Foreign News
Oppenheimer sweeps Golden Globes taking best drama, actor and director
Oppenheimer, one of the biggest box office hits of 2023, has won multiple Golden Globes, as Hollywood kicked off its annual awards season.
Irish actor Cillian Murphy took home best male actor for his portrayal of scientist J Robert Oppenheimer in the film about the development of the atomic bomb.
The film was named best drama, Christopher Nolan the best director and Robert Downey Jr the best male supporting actor.
“I was in the hands of a visionary director, a master,” Murphy said as he accepted the Golden Globe on Sunday night.
Indigenous actor Lily Gladstone, a firm favourite, won best actress in a drama film for her role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The gothic comedy-drama Poor Things, from celebrated Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, was named best film comedy or musical, and its star, Emma Stone, best actress in a film comedy or musical.
The Globes ceremony marks the start of Hollywood’s annual awards season, which culminates with the Oscars on March 10. Overhauled after a diversity and ethics scandal in 2021, the Globes recognise the best in film and television and brought the stars together for the first time after six months of strikes by actors and writers in 2023.
In television, the drama series Succession was named best television drama and took the top acting awards for its final season about the high-stakes battle for control of a global media empire. Kieran Culkin, who played the wayward son Roman Roy, landed the award for best actor, while Australian Sarah Snook won best actress. British actor Matthew Macfadyen took home best supporting actor for his role as her fictional husband, Tom Wambsgans.
Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, meanwhile, were recognised for their leading roles in the television comedy The Bear, while road-rage saga Beef picked up best actor and actress limited series awards for Ali Wong and Steven Yeun.
Several Hollywood legends, from Meryl Streep to Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, all Globe nominees vying for Oscars this year, were among those on the red carpet for the revamped awards.
Pop superstar Taylor Swift was also at the ceremony where she was nominated for best song. That award went to Billie Eilish for What Was I Made For? which she wrote for Barbie.
The satire on misogvny and female empowerment made more than $1bn in ticket sales and was nominated for nine awards including best comedy and best director for Greta Gerwig.
It went home with the newly created trophy for box office achievement.
Among the other winners were the French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, which won best screenplay and best film not in English, and The Boy and the Heron, which won best animated film for Japanese director Havao Miyazaki.
(Aljazeera)
Seven students and a teacher have been killed in Bangladesh after a landslide hit a girls’ school inside a refugee camp
The Islamic study centre in the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar was buried by mud and debris on Wednesday afternoon, sparking frantic search and rescue efforts. It is unclear how many people were inside the school.
The country has been battered by monsoon rains since Sunday, with several deadly landslides reported in Cox’s Bazar.
More than one million Rohingya people live there in what is the world’s largest refugee settlement, having fled a deadly military crackdown in Myanmar.
Rescuers pulled 13 people from the mud that engulfed their school hut, eight of whom died, the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mohammed Mizanur Rahman said.
“Some of them are seven, eight, 11 or 12 years old,” Panna Akhter, a local district officer, told BBC Bangla.
The other five children were taken to hospital for treatment.
Earlier, officials said other landslides had killed at least eight Rohingya refugees, including five children, since Sunday.
Thousands of Rohingya, one of Myanmar’s many ethnic minorities, were killed and more than 700,000 fled to neighbouring Bangladesh during an army crackdown in Myanmar in 2017
The group, which is primarily Muslim, are denied citizenship by the government of Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country.
Many face poor living conditions in Bangladesh, living in makeshift homes of tarpaulin and bamboo on steep hillsides.
More rain is forecast for the coming days, with authorities issuing warnings for more landslides and floods, and evacuating families in high risk areas.
(BBC)
Pakistan is searching for a Boeing cargo aircraft missing over the Arabian Sea with five crew members on board.
The Karachi-bound 737-400 plane operated by a Pakistani carrier took off from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and lost contact with air traffic control about 9:18pm (16:18 GMT) on Tuesday after reporting a navigational system fault, the Pakistan Airports Authority said.
Minutes later, data from Flightradar24, a global flight-tracking service, showed the plane losing nearly 1,525 metres (5,000ft) of altitude in less than a minute before climbing about 1,830 metres (6,000ft) in the next 30 seconds. It then entered a final, near-vertical descent from a height of 11,140 metres (36,550ft).
Its last transmitted position placed it at 335 metres (1,100ft), descending at 22,400 feet per minute, or about 400 kilometres per hour. All contact was lost about 155 nautical miles (287km or 178 miles) west of Karachi.
Security sources told Al Jazeera a Pakistani navy ship, a merchant vessel operated by the Pakistan National Shipping Corporation and two navy aircraft are taking part in the search.
No wreckage or survivors have been found so far.
“We continue to pray, earnestly, for the safety of our colleagues,” K2 Airways, the Karachi-based private cargo airline that operated the flight, said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that it was fully cooperating with authorities on the search.
It was the only plane in the K2 Airways fleet.
If a crash is confirmed, the incident would mark Pakistan’s first major civilian air disaster since May 2020 when a Pakistan International Airlines plane crashed short of the runway in Karachi, killing 97 of the 99 people on board.
The 27-year-old K2 Airways’ 737-400 has flown for six operators.
Delivered to Russia’s Aeroflot as a passenger aircraft in 1999, it later flew for Garuda Indonesia before being converted into a freighter in 2012 for Belgium’s TNT Airways.
Aircraft tracking records show it was withdrawn from service in June 2023 and parked in France for about 10 months.
Irish company AerCap reactivated the aircraft in April 2024 before placing it back into storage, first in Jakarta and later in Karachi, where it remained for nearly six months before entering service with K2 Airways in December 2024.
In a statement, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed grief over the incident and offered his sympathies to the families of the missing crew members.
(Aljazeera)
The woman suspected of carrying out a parcel bombing in Monaco which injured a sanctioned Ukrainian multi-millionaire and his family has been found dead, Ukraine’s security service (SBU) has said.
A cross-border manhunt had been launched for Anastasiia Berezovska, a Ukrainian woman who officials believed had fled the wealthy city-state after planting the bomb in the entrance hall of an apartment building on 29 June.
The 39-year-old’s body was found with gunshot wounds to the head, according to the SBU.
Two people including a current officer within Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) have been detained on suspicion of murder.
Berezovska arrived in Ukraine two days after the attack on 1 July, the SBU said in its statement, citing law enforcement sources.
There, she communicated with her family and two men – a former law enforcement officer and a current officer in the MoD’s main intelligence directorate.
The two men were investigated as possible accomplices in the Monaco attack based on information that they “repeatedly transferred funds” to Berezovska’s “crypto and bank accounts”.
The intelligence officer subsequently confessed to Berezovska’s murder and said he had done so with “another suspect”, the agency said.
It continued: “During the search of the former law enforcement officer’s home, a basement room resembling a torture chamber was found.
“Both suspects were detained on suspicion of committing murder with premeditation by a group of individuals.”
An investigation is ongoing with the “personal assistance” of the head of the intelligence directorate Oleg Ivashchenko.
Monaco’s deputy prosecutor Morgan Raymond said Berezovska had spent days casing out the residence and was “disguised as a man” during the attack last Monday.
Three people were injured, two of them seriously, when a package exploded just as they entered the building shortly after 21:00 local time (19:00 GMT).
Berezovska was believed to have fled in a hire car to Italy and onwards to Germany – where special forces searched an apartment rented by a 39-year-old Ukrainian woman “currently on the run” in the central state of Hesse on Thursday, police said.
The SBU said Ukrainian authorities had shared all available information with officials in Monaco, with who its prosecutor general was in “close co-operation”.
Law enforcement authorities were working to identify “other suspects” in the attack, it added.
Authorities in Monaco have not confirmed the victims’ identities, but local media reported Vadym Yermolaiev, his partner and his 13-year-old son had been targeted.
Yermolaiev, a real estate developer, was named the 39th richest Ukrainian by Forbes magazine in 2020 with a reported fortune of $230m (£173.8m).
He has major interests are in wine and alcohol in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, and has been the subject of sanctions imposed by the government in Kyiv since 2023.
He is a Cypriot citizen, having renounced his Ukrainian citizenship in 2019, and has been living in Monaco.
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