The UK has created a “minister for loneliness” position to tackle modern public health problems associated with social isolation. The government of Prime Minister Theresa May said Wednesday it appointed Tracey Crouch after research showed as many as one in ten people felt lonely “always or often” and that hundreds of thousands of elderly people hadn’t spoken to a friend …

As the Kenyan community is still mourning one of their own, Brian Nyawade Owino, an asylum-seeker whose death was announced in Berlin on 5 January, the police found the remains of a Kenyan woman in the western German city of Essen on Wednesday (17 January). The body of the 27-year-old Mary Waithera Kamathi, popularly known as Carrie Jones, was discovered in …

Kidnappers have abducted two Americans and two Canadians in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna, killing two police officers, a police spokesman said on Wednesday. The North Americans were ambushed by unknown gunmen around Kagarko on their way from the city of Kaduna to the capital Abuja, Reuters quoted Mukhtar Aliyu, a spokesman for the Kaduna state police, as saying. …