NIGERIA
Polio cases reported: WHO
The country has reported the first two cases of polio after more than two years, in an area newly liberated from Islamic extremists who attacked polio vaccinators in the past, the government and the WHO said on Thursday. The country’s removal from the WHO’s list of polio-endemic countries in October last year had meant the entire African continent was free of the crippling disease. Two children have been paralyzed by polio in northeastern Borno State in two different local government areas that had been cut off by Boko Haram’s Islamic extremist uprising, Minister of Health Isaac Adewole said in a statement on Thursday night. “Our overriding priority right now is to rapidly boost immunity in the affected areas to ensure that no more children are affected by this terrible disease,” he said. Adewole said he has ordered the deployment of a national emergency response team.
UNITED KINGDOM
London IS schoolgirl dead
One of three schoolgirls who left London in February last year to join the Islamic State (IS) militant group has died, her family lawyer said on Thursday. Attorney Tasnime Akunjee said the family of Kadiza Sultana learned of her death in Raqqa, Syria, a few weeks ago. She was believed to have been killed by a Russian airstrike in Raqqa, ITV News reported earlier on Thursday. Sultana was making plans to return home and her family was communicating with her to discuss her possible escape from Raqqa, according to an interview published by ITV with Sultana’s sister, which includes recordings of purported telephone calls between the sisters. Sultana, 16, along with two other friends, flew from London’s Gatwick Airport to Turkey on Feb. 17 last year.
UNITED STATES
Terrorist ID sparks lawsuit
A Muslim woman is suing the city of Chicago and six officers who falsely singled her out as a potential terrorist on July 4 last year as she left a subway station wearing a headscarf, face veil and carrying a backpack. Itemid al-Matar’s federal lawsuit filed on Thursday says officers pulled off her religious garb, arrested her and later strip-searched her. The 32-year-old was acquitted of obstructing justice. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said “blatant xenophobia, Islamophobia and racial profiling” motivated the arrest. A public police report said officers “were on high alert of terrorist activity” on the national holiday and that al-Matar was exhibiting “suspicious behavior.” The Chicago Police Department declined to comment, but said in a statement that police “strive to treat all individuals with the highest levels of dignity of respect.”
UNITED STATES
Bathroom request denied
A South Texas school board has denied a request from a woman who wants her transgender daughter to use the girls’ restroom. Kim Shappley’s daughter, Kai, is about to be in kindergarten. She was born as Joseph five years ago. The mother says right away she knew Kai had a different identity than “boy.” The Pearland Independent School District board listened to Shappley on Tuesday, but did not alter its policy. In a statement, the district said children are to use the bathroom matching the gender of their birth certificate. It said transgender children in kindergarten can use gender-neutral bathrooms in their classrooms. Shappley on Thursday said that her daughter has lived as a girl for two years. Shappley has not yet picked an elementary school for her daughter.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to