News Headlines - 25 July 2020

▽UN: 578 children used by Boko Haram as human bombs | NHK WORLD

The UN on Friday published a report on children and armed conflict in Nigeria and surrounding countries.
The report says 801 children were killed and 632 others were maimed by the group between January 2017 and December 2019.
It says more than 40 percent of child casualties, 578, had been forced into suicide attacks.
The report also points out more than 400 children were kidnapped during the same period. Boko Haram was involved in the majority of those cases.

▽Amazon Met With Startups About Investing, Then Launched Competing Products - WSJ

When Amazon.com Inc.’s venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd Corp., it gained access to the technology startup’s finances and other confidential information.
Nearly four years later, in April, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit launched an artificial-intelligence product that does almost exactly what DefinedCrowd does, said DefinedCrowd founder and Chief Executive Daniela Braga.

▽Man parades down Oxford Street wearing nothing but mask - Reuters

A man strolled down central London’s most popular shopping street on Friday with only a mask to cover his nudity, leaving passerbys astounded, amused and shocked.
As the man walked nonchalantly along Oxford Street, naked except for the light blue face mask over his groin, some took pictures on their phones while others simply stared.
It was unclear what prompted the stunt but masks became compulsory on Friday in English shops.

▽Chilean extradited to France over killing of Japanese student | The Japan Times

A plane carrying a Chilean man accused of murdering a Japanese student in France in 2016 took off from Santiago's airport Thursday bound for Paris, where he will face trial.
Nicolas Zepeda, 29, had been under house arrest at his mother’s apartment in the Chilean resort city of Vina del Mar since the Chilean Supreme Court approved his extradition in May. He is charged in France with premeditated murder in the alleged slaying of Narumi Kurosaki, whose body was never found.

▽Belarus’ Lukashenko Threatens to Kick Out Foreign Press Over Protest Coverage - The Moscow Times

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has threatened to kick out foreign journalists he accuses of stirring up protests against him ahead of next month’s election.
Lukashenko, 65, faces what analysts call the toughest re-election campaign in his 26 years in power. Three of his main election rivals have been either jailed or barred from running, prompting the opposition to rally around the wife of a detained candidate instead.
At a government session Thursday, Lukashenko accused foreign journalists of “calling for riots” and hurling “insult after insult.”