Category Archives: World News

‘Devastated’: family members pay tribute to Ahmaud Arbery at sentencing of killers – video

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Ahmaud Arbery's family bared their grief and loss to the judge during the sentencing of three white men convicted of his murder.

The men, father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William 'Roddie' Bryan, chased down Arbery, who was jogging in his neighbourhood, in pickup trucks and shot him dead. 

At the start of the hearing, superior court judge Timothy Walmsley rejected last-minute legal motions by Bryan's defense attorney to throw out his murder conviction and spare Bryan from the life sentence that state law imposes automatically

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As a scientist commenting on Covid I’ve attracted a lot of haters – I won’t let them silence me | Siouxsie Wiles

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The people who harass me are executives and electricians; ordinary people. They can’t imagine I’m simply motivated by wanting to save lives

On Christmas Eve I received an email to let me know I’d been added to the “accused” list on a website called Nuremberg NZ. “Kind regards”, ended the sender. Those behind Nuremberg NZ want people like me to have “thier (sic) day of reckoning” in a similar way to how Nazi war criminals were tried after the second world war. According to the website, my crimes are “misleading the public” and “supporting a government to perform medical experiment (sic) on it’s (sic) citizens”. Nuremberg NZ gives people the opportunity to leave a comment about each accused and to vote on whether they should be listed. User bennyman88 comments with one word, “Murderer”, and votes “agree”.

Great Barrier Island is about 90 kilometres off the coast of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Completely off-grid, the island is home to about 1,000 people and boasts calm bays and surf beaches as well as a dark sky sanctuary, natural hot springs, and native forests. In 2015, island local Gendie Somerville-Ryan started the ‘No Barriers: Small Island Big Ideas’ event series based on the BBC programme Big Ideas. The first event’s theme was pandemics and brought together a virologist, a young adult fiction writer, a sociologist, and a representative from Civil Defence to discuss how the island’s residents should behave if a pandemic was sweeping the world, killing all in its wake.

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Kazakhstan president vows to destroy ‘bandits and terrorists’ behind protests

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Kassym-Jomart Tokayev tells security forces to ‘use lethal force without warning’

The president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has promised an uncompromising crackdown on demonstrators in the country, telling security forces they should “use lethal force without warning” against protesters he called “bandits and terrorists”.

On Friday, relative calm returned to Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and the centre of recent tumult, and some residents ventured out for the first time in several days. They found looted shops, shattered glass and many burnt-out cars, with the grim atmosphere intensified by the thick mist enveloping the city.

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Nato chief warns of real risk of Ukraine conflict as Russian buildup continues

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Jens Stoltenberg says Nato will never withdraw its conditional offer of membership to Ukraine

The risk of conflict is real as Russia continues to mass its forces and artillery on the borders of Ukraine and make demands that it knows are unacceptable, Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, has warned.

Earlier, Nato foreign ministers held a final symbolic display of transatlantic unity before a set of three separate critical talks next week with Russia on Moscow’s demands to restore past spheres of influence and have Nato strategic weapons withdrawn from near Russia’s borders.

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Dozens of Hong Kong officials in Covid quarantine after birthday party

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Chief executive expresses ‘deep disappointment’ that bureaucrats ignored government advice

Dozens of senior officials and legislators in Hong Kong have been sent into a 21-day quarantine after they attended a birthday party despite the government’s own pandemic warning.

The embarrassing incident came as the city’s new “patriots only” legislature is scheduled to hold its first meeting next week. Concerns had been raised in recent weeks after a number of Omicron cases were identified in Hong Kong. Health officials say they cannot rule out hidden clusters in the community.

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Japan attempts to stem surge in Covid cases linked to US military bases

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Limits on restaurant opening times imposed in Okinawa and parts of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi

Japan is to introduce limits on bar and restaurant opening times in three areas in an attempt to stem a surge in coronavirus cases that has been linked to US military bases.

The measures – officially described as a quasi-state of emergency – will go into effect from Sunday until the end of the month in Okinawa, home to more than half of the US service personnel based in Japan, and parts of the western prefectures of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, which also host American troops.

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Novak Djokovic ‘lured to Australia to be humiliated’, says Serbia

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Celebrities join politicians in condemning ‘political harassment’ of Belgrade-born tennis player

Serb politicians and celebrities have described the treatment of Novak Djokovic as shameful scapegoating, as the foreign ministry in Belgrade suggested the world tennis No 1 had been “lured to Australia … to be humiliated.”

The 34-year-old champion, who was born in the Serb capital, is in detention in an immigration hotel in Melbourne pending a legal challenge to Australia’s decision on Wednesday to cancel a visa allowing him to play in the Australian Open.

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More than 100 people killed in northern Nigeria, say survivors

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Authorities say they are searching for bandits who terrorised areas of Zamfara state for three days

More than 100 people have been killed in Nigeria’s troubled northern region, survivors have said, as authorities continued to search for bodies and for suspects after three days of violence.

Bandits arrived in large numbers in the Anka and Bukkuyum local government areas of Zamfara state on Tuesday evening, shooting and burning down houses until Thursday, according to Abubakar Ahmed, a resident in Bukkuyum.

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Sidney Poitier, Black acting pioneer, dies aged 94

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The first Black person to win a best actor Oscar gave a string of groundbreaking performances on screen that helped combat social prejudice

Sidney Poitier, whose groundbreaking acting work in the 1950s and 60s paved the way for generations of Black film stars, has died aged 94. His death was announced on Friday by the minister of foreign affairs of the Bahamas, Fred Mitchell.

The Bahamas deputy prime minister, Chester Cooper, said he was “conflicted with great sadness and a sense of celebration when I learned of the passing of Sir Sidney Poitier”.

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Putin taking a risk in Kazakhstan and may hope for reward

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Analysis: CSTO may be an alliance but decision to intervene was almost certainly taken in Moscow

The old joke about the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact was that it was the only military alliance to attack itself, after its tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 to crush a reform movement there.

With the deployment of troops from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) to Kazakhstan on Thursday, some heard “eerie echoes” of the so-called Prague spring of 1968, and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956.

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‘It just feels so wrong’: UAE works on Friday for first time

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People juggle work and Friday prayer as country switches to Saturday-Sunday weekend

Employees and schoolchildren juggled work and studies with weekly Muslim prayers on the first ever working Friday in the United Arab Emirates, as the Gulf country formally switched to a Saturday-Sunday weekend.

Some grumbled at the change and businesses were split, with many moving to the western-style weekend but other private firms sticking with Fridays and Saturdays, as in other Gulf states.

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Trinity College Dublin begins €90m project to relocate vulnerable books

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Restoring and moving 750,000 volumes and ancient manuscripts expected to take five years

It is known as Ireland’s “front room”, where esteemed visitors including the Queen, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been taken to get a sense of the “land of saints and scholars”.

Biden, vice-president at the time, was so moved by the atmospherics in the dimly lit, barrel-vaulted hall when he visited Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 2016 that he came back a year later to contemplate the history of its old library, known as the Long Room.

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First female judge nominated for Pakistan’s supreme court

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Move to appoint Justice Ayesha Malik, who banned virginity tests for rape survivors, described as ‘defining moment’ for the country

Pakistan’s top judicial commission has nominated a female judge to the supreme court for the first time in the country’s history.

The move to pave the way for Justice Ayesha Malik to join the court has been widely praised by lawyers and civil society activists as a defining moment in the struggle for gender equality in Pakistan.

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Peruvian statue’s giant penis thrills tourists but vandals are turned off

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Visitors stop for selfies with 9ft representation of fertility symbol from pre-Columbian Mochica culture but phallus already damaged

The newly erected statue of a grinning man with an enormous phallus has prompted delight and rage in an archaeological hotspot in northern Peru where it has been on show since the beginning of the year.

Although perhaps not anatomically correct, the crimson fibreglass structure is a faithful representation of a ceramic vessel from Peru’s pre-Columbian Mochica culture, whose people lived in the region between 150 and 700 AD.

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‘They want to remove us and take the rock’, say Zimbabweans living near Chinese-owned mines

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As companies extract wealth, villagers say they see little benefit and are instead exploited in quarries, live in homes damaged by blasts and are unable to farm polluted land

A convoy of trucks laden with huge black granite rocks trundles along the dusty pathway as a group of villagers look on grimly.

Every day more than 60 trucks take granite for export along this rugged road through Nyamakope village in the district of Mutoko, 90 miles east of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

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Taliban stop Afghan women using bathhouses in northern provinces

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Decision to close public hammams – most people’s only chance for a warm wash – sparks anger in light of country’s mounting crises

The Taliban sparked outrage this week by announcing that women in northern Afghanistan would no longer be allowed to use communal bathhouses.

The use of bathhouses, or hammams, is an ancient tradition that remains for many people the only chance for a warm wash during the country’s bitterly cold winters.

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New Zealand’s successful Covid policies hid inequality – the government can’t ignore it this year | Morgan Godfery

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In 2022 Jacinda Ardern must act on runaway house prices while the central bank should grab inflation by the neck

March 2020 seems like an age ago. And also like it was yesterday. The month begun more or less like any other March in New Zealand. The weather was typically warm and dry, most people were back in the office or on site, and parliament was sitting after its generous summer recess. In most respects you could mistake March 2020 for March 2019. Except, on 4 March, the country recorded its second coronavirus case after a woman returning from northern Italy, where this strange virus had taken hold, presented with the infection at the border. The number of infections increased again and again as the month unfolded with 647 come 1 April.

In the early days of March, government advisers and prime minister Jacinda Ardern were aiming, like the rest of the world, for either “herd immunity” or “flattening the curve”. But when the government’s chief science adviser presented advice on precisely what this meant for the health system – a quick collapse, essentially – Ardern went for the approach her advisers at the universities of Otago and Auckland were advocating: elimination. On 25 March the prime minister made her way to parliament’s debating chamber and in a historic speech announced a national state of emergency and a move to an alert level 4 lockdown. The speech helped generate unprecedented national solidarity.

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Philippines’ Duterte orders arrest of unvaccinated people who violate stay-at-home orders

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President ‘appalled’ at the large numbers of Filipinos not vaccinated ‘galloping in our community’

The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has ordered the arrest of unvaccinated people who violate stay-at-home orders aimed at curbing “galloping” coronavirus infections driven by the Omicron variant.

The government tightened restrictions in Manila and several provinces and cities this week. Unvaccinated people among the capital’s 13 million people were ordered to stay home, after infection numbers tripled in the last two days.

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I had death threats and my tires slashed for my reporting. Many journalists in the Pacific face huge dangers | Joyce McClure

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Freedom of the press might be included in some constitutions of Pacific countries, but it often only works in theory

I spent five years as the lone journalist on the remote Pacific island of Yap. During that time I was harassed, spat at, threatened with assassination and warned that I was being followed. The tyres on my car were slashed late one night.

There was also pressure on the political level. The chiefs of the traditional Council of Pilung (COP) asked the state legislature to throw me out of the country as a “persona non grata” claiming that my journalism “may be disruptive to the state environment and/or to the safety and security of the state”.

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South Korea should fund hair loss treatment, says election hopeful in bald bid for power

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Proposal for hair regrowth on public healthcare insurance by Lee Jae-myung criticised as populist by opponents

South Korea’s ruling party presidential candidate has ignited a fierce debate after proposing that the country’s public healthcare insurance should cover hair loss treatment.

Lee Jae-myung’s proposal this week has triggered a flood of messages of support on online communities for people suffering hair loss – but also prompted accusations that it was a bald attempt to win votes.

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