Drought killed 43 000

SOMALIA - Somalia’s ongoing record drought killed as many as 43 000 people last year, half of them were children under five, researchers said on Monday in the first attempt to estimate countrywide deaths. After five consecutive failed rainy seasons, half of Somalia’s 17 million people are in urgent need of aid, the United Nations has said, although parts of the country avoided a famine declaration last year that some experts had been expecting. The research, led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that half the deaths were children younger than five and that the crisis could prove worse than Somalia’s last major drought in 2017 and 2018.

Force condemned

LONDON - Scotland Yard is ‘broken’and its ‘rotten’ranks are riven with racism, misogyny and homophobia, a shock review said. The Met cannot be trusted to police itself and may harbour many more predatory officers like Sarah Everard’s killer Wayne Couzens and serial rapist David Carrick, it concludes. In the most damning report in its near 200-year history, the force is described as institutionally racist and corrupt as well as misogynistic and homophobic.

Putin’s double

RUSSIA- Vladimir Putin was mocked by Ukraine for allegedly sending a lookalike to war-ravaged Mariupol in a high security visit. Kyiv official Anton Gerashchenko posted three images of Putin’s chin and questioned whether they belonged to the same man. He taunted: ‘What’s up with your chin, Putin?’ The Interior Minister advisor posted: ‘Looks like lately his make-up artists (i.e. for the recent trips of the bunker man to the occupied Crimea and Mariupol) had to work with quite a low-quality copy, not even a double but its copy.’’