Author: Gulf News Week

SARWORLOR, Liberia (news agencies) — Five months ago, Roseline Phay, a 32-year-old farmer from the West African nation of Liberia, set off on a quest to find contraceptives.Phay and her partner have two daughters, and they barely make ends meet. Determined not to have more children, she went to a health worker in her village, but contraception pills, implants and condoms had run out. Phay trekked for hours on red clay roads to the nearest clinic, but they had no contraceptives either.She did not know it, but her mission was doomed from the beginning. Just weeks before, U.S. President Donald…

Wrexham, the Welsh soccer team co-owned by “Deadpool” actor Ryan Reynolds, has arrived Down Under for its latest preseason tour overseas — and where more apt to start than Marvel Stadium.The Wrexham squad has landed in Melbourne for the first of three tour games to get ready for a first season in 43 years in English soccer’s second tier, having just secured a third straight promotion.Playing in Australia and New Zealand — after recent preseason tours to the United States — is part of an effort to spread Wrexham’s global footprint that has been supercharged by the popular “Welcome to…

Top British diplomat David Lammy says the US-backed aid distribution mechanism in Gaza is ‘not doing a good job’.British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has decried the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying that the United Kingdom could take further action against Israel if a ceasefire deal to end the war in the Palestinian territory does not materialise. Speaking to the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, Lammy also criticised the new aid distribution mechanism in Gaza via a group backed by the United States and Israel, dubbed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “We’ve been very clear that we don’t support the…

GENEVA (news agencies) — Switzerland’s medical products authority has granted the first approval for a malaria medicine designed for small infants, touted as an advance against a disease that takes hundreds of thousands of lives — nearly all in Africa — each year. Swissmedic gave a green light Tuesday for the medicine from Basel-based pharmaceutical company Novartis for treatment of babies with body weights between 2 and 5 kilograms (nearly 4½ to 11 pounds), which could pave the way for hard-hit African nations to follow suit in coming months.The agency said that the decision is significant in part because it’s…

LOS ANGELES (news agencies) — Raphael Saadiq has always admired the boldness of stand-up icons like Dave Chappelle and Eddie Murphy who commanded the stage alone with only their stories.Now, the three-time Grammy winner is taking a similar leap, stepping into the spotlight solo for his own one-man show tour, announced Tuesday. The intimate No Bandwidth tour will pull back the curtain on Saadiq’s life and music, weaving never-before-told stories with performances spanning Tony! Toni! Toné!, Lucy Pearl and his solo catalog.The tour kicks off in Sacramento on Sept. 7 that’s expected to run into mid-October. It’ll mark a return…

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (news agencies) — The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Tuesday for the Taliban’s supreme leader and the head of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court on charges of persecuting women and girls since seizing power nearly four years ago.The warrants also accuse the leaders of persecuting “other persons non-conforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as ‘allies of girls and women.’”The warrants were issued against Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhunzada and the head of the Supreme Court, Abdul Hakim Haqqani.The warrants came just hours after the United Nations…

US President Donald Trump and his Middle East envoy both claimed the talks could happen next week, following the Iranian president’s comments on being open to dialogue.Iran says it has not requested talks with the United States over its nuclear programme, as claimed by US President Donald Trump. “No request for a meeting has been made on our side to the American side,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said on Tuesday in comments carried by the country’s Tasnim news agency. The clarification came a day after Trump, during a dinner in the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin…

BARCELONA, Spain (news agencies) — Spanish police believe Liverpool player Diogo Jota was driving over the speed limit when he and his brother died in a car crash last week.Spain’s Civil Guard said on Tuesday that while their investigation into the cause of the crash last Thursday continues, they believe Jota was driving too fast when the Lamborghini veered off course after a tire burst.Previously, the police had not said if Jota or his brother André Silva were driving. On Tuesday they said that it appeared Jota was.The siblings died in the car when it burst into flames on an…

NEW YORK (news agencies) — THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. news agencies’s earlier story follows below.Wall Street was mixed in quiet trading early Tuesday as markets appeared to shrug off new tariff deadlines for U.S. trading partners.Futures for the S&P 500 added 0.1% before the bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.1%. Nasdaq futures rose 0.2%.Markets tumbled Monday after President Donald Trump set a 25% tax on goods imported from Japan and South Korea and new tariff rates on a dozen other nations scheduled to go into effect on Aug. 1.The S&P slid 0.8% on…

NEW YORK (news agencies) — Oprah Winfrey has chosen a novel with a timely theme for her latest book club pick. Bruce Holsinger’s “Culpability” is a family drama that probes the morals and ethics of AI.“I appreciated the prescience of this story,” Winfrey said in a statement Tuesday, the day of the novel’s publication. “It’s where we are right now in our appreciation and dilemmas surrounding Artificial Intelligence, centered around an American family we can relate to. I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!”Holsinger, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of four…