All posts tagged: flee

With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’

With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’

Published by skeptic

In fact, the app doesn’t even have a good English translation of its own name: Xiaohongshu is the just the phonetic translation of its Chinese name. 小红书. While the literal translation “little red book” may remind English-speaking users of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s collection of speeches and propaganda slogans by the same name, it has a different connotation in China, where users interpret it as a source of reliable user-generated recommendations for mundane things, like which restaurant to go to or which cosmetic product to buy. The recent influx of American users has certainly caught the attention of Xiaohongshu’s existing user base. David Yang, a recent master’s program graduate from China currently living in Paris, suddenly found his Xiaohongshu feed full of American users on Sunday. He had previously seen some non-Chinese creators intentionally coming to the platform to attract Chinese followers, but nothing at this scale. Now, when he scrolls his Xiaohongshu home page, about one quarter of the content is from so-called TikTok refugees, according to a screen recording he shared. “Some …

Home Office faces fallout from Rwanda roundup as asylum seekers hide or flee | Home Office

Home Office faces fallout from Rwanda roundup as asylum seekers hide or flee | Home Office

Published by skeptic

The Home Office is dealing with growing fallout from the high-profile roundups of asylum seekers it wants to send to Rwanda, as some have gone into hiding while others have fled across the border to Ireland. Officials began rounding up asylum seekers to detain them for the Rwanda scheme a week ago, with at least one now on hunger strike and another threatening suicide. While the government has disseminated its message widely about detaining people for Rwanda, it is not clear whether officials had anticipated that some asylum seekers would go into hiding and others would go to Ireland. Lou Calvey, the director of the charity Asylum Matters, said: “Frontline asylum charities report people leaving their asylum accommodation in order to avoid arrest. They are raising the alarm about the increasing risks of destitution and exploitation.” Asylum seekers who have attended regular reporting sessions at centres around the UK have said that they had never seen things so quiet. “I walked right in and didn’t have to queue at all. In all the years I’ve …

Drone Footage Shows Ukrainian Village Battered to Ruins as Residents Flee Russian Advance

Drone Footage Shows Ukrainian Village Battered to Ruins as Residents Flee Russian Advance

Published by skeptic

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Ukrainian village of Ocheretyne has been battered by fighting, drone footage obtained overnight by The Associated Press shows. The village has been a target for Russian forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Russian troops have been advancing in the area, pounding Kyiv’s depleted, ammunition-deprived forces with artillery, drones and bombs. Ukraine’s military has acknowledged the Russians have gained a “foothold” in Ocheretyne, which had a population of about 3,000 before the war, but says that fighting continues. Residents have scrambled to flee the village, among them a 98-year-old womanwho walked almost 10 kilometers (6 miles) alone last week, wearing a pair of slippers and supported by a cane, until she reached Ukrainian front lines. Not a single person is seen in the footage obtained late Friday, and no building in Ocheretyne appears to have been left untouched by the fighting. Most houses, apartment blocks and other buildings look damaged beyond repair, and many houses have been pummeled into piles of wood and bricks. A factory on the outskirts …

Residents flee as Haitian gangs launch new gun and arson attacks in capital | Haiti

Residents flee as Haitian gangs launch new gun and arson attacks in capital | Haiti

Published by skeptic

Gunmen have launched a string of fresh attacks in Port-au-Prince, burning homes and exchanging gunfire with police for hours in one of the biggest outbreaks of violence since Haiti’s new prime minister was announced. The attacks, which forced hundreds to flee their homes, began late on Wednesday in neighborhoods including Solino and Delmas 18, 20 and 24, south-west of the main international airport, which has remained closed for nearly two months. “The gangs started burning everything in sight,” said a man called Néne, who declined to give his last name out of fear. “I was hiding in a corner all night.” He and a friend were carrying a dusty red suitcase between them that was stuffed with clothes – the only things they could save. The clothes belonged to Néne’s children, whom he had rushed out of Delmas 18 around dawn during a pause in the fighting. Neighborhoods that once bustled with traffic and pedestrians were like ghost towns shortly after sunrise, with a heavy silence blanketing the area except for the occasional bleating from …

Married at 10, abused and forced to flee without her children: an Afghan woman on life under the Taliban | Afghanistan

Married at 10, abused and forced to flee without her children: an Afghan woman on life under the Taliban | Afghanistan

Published by skeptic

At the age of 10, while still in the third grade, I received news from my mother and stepfather that we would travel to Helmand province for my brother’s wedding. Little did I know, it was to be my own wedding, as my family had arranged my marriage to my cousin and sold me for 40,000 Afghanis [£500], without my knowledge or consent. That night, after the wedding, I went to sleep beside my mother and little brother, only to wake up next to my cousin. Trembling from confusion and fear, I fled the room in tears and screams. But my mother and her sister coerced me back into that room. It was then that I was told I had been married to my cousin. Mahtab Eftekhar, pictured with her mother and uncle on her wedding day, aged 10. She thought it was her brother’s wedding, not her own. Photograph: Handout It was the beginning of an agonising nightmare that shattered my childhood and adult life. Two years later in 2007, aged 12, I became …

Some Palestinians forced to flee homes as Israel shells northern Gaza

Some Palestinians forced to flee homes as Israel shells northern Gaza

Published by skeptic

Israel has said it will eradicate Hamas following the militant group’s rampage in southern Israel on Oct 7 in which 1,200 people were killed and 253 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies. The war, now in its seventh month, has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, and many more are feared buried in rubble. The offensive has laid to waste much of the enclave, displacing most of its 2.3 million people and creating a humanitarian crisis. In the past 24 hours, Israeli strikes have killed at least 79 Palestinians and wounded 86, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Two people were killed in a strike on a house in Rafah, four were killed when a missile hit a group standing outside a supermarket in the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp and one was killed in a strike on a house in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, Palestinian health officials said. Residents in northern Gaza and suburbs of Gaza City reported heavy shelling. “We don’t know why this is all happening. Is it because we returned home and we finally got …

About 1,300 people from Myanmar flee into Thailand after clashes break out in key border town

About 1,300 people from Myanmar flee into Thailand after clashes break out in key border town

Published by skeptic

BANGKOK —  About 1,300 people have fled from eastern Myanmar into Thailand, officials said Saturday, as fresh fighting erupted at a border town that has recently been captured by ethnic guerillas. Fighters from the Karen ethnic minority last week captured the last of the Myanmar army’s outposts in and around Myawaddy, which is connected to Thailand by two bridges across the Moei River. The latest clashes were triggered in the morning when the Karen guerillas launched an attack against Myanmar troops who were hiding near the 2nd Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge, a major crossing point for trade with Thailand, said police chief Pittayakorn Phetcharat in Thailand’s Mae Sot district. He estimated about 1,300 people fled into Thailand. Thai officials reported people had started crossing since Friday following clashes in several areas of Myawaddy. The fall of Myawaddy is a major setback for the military that seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021. Myanmar’s once-mighty armed forces have suffered a series of unprecedented defeats since last October, losing swathes of territory …

Cameroon doctors flee to Europe, North America for lucrative jobs

Cameroon doctors flee to Europe, North America for lucrative jobs

Published by skeptic

YAOUNDE, CAMEROON —  The state of health care in Cameroon is a source of growing concern, with thousands of doctors fleeing the central African country for lucrative jobs elsewhere, especially in Europe and North America, according to officials. The number of people, including doctors, acquiring passports and applying for visas has increased by 70 percent, officials say. In addition, 75 percent of the 1,000 doctors that Cameroon’s government trains each year are leaving. Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health reports that several hundred doctors are enrolled in what members of the profession see as lucrative schemes to emigrate to Canada. Also, the number of health workers, including doctors, applying for the U.S. government’s Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the Green Card Lottery, is rising. The Cameroon Medical Council, an association of doctors, says the doctor-patient ratio in Cameroon has sunk to one doctor per 50,000 people, instead of the World Health Organization’s recommended ratio of one doctor per 10,000 patients. The group reports that the doctors are fleeing to escape hardship, poor pay, difficult …

A Russian pacifist helped Ukrainians flee the country. Then the Kremlin caught him | Ukraine

A Russian pacifist helped Ukrainians flee the country. Then the Kremlin caught him | Ukraine

Published by skeptic

Lost and disoriented, Olena Primak stood at Belgorod’s train station, holding tightly to her young daughter’s arm. The scorching summer heat and the long journey had left the Ukrainian refugee on the brink of collapse. Primak had been told to wait for a Russian volunteer called “Alexander” who would help her get back to Ukraine. “Suddenly, a man with the most generous of smiles appeared at the station,” she recalled. With a gentle countenance, warm eyes and grey hair, the 61-year-old Alexander Demidenko approached Primak, offering to take her bags. After living over a year under Russian control in the southern Ukrainian town of Novaya Kakhovka, Primak, a former shopkeeper, decided in June 2023 that she could no longer bear foreign occupation. “We had to endure a series of long, cramped train rides through Russia, trying to hide that we are Ukrainians so we wouldn’t get in trouble,” Primak said, describing a journey that also included a “nightmare” passing through one of Russia’s notorious filtration camps. To get back to Ukrainian-controlled land, she had to …