Tag: World News

MANILA (TIP): President Ferdinand Marcos said on March 28 the Philippines will not be “cowed into silence” by Beijing after confrontations in the South China Sea that injured Filipino troops and damaged vessels.
Marcos’s remarks came as China blamed the Philippines for raising tensions in the hotly contested waterway, which Beijing claims almost entirely.
Beijing and Manila have a long history of maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea and there have been repeated confrontations between their vessels near disputed reefs in recent months.
Manila summoned a Chinese envoy over the latest incident near Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands, which occurred last Saturday during a Philippine mission to resupply troops garrisoned on the BRP Sierra Madre, a grounded navy ship.
The Philippines said the China Coast Guard blocked its supply vessel and damaged it with a water cannon, injuring three soldiers.
The China Coast Guard has defended its actions, describing them as “lawful regulation, interception and expulsion” of a foreign vessel that “tried to forcefully intrude” into Chinese waters.
Beijing has urged Manila to “pull back from the brink” and stop “provoking trouble at sea,” but Marcos hit back on Thursday.
“We seek no conflict with any nation, more so nations that purport and claim to be our friends, but we will not be cowed into silence, submission, or subservience,” Marcos said in a statement. He said the Philippines would respond with a “countermeasure package that is proportionate, deliberate, and reasonable in the face of the open, unabating, and illegal, coercive, aggressive, and dangerous attacks by agents of the China Coast Guard and the Chinese Maritime Militia.”
“Filipinos do not yield,” Marcos said.
‘A dangerous road’
China claims almost the entire South China Sea, brushing off rival claims from other countries, including the Philippines, as well as an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.
Among the claimants, China has been the most assertive, deploying ships to patrol the waters and building artificial islands, which it has militarised.
In a statement Thursday entitled “China Will Not Allow the Philippines to Act Wilfully”, Beijing’s defence ministry blamed “the provocations by the Philippine side” for the increased tensions over the South China Sea.
“Relying on the backing of external forces… the Philippine side has frequently infringed on rights and provoked and created trouble at sea, as well as spreading false information to mislead the international community’s perception of the issue, which is, so to speak, going further and further down a dangerous road,” it added.
Second Thomas Shoal is about 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan, and more than 1,000 kilometres from China’s nearest major landmass, Hainan island.
US repeats ‘ironclad’ commitment
The United States, a treaty ally of the Philippines, has led a chorus of support for the Southeast Asian country in response to Chinese actions. (AFP)

DEIR AL-BALAH (TIP): An international team of doctors visiting a hospital in central Gaza was prepared for the worst. But the gruesome impact Israel’s war against Hamas is having on Palestinian children still left them stunned. One toddler died from a brain injury caused by an Israeli strike that fractured his skull. His cousin, an infant, is still fighting for her life, with part of her face blown off by the same strike.
An unrelated 10-year-old boy screamed out in pain for his parents, not knowing that they were killed in the strike. Beside him was his sister, but he didn’t recognise her because burns covered almost her entire body.
These gut-wrenching casualties were described to The Associated Press by Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive-care doctor from Jordan, following a 10-hour overnight shift at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah.
Haj-Hassan, who has extensive experience in Gaza and regularly speaks out about the war’s devastating effects, was part of a team that recently finished a two-week stint there.
After nearly six months of war, Gaza’s health sector has been decimated. Roughly a dozen of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are only partially functioning. The rest have either shut down or are barely functioning after they ran out of fuel and medicine, were surrounded and raided by Israeli troops, or were damaged in fighting.
That leaves hospitals such as Al-Aqsa Martyrs caring for an overwhelming number of patients with limited supplies and staff. The majority of its intensive care unit beds are occupied by children, including infants wrapped in bandages and wearing oxygen masks.
“I spend most of my time here resuscitating children,” Haj-Hassan said after a recent shift. “What does that tell you about every other hospital in the Gaza Strip?”
A different team of international doctors working at Al-Aqsa Martyrs in January stayed at a nearby guesthouse. But because of a recent surge of Israeli strikes nearby, Haj-Hassan and her co-workers stayed in the hospital itself.
That gave them a painfully vivid look at the strain the hospital has come under as the number of patients keeps rising, said Arvind Das, the team leader in Gaza for the International Rescue Committee. (AP)
France’s parliament seeks to ban hair discrimination affecting black women
PARIS (TIP): The French parliament on March 28 began debating a bill targeting workplace discrimination based on hair texture, which the draft law’s backers say targets mostly black women wearing their hair naturally.
Olivier Serva, an independent National Assembly deputy for the French overseas territory of Guadeloupe and the bill’s sponsor, said it would penalise any workplace discrimination based on “hairstyle, colour, length or texture.”
Similar laws exist in around 20 US states which have identified hair discrimination as an expression of racism.
In Britain, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has issued guidelines against hair discrimination in schools.
Serva, who is black, said women “of African descent” were often encouraged before job interviews to change their style of hair.
‘Target of discrimination’
The deputy, who also included discrimination suffered by blondes and redheads in his proposal, points to an American study stating that a quarter of black women polled said they had been ruled out for jobs because of how they wore their hair at the job interview.
Such statistics are hard to come by in France, which bans the compilation of personal data that mention a person’s race or ethnic background on the basis of the French Republic’s “universalist” principles.
The draft law does not, in fact, contain the term “racism”, noted Daphne Bedinade, a social anthropologist, saying the omission was problematic.
“To make this only about hair discrimination is to mask the problems of people whose hair makes them a target of discrimination, mostly black women,” she told Le Monde daily.
While statistics are difficult to come by, high-profile people have faced online harassment because of their hairstyle.
In the political sphere they include former government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye, and Audrey Pulvar, a deputy mayor of Paris, whose afro look has attracted much negative comment online.
The bill’s critics say it is unnecessary, as discrimination based on looks is already banned by law.
“There is no legal void here,” said Eric Rocheblave, a lawyer specialising in labour law. Calling any future law “symbolic,” Rocheblave said it would not be of much practical help when it came to proving discrimination in court. (AFP)

CAPE TOWN (TIP): A bus carrying worshippers headed to an Easter festival plunged off a bridge on a mountain pass and burst into flames in South Africa on March 28, killing at least 45 people, authorities said.
The only survivor of the crash was an 8-year-old child, who was receiving medical attention, according to authorities in the northern province of Limpopo. They said the child was seriously injured.
The Limpopo provincial government said the bus veered off the Mmamatlakala bridge and plunged 50 meters (164 feet) into a ravine before busting into flames.
Search operations were ongoing, the provincial government said, but many bodies were burned beyond recognition and still trapped inside the vehicle.
Authorities said they believe the bus was traveling from the neighboring country of Botswana to the town of Moria, which hosts a popular Easter pilgrimage. They said it appeared that the driver lost control and was one of the dead.
Minister of Transport Sindisiwe Chikunga was in Limpopo province for a road safety campaign and changed plans to visit the crash scene, the national Department of Transport said. She said there was an investigation underway into the cause of the crash and offered her condolences to the families of the victims.
The South African government often warns of the danger of road accidents during the Easter holidays, which is a particularly busy and dangerous time for road travel. More than 200 people died in road crashes during the Easter weekend last year.
The Zionist Christian Church has its headquarters in Moria and its Easter pilgrimage attracts hundreds of thousands of people from across South Africa and neighboring countries. This year is the first time the Easter pilgrimage to Moria is set to go ahead since the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP)