In Khartoum, Sudan, as a result of a mosquito-borne outbreak, the corridors of Omdurman Hospital have been transformed into a makeshift ward for patients with dengue fever.
With thousands of cases reported, the disease has become the ideal breeding ground for further development due to the persistent rains.
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Mohammed Siddig, a patient, explained that he had dengue fever symptoms two weeks ago and had been tested at a nearby health facility, one of the few extensive medical facilities in the capital.
According to Siddig, “I was referred to a hospital and they couldn’t treat me, so I was taken to Omdurman Hospital.”
Khartoum is attempting to rebuild after nearly two and a half years of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Nearly half of the hospitals in the capital have been destroyed, according to Sudanese authorities.
The war, which started in April 2023, has led to a number of mass displacement, ethnic killings, and the worst humanitarian crisis ever to hit the world.
Hospitals in war-torn Sudan are overwhelmed by a widespread disease outbreak [Screengrab/Al Jazeera].
Abdul Rahman Abdalla, the brother of the Omdurman Hospital patient, claimed that his condition “no improvement.”
He claimed that he has only received IVs and that there hasn’t been any improvement.
In just one area of the capital, more than 5, 000 cases of malaria, typhoid, and dengue fever, as well as dozens of fatalities, have been reported in the past month.
At a time when thousands of people are visiting the capital, Sudan’s health centers are under strain due to the rise in cases. Some patients have been forced to seek alternative medical care due to the hospital congestion and lack of supplies.
Mohamed Ali’s home was returned to Khartoum North after the SAF recaptured the city in March. Ali chose home remedies over medical care despite having positive results for dengue fever and malaria.
Because the health center in our district isn’t properly equipped, I was tested at a different district. Because I couldn’t get malaria treatment, I made the decision to stay in. Because it’s quicker than hospital wait, Ali told Al Jazeera, “I’m also taking traditional remedies.”
However, aid organizations have cautioned that there is a higher likelihood of the number of cases involving those who have positive tests for the diseases.
As a result of Super Typhoon Ragasa’s devastating flooding and landslides in the area, rescuers worked night and day to evacuate residents in the northern Philippines. The strongest storm of the year has caused thousands of people to flee.
Sloviansk, Ukraine – When pro-Russian rebels seized the southeastern Ukrainian town of Sloviansk 11 years ago, Raisa said she and her neighbours “treated them well”.
On April 12, 2014, hundreds of armed men led by former Russian intelligence officer Igor Girkin snuck into Sloviansk, making it the first Ukrainian town to be taken over by Moscow-backed separatists.
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They fought with police, flew a Russian flag over the town hall, built barricades and roadblocks, and handed out firearms and grenade launchers to jubilant local men who wanted Moscow to annex their region of Donbas.
Russia had just annexed Crimea during a chaotic interregnum that followed the removal of pro-Russian President and Donbas native Viktor Yanukovych after a months-long popular uprising in Kyiv.
“Under Yanukovych, Donbas had lots of privileges, lots of perks,” Raisa, a 72-year-old retired sales manager, said while holding her bike outside a grocery store in Sloviansk.
But 10 weeks of separatist occupation and 11 years of war later, her views – and those of many here – have undergone a U-turn.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began in 2022, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen have been killed as millions of civilians have suffered displacement and been rendered homeless and jobless amid an economic nosedive and galloping prices.
“Now I would have shot [the rebels] myself,” Raisa said, clutching a fist.
As the war rumbles on, Ukrainian servicemen in Sloviansk take the train to their next stop [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
Raisa withheld her last name and personal details because she fears reprisals from those who sympathise with and aid Moscow.
Her son is fighting on the front line that lies a mere 15km (9 miles) east of Sloviansk. Her daughter helps the war effort from western Ukraine.
Her teenage granddaughter lives with her and studies from home online because of the danger posed by daily shelling and drone attacks.
“She dreams of entering a university in Kyiv,” Raisa said.
Sloviansk, whose name means “the city of Slavs”, the ethnolinguistic group Ukrainians and Russians belong to, was founded almost four centuries ago as a frontier fortress.
It evolved into an industrial town with a population of 50,000 people employed at factories, balneological resorts, salt and potassium mines, and ceramic workshops.
There were even plans to mine shale natural gas, but a joint project with Shell was mothballed in 2014.
Since Sloviansk was retaken by Ukrainian forces in July 2014, it has yet again become a military stronghold, part of a “fortress belt” in the Donbas that ruined Moscow’s dream of a sweeping takeover of the region on its border.
Sloviansk was a key target of Russia’s largely failed offensive this summer.
Its streets, shops and cafeterias are filled with burly, stern men in camouflage who often sport tattoos with Ukraine’s national or nationalist symbols and drive around in four-wheeled jeeps the colour of their uniforms.
The sale of alcohol is limited, but the town is studded with gyms and shops selling military gear while ubiquitous advertisements like “Will buy drones in any condition” signal the operation of workshops that repair or assemble unmanned aircraft.
The workshops are clandestine because even though the number of Russia sympathisers has fallen, there are still spies who pass on the locations of military sites to Moscow’s forces.
“Where are intelligence services? Why can’t they arrest the spotters?” Vasily Petrenko, an 82-year-old retired teacher, asked rhetorically, finger-counting the sites that have been hit with drones, missiles or glide bombs in recent months.
At least three spies have been arrested this year alone, according to intelligence services and prosecutors.
Petrenko estimated that among his peers, about 40 percent are pro-Moscow, nostalgic about their Soviet-era youth and awaiting the arrival of Russian troops.
“They sit around drinking beer, asking, ‘When are they coming? When are they coming?’” he told Al Jazeera while leaning on a worn-out wooden cane. “They should just be gathered and reported.”
A glide bomb’s thunderous blast interrupted him mid-sentence.
A resident of Sloviansk walks past a building damaged by Russian shelling [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera]
These bombs, which can fly up to 70km (44 miles) after being dropped, have obliterated entire streets in parts of Sloviansk.
“You don’t know whether you will wake up in the morning or not,” Lydia Bobok, a 37-year-old mother of two, told Al Jazeera in a park next to a Soviet-era monument to the mothers of fallen soldiers.
Such blasts have proved to be the best wake-up call for pro-Russian locals, she said.
Instead of relying on Russian television or pro-Russian politicians who used to frequent Ukrainian talk shows before the full-scale invasion, all they have to do is look around.
“The essence has changed,” she said.
But several locals Al Jazeera approached refused to discuss the war and their political proclivities, repeating: “I don’t know anything about politics. I’m just living my life.”
Sloviansk was the venue of an alleged Russian attempt at stirring up tensions.
On July 12, 2014, the Russian-owned Channel One network ran an interview with a woman who was identified as a “refugee from Sloviansk”.
She claimed Ukrainian servicemen had “crucified” a three-year-old boy in front of his mother who was married to a separatist.
“The mum watched the child bleed to death,” the woman claimed, adding that the servicemen “made cuts to make the child suffer”.
This reporter was in Sloviansk on the day the “interview” aired but failed to find the alleged crucifixion. Independent, now-exiled Russian news outlets Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain, which visited the town, also found no evidence to back up the claims.
During an earlier visit during the separatist-run occupation, this reporter saw crowds of locals thronging the town centre and cheering the rebels sitting on their “trophies” – several armed personnel carriers hijacked from Ukrainian forces.
They incessantly talked about the “Russian Spring”, a Kremlin-coined term after the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. The term denoted the “inevitable” annexation of Russian-speaking Ukrainian regions in the east and south.
Eleven years later, the first hero of the “Russian Spring”, the separatist Girkin, is serving a four-year jail sentence for “extremism” after lambasting the Kremlin.
In 2022, a court in The Hague sentenced Girkin in absentia to life in jail for his role in the July 17, 2014, downing of a Malaysian passenger plane over Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board.
Sloviansk now seems to have chosen Ukraine’s side.
“Sloviansk has been, is and will be part of Ukraine,” Boris, a military officer who enlisted after fleeing the Russia-occupied part of the southern region of Kherson in 2022, told Al Jazeera. He also requested his surname be withheld out of fear of reprisals from pro-Moscow rebels or spies.
As one of the strongest typhoons of the year threatened to cause flooding and landslides on its way to southeast China, at least three people were killed, and thousands of people were evacuated from villages and schools in Northern Philippines. Additionally, offices were closed.
When it slammed into Panuitan Island off Cagayan province in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, Super Typhoon Ragasa reportedly had sustained winds of 215 kilometers per hour (134 miles per hour), with gusts of up to 295 kilometers per hour (183 mph), according to Philippine forecasters.
In the Philippines, tropical cyclones with sustained winds of 185 km/h (115 mph) or higher are referred to as super typhoons, a designation that was made to emphasize the urgency of these extreme weather events.
The storm was generating winds of up to 215 km/h (134 mph) near its center as of 8 p.m. (12:00 GMT), according to the national weather service, with gusts reaching 265 km/h (165 mph) near its center.
Information officer Herbert Singun told the AFP news agency on Calayan Island that one minor injury was caused by a piece of a school roof falling onto an evacuation center 100 feet away (about 30 meters) from the storm’s center.
More than 10,000 Filipinos were evacuated from the country, with government buildings and schools closing on Monday in the Manila region and 29 other provinces.
The Philippines is the first major landmass to face the Pacific cyclone belt, and millions of people are living in constant poverty in disaster-prone regions each year due to an average of 20 storms and typhoons.
In preparation for the potential imminent rapture, an end-times prophecy some believe could occur on September 23 or 24 this year, evangelical Christians have been sharing warnings and advice in videos and videos on social media.
Rapture predictions have long been linked to real-world events, including Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza, despite the apparent inspiration of a South African pastor’s prediction shared on YouTube.
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What exactly is the rapture, and why do some Evangelical Christians think the world might end this week?
What information is necessary here:
The rapture is what?
Not all Christians believe in the rapture.
According to Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, author of Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, this shouldn’t surprise you because the word “rapture” doesn’t appear in the Bible.
It is regarded as a prophecy for those who do because it covers events that will occur before Jesus returns to earth.
True Christians will rise up into the clouds “to meet the Lord in the air,” according to rapture theology followers.
Non-believers will also be left behind on Earth, where they will experience a number of tribulations, including plagues and fires, at the same time.
What are people saying about TikTok’s rapture?
A woman shares tearfully with her best friend in a video shared by an account with 848, 100 followers, called christwillreturn, in which she shares the words “you need to repent.” Now. You won’t be forgotten, I want you.
She recalls a dream in which she attempted to warn people that “Jesus is coming,” but instead she yelled and said, “Nobody was listening to me.”
Some people made fun of me, I said. Everyone needs to turn their heads, I feel. She continued, “He’s coming.”
Two men offer advice on what non-believers should do when the rapture occurs in another video shared by Christianquotes89.
“You’re probably wondering where the missing people went, I suppose. What’s happening here? One of the men explains, “I imagine you’re pretty afraid and looking for answers.”
“All of us who entrusted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior have been taken off the planet to heaven, to the Father’s house in heaven.” . with Jesus . He continued, “We will be there with him, and we will be returning with him in about seven years.”
He warned that those who are left behind will go through a “troubling period that’s worse than any period since mankind was created” in the interim.
How many people think that rapture is real?
People who are watching the rapture in popular videos also respond with surprise and even disdain, while also appearing to be genuinely concerned that it might start soon.
End-times beliefs are not particularly uncommon in the United States, where many of the videos come from.
Nearly half of Christians in the US, or 47 percent, respond to questions about whether they believe we are in the end times, according to research from the Pew Research Center’s study from 2022.
Although, according to Pew, the majority of Americans, or 58%, “reject the notion that humanity is in its final days.”
According to Pew, end-times beliefs may have an impact on how people feel about the world’s current state, including issues like climate change.
At 51%, those who think we’re living in the past were less likely than others to say that climate change is “an extremely or very serious problem” (62%).
Will there soon be rapture?
According to South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela, the rapture might occur on September 23 or 24 in a video that was posted on YouTube three months ago.
As of September 22, the video had more than 560,000 views.
However, other types of end-times prophecies date back even further than that, and predictions for the rapture have been made since at least the 1800s.
There have also been a number of well-known books and films about the rapture that have sold millions of copies in that time.
The late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, whose non-fiction book The New York Times ranked among the best in 1970, is one of them.
Lindsey, 95, passed away last year, making it more popular that events in contemporary Israel and Palestine would lead to the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
According to Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth, Jesus’s return wouldn’t occur until after the final great war, which “was triggered by an invasion of the”new state of Israel.”
He added that “mankind will be on the verge of annihilation” when this would only occur.
One of the central themes of the rapture, that non-believers will be abandoned on earth, was recently brought out by the well-known Left Behind series of books.
One of the 16 books in the series was also adapted into a movie starring Nicolas Cage, and at least three of them reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
According to clinical social worker and author Josie McSkimming, beliefs about the end times can become deeply ingrained, especially in people who were raised learning about them in schools. Additionally, events like Israel’s war against Palestinians in Gaza may help to elicit those feelings.
According to McSkimming, who is from Sydney, Australia, and the author of Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity, “I have clients who have left those churches, who have found themselves very dysregulated, very distressed, hypervigilant, and fear that this is the end times.”
