UbuneBlog

CONVICTING food safety whistleblowers in China has a ‘chilling effect’ on other activists, a UN envoy said on Thursday, after the November jailing of a man who campaigned for victims of a tainted milk scandal. Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said he had raised the case of Zhao […]

MILITANTS in Iraq have attacked at least four Christian homes with a combination of grenades and bombs, killing two people and sending fear into the country’s already terrified tiny Christian community. Thursday night’s attack was the first since al-Qaeda-linked militants last week threatened a wave of violence against Christians in Iraq. The community went so […]

LARGE amounts of rice noodles made with rotten grain and potentially carcinogenic additives are being sold in south China, state press said on Friday, in the country’s latest food safety scare. Up to 50 factories in south China’s Dongguan city near Hong Kong are producing about 500,000kg of tainted rice noodles a day using stale […]

SWEET dreams are made of this for Annie Lennox, honoured by the Queen her New Year list of awards. The statuesque Scottish singer, who came to fame in 1980s duo Eurythmics, was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, for her work with charities fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa. […]

The Bank of Japan said Thursday that 82.31 trillion yen worth of banknotes were being kept in household or corporate coffers without being deposited at financial institutions by the end of this year, up 1.7% from a year earlier to a record high. People are tending to keep their money under the mattress given the […]

NATIONAL football coach Ricki Herbert and captain Ryan Nelsen received New Year’s Honours on Friday after New Zealand defied expectations at the World Cup in South Africa. Herbert was named Companion to the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year’s Honours List, with Nelsen becoming an Officer of the New Zealand Order of […]

MORE than 10 million people living in Britain today, almost a fifth of the population, will reach their 100th birthday, the Department for Work and Pensions said on Thursday. More than half of these future centenarians are currently aged between 16 and 50. The rise in life expectancy means many millions of Britons will spend […]

BUCKINGHAM Palace says Queen Elizabeth has become a great-grandmother. Autumn Phillips, wife of the queen’s grandson, Peter Phillips, has given birth to a baby girl. The baby is the queen’s first great-grandchild and is 12th in line to the throne. A statement issued on Thursday by the palace says Autumn Phillips gave birth at Gloucestershire […]

IMPISHLY posing for the camera, little Makayla Worrall’s smile belies a battle no four-year-old should face. Severe abdominal pain five months ago turned out to be ovarian cancer, which very rarely presents in children. Her stomach blew up like a pregnant belly, measuring 68cm around the girth, and she was constantly curled up on the […]

ABOUT 20 Israeli suppliers will help build the first modern Palestinian city in the West Bank but only after promising they will not use products or services from Israeli settlements, the project’s developer said on Tuesday. The announcement angered the Jewish settlers, who accused the suppliers of caving in to an international boycott of settlement […]