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sydney — A man stabbed five people to death at a busy Sydney shopping center Saturday before police shot and killed him, officials said. Multiple people, including a small child, were also injured in the attack. The suspect stabbed nine people at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Bondi Junction, which is in the city's eastern suburbs, before a police inspector shot him after he turned and raised a knife, New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke told reporters. Five of the victims and the suspect died, he said. He had no specific details on the condition of the injured. Cooke said he believed that the suspect acted alone, and he was "content that there is no continuing threat." He said officials didn't know who the offender was. "This is quite raw," he said, and a "lengthy and precise" investigation was just beginning. He said there was "nothing that we are aware of at the scene that would indicate any motive or any ideology." When asked whether officials were ruling out terrorism, he said: "We're not ruling anything out." Cooke said the police inspector, a senior officer, was alone when she confronted the suspect and engaged him soon after her arrival on the scene, "saving a range of people's lives." Video showed many ambulances and police cars around the shopping center, and people streaming out. Paramedics were treating patients at the scene. Witness Roi Huberman, a sound engineer at ABC TV in Australia, told the network that he sheltered in a store during the incident. "And suddenly we heard a shot or maybe two shots and we didn't know what to do," he said. "Then the very capable person in the store took us to the back where it can be locked. She then locked the store and then she then let us through the back and now we are out."

ORENBURG, Russia — Authorities in the Russian city of Orenburg called on thousands of residents to evacuate immediately on Friday due to rapidly rising flood waters after major rivers burst their banks due to a historic deluge of melting snow. Water was also rising sharply in another Russian region -- Kurgan -- and in neighboring Kazakhstan. Authorities said 100,000 people had been evacuated so far, as rapidly warming temperatures melted heavy snow and ice. The deluge of melt water has forced more than 120,000 people from their homes in Russia's Ural Mountains, Siberia and Kazakhstan as major rivers such as the Ural, which flows through Kazakhstan into the Caspian, overwhelmed embankments. Regional authorities called for the mass evacuation of parts of Orenburg, a city of over half a million people about 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow. "There's a siren going off in the city. This is not a drill. There's a mass evacuation in progress!" Sergei Salmin, the city's mayor, said on the Telegram messenger app. Russian news agencies later quoted officials in Orenburg as saying that more than 13,000 residents had been evacuated throughout the region, more than a quarter of them children. The agency reports quoted Mayor Salmin as saying residents were turning out to help erect dykes to keep high-rise apartment blocks from being flooded. Dump trucks loaded with clay were dispatched to areas at risk. Emergency workers said water levels in the Ural river were more than 2 meters above what they regarded as a dangerous level. Water lapped at the windows of brick and timber houses in the city, and pet dogs perched on rooftops. Salmin called on residents to gather their documents, medicine and essential items and to abandon their homes. Personal losses People living in flooded homes lamented the loss of their belongings. "Judging by the water levels, all the furniture, some household appliances and interior decorating materials are ruined," local resident Vyacheslav told Reuters as he sat in an idling motorboat and gazed over his shoulder at his two-story brick home, partially submerged in muddy water. "It's a colossal amount of money." Alexei Kudinov, Orenburg's deputy mayor, had said earlier that over 360 houses and nearly 1,000 plots of land had been flooded overnight. He said the deluge was expected to reach its peak on Friday and start subsiding in two days' time. Orenburg Governor Denis Pasler told President Vladimir Putin on Thursday that 11,972 homes had been flooded and if waters rose further 19,412 more people would be in danger. The village of Kaminskoye in the Kurgan region was also being evacuated Friday morning after the water level there rose 1.4 meters overnight, Kurgan's regional governor Vadim Shumkov said on the Telegram messaging app. Kaminskoye is a settlement along the Tobol river which also flows through the regional center Kurgan, a city of 300,000 people. Shumkov said a deluge could reach Kurgan in the coming days. "We can only hope the floodplain stretches wide and the ground absorbs as much water as possible in its way," he said, adding that a dam was being reinforced in Kurgan. Kurgan is home to a key part of Russia's military-industrial complex -- a giant factory that produces infantry fighting vehicles for the army which are in high demand in Ukraine where the Russian military is on the offensive in some areas. There were no reports that the factory, Kurganmashzavod, had so far been affected. Rising water levels are also threatening southern parts of Western Siberia, the largest hydrocarbon basin in the world, and in areas near the Volga, Europe's biggest river. Water levels in some other Russian regions are expected to peak within the next two weeks.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

DAKAR, Senegal — Soaring prices have helped fuel a food crisis in West and Central Africa, where nearly 55 million people will struggle to feed themselves in the coming months, U.N. humanitarian agencies warned Friday. The number facing hunger during the June-August lean season has quadrupled over the last five years, they said, noting that economic challenges such as double-digit inflation and stagnating local production had become major drivers of the crisis, beyond recurrent conflicts in the region. Among the worst-affected countries are Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Mali, where around 2,600 people in northern areas are likely to experience catastrophic hunger, said the World Food Program, U.N. children's agency UNICEF, and the Food and Agriculture Organization in a joint statement. "The time to act is now. We need all partners to step up ... to prevent the situation from getting out of control," said Margot Vandervelden, WFP's acting regional director for West Africa. Due to the food shortages, malnutrition is alarmingly high, the agencies said, estimating that 16.7 million children younger than 5 are acutely malnourished across West and Central Africa. The region's heavy dependence on food imports has tightened the squeeze, particularly for countries battling high inflation such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Policies should be introduced to boost and diversify local food production "to respond to the unprecedented food and nutrition insecurity," said Robert Guei, the FAO's Sub-regional Coordinator for West Africa.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

lowell, massachusetts — The Massachusetts city of Lowell is home to the second-largest Cambodian community in the U.S., and the Khmer Post USA, a newspaper printed in English and Khmer, aims to keep them informed under a near-constant threat of closure. The newspaper has a potential audience of 35,000 Cambodians in Lowell and the surrounding area. Many seem to use its pages as tablecloths or packing paper, but the biweekly’s co-founder and publisher, Soben Ung, 38, says this doesn’t upset her. One of her goals for the publication is keeping the Khmer language alive in the immigrant community. As Cambodians born in the U.S. supplant those who arrived as refugees in the 1980s in the aftermath the murderous Khmer Rouge rule of 1975-79, the language is used by fewer people. “When they spread it out to pack stuff, they see it, at least they read one or two words,” she told VOA Khmer during an interview. “It is a kind of exposure. As long as the paper reaches their hands, it serves some benefit. … Reading it is helping yourself, improving your knowledge.”   A mix of news Soben Ung publishes 5,000 copies of the newspaper, which is distributed free and supported by ad revenue. The small staff includes journalists in Cambodia, and each issue offers readers a mix of news from Cambodia, local news related to Cambodians that isn’t covered by the mainstream press and features on Cambodian history. The immigrant press has a long history in the United States. Benjamin Franklin published the first such newspaper, the German-language Philadelphische Zeitung  in 1732. It failed about a year later because the German community rejected a publication by somebody who wasn’t German, according to notes for a 2014 exhibition in Washington. The exhibition, curated by Sharon Shahid, who is now an editor at VOA, focused “on how America’s ethnic media not only kept their particular constituencies informed, but also propelled each group’s struggle for justice.” By linking their country of origin with their adopted country, immigrant media help newcomers by guiding them toward inclusion, said Shahid. In Lowell, Cambodians' move toward inclusion is due in part to the city’s history of welcoming waves of immigrants since the 19th century because they were needed as workers in the storied textile mills that put the place on the map in the 1820s. The Cambodian community has been active in civic affairs for years, and a Cambodian American, Sokhary Chau, who is now on the city council, was elected mayor in 2021. Soben Ung believes the Khmer Post USA has been key to the emergence of Cambodian engagement in the local political process. “It made our community grow,” she told VOA Khmer. “We have a voice, we have power so that we have respect. We had a mayor who is Cambodian. We have state representatives who are Khmers, two of them. We have three city councilors.”   Began in Philadelphia The Khmer Post USA editor-in-chief, Samkhon Pin, was president of the Khmer Journalist Association of Cambodia, formed in 1994, which pushed for a free press after decades of restrictions. He said the paper began in 2005 to serve the Cambodian population of Philadelphia before moving to Lowell in 2010, which had a larger Cambodian community and more Cambodian-run businesses that could afford to buy the ads that support it. Vladimir Batrim of the Lowell Primary Care Center has advertised in the Khmer Post USA since 2017, when he opened the center. More than 95% of the center’s 4,000 users are Cambodian Americans, he said, and his thinking was, “As we work for the Cambodian community, why not support another Cambodian-run business, which is the newspaper? … That is a kind of mutual support. I support their business because they are working for the same community.” Other local businesses and government agencies bought ads because they viewed the Khmer Post USA as an effective channel for getting information to the Cambodian community on topics such as local schools, social services or elections. But the newspaper battles for survival. Some Cambodians, like Sovanna Oung, 61. who fled to the U.S. in 1983 and now repairs houses and delivers fish, say they’re too busy to read the paper regularly. The target audience is diminished by elders who find reading taxing on the eyes and by younger people who cannot read Khmer. Soben Ung vows to keep publishing the newspaper as long as possible. “If I don’t run it, who will?” she said. “I hope that it lives for a long time,” said Samkhon Pin. Sovanna Oung added, “If it has to close, I’ll be sorry.”

MEXICO CITY — A report released by the Mexican government Friday says the country is facing a dire shortage of fentanyl for medical use, even as Mexican cartels pump out tons of the illicit narcotic. The paradox was reported in a study by Mexico's National Commission on Mental Health and Addictions. The study did not give a reason for the shortage of the synthetic opioid, which is needed for anesthesia in hospitals, but claimed it was a worldwide problem. The commission said fentanyl had to be imported, and that imports fell by more than 50% between 2022 and 2023. Nonetheless, Mexican cartels appear to be having no problem importing tons of precursor chemicals and making their own fentanyl, which they smuggle into the United States. The report says Mexican seizures of illicit fentanyl rose 1.24 tons in 2020 to 1.85 tons in 2023. Some of that is now spilling back across the border, with an increase in illicit fentanyl addiction reported in some Mexican border regions — a problem Mexico paradoxically blamed on the United States. "Despite the limitations of availability in pharmaceutical fentanyl in our country, the excessive use of opiates in recent decades in the United States has had important repercussions on consumption and supply in Mexico," the report states. The report said that requests for addiction treatment in Mexico increased from 72 cases in 2020, to 430 cases in 2023. That sounds like a tiny number compared to the estimated 70,000 annual overdose deaths in the United States in recent years related to synthetic opioids. But in fact, the Mexican government does very little to offer addiction treatment, so the numbers probably don't reflect the real scope of the problem. The shortage of medical anesthetic drugs has caused some real problems in Mexico. Local problems with the availability of morphine and fentanyl have led anesthesiologists to acquire their own supplies, carry the vials around with them, and administer multiple doses from a single vial to conserve their supply. In 2022, anesthetics contaminated by those practices caused a meningitis outbreak in the northern state of Durango that killed about three dozen people, many of whom were pregnant women given epidurals. Several Americans died because of a similar outbreak after having surgery at clinics in the Mexican border city of Matamoros in 2023. The response by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to those twin problems — not enough legal fentanyl, and too much of the illicit stuff — has been contradictory. In 2023, López Obrador briefly proposed banning fentanyl even for medical use but has not mentioned that idea lately after it drew a wave of criticism from doctors. Meanwhile, the president has steadfastly denied that Mexican cartels produce the drug, despite overwhelming evidence that they import precursor chemicals from Asia and carry out the chemical processes to make fentanyl. López Obrador claims they only press the drug into pill form.

new york — Scrabble is getting a bit of a makeover, at least in Europe. New version advertised as being more team-oriented and quicker to play Mattel has unveiled a double-sided board that features both the classic word-building game and Scrabble Together, a new rendition designed to be accessible "for anyone who finds word games intimidating." This new version, which is now available across Europe, is advertised as being more team-oriented and quicker to play. The update marks the first significant change to Scrabble's board in more than 75 years, Mattel said Tuesday. "We want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players," Ray Adler, vice president and global head of games at Mattel said in a prepared statement, noting that consumers will still be able to choose between the classic game and new version. Seeking to expand their reach, toy companies have rolled out alternative or simplified ways to play board games for years, ranging from "junior" editions made for younger children to multiple sets of instructions that players can opt into for increasing difficulty. Scrabble Together is marketed toward players of all ages. Jim Silver, a toy-industry expert and CEO of review site TTPM, said the double-sided board is a smart approach because it allows players to switch from one mode to another as they wish. Mattel's announcement was also accompanied by a survey that offered a glimpse into some of the ways British consumers have previously tackled classic Scrabble. London-based market researcher Opinion Matters found that 75% of U.K. adults aged 25 to 34 have searched a word when playing the board-and-tile game to check if it's real. And almost half (49%) reported trying to make up a new word in hopes of winning. Whether the new version will expand beyond Europe one day remains to be seen. While Mattel, which is based in El Segundo, California, owns the rights to Scrabble around much of the world, Hasbro licenses the game in the U.S., for example. "Mattel and Hasbro have worked separately to develop different versions of Scrabble every year," Silver said. As a result, some versions are only available in certain countries, creating an "interesting dynamic" for avid fans of the game, he added. A spokesperson for Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, confirmed to The Associated Press via email Tuesday that the company currently has no plans for a U.S. update — but added that the brand "love[s] the idea of different ways to play Scrabble and continue[s] to attract new players to the game around the world." Scrabble's origins date back to 1931, when American architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game's forerunner. Scrabble's original name was "Lexiko," according to a Mattel factsheet, and before officially getting the Scrabble title and trademark in 1948, Butts' creation was also called "Criss-Crosswords," "It" and "Alph." Today, Scrabble is produced in 28 different languages. More than 165 million games have been sold in 120 countries around the world since 1948, according to Mattel, with an average of 1.5 million games sold globally each year. Beyond the decades-old Scrabble fanbase, other word games have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, including Bananagrams and online guessing game Wordle.

smithville, missouri — Before his transgender daughter was suspended after using the girls' bathroom at her Missouri high school. Before the bullying and the suicide attempts. Before she dropped out. Before all that, Dusty Farr was — in his own words — "a full-on bigot." By which he meant that he was eager to steer clear of anyone LGBTQ+.  Now, though, after everything, he says he wouldn't much care if his 16-year-old daughter — and he proudly calls her that — told him she was an alien. Because she is alive.  "When it was my child, it just flipped a switch. And it was like a wake-up," says Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District on Kansas City's outskirts.  Looking back, Farr figures his daughter, the youngest of five, started feeling out of place in her own body when she was just 6 or 7. But he didn't see it, even as they fished and camped together.  Then when she was 12, she started to steer away from him, spending more time with the rest of the family. It lasted for a few months before she came out. He knows now how hard this was. "Growing up," he says, "my kids knew how I felt."  His wife, whom he described as less sheltered, was on board immediately. Him, not so much.  "Given the way I was raised, a conservative fire-and-brimstone Baptist, LGBTQ is a sin, you're going to hell. And these were things, unfortunately, that I said to my daughter," Farr says. "I'm kind of ashamed to say that."  They bumped heads, their relationship strained. In desperation, he turned to God and then it hit him: "She's a girl."  'Pure joy' His daughter, who is named only by her initials of R.F. in the lawsuit, was stunned. He had been, she recalls, "to say it nicely, very annoying." Now everything was different.  "There was this electricity in me that was just, it felt like pure joy," she recalled as she played with her dog at a park in February. Her father was with her.  She, her father and her attorneys asked that she remain anonymous because she is unnamed in the lawsuit and they want to protect her from discrimination.  She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or distress caused when gender identity doesn't match a person's assigned sex. She grew out her hair and began taking drugs to delay puberty — a common treatment.  Farr says things returned to normal — for the most part. But then came high school. "And," Farr says, "anything I did to her, school was 10 times worse."  The 2021-22 school year had just started when the assistant principal pulled his daughter aside. According to the suit filed last year, the administrator said students must use the restroom of their sex designated at birth or a single gender-neutral bathroom. The district disputes that happened.  Another employee, the suit said, took it further and told her using the girls' bathroom was against the law. The district disputed that happened, too.  The thing is, there isn't a law — at least, not in Missouri.  While more than 10 states have enacted laws over bathroom use, Missouri is not one of them. What Missouri has done is impose a ban on gender-affirming care. For bathrooms, it leaves policy debate to local districts.  'Hopeless' feeling "Asinine" is how Farr described the whole wave of restrictions, while acknowledging in the same breath that he probably would have supported them a decade ago. "Kind of makes me dislike myself a little bit."  He figured it was all just a way to intimidate her. His daughter didn't understand: "It kind of just made me feel hopeless in my education," she recalls thinking.  The gender-neutral bathroom was far from her classes and often had long lines, the suit says. She, as a freshman, was missing class, and teachers were lecturing her. So she used the girls' restroom. Verbal reprimands were followed by a one-day, in-school suspension and then a two-day, out-of-school suspension, the suit says.  "Your policy is dumb," Farr recalled telling the school, which argued in its response to his lawsuit that his daughter was eating lunch in the girls' restroom.  His daughter started using the boys' restroom. One day, a classmate approached and told another student, "Maybe I should rape her," the suit said.  Beyond angry now, Farr called not just the school but the American Civil Liberties Union. The district acknowledged the incident, saying a student made a "highly inappropriate" comment about rape and was disciplined. By now, Farr's daughter was afraid to go to school.  He described it as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.  The district sees it differently, writing in a court filing that "there were numerous factors and circumstances in R.F.'s life, unrelated to school, which may have caused emotional harm, depression and anxiety."  Ultimately, her parents got the school to agree to let her finish her freshman year online. But she missed three weeks of classes before the switch was approved. Typically an A and B student, she plummeted to D's and F's. Worse to Farr, his daughter was withdrawing.  He describes it as "a dark rabbit hole of depression." Twice she tried to kill herself and was hospitalized. Everything from butter knives to headache medicine was locked up.  She returned in person to start her sophomore year, hoping things would be better. She made it only a few weeks before returning to online school.  Family leaves At semester's end, Farr and his family moved out of the district. Bathroom access remained a source of friction in her new school, so again she switched to online school. When she turned 16 last spring, Farr and his wife agreed to let her drop out.  She is in counseling now, taking hormone replacement therapy and considering an alternative high school completion program. She'd like to go to college one day, and study psychology, maybe law.  Sometimes Farr's daughter yells at him, and he admits that he missed the teen attitude. That spirit and fight had faded.  "Being a teenager is hell," he says. "Being a trans teen is 10 kinds of hell. She's the brave one. I'm just her voice."  He feels he has changed enough to fill this role — that being her voice can help other parents and kids avoid what his family endured. He thinks that because of where he came from, maybe people will listen when he raises alarms. Maybe.  "It's almost like a transgender person," he says of his transformation. "There's the dead me. And then there's the new me."

SALT LAKE CITY — The International Olympic Committee was effusive Wednesday in its support for a decadeslong effort to bring back the Winter Games to Utah's capital city in 2034. Unlike so many other past hosts that have decided bringing back the Games isn't worth the time, money or hassle, Salt Lake City remains one of the few places where Olympic fever still burns strong. Olympic officials praised the city for preserving facilities and public enthusiasm as they kicked off their final visit ahead of a formal announcement expected this July. Reminders of the 2002 Winter Games are nestled throughout the city, from a towering cauldron overlooking the valley to an Olympic emblem stamped on manhole covers downtown. Leaving the airport, a can't-miss arch amid snow-capped mountains shows visitors they're entering an Olympic city. Those remnants are part of a long-term strategy Utah leaders launched on the heels of their first Olympics to remind residents that the Games are part of the fabric of their city, and that being a host city is a point of pride. Olympic officials said they were greeted with such excitement Wednesday that it felt like the 2002 Winter Games never ended. In the decades since Salt Lake City first opened its nearby slopes to the world's top winter athletes, the pool of potential hosts has shrunk dramatically. The sporting spectacular is a notorious money pit, and climate change has curtailed the number of sites capable of hosting. Even though Salt Lake City got caught in a bribery scandal that nearly derailed the 2002 Winter Olympics, it has worked its way back into the good graces of an Olympic committee increasingly reliant on passionate communities as its options dwindle. The city is now a prime candidate if officials eventually form a permanent rotation of host cities, Olympic Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi told reporters. "We are in an environment here where we look for opportunities more than concerns," Dubi said. "For the next 10 years, we're not so much looking at what is challenging, but what are the opportunities to work together." The committee was left with only two bid cities for 2022 — Beijing, China, and Almaty, Kazakhstan — after financial, political and public concerns led several European contenders to drop out. "The International Olympic Committee needs Salt Lake City a lot more than Salt Lake City needs the International Olympic Committee, or the Olympics," said Jules Boykoff, a sports and politics professor at Pacific University. For Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, securing the bid is central to his goal of cementing the state as North America's winter sports capital. Cox has continued a long-running push by state leaders to beckon professional sports leagues and welcome international events like last year's NBA All-Star Game that could help burnish its image as a sports and tourism mecca, while chipping away at a lingering stigma that Utah is a bizarre, hyper-religious place. About half of the state's 3.4 million residents and the majority of state leaders belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church. Dave Lunt, a historian at Southern Utah University who teaches about the Olympics, said the Games give members of that faith, and other residents, a chance to clear up misconceptions and share their values with the world. "Latter-day Saints really just want to be liked. No disrespect or anything, that's my community, but there's this history of, we want to show that we fit in, we're good Americans," he said. "We're happy to host the party at our house." The 2002 Games, widely regarded as one of the most successful Olympics, brought government funding for a light-rail system and world-class athletic facilities. The city grew rapidly in its wake. Utah bid leaders declined to release a budget estimate, saying they should be able to provide one next month. But they assured the committee that they could keep costs down by using most of the same venues they've spent millions to maintain since 2002. They also touted bipartisan support for hosting in the Democratic capital city of a predominantly Republican state. With few options remaining for the Olympic committee, Salt Lake City has leverage to dictate terms, Boykoff said. Those can include funds, deadlines and even which sports are included. And with NBC's multibillion-dollar broadcasting contract with the Olympic committee set to expire in 2032 — two years before Utah would host — the committee has a vested interest in selecting a U.S. city in a better time zone for live broadcasts to entice U.S.-based broadcasting giants. Unlike many cities, Salt Lake City residents did not get to vote on whether they wanted another Games, even as leaders say their polling shows more than 80% approval statewide. Olympic historians say the hype can distract residents from downsides for other hosts, such as gentrification, corruption, rising taxes or empty promises of environmental improvements. So far, no opposition has formed in Utah. "If we consider the Olympics a cultural institution," Lunt said, "maybe it's worth paying some money if the people of Utah decide that's important to us, collectively."

warsaw, poland — Ola Kozak is celebrating. The 11-year-old, who loves music and drawing, expects to have more free time for her hobbies after Poland's government ordered strict limits on the amount of homework in the lower grades.  "I am happy," said the fifth-grader, who lives in a Warsaw suburb with her parents and younger siblings. The lilac-colored walls in her bedroom are covered in her art, and on her desk she keeps a framed picture she drew of Kurt Cobain.  "Most people in my class in the morning would copy the work off someone who had done the homework or would copy it from the internet. So it didn't make sense," she said.  The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk enacted the ban against required homework this month amid a broad discussion about the need to modernize Poland's education system, which critics say puts too much emphasis on rote learning and homework, and not enough on critical thinking and creativity.  Under the decree, teachers are no longer to give required homework to kids in the first to third grades. In grades four to eight, homework is now optional and doesn't count towards a grade.  Not everyone likes the change — even Ola's parents are divided.  "If there is something that will make students enjoy school more, then it will probably be good both for the students and for the school," said her father, Pawel Kozak.  His wife, Magda Kozak, was skeptical. "I am not pleased, because (homework) is a way to consolidate what was learned," she said. "It helps stay on top of what the child has really learned and what's going on at school."  Ola's brother Julian, a third-grader, said he sees both sides.  Homework's plusses and minuses  Debates over the proper amount of homework are common around the globe. While some studies have shown little benefit to homework for young learners, other experts say it can help them learn how to develop study habits and academic concepts.  Poland's educational system has undergone a number of controversial overhauls. Almost every new government has tried to make changes — something many teachers and parents say has left them confused and discouraged. For example, after communism was thrown off, middle schools were introduced. Then under the last government, the previous system was brought back. More controversy came in recent years when ultra-conservative views were pushed in new textbooks.  For years, teachers have been fleeing the system due to low wages and political pressure. The current government is trying to increase teacher salaries and has promised other changes that teachers approve of.  But Sławomir Broniarz, the head of the Polish Teachers' Union, said that while he recognized the need to ease burdens on students, the new homework rules are another case of change imposed from above without adequate consultation with educators.  "In general, the teachers think that this happened too quickly, too hastily," he said.  He argued that removing homework could widen the educational gaps between kids who have strong support at home and those from poorer families with less support and lower expectations. Instead, he urged wider changes to the entire curriculum.  Boy's complaint inspired limits The homework rules gained impetus in the runup to parliamentary elections last year, when a 14-year-old boy, Maciek Matuszewski, stood up at a campaign rally and told Tusk before a national audience that children "had no time to rest." The boy said their rights were being violated with so much homework on weekends and so many tests on Mondays.  Tusk has since featured Matuszewski in social media videos and made him the face of the sudden change.  Education Minister Barbara Nowacka said she was prompted by research on children's mental health. Of the various stresses children face, she said, "the one that could be removed fastest was the burden of homework."  Pasi Sahlberg, a prominent Finnish educator and author, said the value of homework depends on what it is and how it is linked to overall learning. The need for homework can be "very individual and contextual."  "We need to trust our teachers to decide what is good for each child," Sahlberg said.  In South Korea, homework limits were set for elementary schools in 2017 amid concerns that kids were under too much pressure. However, teenagers in the education-obsessed country often cram long into the night and get tutoring to meet the requirements of demanding school and university admission tests.  In the U.S., teachers decide how much homework to assign. Some elementary schools have done away with homework to give children more time to play, participate in activities and spend time with families.  A guideline circulated by teachers unions in the U.S. recommends about 10 minutes of homework per grade. So, 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on.  The COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis around youth mental health have complicated debates around homework. In the U.S., extended school closures in some places were accompanied by steep losses in learning, which were often addressed with tutoring and other interventions paid for with federal pandemic relief money. At the same time, increased attention to student well-being led some teachers to consider alternate approaches including reduced or optional homework.  It's important for children to learn that mastering something "usually requires practice, a lot of practice," said Sahlberg, in Finland. If reducing homework leads kids and parents to think school expectations for excellence will be lowered, "things will go wrong." 

LAPOVO, Serbia — Zeljko Ilicic saved his first horse from certain death 12 years ago and found his calling. The Serbian, now 43, set up the Balkan country's only horse sanctuary in 2015 on a small piece of land in Lapovo in Central Serbia. Around 80 horses have since passed through Staro Brdo, or Old Hill, sanctuary. Ilicic has taken in tortured, old and abused horses, but also those that had lived well but could no longer be looked after by caretakers. Animal care is a persistent challenge in Serbia, which is impoverished and marred by corruption after years of crisis and conflict in the 1990s. While authorities run shelters for dogs, there are no state-backed facilities for horses. Ilicic's sanctuary today provides shelter and care for dozens of animals. "I witnessed the sad destiny of a horse that was about to be put down," he said, recalling the first animal he saved. "I decided to try to bring him back to life and to keep him if he survived. And he did." One of Ilicic's favorite horses over the years, he said, was a local derby winner that eventually died peacefully of old age. Another, now 28, was in a number of Serbian movies before retiring to the sanctuary, its legs stiff with arthritis. Some horses end up in limbo as "neither a pet nor a working machine" on farms, he said, so they become a burden to people. Violeta Jovic, who works at the sanctuary, remembers a time in 2020 when veterinary inspectors intercepted a truck packed with nearly two dozen illegally transported horses bound for slaughter. She said they were all in bad condition but that the sanctuary managed to find new homes for most of them, while three remained under their care. "This is no longer volunteerism or a hobby or a job," she added. "This has become my life." The sanctuary tries to find new homes for as many animals as possible to ensure there is always space for new ones. When a horse is ready for adoption, the sanctuary launches a bid for potential caretakers. Staro Brdo today looks after nine horses, two donkeys, a buffalo, seven pigs, and several dogs, cats and chickens. Seven newborn kittens, found in a closed plastic bag, and seven Yorkshire piglets found at a waste dump have become fully grown animals that like to cuddle and play. A cacophony of animal sounds echoes through the small estate as a visitor ventures in. The sanctuary operates on donations but Ilicic said he hopes to become self-sustaining through various initiatives, including therapy riding. Serbian authorities have helped by repairing local roads and Ilicic has cooperated with veterinary inspections, but there is still no legal framework to register his facility as an official horse sanctuary. "We are the only ones in the Balkans at the moment and we hope that, in time, we will be recognized by the state," he said.

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Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

new york — Robert MacNeil, who created the even-handed, no-frills PBS newscast "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" in the 1970s and co-anchored the show with his late partner, Jim Lehrer, for two decades, died on Friday. He was 93.  MacNeil died of natural causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to his daughter, Alison MacNeil.  MacNeil first gained prominence for his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for the public broadcasting service and began his half-hour "Robert MacNeil Report" on PBS in 1975 with his friend Lehrer as Washington correspondent.  The broadcast became the "MacNeil-Lehrer Report" and then, in 1983, was expanded to an hour and renamed the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour." The nation's first one-hour evening news broadcast, and recipient of several Emmy and Peabody awards, it remains on the air today with Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz as anchors.  It was MacNeil's and Lehrer's disenchantment with the style and content of rival news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC that led to the program's creation.  "We don't need to SELL the news," MacNeil told the Chicago Tribune in 1983. "The networks hype the news to make it seem vital, important. What's missing [in 22 minutes] is context, sometimes balance, and a consideration of questions that are raised by certain events."  MacNeil left anchoring duties at "NewsHour" after two decades in 1995 to write full time. Lehrer took over the newscast alone, and he remained there until 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.  When MacNeil visited the show in October 2005 to commemorate its 30th anniversary, he reminisced about how their newscast started in the days before cable television.  "It was a way to do something that seemed to be needed journalistically and yet was different from what the commercial network news (programs) were doing," he said.  Wrote memoirs, novels MacNeil wrote several books, including two memoirs "The Right Place at the Right Time" and the best seller "Wordstruck," and the novels "Burden of Desire" and "The Voyage."  "Writing is much more personal. It is not collaborative in the way that television must be," MacNeil told The Associated Press in 1995. "But when you're sitting down writing a novel, it's just you: Here's what I think, here's what I want to do. And it's me."  MacNeil also created the Emmy-winning 1986 series "The Story of English," with the MacNeil-Lehrer production company, and was co-author of the companion book of the same name.  Another book on language that he co-wrote, "Do You Speak American?," was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005.  Explored post 9/11 challenges In 2007, he served as host of "America at a Crossroads," a six-night PBS package exploring challenges confronting the United States in a post-9/11 world.  Six years before the 9/11 attacks, discussing sensationalism and frivolity in the news business, he had said: "If something really serious did happen to the nation — a stock market crash like 1929, ... the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor — wouldn't the news get very serious again? Wouldn't people run from `Hard Copy' and titillation?"  "Of course you would. You'd have to know what was going on."  That was the case — for a while.  Born in Montreal in 1931, MacNeil was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955 before moving to London where he began his journalism career with Reuters. He switched to TV news in 1960, taking a job with NBC in London as a foreign correspondent.  In 1963, MacNeil was transferred to NBC's Washington bureau, where he reported on Civil Rights and the White House. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and spent most of 1964 following the presidential campaign between Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, and Republican Barry Goldwater.  In 1965, MacNeil became the New York anchor of the first half-hour weekend network news broadcast, "The Scherer-MacNeil Report" on NBC. While in New York, he also anchored local newscasts and several NBC news documentaries, including "The Big Ear" and "The Right to Bear Arms."  MacNeil returned to London in 1967 as a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s "Panorama" series. While with the BBC, be covered such U.S. stories as the clash between anti-war demonstrators and the Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the funerals of the Reverand Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower.  In 1971, MacNeil left the BBC to become a senior correspondent for PBS, where he teamed up with Lehrer to co-anchor public television's Emmy-winning coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973.