AFP) – A “mass bleaching event” is unfolding on Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef, authorities said Friday, as warming seas threaten the spectacular home to thousands of marine species. Often dubbed the “world’s largest living structure”, the Great Barrier Reef is a 2,300 kilometre (1,400 mile) expanse of tropical corals that house a stunning array of biodiversity. But repeated mass bleaching events have threatened to rob the tourist […]

First Arab woman to graduate NASA training shoots for the Moon

By Moisés ÁVILA HOUSTON, March 7, 2024 (AFP) – Like her ancestors before her, Emirati astronaut Nora AlMatrooshi has spent much of her life gazing up at the stars and dreaming of flying to the Moon. This week, she became the first Arab woman to graduate from NASA’s training program, ready to blast off into the cosmos. AlMatrooshi, 30, remembers an elementary school lesson about space in which her teacher simulated a trip to the […]

La Nina return could reduce extreme heat risks for 2024: scientists

PARIS, March 7, 2024 (AFP) – The rapid return of the La Nina weather phenomenon “may actually decrease” the risk that 2024 smashes last year’s record heat, Europe’s climate monitor told AFP, amid enduring historic global temperatures. Although the past nine consecutive months have clocked temperatures previously unseen by humanity, it fell in line with climatologists’ predictions of human-caused climate change which “could have taken more into account”, said Carlo Buontempo of the Copernicus Climate […]

February marks 9th straight month of record-smashing global heat: climate monitor

By Benjamin LEGENDRE, Kelly MACNAMARA PARIS, March 7, 2024 (AFP) – Last month was the warmest February on record globally, the ninth straight month of historic high temperatures across the planet as climate change steers the world into “uncharted territory”, Europe’s climate monitor said Thursday. The last year has seen an onslaught of storms, crop-withering drought and devastating fires, as human-caused climate change — intensified by the naturally-occurring El Nino weather phenomenon — stoked warming […]

‘Worse than our nightmares’: the perils of pregnancy in war-torn Gaza

By Mai Yaghi and Adel Zanoun with Chloe Rouveyrolles-Bazire in Jerusalem GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories, March 6, 2024 (AFP) – Forced to flee her home by Israeli bombardment, Asmaa Ahmed gave birth in the middle of the night in a Gaza City school that had no electricity. The doctor arrived just in time, working by the light of a mobile phone and clamping the umbilical cord with whatever medical staff could find. “I was very, […]

Indigenous Bolivian women take up taekwondo against gender-based violence

By Esther MAMANI A violent attack by would-be robbers steered Bolivian Lidia Mayta towards the martial art of taekwondo. Three years later, she helps train other Indigenous women to defend themselves against rampant gender-based violence in the South American country. Mayta told AFP she would have died if neighbors had not come out of their own homes to scare off the assailants choking her outside her front door. They were trying to steal her wallet. […]