World Tour: Bangladesh parliament dissolves

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour.

Onize Ohikere is off again today, and for a good reason. She got married over the weekend! She’s scheduled to be back next week. In the meantime, WORLD’s Mary Muncy is here with this week’s international news round up.

AUDIO: [Sound of protest]

Bangladesh unrest—We begin today’s roundup in Bangladesh where country-wide protests forced the dissolution of parliament yesterday.

The day before, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country after a 15-year rule.

AUDIO: [Man speaking Bengali]

This Bangladeshi man called the protests a movement against autocracy.

The unrest started a few weeks ago with peaceful protests against a government job quota system, but they quickly turned violent and nearly 300 people have been killed.

AUDIO: [Person speaking Bengali]

A different Bangladeshi says a mob attacked the police station. The police opened fire on the mob, but were pushed back and eventually had to flee.

UK anti-immigration protests—Next, the United Kingdom is facing its own wave of violent protests.

AUDIO: [Sound of protest]

After a stabbing at a dance party that left three children dead last month, rumors spread that the stabber was a Muslim immigrant and anti-migration protesters have been rioting and burning buildings.

Police have arrested a 17-year-old suspect and say he was born in the UK and have charged him with murder rather than terror-related charges.

The director of a group measuring anti-Muslim attacks says the community is scared.

ATTA: People cannot really go and do their day-to-day job realistically, because Uber drivers have been attacked, taxi drivers attacked, women threatened and mosques vandalized. And this is becoming, in the last few days, the activity that is happening on a daily basis across different regions of the UK.

The UK’s prime minister has blamed far-right propaganda for the protests and is calling for an end to violence.

AUDIO: [Sound of funeral]

India landslides—We move now to India, where people are mourning the deaths of more than 200 people killed by landslides.

Torrential rains triggered the landslides over the weekend in rural, southern India. Officials say the landslides destroyed homes and over 10,000 people are in relief camps.

AUDIO: [Survivor speaking Hindi]

This survivor says she told her husband to pull their children out of their house… and as soon as he got them out, everything was swept away by water.

AUDIO: [Sound of surfing]

Whale photobomber—We end today’s round-up with Olympic surfing off the coast of Tahiti where semifinal surfers got a rather large photobomber.

A whale launched itself into the air behind two surfers as they were swimming for their next wave.

Tatiana Weston-Webb representing Brazil was one of those surfers. She told ISA Surfing before the competition:

WESTON-WEBB: The women today are just pushing boundaries and breaking boundaries and I don’t know, I feel so proud to be a part of women’s surfing right now like I feel so proud of us.

She went on to win silver, just a few points behind America’s Caroline Marks.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy filling in for Onize Ohikere.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.