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One journalist killed, another injured in Ukraine

Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was injured while reporting outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, yesterday and was hospitalised, the network said.

Hall is a Washington-based correspondent who covers the US State Department for Fox News, where he has worked since 2015.

"We have a minimal level of details right now, but Ben is hospitalised and our teams on the ground are working to gather additional information as the situation quickly unfolds," Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott said in a message to Fox employees.

Fox's John Roberts read Scott's statement about Hall on the air at Fox.

On Sunday, Brent Renaud, an acclaimed film-maker who travelled to some of the darkest and most dangerous corners of the world for documentaries that transported audiences to little-known places of suffering, died after Russian forces opened fire on his vehicle in Ukraine.

The 50-year-old Little Rock, Arkansas native was gathering material for a report about refugees when his vehicle was hit at a checkpoint in Irpin, just outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

Renaud was one of the most respected independent producers of his era, said Christof Putzel, a film-maker and close friend who had received a text from Renaud just three days before his death.

Renaud and Putzel won a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award for Arming the Mexican Cartels, a documentary on how guns trafficked from the United States fuelled rampant drug gang violence.

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War spells danger for global food supply

Russia's war against Ukraine is threatening the global food supply and putting developing countries, especially the world's poorest, at risk, the United Nations chief and the head of the UN food agency warned yesterday.

More than 40 African and least-developed countries import at least one-third of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia, and 18 of them import at least 50 per cent, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told reporters. These countries include Egypt, Congo, Burkina Faso, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, he said.

"All of this is hitting the poorest the hardest, and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe," the secretary general warned.

David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, told The Associated Press during a visit to the Ukrainian city of Lviv that 50 per cent of the grain the programme buys to feed "the 125 million people we reach on any given day, week or month" comes from Ukraine, as does 20 per cent of the world's supply of corn.

"So (the war) is going to have a dynamic, global catastrophic impact," Beasley said.

Guterres announced an additional US$40 million from the UN's emergency fund to get critical supplies of food, water and medicine into Ukraine, where at least 1.9 million people are displaced.

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Pope condemns Russia's attack on Ukraine

Pope Francis says the war in Ukraine shows that those in power have not learned from the harsh lessons of previous wars over the past century.

The Vatican has responded to the Russian invasion by sending a cardinal to visit refugees. The cardinal visited last week with some of those who have taken refuge in Hungary. He is scheduled to visit with others in Slovakia on Wednesday before heading to Ukraine, the Holy See said.

In a speech at the Vatican yesterday, the pope said regional wars, especially that in Ukraine, demonstrate that "those who rule the destinies of peoples still haven't absorbed the lessons of the tragedies of the 20th century".

A day earlier, in his strongest condemnation yet of the war, the pontiff said no strategic reason could justify Russia's attack on Ukraine.

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