Tuesday, February 27
Russia has ordered a daily five-hour “pause” in the bombing of the rebel-held Syrian region of Eastern Ghouta, ABC Radio reports .
The ceasefire between 9:00am and 2:00pm will allow wounded civilians to leave through a “humanitarian corridor” from Tuesday (local time).
However this temporary relief falls short of the 30-day ceasefire across the whole of Syria that the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved on the weekend.
Britain’s deputy UN ambassador Jonathan Allen said Russia and other council members were obliged to do everything possible to implement the full ceasefire without delay.
“[The pause] is not compliance, that is not implementation,” Mr Allen said.
“But it does show that it can be implemented.”
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said Eastern Ghouta could not wait.
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A South Australian mother has found a deadly baby brown snake hiding in the lip of her child’s lunchbox.
Adelaide snake catcher Rolly Burrell told ABC Radio Adelaide the Hahndorf mum was preparing her child’s lunch on Monday when she found the deadly snake.
“She’d already started packing it, the lunchbox itself has a lip around the top — snakes like to get into closed spaces so they feel secure,” Mr Burrell said.
“When she opened up the lid … she didn’t even see it and she was halfway through putting the lunch in and then she saw it and shut the lid down and gave us a call.”
Mr Burrell said it was normal for baby brown snakes, which were just as lethal as a full grown one, to hatch at this time of year, but said he had been receiving an unusually high number of calls this year.
“We’re doing about 50, 60 calls a day and they’re all baby brown snakes,” he said.
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US President Donald Trump, who has been highly critical of the law enforcement response to the Florida school shootings, says he would have rushed in, unarmed, if he’d been there.
Speaking to a roomful of governors at the White House, Trump said Monday, “You don’t know until you’re tested, but I think I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too.”
His session with the governors, in Washington for their annual meeting, was heavily focused on finding ways to address the massacre of 17 students and teachers in a Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
As for his statement about what he would have done personally, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “He was saying that he would be a leader and would want to take a courageous action, and a lot of the individuals that helped protect others that day weren’t carrying firearms, which I think shows that you can be helpful in that process.”
Trump said again that he was disappointed in officers who didn’t stop the gunman, calling their performance “frankly disgusting.”
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