Month: February 2018

Russian teams of emergency workers and investigators searched a snow-covered field outside Moscow Monday, looking for body fragments and clues after a plane crashed a day earlier, killing all 71 people on board, including the crew and three children. The 65 passengers on board were from 5 to 79-years-old, according to a list posted by the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which did not give their nationalities. More than 400 people and 70 vehicles were deployed to the crash site, the ministry said. WATCH: Crash ​President Vladimir Putin ordered a special commission to investigate what caused the Antonov AN-148 plane to go …

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Russian authorities are investigating the cause of a passenger plane crash near Moscow on Sunday. All 71 people on board are thought to have died in the crash. Fragments of the An-148 plane have been found near the village of Stepanovskoye, about 40 kilometers from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports weather conditions, pilot error or a technical malfunction are among the possible causes. …

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The British government is warning charities and humanitarian relief organizations that it will withdraw public funding if they fail to establish effective internal reviews to prevent and investigate sexual predatory behavior and abuse by their aid workers.  The warning came Sunday in the wake of disclosures that one of the country’s biggest charities, Oxfam, failed to disclose its dismissal in 2011 of senior aid workers who paid local prostitutes, some likely under-age, for sex parties in Haiti in the wake of a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left 300,000 injured and 1.5 million homeless. Four men …

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British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says the United Nations must supervise the return of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar because many are scared to come home on their own. Johnson spoke to reporters Sunday after his meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, de facto leader of the country formerly known as Burma “I saw real apprehension both in camps in Bangladesh and amongst the remaining villagers,” Johnson said. “The Burmese authorities need to work very hard with international agencies to overcome the real alarm that people feel about coming back to Burma.” A military crackdown on Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority sent …

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Forget the Winter Olympics, the Champion’s League or the Super Bowl. The real competition right now is who’s going to be invited to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. Everyone who is anyone in Britain is angling for an embossed royal ticket. British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua, who is seeking to add two more world championships to the three he already owns, says he would be happy to interrupt his high-level training for a trip to Windsor Castle on May 19. The ebullient Joshua has not been shy, tweeting a picture of himself and Harry with the question “Need a …

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The World Health Organization is calling for resolute action to end violence against children. WHO’s appeal comes in advance of a meeting in Stockholm, Sweden this week that will seek solutions to the problem of violence, which affects one out of every two children on this planet. The upcoming conference will explore ways to achieve the U.N.’s sustainable development goal of ending violence against children by 2030. But, the statistics weigh heavily against this aspiration. The World Health Organization reports one half of the two billion children on earth, aged between two and 17, are victims of physical, sexual or …

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All 71 people aboard a Russian passenger plane were killed when it crashed near Moscow, Russian officials said Sunday. “Sixty-five passengers and six crew members were on board, and all of them died,” Russia’s office of transport investigations said in a statement. The seven-year-old plane disappeared from the radar just minutes after departing from the capital city’s second largest airport, Domodedovo and was falling up to 6,700 meters per minute in the last seconds of the crash, flight-tracking site FlightRadar24 reported. The An-148 regional jet, operated by Saratov Airlines, was traveling from Domodedovo, to the city of Orsk when it …

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London’s newest museum attraction is greasy, smelly – and a glimpse at the hidden underside of urban life. The Museum of London on Thursday unveiled its latest display, a chunk of a 130-metric-ton (143-U.S.-ton) fatberg that but was blasted out of a city sewer last year. It took sewage workers with jet hoses nine weeks to dislodge the 250-meter (820-foot) -long mass of oil, fat, diapers and baby wipes from beneath Whitechapel in the city’s East End. The museum has lovingly preserved a chunk the size of a shoe-box, whose mottled consistency a curator likens to parmesan crossed with moon …

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EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini is dismissing criticism of the newly released European Commission enlargement strategy for the Western Balkans. Unveiled Tuesday, the strategy document says aspiring member nations Serbia and Montenegro in particular could become full members by 2025, assuming they successfully implement all required reforms and commit to “fundamental values” of the European bloc. As widely reported, the document is a product of Brussels’ redoubled efforts to exercise power in a region under growing influence from Moscow and Beijing, as one of its own member nations, Britain, pulls away. “Although Europe has identified the [Balkan] region’s problems …

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Britain’s Charity Commission must conduct a “full and urgent investigation” into Oxfam following an alleged cover-up of its staff hiring prostitutes in Haiti during a 2011 relief effort on the earthquake-hit island, the prime minister’s office said Saturday. “The reports of what is unacceptable behavior by senior aid workers in Haiti are truly shocking,” a spokeswoman for Theresa May said. “We want to see Oxfam provide all the evidence they hold of the events to the Charity Commission for a full and urgent investigation of these very serious allegations.” The call came as the British charities regulator released its own statement …

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel declined to comment Saturday on a Polish law that imposes jail terms for suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust, saying she did not want to wade into Poland’s internal affairs. The law would impose prison sentences of up to three years for using the phrase “Polish death camps” and for suggesting “publicly and against the facts” that the Polish nation or state was complicit in Nazi Germany’s crimes. “Without directly interfering in the legislation in Poland, I would like to say the following very clearly as German chancellor: We as Germans are responsible for …

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Skier Albin Tahiri will miss Kosovo’s 10th-anniversary celebrations next week — but as the country’s first winter Olympian, he thinks his 1.8 million compatriots will forgive him while he competes in the Pyeongchang Games that began Friday. While it has long had snow-capped mountains offering steep slopes and deep powder, Kosovo didn’t exist as a country until it broke free from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after a NATO-led bombing campaign pushed out Serbian forces to end a brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanians during a two-year battle for independence. Now the 28-year-old Tahiri will compete in all five alpine-ski …

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