According to his agent, the body of former Premier League player and Ghanaian Christian Atsu was discovered in Turkey’s earthquake debris.
Atsu, 31, was wrongly reported to have been rushed to the hospital last week. He was really playing for Super Lig team Hatayspor following earlier stops at Newcastle United and Everton.
After the earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 and killed tens of thousands of people, he had been reported missing in Antakya.
Nana Sechere tweeted: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce to all well wishers that sadly Christian Atsu’s body was recovered this morning. My deepest condolences go to his family and loved ones.
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their prayers and support. I ask that whilst we make the necessary arrangements, that everyone would please respect the privacy of the family during this very difficult time.”
After spending a portion of his boyhood at the Feyenoord academy in Ghana, Atsu joined Porto in 2011 and then signed with Chelsea for a sum of £3.5 million two years later. He was loaned to Vitesse, Bournemouth, Everton, and Málaga and did not play for the Blues’ first team.
Atsu had a fruitful loan season with Newcastle in 2016–17, and the following year, he committed permanently to the team for £6.2 million. He played with the Magpies for 75 games before moving on to Al-Raed in Saudi Arabia and then Hatayspor. On February 5, the day before two tragic earthquakes shook southeast Turkey, Atsu entered the game as a replacement and scored the game-winning goal against Kasimpasa.
Outside from football, Atsu served as an ambassador for the children’s charity Arms Around the Child, which has offices in Ghana, South Africa, and India and offers homes, protection, support, and education for kids.
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According to the Bulgarian administration, at least 18 individuals have been found dead inside an abandoned vehicle. Over 40 migrants looked to have been being unlawfully transported by the van. The survivors were transported to a hospital for medical attention.
The truck was found close to the Lokorsko settlement, 20 kilometres (12 miles) northeast of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The enormous number of persons attempting to join the EU from Turkey has long been a problem for Bulgaria.
It is thought to be the most fatal immigrant-related incident to have occurred in Bulgaria.
According to the interior ministry, the van “was unlawfully transporting about 40 migrants concealed under some timber.” “Eleven of them have passed away.”
As per Bulgaria’s health emergency centre, eight of the patients who were taken to the hospital on a medical emergency were in a critical condition.
According to sources, police are looking for the people traffickers who they believe to have drove the vehicle and fled.
Asylum seekers claim they have been stopped, arrested, stripped, and beaten while trying to enter Bulgaria from Turkey. Asylum seekers have accused Bulgaria of torturing persons trying to enter from Turkey.
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Few people are as familiar with Vladimir Putin as Alexander Lukashenko. The authoritarian ruler of Belarus is a staunch supporter of the “special military operation,” as Mr. Putin refers to it, which is what the majority of the rest of the world refers to as Russia’s conflict in Ukraine.
Mr. Putin hasn’t had a conversation with Western journalists since his extensive invasion of Ukraine a year ago. Nonetheless, Mr. Lukashenko answered questions from a select number of foreign media, including the BBC, today in Minsk.
There has been a rise in military cooperation between Russia and Belarus, as evidenced by joint exercises and the creation of a combined military organisation. Yet, up to this point, the president of Belarus has refrained from sending his troops into Ukraine to fight with Russian forces.
Alexander Lukashenko is not recognised as the rightful leader of Belarus by the UK, EU, or the US. Belarusians flocked to the streets in 2020 to protest him for allegedly stealing the nation’s presidential election. The demonstrations were mercilessly put down.
Using the incident on Thursday, Mr. Lukashenko accused the West of starting the war in Ukraine.
He made accusations against Western nations for escalating the situation and displayed some Putinesque nuclear sabre-rattling.
Having facilitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine one year ago, the Belarusian leader now claims he can help negotiate peace.
Mr Lukashenko suggested that next week would be a good time to start, with US President Joe Biden due to visit Poland.
“I invite [President Biden] to Belarus,” Mr Lukashenko said. “It’s not far from Warsaw, Thirty minutes and he’ll be in Minsk. He could land his plane here. I will persuade the president of Russia to come. I invite him too to Minsk, as well as Biden. We will sit down and reach an agreement.”
It is an invitation the US president is likely to decline. In this war Mr Lukashenko is not seen as an honest broker.
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Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was cleared of paying witnesses to fabricate stories about his infamous “bunga-bunga” parties.
The 86-year-old multibillionaire media tycoon was charged with paying young showgirls and other witnesses to provide false testimony on the allegedly pornographic gatherings.
The remaining 28 defendants were all found not guilty, including Moroccan dancer Karima El Mahroug, also known as Ruby, who was involved in a previous Berlusconi case. Berlusconi has had numerous legal battles.
Right-wing senator Ruby successfully appealed his conviction for paying for sex with a minor prostitute in the Ruby case. He denied having had intercourse with Ruby, and she denied ever having worked as a prostitute.
He has asserted innocence throughout his legal proceedings and charged that the prosecution is out for revenge on account of his political views. He argued that the gatherings, which some people had referred to as “orgies,” were actually formal dinners.
In 2013, Berlusconi was sentenced for tax fraud, which was the sole trial that resulted in a conviction. Italian justice was sympathetic with him because of his advanced age; he completed a year of volunteer work at a nursing home close to Milan. Between 1994 and 2011, Berlusconi served as prime minister three times. In the “bunga-bunga” trial, he was accused of paying witnesses millions of euros in hush money, but he insisted that the money was offered as compensation for persons connected to the notorious parties who had their reputations damaged.
He was temporarily barred from political office over his conviction for tax fraud, but won a seat in the Senate in 2022 elections.
His Forza Italia party plays a key role in Italy’s ruling right-wing coalition, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She hailed his acquittal as “excellent news that puts an end to a long legal case that also had important repercussions on Italian political and institutional life”.
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In an effort to streamline operations as it deals with economic headwinds and rising competition for electric cars, Ford announced on Tuesday that it will eliminate 3,800 jobs in Europe over the next three years.
According to the carmaker, 2,300 jobs would be lost in Germany, 1,300 in the U.K., and 200 in other parts of Europe. It claimed that its plan to have an all-electric fleet available in Europe by 2035 remained the same and that it would soon begin producing its first electric vehicle with European components.
The American carmaker will retain around 3,400 engineers in the region who will build on core technology provided by their U.S. counterparts and adapt it to European customers, European passenger electric vehicle (EV) chief and head of Ford Germany Martin Sander said on a press call. “There is significantly less work to be done on drivetrains moving out of combustion engines. We are moving into a world with less global platforms where less engineering work is necessary. This is why we have to make the adjustments,” Sander said.
According to Sander, the automaker’s electrification plan hasn’t changed, and its objective to provide an all-electric fleet in Europe by 2035 remains the same. Later this year in Cologne, Ford will introduce its first electric vehicle in Europe built on Volkswagen’s MEB platform. Sander said Ford is also thinking about introducing a Ford platform to Europe, perhaps to its Valencia facility.
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Dr Sumitha Nandan, the newly-appointed Executive Director of Manappuram Finance, brings to the table oodles of energy and a fresh worldview – By Sujit Chandra Kumar
Dr Sumitha Nandan’s earliest memories about her growing-up years in Valapad revolve around her grandfather, the late Mr V.C. Padmanabhan. Says Dr Sumitha, the newly-appointed Executive Director of Manappuram Finance, which has its headquarters in Valapad: “I was his favourite grandchild, perhaps because I was the eldest. Whenever I took a fancy for something, I would run to him rather than my dad.” The most poignant and painful of all the memories surrounds the passing away of her granddad who founded the Manappuram group of companies. “It was all so sudden. None of us among kids could figure out what was happening. We saw the ambulance arrive and all our favourite people in mourning. Then, I had to take leave from school for the ceremonies,” she reminisces.
The year was 1986 and Sumitha was then in the third standard. It was the same year when her dad Mr V.P. Nandakumar took over his father’s single-room business at Valapad. The rest, as they say, is corporate history. Says Dr Sumitha: “Manappuram has always been dad’s first child. He eats, drinks and breathes Manappuram.”
In those days, life was a lot different in the sleepy hamlet tucked away in Thrissur, she observes. “On Sundays, we would go to the beach and have a running race for which dad would join too. We would then run from one part of the beach to another where a stream joins the ocean. On our way back on late evenings, we would meet all the members of our extended family. Dad is very emotionally connected to his extended family and our neighbours and so he would make us interact with all of them.”
After her seventh standard, she moved to Bangalore to join the Bishop Cotton Girl’s School. “Every time I returned, I would be struck by the greenery, the pristine village environs and the close connectivity of the people, as opposed to the city’s hustle and bustle,” she says. Today, Valapad has blossomed into a self-contained township thanks to the ‘Manappuram effect’, a far cry from the days when Dr Sumitha, her brothers and cousins would play in the open fields, pluck cashew fruits and have their mouth full of almonds.
After Bangalore, she moved to Kodaikanal for her Plus Two and then made the biggest career choice of her life when she joined the Sidhartha Medical College in Tumkur. “This may come as a surprise to many but medicine was not at all in my list of choices. I grew up watching my dad lead Manappuram from strength to strength and did not want to pursue any career other than business. But then, the prevailing trend was for parents to push their kids to do either medicine or engineering after the twelfth. My parents were no different and I had to go by their wish,” she says. “In fact, it was during my house surgency at the Jubilee Mission Medical College and Research Institute in Thrissur that I really became interested in the medical field and woke up to its myriad possibilities.” Subsequently, she worked at the Vijaya Hospital in Chennai for a year before enrolling for her postgraduation in gynecology at the Ramachandra Medical College in Chennai.
Meanwhile, she got married and moved to Kochi where she had stints with leading hospitals such as the Thrikkakkara Cooperative Hospital, the Indira Gandhi Cooperative Hospital and KIMS. But the desire to be an entrepreneur pulled her back and made her join Manappuram Finance as Senior Vice President first and then as Executive Assistant to MD & CEO. During her three-and-a-half-year stint, she handled many key assignments including the one as the CEO of Online Gold Loan division. “It was a new concept then and I had a young team and we were able to make a lot of headway,” she recalls.
In 2018, she felt that she hadn’t done full justice to her training and talent as a medical professional. “I did miss my profession and I am someone who likes to listen to people’s problems and solve them,” says Dr Sumitha, who went back to being a doctor. Initially, she taught at the Amritha Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi but was determined to do something unique and specialised in Cosmetic Gynecology, a new sub branch that was little-known in Kerala. “I practised it at the CIMAR hospital in Kochi and I am still the only one to handle this discipline in the state,” she says. “To give an example, for a problem like stress urinary incontinence, there was only the option of invasive surgery where you put a sling or a mesh. But if detected early, you can now tackle it with a couple of sittings of laser and I have over 95 per cent rate of success in this line of treatment. There are also solutions to many other conditions which women hesitate to open up about.”
Life came full circle for Dr Sumitha when she rejoined Manappuram Finance as Executive Director in January this year. She has her task cut out as the head honcho of an NBFC with a network of 5,200 branches that crisscross the country and a workforce of 45,000 employees. She realises that the challenge is to take the company to the next level and she has no doubt that her exposure to other fields would be a distinct advantage. “Whether you are in the healthcare sector or finance sector, business is all about people management. When you are a doctor, you tend to be a little more compassionate and this would be a plus when it comes to managing people and managing change,” she says. “There is already a well-established system in place at Manappuram. The task is to bring a certain cohesion so that it runs like a well-oiled machine. One cannot achieve anything all by oneself but only through team building and the right kind of leadership. In my view, success comes to those companies that manage to do things a little better than their competitors.”
She goes on to add that without innovation and readiness to change, no business or industry can hope to succeed. “Going digital is no longer an innovation but an absolute necessity. Post Covid, everything has become digital because people have tasted convenience. Shopping is the best example. Even in the medical field, people turned to online consultation in an industry that always believed in one-on-one consultation. But Covid has proved to be the biggest disruptor. Even people who were resistant to change were forced to embrace the online mode,” she says.
She cites the example of how in her previous stint at Manappuram, a lot of time and effort was spent on making the office go paperless. “We even hired a senior official to facilitate the process but it did not help much. But Covid ensured what humans couldn’t and the office is now paperless. Unless there is an adversity, people are not willing to imbibe change because change is always painful,” she explains. Even as she maintains a hectic schedule at work, Dr Sumitha takes care to spend quality time with her two daughters, Anushka and Aashirya, whenever she can. “Ours is the only generation that had to listen to our parents as well as our kids,” jokes Dr Sumitha, who radiates an effervescent nature.
“Today’s generation will not simply accept whatever you tell them but will have a million questions. But I am fortunate to have kids who are very adjusting, perhaps because I have always been a working woman. My Sundays are mostly devoted to them. I feel it is important to have open conversations with your children. You need to be a friend and inspire confidence in them so that they share their joys as well as disappointments with you,” she says. “Yes, you have to monitor them but at the same time give them the space that they require. You have to allow them to have their privacy, the freedom to take their own decisions and the chance to fail and learn from mistakes.”
A trained Bharatnatyam dancer, Dr Sumitha unwinds by listening to melodies, enjoying classical art forms and watching videos on self-improvement. Her day starts with an hour of chanting and meditation. “It is important to differentiate between religion and spirituality. While religion is restrictive, spirituality is liberating,” she signs off.
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Jakub Jankto of the Czech Republic says he “no longer wants to hide” as he comes out as gay in public, becoming the first active international player in men’s football.
The 27-year-old midfielder, on loan from Getafe of Spain, announced it on Twitter on Monday. In 45 appearances since making his senior debut for the Czech Republic in 2017, Jankto has four goals to his credit.
Like everybody else, I have my strengths, I have my weaknesses, I have a family, I have my friends,” he said.
“I have a job that I have been doing as best as I can for years with seriousness, with professionalism and passion.”
He added: “Like everybody else, I also want to live my life in freedom without fears, without prejudice, without violence but with love.
“I am homosexual and I no longer want to hide myself.”
In the men’s game in the UK last year, Jake Daniels of Blackpool made history by becoming the first professional athlete to come out while still competing in more than 30 years.
Justin Fashanu, who played for clubs in England and Scotland after coming out as gay in October 1990, was the last active men’s professional football player in the UK to do so before Daniels.
Josh Cavallo, an Adelaide United player who came out in October, was the only active out homosexual top-flight male professional footballer in the world prior to Jankto’s public coming out.
Sparta Prague announced in a statement that Jankto had “some time ago” spoken openly about his sexual orientation with the club’s management, coach, and teammates.
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According to Turkish authorities, 113 arrest warrants have been issued in relation to the building of the structures that were destroyed by the earthquake on Monday. There have already been at least 12 people detained by Turkish police, including construction workers.
Rescue operations have been hampered in some areas due to protests in southern Turkey. More than 28,000 individuals have now been officially declared dead in Turkey and Syria.
More arrests are anticipated, but many will interpret the move as an effort to shift responsibility for the catastrophe in general.
Since many new buildings in Turkey are unsafe because of widespread corruption and government practises, experts have been warning about this for years.
In order to promote a construction boom, including in earthquake-prone areas, those rules permitted so-called amnesties for contractors who flouted building regulations.
The earthquake caused the collapse of thousands of buildings, prompting concerns about whether human error contributed to the severity of the natural disaster. After 20 years in office, the president’s future is in jeopardy as elections approach.
The United Nations’ top humanitarian official, who was in the Turkish province of Kahramanmaras on Saturday, called the earthquake the “worst occurrence in this region in 100 years.”
For the first time in 35 years, the Turkish-Armenian border crossing reopened on Saturday to permit the passage of aid.
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In the past few months, more than 5,000 pregnant Russian women have entered Argentina, including 33 on one aircraft on Thursday, according to officials. According to the national migration office, all of the most recent entrants were in their final stages of pregnancy.
It’s claimed that the ladies want their children to be born in Argentina so they can become citizens of that country. Local media thinks that the war in Ukraine is to blame for the current rise in visitors.
According to Florencia Carignano, the head of the migration agency, three of the 33 women who arrived in the Argentinian capital on one aircraft on Thursday were detained due to “issues with their documentation,” joining three other women who arrived the day before.
The three women who were arrested on Thursday claim that they are being “falsely imprisoned” since they are being held on the grounds that they are “false tourists,” according to their attorney. According to Christian Rubilar, this phrase “does not exist in our statute.” He said, “These women are being illegally detained; they did not break any laws governing migration or commit any crimes.”
Since then, the women have been freed.
La Nacion attributed the sharp increase in Russian immigration to the conflict in Ukraine, noting that “[Russian women] are attracted by their [right to] visa-free entry to Argentina, as well as by the high-quality medicine and variety of hospitals, [as well as] fleeing war and their country’s health service.”
“Birth tourism” by Russian citizens to Argentina appears to be a lucrative and well-established practice.
Pregnant women who want to give birth in Argentina can choose from a variety of packages on a Russian-language website, according to the BBC. The website offers discounts on the price of stays at “the top hospitals in the Argentinian capital,” as well as services like customised birth plans, airport pickups, Spanish lessons, and other services.
The packages range from “first class,” which starts at $15,000 (£12,433), to “economy class,” which starts at $5,000 (£4,144).
According to the company’s website, its founder has been promoting birth tourism and providing migration support since 2015. The business also claims to be “100% Argentinian.”
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According to a zoo, a critically endangered monkey known as the dancing lemur was successfully bred for the first time in Europe.
The birth of the infant Coquerel’s sifaka was a “landmark moment for the species,” according to Chester Zoo. A spokesman claimed that 18 months after Beatrice and Elliot were relocated from the US, their “wonderful small child” was delivered to them.
Mark Brayshaw, curator of mammals, reported that mother and foetus were “doing excellent.”
The species had had an 80% reduction in the previous 30 years due to massive deforestation, and it is only found in the wild in the treetops of north-west Madagascar.
Because they retain an upright stance while moving and spring side to side along the floor on their back legs, they can be distinguished from other lemurs.
The Coquerel’s sifaka family trio in Chester made up over half of the seven of these extremely endangered monkeys being cared for in Europe, according to the zoo official.
They estimated that the newborn, who weighed 4 oz (119 g), would initially cling to its mother’s abdomen for “a few weeks, before riding on her back like a backpack until about six months old.”
Director of animals and plants at the zoo Mike Jordan called the birth “a true landmark moment for conservation.”
He claimed that it had “kickstarted” a breeding programme for the species in Europe, which could be “the lifeboat that keeps them from being completely wiped out.”
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