Page 2 - Supporter Programme News Today

Apr 20, 2021 05:17 PM EDT On the bad days, when the chimneys make much noise so intensely that the windows vibrate, families say thick smoke appears in the air, killing plants and dusting everything to volcanic grey. For many years now, this has been the stale life of people in Iraq, where air pollution is at its all-time high. (Photo : Getty Images) Great Contributor to the Climate Crisis  For the residents of Nahran Omar, a town in southern Iraq that is next to some oil wells, the flames com...

The poisoned clouds that are suffocating the people of Iraq Bel Trew © Provided by The Independent On the bad days, when the chimneys roar so intensely that the windows shake, families say thick soot appears in the air, killing plants and dusting everything a volcanic grey. For the inhabitants of Nahran Omar, a town in southern Iraq perched next to several oil wells, the flames rising from the towers, belching toxic chemicals into the air, are their daily reality. This contro...

Praying feverishly under her breath, the wife of a critically ill Covid-19 patient paces the corridors of the Baghdad coronavirus ward against a sudden tide of doctors. Behind her on the hospital bed, her asthmatic husband starts to spasm painfully as his airways close. Exhausted medics rush to save his life. Against the insistent sigh of ventilators, with her head bowed, his wife pleads for a miracle. It is another difficult afternoon for the...

It wasn’t until Ali tried to sell the cooking gas canister he had stolen from his parents’ stove that he realised it was drugs that were consuming him – not the other way around. The 27-year-old Iraqi had already sold his mobile phone, chairs, bed, even the very mattress he slept on to buy just a few more grams of crystal meth. The last item left was this battered canister, but even that wouldn’t fetch enough to cover the cost of a fix. Feverish...

Make Britain Great Again: How Ukip tried to ride the Trump wave – and it ended in disaster Lizzie Dearden © Provided by The Independent It was founded in the 1990s as a party for Eurosceptics, but after the Brexit referendum Ukip was without purpose and, after the exit of Nigel Farage as leader, without its frontman.  What came next was a chaotic decline that saw the party take inspiration from across the Atlantic, trying to harness the Donald Trump’s populist message in ...

How the Parler takedown has dealt another blow to the British far right Lizzie Dearden © Provided by The Independent The shutdown of social media network Parler in the wake of the storming of the US Capitol sent reverberations through the online world of Donald Trump supporters this week. But it also left the British far right scrambling to save its audiences – the app was among a cluster of niche social networks that extremists have been forced to rely on after bans by Face...