MOSCOW: Russian forces are just 1.5 kilometers outside the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after Russian units pushed up from the south toward the road and rail hub which had a pre-war population of 60,000 people, a prominent pro-Russian blogger said on Friday.
Russia controls a chunk of Ukraine about the size of the American state of Virginia and is advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion, according to open source maps.
Yuri Podolyaka, a prominent Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, said Russian forces were now just 1.5 km from the city after a push from the south.
Podolyaka said members of Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups, special forces which penetrate the front ahead of the advance, were already in the city.
Reuters was unable to verify battlefield accounts from either side due to reporting restrictions.
Ukraine’s military said in recent days that Russian troops destroyed or captured several Ukrainian positions near the city.
The fall of Pokrovsk, an important logistics center for the Ukrainian military, would be one of Ukraine’s biggest military losses in months.
Control of the city, which the Russian media call “the gateway to Donetsk,” would allow Moscow to severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines along the eastern front and boost its campaign to capture the city of Chasiv Yar, which sits on higher ground offering potential control of a wider area.
Squeezing the Ukrainian military’s access to the road network in the vicinity would make it harder for Kyiv’s troops to hold pockets of territory either side of Pokrovsk, which could allow Russia to consolidate and advance the front line.
The city also hosts a mine which is Ukraine’s only domestic coking coal supplier for its once-giant steel industry.
Ukrainian steelmaker Metinvest BV has halted some operations at the mine because of its proximity to advancing Russian troops along the front line of the war with Russia, an industry source said on Thursday.
Russian forces advance toward strategic city in Ukraine’s east, war blogger says
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Russian forces advance toward strategic city in Ukraine’s east, war blogger says
- The fall of Pokrovsk, an important logistics center for the Ukrainian military, would be one of Ukraine’s biggest military losses
- Control of the city would allow Moscow to severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines along the eastern front
’Lives at risk’: Women’s medical training ban threatens Afghan health sector
- From her private hospital in Afghanistan’s capital, doctor Najmussama Shefajo predicts a rise in maternal mortality rates “within three or four years“
The Taliban’s supreme leader is reportedly behind a ban on women studying midwifery and nursing at training institutes across the country, already among the worst in the world for deaths in childbirth.
“We may not see the impact very quickly but after three to four years we will see the maternal mortality rate go up and up,” said Shefajo.
“People will for sure have more babies at home. But what about complications? What about operations? Many procedures cannot be done at home.”
Since the Taliban government banned women from universities two years ago, Shefajo has been giving on-the-job medical training, including in midwifery and nursing.
But she said she doesn’t have the capacity or facilities to take on every woman keen to learn in her hospital, despite no shortage of volunteers.
“Midwifery and nursing are like the two wings of the doctors; if the bird doesn’t have wings, it cannot fly,” she added, ducking behind curtains to treat patients.
Already Afghanistan is facing a “desperate shortage of trained health care workers, especially women,” according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
No official notice has been issued by the Taliban government, but health ministry sources and managers of training institutes said this month that they had been told to block women from classes.
Restricting medical training is the latest action against women’s education since the Taliban authorities swept to power in 2021, imposing rules the United Nations has called “gender apartheid.”
“In a country where women and children depend on female health professionals for culturally sensitive care, cutting the pipeline of future health providers would put lives at risk,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.
Training institutes had ensured women would continue to learn health care skills, such as midwifery and nursing, or laboratory work, pharmacy and dentistry.
The ban would impact about 35,000 women studying at medical training centers, according to a figure from a health ministry source.
“We are concerned about the effects on the already fragile health care system,” said Achille Despres, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan, where the organization offers health services and training.
International NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which runs some of its busiest maternity hospitals in Afghanistan, also warned of the consequences of the ban, given that the nation’s “medical needs... are huge.”
“There is no health care system without educated female health practitioners,” country representative Mickael Le Paih said in a statement.
Afghanistan and MSF already face a dearth of obstetrician-gynaecologists (OB-GYNs) in a country with high fertility rates where women often have children from a young age, Le Paih told AFP.
And demand is only likely to increase, he added, as almost half of Afghanistan’s population is under 15 years old, according to a 2022 health ministry report.
“You can imagine the impact in several years’ time when you will have a large number of women reaching childbearing age,” he said.
The ban will undoubtedly further strain access for the 70 percent of the population living in rural areas.
After news of a ban spread last week, some training facilities closed their doors immediately, while others rushed to hold final exams and graduations, as still others said they would open as normal after the winter break unless they received a written order.
Shefajo and others want to provide online lessons, but say the lack of practical experience would be detrimental to learning.
Hadiya, 22, recently finished her first year studying midwifery, after having been forced to quit computer science studies at university and English courses.
“We may have midwives now, but medicine is changing every day... and it is clear that the situation in Afghanistan in the field of child and mother health is getting worse,” Hadiya told AFP.
“It’s like we’re in a cage, all the girls are thinking of finding a way to leave here so we can at least continue our studies and reach our goals,” she said.
“When I see the situation in Afghanistan, I think no child should be born here.”
Six dead, 30 injured in hospital fire in India
- Fire broke out late Thursday night in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and its cause is still being investigated
- Building fires are common in India due to lack of firefighting equipment, routine disregard for regulations
NEW DELHI: A fire at a private hospital in southern India killed at least six people, police said Friday, with more than two dozen others injured in the blaze.
Building fires are common in India due to a lack of firefighting equipment and a routine disregard for safety regulations.
The fire broke out late Thursday night in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and its cause is still being investigated.
All six victims were found unconscious inside a lift at the hospital in the city of Dindigul, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Police superintendent A. Pradeep told AFP that around 30 people had been injured but all were “stable.”
The fire started at the reception area on the ground floor and rapidly spread to the other floors, the Times of India newspaper reported.
The blaze came just weeks after 10 newborns were killed when a fire engulfed a hospital in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Earlier this year, a similar fire broke out at a children’s hospital in New Delhi that killed six infants.
At least 27 people were killed, including several children, when a fire broke out at a packed amusement park arcade in May in the western state of Gujarat.
Russia says strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in retaliation for ATACMS attack
- Russian defense ministry says air- and sea-based long-range precision weapons and drones were used
MOSCOW: Russia has carried out a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in retaliation for Kyiv’s use of US-supplied ATACMS missiles, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday.
The ministry said that air- and sea-based long-range precision weapons and drones were used against “critical facilities of Ukraine’s fuel and energy infrastructure that support the military-industrial complex.”
Earlier on Friday Ukraine said that Russia had launched a large-scale missile attack on Ukrainian energy facilities during the morning rush hour on Friday.
Indian police say probing bomb threat to central bank in Mumbai
- Warning was sent to official email address of newly appointed RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra
- Schools, railway stations, airports, airlines have been subject this year to hundreds of hoax bomb threats
MUMBAI: Police in India’s financial capital Mumbai said on Friday that they were investigating a bomb threat to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) after it received an email in Russian warning of an explosive attack.
The warning was sent to the official email address of newly appointed RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra, a senior Mumbai police officer said.
“We have registered a case, and the investigation is ongoing,” the officer said.
Schools, railway stations, airports and airlines in India have been subject this year to hundreds of bomb threats that have turned out to be hoaxes.
At least 40 schools in Delhi received a bomb threat by email on Monday, while airlines and airports in India got nearly 1,000 hoax threats until November this year, nearly ten times more than in the whole of 2023.
Huge and rare Mekong catfish spotted in Cambodia, raising conservation hopes
- Few of the millions of people who depend on the Mekong for their livelihoods have ever seen a giant catfish
- The species’ population has plummeted by 80% due to rising pressures from overfishing, dams and other disruptions
HANOI: Six critically endangered Mekong giant catfish — one of the largest and rarest freshwater fish in the world — were caught and released recently in Cambodia, reviving hopes for the survival of the species.
The underwater giants can grow up to 3 meters long and weigh up to 300 kilograms, or as heavy as a grand piano. They now are only found in Southeast Asia’s Mekong River but in the past inhabited the length of the 4,900-kilometer-long river, all the way from its outlet in Vietnam to its northern reaches in China’s Yunnan province.
The species’ population has plummeted by 80 percent in recent decades due to rising pressures from overfishing, dams that block the migratory path the fish follow to spawn and other disruptions.
Few of the millions of people who depend on the Mekong for their livelihoods have ever seen a giant catfish. To find six of the giants, which were caught and released within 5 days, is unprecedented.
The first two were on the Tonle Sap river, a tributary of the Mekong not far from Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. They were given identification tags and released. On Tuesday, fishermen caught four more giant catfish including two longer than 2 meters that weighed 120 kilograms and 131 kilograms, respectively. The captured fish were apparently migrating from their floodplain habitats near Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake northward along the Mekong River, likely to spawning grounds in northern Cambodia, Laos or Thailand.
“It’s a hopeful sign that the species is not in imminent, like in the next few years, risk of extinction, which gives conservation activities time to be implemented and to continue to bend the curve away from decline and toward recovery,” said Dr. Zeb Hogan, a University of Nevada Reno research biologist who leads the US Agency for International Development-funded Wonders of the Mekong project.
Much is still unknown about the giant fish, but over the past two decades a joint conservation program by the Wonders of the Mekong and the Cambodian Fisheries Administration has caught, tagged and released around 100 of them, gaining insights into how the catfish migrate, where they live and the health of the species.
“This information is used to establish migration corridors and protect habitats to try to help these fish survive in the future,” said Hogan.
The Mekong giant catfish is woven into the region’s cultural fabric, depicted in 3,000-year-old cave paintings, revered in folklore and considered a symbol of the river, whose fisheries feed millions and are valued at $10 billion annually.
Local communities play a crucial role in conservation. Fishermen now know about the importance of reporting accidental catches of rare and endangered species to officials, enabling researchers to reach places where fish have been captured and measure and tag them before releasing them.
“Their cooperation is essential for our research and conservation efforts,” Heng Kong, director of Cambodia’s Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute, said in a statement.
Apart from the Mekong giant catfish, the river is also home to other large fish including the salmon carp, which was thought to be extinct until it was spotted earlier this year, and the giant sting ray.
That four of these fish were caught and tagged in a single day is likely the “big fish story of the century for the Mekong”, said Brian Eyler, director of the Washington-based Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia Program. He said that seeing them confirms that the annual fish migration was still robust despite all the pressures facing the environment along the Mekong.
“Hopefully what happened this week will show the Mekong countries and the world that the Mekong’s mighty fish population is uniquely special and needs to be conserved,” he said.
