Category Archives: World News

‘It’s a dream’: exoskeleton allows boy with cerebral palsy to walk and play

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Boy, 12, takes Marsi Bionics-designed kit into Madrid school for first time

Given the day’s importance and the many long months he and his family had dreamed of it, Jorge would probably have preferred a special guest appearance by Tony Stark, Dr Bruce Banner or Marshall the fire pup from Paw Patrol. Or, better still, all three.

But in the end he had to make do with a surprise visit from Pedro Sánchez. At 12.45pm on Tuesday, surrounded by friends and teachers – and Spain’s prime minister – Jorge fulfilled the biggest ambition of his 12 years by standing up, walking over to his classmates, and playing with them.

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Ivanka Trump to testify before panel investigating Capitol attack

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Donald Trump’s eldest daughter, a former senior White House adviser, to speak virtually to committee about events of January 6

Ivanka Trump will testify before the January 6 committee on Tuesday.

The Guardian confirmed that former president Donald Trump’s oldest daughter, and former senior White House adviser, will speak to the panel virtually.

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Nigerian humanist jailed for 24 years after pleading guilty to blasphemy

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Mubarak Bala’s case seen as part of a clampdown on critics of religious orthodoxy in a deeply conservative region

A prominent Nigerian humanist has been sentenced to 24 years in prison after pleading guilty to blasphemy charges, in a landmark case that has put a new focus on the threats to freedom of expression in the west African country.

Mubarak Bala, the president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was sentenced on Tuesday afternoon, two years after his arrest at his home in the northern Kaduna state on 28 April 2020. He was then taken to neighbouring Kano, where calls for action against him had been made by members of the religious establishment in the majority Muslim and conservative state.

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Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi faces plagiarism trial in Iranian court

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Director and grand prix winner at last year’s Cannes festival for A Hero was sued by former student for using story from her documentary without credit

Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar winning director of A Separation and The Salesman, has been indicted in a plagiarism case brought by one of his former students, who had claimed he took the idea for his 2021 film A Hero from a documentary she had made for a film class.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Azadeh Masihzadeh brought the case after Farhadi had earlier sued her for defamation; in both cases the courts ruled in Masihzadeh’s favour. The case will now pass to a second judge whose ruling will decide whether or not Farhadi will be convicted. This can then be appealed.

This article was amended on 5 April 2022. It had been originally stated that Asghar Farhadi was convicted of the crime, following widespread misinformation, but has now been changed to reflect that he has been indicted and a trial will decide the outcome.

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Fuel protests prompt Lima curfew as Ukraine crisis touches South America

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Peru’s embattled president takes drastic step as fertiliser and fuel prices soar and Brazil seeks to open Indigenous territory to mining

Peru’s embattled president Pedro Castillo has banned residents of the capital, Lima, from leaving their homes in an attempt to quell nationwide protests over soaring fuel and fertiliser prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a televised address just before midnight on Monday, Castillo announced a curfew from 2am until 11.59pm on Tuesday, claiming the measure would “protect the fundamental rights of all people”.

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Sri Lanka faces medical emergency as economic crisis hits drug supplies

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Union warns of complete breakdown of health system with hospitals ‘all running out of medicines’

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has deteriorated into a medical crisis, with the top medical union declaring a national health emergency over a life-threatening shortage of drugs.

On Tuesday the country’s most powerful trade union, the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA), called a meeting and declared a medical crisis as doctors and hospitals reported a widespread lack of medicine.

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Shanghai puts whole city on lockdown as Covid cases surge

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Residents of China’s most populous city complain of government’s lack of organisation

Shanghai has put all its 26 million residents under lockdown in China’s single-biggest city-wide imposition of the restrictions since the pandemic began as authorities admitted the difficulty in containing the fast-spreading Omicron variant.

Until this week, the megacity – also China’s most populous – adopted an approach of phased lockdown. Initially, the eastern side of the Huangpu River went into lockdown between 28 March and 1 April, then the western side followed suit for another four days.

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Russian mercenaries and Mali army accused of killing 300 civilians

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Human Rights Watch says deaths during anti-jihadist operation in Moura ‘the worst atrocity in Mali in a decade’

Suspected Russian mercenaries participated in an operation with Mali’s army in March in which about 300 civilian men were allegedly executed over five days, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.

Eyewitnesses and local community leaders said hundreds of men were rounded up and killed in small groups during the anti-jihadist operation on 23 March in the central town of Moura. The rural town of about 10,000 inhabitants is in the Mopti region, a hotspot of jihadist activity that has intensified and spread to neighbouring countries in the Sahel region.

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Sudan militia leader denies war crimes at landmark ICC Darfur trial

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Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman is accused of 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity

A former militia leader in Sudan has denied committing war crimes and crimes against humanity as his landmark hearing opened at the international criminal court.

Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman is accused of leading thousands of pro-government fighters on a systematic campaign of murder, rape and torture during the height of violence in the Darfur region of Sudan between 2003 and 2004.

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El Salvador reels as 6,000 people arrested in unprecedented crackdown

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Authoritarian populist president Nayib Bukele has suspended rights in state of emergency justified as attack on MS13 gang

Distraught families across El Salvador are searching for information on the fate of their loved ones after almost 6,000 people were arrested in an unprecedented security crackdown over the past week.

Men, women and children have been rounded up across the Central American country since the government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, suspending constitutional rights including the presumption of innocence.

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Ukraine war to slow growth and drive up poverty in Asia, World Bank warns

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Conflict adds strain to developing economies in east Asia and Pacific already struggling with Covid and inflation

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further dampened the economic prospects for developing countries in east Asia and the Pacific, meaning lower economic growth and higher poverty in the region this year, the World Bank has warned.

The Ukraine factor came on top of the existing risks that the region – home to 2.1 billion people and stretching from China to Papua New Guinea – has been facing in recent years. They included the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the financial tightening in the US, and the pandemic resurgence amid China’s zero-Covid policies.

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Victims of Brazil’s Mariana dam disaster seek compensation through UK courts

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In one of the largest claims in English legal history, 200,000 people affected by the 2015 incident will have their case heard this week

More than 200,000 victims of Brazil’s worst environmental disaster are seeking compensation in a UK court this week, in one of the largest group claims in English legal history.

The claimants, including representatives of Krenak indigenous communities, are fighting to get compensation for the devastation caused by the Mariana dam disaster in November 2015. The £5bn lawsuit is against the Anglo-Australian mining company BHP.

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UK politicians request visa scheme for Ukrainian students and academics

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In a letter to Priti Patel, the cross-party group calls for temporary places where those displaced can study and carry out research

A cross-party group of MPs and peers has joined forces with UK universities in calling for the visa scheme for Ukrainian refugees to be extended to temporary placements for students and academics.

In a letter to Priti Patel, the home secretary, the parliamentarians and Universities UK, the advocacy organisation for universities, said the scheme should provide visas and temporary places for displaced students and academics to study and carry out research.

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Blue Mountains landslide: British father and son killed as two other family members in critical condition

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A fifth member of the family, who were holidaying in Australia from the UK, is being treated for shock

Crews have worked into the night to retrieve the bodies of a British man and his son after five members of the same family were caught in a landslip in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

The nine-year-old boy and his 49-year-old father died at the scene at Wentworth Pass, New South Wales police said.

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Bird populations in Panama rainforest in severe decline, study finds

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Of 57 species sampled, 35 decreased in number by 50% over four decades, with climate crisis likely factor

Bird populations in a Central American tropical rainforest are suffering severe declines, with likely factors including climate breakdown and habitat loss.

Scientists from the University of Illinois tracked species of birds in a protected forest reserve in central Panama to determine if and how populations had changed from 1977 to 2020.

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The bodies of Bucha have set a difficult test for the west

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Analysis: From Ukraine’s point of view, this has to be the time to pile pressure on Germany in particular

Sometimes a war crime is so egregious, and so fully reported, that it cannot but stir the conscience of the west. The My Lai massacre in 1968, Srebrenica in 1995, the British suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Rwanda genocide of 1994, the Disappeared of Argentina under the junta in the 1980s or even the dispatches about bodies piled high in Bulgarian town squares by the US war reporter Januarius MacGahan in 1876 were all moments when the defence of ignorance has to be abandoned.

Even then the truth is more complicated and the west did not always act. Bill Clinton regretted he did not respond to the murders of Tutsis in 1994, saying he did not “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror”. Srebrenica was arguably only the culmination of ethnic cleansing that had been going on for three years. My Lai, revealed two years after the event, only provided further momentum to a pre-existing US anti-war movement. The scale of the British repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was only truly documented decades afterwards by a Harvard historian Caroline Elkins in her book Britain’s Gulag.

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Sanctions on Russia must stay till all troops leave Ukraine, says Liz Truss

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Foreign secretary in discussions with Ukrainian foreign minister about intensifying sanctions after atrocities in Bucha

The West must not lift sanctions against Russia until all its troops have left Ukraine and Vladimir Putin is unable to mount such an offensive again, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said.

She was speaking alongside the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in Warsaw, where the two discussed how to step up sanctions against Russia to the maximum in the wake of the alleged war crimes revealed in Bucha.

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Pakistan’s supreme court delays verdict on fate of Imran Khan

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Country remains in political turmoil as it awaits ruling on PM’s move to dissolve parliament and call election

Pakistan remains without a government and engulfed in political turmoil after the supreme court delayed its verdict on whether the prime minister, Imran Khan, had violated the constitution by dissolving parliament rather than face a no-confidence vote.

Khan’s decision to call for parliament to be dissolved on Sunday, rather than allow a no-confidence vote on his premiership that was expected to oust him, had been justified by him on the basis that it was an alleged “foreign conspiracy” led by the west against his government.

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Routing of Russian forces from Kyiv area will be hard to repeat in eastern Ukraine

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Analysis: while Ukrainian troops have strong defensive positions in Donbas they lack the capability to force out the invaders

Russia’s withdrawal from around Kyiv and the north and north-east of Ukraine appears more comprehensive than most onlookers had anticipated. It will be a little while before the picture becomes definitive, but Moscow’s forces are now fast retreating out of the country from the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy districts, Ukrainian regional officials say.

It is impossible to describe this as anything other than a serious reverse. Such is the haste of the exit that some units are being left behind to be mopped up by the Ukrainians. Sumy, a little over 30km from the Russian border, did not fall to the invaders, while the road to Chernihiv, which was at risk of encirclement, is now open to the capital to the south-west.

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Biden calls for Putin to face war crimes trial over civilian killings in Ukraine

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Western leaders prepare fresh round of sanctions against Moscow amid outrage over reports of killings in town of Bucha, near Kyiv

Joe Biden has called for Vladimir Putin to be tried for war crimes as western leaders prepared a fresh round of economic sanctions against Moscow amid mounting global outrage over claims of civilian killings by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

The US president was responding to harrowing images broadcast around the world after the discovery over the weekend of a mass grave and bodies in civilian clothes, some with their hands bound, in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.

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