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Wits students protest
JOHANNESBURG - Scores of Wits University students have shut the main entrance to the campus in protest against ‘financial exclusion and lack of accommodation’. The Student Representative Council (SRC) gathered students in the early hours of Wednesday and blocked the Yale Road North entrance on Empire Road to have their demands heard. SRC member Karabo Matloga told TimesLIVE that many students have not registered due to their outstanding debt. Matloga said the university provides a R50 000 ‘hardship fund’ to indebted students who can only register once half the debt is paid.
Student debt relief
WASHINGTON - Hundreds of student activists rallied outside the US Supreme Court as arguments were being heard over the legality of President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel R430 billion in student debt. Six Republican-controlled States and two student borrowers sued to stop the plan, arguing it exceeded the president’s authority. The Biden administration, however, cited a 2003 law permitting the government to modify or waive federal loans in emergencies. More than 25 million people applied for the programme for applications with stops in 2022.
Alleged traffickers arrested
ITALY - Italian authorities arrested three people and were looking for a fourth suspect who they believe trafficked up to 200 migrants aboard a wooden boat that smashed apart on rocks off southern Italy on Sunday, killing at least 64 people. The coffins of the victims found so far were laid out in an indoor sports arena in the southern city of Crotone, with small white caskets for the youngest of them and brown wooden ones for the others. All had flowers on top, and some had engraved name tags.
FRANCE - France said Wednesday it seized 27 tonnes of cocaine in 2022, a five-fold increase over 10 years, as Europe faces a surge in trafficking and use of the drug.
Seizures were up five per cent last year compared with 2021, according to interior ministry figures, with more than half of the narcotic coming from the West Indies and France’s poverty-stricken South American region of Guiana.
As the illegal trade has swelled, most cocaine now enters Europe through northern ports like Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and France’s Le Havre.
With its vast cargo terminals where the River Seine reaches the sea, port city Le Havre has become the main point of entry for cocaine into France.
It saw 1.9 tonnes of coke confiscated in just a few days last February according to the ministry of public accounts, which oversees customs enforcement.
An AFP investigation earlier this year found that more than a sixth of the cocaine consumed in France is smuggled inside the bodies of drug mules, including pregnant women, on flights from Guiana.
BAB AL-HAWA - World Health Organisation (WHO) Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged the international community on Wednesday to help earthquake-hit north-west Syria, on his first-ever visit to rebel-held areas of the war-ravaged country. “The people of north-west Syria need the assistance of the international community to recover and rebuild,” Tedros told reporters after entering from neighbouring Türkiye via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing. “I call on the international community, governments, philanthropists, individuals, to dig deep,” added Tedros, the highest-ranking United Nations official to visit the rebel-held area since civil war broke out almost 12 years ago.
The WHO chief had already travelled to government-controlled Aleppo and Damascus the same week as the February 6 disaster that killed more than 50 000 people in Türkiye and Syria. On Wednesday,