World Tour: Lebanese churches offer shelter

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The WORLD and Everything in It: WORLD Tour, with our reporter in Africa, Onize Oduah.

AUDIO: You want some more?

Lebanon church offer aid — We start today in Lebanon where churches and schools have become refuges for people fleeing Israeli airstrikes.

The recent ongoing bombardment has killed several high-ranking commanders of the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.

St. Joseph Church, a Roman Catholic church in Beirut, has received more than 100 migrants who live near some of the hotspots.

Michael Petro is the project director for the Jesuit Refugee Service’s Migrant Programs. He says the church has also assisted another 100 migrants in finding other places to live.

PETRO: Most of the people are coming with just the clothes they had, and so people are very stressed, people are worried. There's a sense we have no idea how long this is going to last for. But what I will say is one of the best things about the shelter is that we've been prioritizing families with children.

Lebanon currently hosts nearly 2 million refugees—the majority of them from Syria. The country is also home to some 250,000 migrant domestic workers, mostly from African and Asian nations.

Kumiri Parara is a Sri Lankan migrant.

PARARA: [Speaking Arabic]

She says here that she fled her home in southern Lebanon with her son as the strikes got closer. She found out later that her house was bombed one day after she left.

AUDIO: [Applause protest]

UK anti-Brexit march — Over in London, hundreds of protesters marched to Parliament Square in Westminster on Saturday, demanding a return to the European Union.

The 2016 Brexit referendum marked the start of Britain’s exit from the bloc—a move that finally happened four years ago.

But the protesters say it hasn’t paid off so far.

Seventy-three-year-old Christine Humphries participated in the march.

HUMPHRIES: It's just so sad because we miss out on so many things. The young people are suffering from it in all the countries and in our country, and it just seemed such a pointless thing to do when we're worse off now than we were before, and we need our friends in Europe.

A group called National Rejoin March has organized the protest annually to campaign for a Brexit reverse.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is meeting today with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to discuss his plans to reset post-Brexit relations with the bloc.

AUDIO: [Applause]

Japan death-row acquittal — And in Japan, a court has overturned the sentence of the world’s longest-serving death row inmate.

Last week, a Japanese court declared Iwao Hakamada innocent of quadruple murder after 46 years on death row.

The ruling concluded that authorities interrogated and severely tortured Hakamada to force his confession of robbing and killing his boss and his boss’s wife and two children.

HAKAMADA: [Speaking Japanese]

The 88-year-old says here that he had waited for this moment for a long time.

Prosecutors have until next Thursday to appeal the acquittal.

Japan and the United States are the final major industrialized democracies that still implement capital punishment.

AUDIO: [Happy birthday]

South Africa birthday — We close here in Africa at the 118th birthday celebration of a South African woman.

According to her identity card, Margaret Maritz was born on September 27, 1906. That makes her possibly the oldest living person in the world—although her identity card has not been independently verified.

Gregory Elroy Adams is a senior nurse at Maritz’ care home.

ADAMS: She is a very nice person to talk to, she talks about her life as a young woman, you must respect your mother and your father. She didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke. That’s the kind of stuff that she talked about. And that’s why she is a loving person, always a smile, always a happy person.

Japanese national Tomiko Itooka, who is now 116, currently holds the Guinness World Record as the verified oldest living person.

AUDIO: [Cheering]

That’s it for this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Oduah in Abuja, Nigeria.

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