One of the ships is carrying corn to South Korea, while the other is carrying bulk sunflower meal to Istanbul, says the Turkish Defence Ministry.

Türkiye's National Defence Ministry has said that two more ships carrying over 70,000 tonnes of grain have left Ukraine.

The Liberian-flagged Ocean Lion, carrying 64,720 tonnes of corn to South Korea, set sail on Tuesday from Chornomorsk under a historic Türkiye-brokered deal to unblock Ukrainian grain exports.

The second ship, Turkish-flagged Rahmi Yagci, which is carrying 5,300 tonnes of bulk sunflower meal to Istanbul, too left Chornomorsk, the ministry said in a statement.

It added that four ships anchored off Istanbul's Ahirkapi port on Monday night will also be inspected in the coming hours.

On July 22, Türkiye, the United Nations, Russia and Ukraine signed the landmark deal to reopen three Ukrainian ports — Odessa, Chornomorsk and Yuzhny — for the export of grain that has been stuck for months due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is now into its sixth month.

A team from the Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul, comprising representatives from all four sides, inspects each ship before it departs for its destination.

Source: agencies

Myanmar's military since seizing power in February last year has waged a bloody crackdown on dissent, with the violence leaving more than 2,100 civilians dead and nearly 15,000 arrested.

UN investigators have reported mounting evidence of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture and sexual violence, committed in Myanmar since last year's military coup.

The United Nations' Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) said on Tuesday women and children were particularly being targeted.

"There are ample indications that since the military takeover in February 2021, crimes have been committed in Myanmar on a scale and in a manner that constitutes a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population," the investigators said in a statement.

Myanmar's military seized power on February 1 last year, ousting the civilian government and arresting de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The junta has waged a bloody crackdown on dissent, with the violence leaving more than 2,100 civilians dead and nearly 15,000 arrested, according to a local monitoring group.

The investigation team warned in its annual report that over the 12 months to the end of June, "the scope of potential international crimes taking place in Myanmar has broadened dramatically."

The IIMM was established by the UN Human Rights Council in September 2018 to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and prepare files for criminal prosecution.

It cooperates with the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court among others.

Sexual crimes 

"Perpetrators of these crimes need to know that they cannot continue to act with impunity," said IIMM chief Nicholas Koumjian.

The report said that according to the evidence collected, "Sexual and gender-based crimes, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, and crimes against children have been perpetrated by members of the security forces and armed groups."

Koumjian said the investigators were focusing in particular on crimes committed against women and children, which are "amongst the gravest international crimes, but they are also historically under-reported and under-investigated."

Children in Myanmar had been killed, tortured and arbitrarily detained, including as proxies for their parents, the report found.

They had also been subjected to sexual violence and conscripted and trained by security forces and armed groups.

The team, which has never been permitted to visit Myanmar, said it had nonetheless now collected nearly three million "information items", including interview statements, documents, photographs and geospatial imagery.

The investigators said the evidence they had collected indicated that "several armed conflicts are ongoing and intensifying on the territory of Myanmar".

They said they were drawing up case files on specific incidents of war crimes committed in the context of those armed conflicts, including intentional attacks directed at civilians, indiscriminate killings and the widespread burning of villages and towns.

Nature of crimes 'expanding' 

Other UN experts and the IIMM itself had already warned that war crimes and crimes against humanity were being committed.

But on Tuesday, the investigators cautioned that more and more regions were becoming engulfed in the violence, and that "the nature of the potential criminality is also expanding."

They pointed to the junta's execution of four political prisoners last month, marking the first executions in the country in decades.

The IIMM also highlighted the ongoing plight of Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority, five years after a bloody 2017 crackdown that resulted in the displacement of nearly a million people.

Most of the around 850,000 Rohingya who were driven into camps in neighbouring Bangladesh are still there, while another 600,000 are in Myanmar's Rakhine state.

"While the Rohingya consistently express their desire for a safe and dignified return to Myanmar, this will be very difficult to achieve unless there is accountability for the atrocities committed against them, including through prosecutions of the individuals most responsible for those crimes," Koumjian said.

Last month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague threw out objections from Myanmar's military rulers and decided to hear a landmark case accusing the country of genocide against the Rohingya.

Source: agencies

Boat carrying 30 Tunisian nationals sinks off Tunisia's coast, drowning three women and three children, local media report

Six people have died off the coast of Tunisia after a boat carrying 30 Tunisian nationals capsized. 

Those drowned included three women and three children, state news agency TAP reported on Tuesday. The boat capsized as it was attempting to sail from Tunisia to Italy. 

The Tunisian coast guard and navy were able to rescue 20 people, while the search for other survivors is ongoing.

Deadly crossings 

Tunisia and neighbouring Libya are key departure points for migrants and refugees seeking to reach European shores, often in vessels that are barely seaworthy.

The Italian island of Lampedusa is only about 130 kilometres from Tunisia's coast.

Nearly 2,000 migrants drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean in 2021, compared to 1,401 in 2020,  according to the International Organization for Migration. 

Source: agencies

Kuwaiti temperatures continued to break records, exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, with Al Jahra station recording 53 degrees, followed by Al Sulaibiya station 52.1 degrees.

Kuwait recorded the highest temperatures on earth Sunday, reports a local Arabic newspaper, according to Eldorado Weather (http://www.eldoradoweather.com).

Dirar Al-Ali, a meteorological department observer, said Monday that forecasts indicate very hot and humid weather, especially in coastal areas.

According to him, the weather will be very hot from Tuesday to Thursday, with northwesterly winds becoming active and the possibility of dust being raised, which will reduce horizontal visibility. Some areas may experience temperatures ranging from 48 to 50 degrees Celsius.

Procedures are currently underway to hire Turkish doctors and nurses by next year, sources revealed to Kuwait Times, following Minister of Health Khaled Al-Saeed’s visit to Turkey. The medical staff will be occupying positions in the new hospitals. “Kuwait Ministry of Health is keen on hiring staff from different nationalities as long as they qualify for the positions. Turkey’s level in the medical sector is well established and is noted for its high medical quality,” sources said. The agreement also includes sending some Kuwaiti patients to be treated in Turkish hospitals and establishing offices in Turkish cities to cater the needs of the Kuwaiti patients.

In another development, 650 Bangladeshi nurses will be arriving in Kuwait in the coming weeks. The first batch of 50 nurses from Bangladesh arrived in Kuwait in June. Ambassador of Bangladesh to Kuwait, Major General Md Ashikuzzaman along with officers of the Embassy and officers from the respective companies welcomed the nurses at Kuwait International Airport and congratulated them for being selected as the first batch to serve in Kuwait.

The Ambassador thanked the relevant Ministries of Kuwait and the Embassy of Kuwait in Bangladesh and related companies for recruiting Bangladeshi skilled manpower to Kuwait. He also thanked the Ministry of Health of Bangladesh, Ministry of Expatriates Welfare and Overseas Employment, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bangladesh Overseas Employment and Services Limited (BOESL) for their assistance in expediting the recruitment process of nurses in Kuwait. Also, some Indian nurses are expected to arrive in Kuwait very soon. These nurses will work in public and private hospitals./agencies

Climate hazards, such as flooding, heat waves and drought have worsened more than half of the hundreds of known infectious diseases in people, including malaria, hantavirus, cholera and even anthrax.

Researchers looked through the medical literature of established cases of illnesses and found 218 out of the known 375 human infectious diseases, 58 per cent, seemed to be made worse by one of 10 types of extreme weather connected to climate change, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Climate Change.

Doctors, going back to Hippocrates, have long connected disease to weather, but this study shows how widespread the influence of climate is on human health.

In addition to looking at infectious diseases, the researchers expanded their search to look at all type of human illnesses, including non-infectious sicknesses such as asthma, allergies and even animal bites to see how many maladies they could connect to climate hazards in some way, including infectious diseases.

They found a total of 286 unique sicknesses and of those 223 of them seemed to be worsened by climate hazards, nine were diminished by climate hazards and 54 had cases of both aggravated and minimised, the study found.

The new study doesn’t do the calculations to attribute specific disease changes, odds or magnitude to climate change, but finds cases where extreme weather was a likely factor among many. The study did map out the 1,006 connections from climate hazard to illness.

"If climate is changing, the risk of these diseases are changing," said study co-author Dr Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Doctors, such as Patz, said they need to think of the diseases as symptoms of a sick Earth.

“The findings of this study are terrifying and illustrate well the enormous consequences of climate change on human pathogens,” said Dr Carlos del Rio, an Emory University infectious disease specialist, who was not part of the study. “Those of us in infectious diseases and microbiology need to make climate change one of our priorities and we need to all work together to prevent what will be without doubt a catastrophe as a result of climate change.”

Study lead author Camilo Mora, a climate data analyst at the University of Hawaii, said what is important to note is that the study isn’t about predicting future cases.

“There is no speculation here whatsoever,” Mora said. "These are things that have already happened.”

One example Mora knows first-hand. About five years ago, Mora’s home in rural Colombia was flooded - for the first time in his memory water was in his living room - and Mora contracted Chikungunya, a nasty virus spread by mosquito bites. And even though he survived, he still feels joint pain years later.

Sometimes climate change acts in odd ways. Mora includes the 2016 case in Siberia when a decades-old reindeer carcass, dead from anthrax, was unearthed when the permafrost thawed from warming. A child touched it, got anthrax and started an outbreak.

Mora originally wanted to search medical cases to see how COVID-19 intersected with climate hazards, if at all. He found cases where extreme weather both exacerbated and diminished chances of COVID. In some cases, extreme heat in poor areas had people congregate together to cool off and get exposed to the disease, but in other situations, heavy downpours reduced COVID-19 spread because people stayed home and indoors, away from others.

Longtime climate and public health expert Kristie Ebi at the University of Washington cautioned that she had concerns with how the conclusions were drawn and some of the methods in the study. It is an established fact that the burning of coal, oil and natural gas led to more frequent and intense extreme weather and research has shown that weather patterns are associated with many health issues, she said.

“However, correlation is not causation,” Ebi said in an email. “The authors did not discuss the extent to which the climate hazards reviewed changed over the time period of the study and the extent to which any changes have been attributed to climate change.”

But Dr Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard School of Public Health, Emory’s del Rio and three other outside experts said the study is a good warning about climate and health for now and the future. Especially as global warming and habitat loss push animals and their diseases closer to humans, Bernstein said.

“This study underscores how climate change may load the dice to favour unwelcome infectious surprises,” Bernstein said in an email. “But of course it only reports on what we already know and what’s yet unknown about pathogens may be yet more compelling about how preventing further climate change may prevent future disasters like COVID-19.”

Source: AP