Boxing helped prizefighter Arifonso Zvenyika overcome real hardship. Now he teaches the sport he loves to aspiring fighters in a Harare ghetto
Beneath a corrugated iron roof in the crowded Harare suburb of Mbare, a group of boys darts back and forth across a smooth concrete floor, firing a series of rapid punches into the air.
A wiry older man, dressed in low-slung tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops, watches their moves, encouraging them to “Jab! Jab! Jab!”.
Continue reading...Our security correspondent speaks to a predecessor about an era of spooks, leaks and open hostility from MI5
It is time for morning coffee and Richard Norton-Taylor and I are discussing secrecy, deception and brown envelopes, which comes naturally to the pair of us, as past and present defence and security correspondents of the Guardian.
Norton-Taylor joined the paper in January 1973 (when, incidentally, this writer was not yet two), starting in Brussels and switching to security a few years later. The first part of his career was dominated by a series of landmark official secrecy battles.
Continue reading...Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression
As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.
“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”
Continue reading...Systematic partisan lying and misinformation from the media, both mainstream and social, has done enormous damage to liberal democracies, the former PM writes
The United States has suffered the largest number of Covid-19 deaths: about 600,000 at the time of writing. The same political and media players who deny the reality of global warming also denied and politicised the Covid-19 virus.
To his credit, Donald Trump poured billions into Operation Warp Speed, which assisted the development of vaccines in a timeframe that matched the program’s ambitious title. But he also downplayed the gravity of Covid-19, then peddled quack therapies and mocked cities that mandated social distancing and mask wearing.
Continue reading...Exclusive: diplomatic effort by US following Australia cancelling $66bn deal with France not matched by London
The US has urged Britain to follow its example and try to repair its relations with Paris in the wake of the row over France’s loss of its submarine contract with Australia.
Australia pulled out of the $66bn (£48bn) contract for 12 diesel electric-powered submarines, signed in 2016, to opt instead for nuclear-powered submarines to be developed with America and the UK. The secretive and sudden cancellation of the contract has created a crisis of trust between Paris on the one hand and London, Canberra and Washington on the other.
Continue reading...Countries ‘colluded to provoke and stir up trouble’ in region that China claims as its territory
The Chinese military has condemned the United States and Canada for each sending a warship through the Taiwan Strait last week, saying they were threatening peace and stability in the region.
China claims democratically ruled Taiwan as its own territory, and has mounted repeated air force missions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) over the past year, provoking anger in Taipei.
Continue reading...Analysis: about half the capital, Port-au-Prince, is controlled by criminals, many of whom do dirty jobs for business and politicians
The kidnapping of 17 foreign missionaries in Haiti marks the latest escalation in a wave of criminality in the impoverished and politically fragile Caribbean state, which has long seen waves of gang-related crime coincide with heightened political turmoil.
According to some estimates, Haiti’s powerful gangs, numbering about 90 criminal organisations in total, control territory amounting to half of the sprawling capital of Port-au-Prince and cost the country over $4bn a year.
Continue reading...Once used in the hunt for fugitive criminals, the global police agency’s most-wanted ‘red notice’ list now includes political refugees and dissidents
Flicking through the news one day in early 2015, Alexey Kharis, a California-based businessman and father of two, came across a startling announcement: Russia would request a global call for his arrest through the International Criminal Police Organization, known as Interpol.
“Oh, wow,” Kharis thought, shocked. All the 46-year-old knew about Interpol and its pursuit of the world’s most-wanted criminals was from novels and films. He tried to reassure himself that things would be OK and it was just an intimidatory tactic of the Russian authorities. Surely, he reasoned, the world’s largest police organisation had no reason to launch a hunt for him.
Continue reading...Protesters say post-dictatorship interim government has failed them politically and economically
Hundreds of pro-military Sudanese protesters have rallied for a second day in Khartoum, in an escalation of what the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, called the “worst and most dangerous crisis” of the country’s precarious transition.
The protesters are demanding the dissolution of Sudan’s post-dictatorship interim government, saying it has failed them politically and economically.
Continue reading...French president attends memorial for those killed and lays flowers at bridge over the Seine
Emmanuel Macron has described a bloody police operation against Algerian pro-independence demonstrators 60 years ago that led to many deaths as an “unforgivable” crime.
Attending a memorial for those killed, Macron laid flowers at a bridge over the River Seine which marked a starting point for the protests in October 1961 that led to one of the darkest chapters of French postwar history.
Continue reading...Follow all the latest on the coronavirus pandemic from the UK and around the world
Germany has reported 4,373,789 confirmed coronavirus cases, an increase of 8,682 and a total of 94,618 deaths, an increase of 17 according to the Robert Koch Institute.
This piece from Der Ziet is in German, but the RKI is warning of a new wave of new infections after the autumn holidays.
In the autumn and winter that lie ahead of us we must assume that the infection rate will worsen.
Continue reading...Declassified documents reveal how in 1965 a shadowy dirty tricks arm of the Foreign Office incited anti-communist massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead
In early 1965 Ed Wynne, an official from the Foreign Office in London in his late 40s, arrived at the door of a two-storey villa set in the discreet calm of a genteel housing estate in colonial Singapore.
But Wynne was no ordinary official. A specialist from the Foreign Office’s cold war propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), he had been assigned to lead a small team. A junior official, four local people and two “IRD ladies”, seconded to the unit from London, would join him.
Continue reading...Newly declassified papers show shocking role played by Britain in slaughter
A propaganda campaign orchestrated by Britain played a crucial part in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century, shocking new evidence reveals.
British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”.
Continue reading...Critics compare figure of famous soprano erected in Greek capital to an Oscar statuette
Drama in life, drama in posterity. For Maria Callas, Greece’s greatest diva, there is, even 44 years after her death, no let up from the artistic wrangling that was her lot.
But this time the uproar is focused on a statue erected at the foot of the ancient Acropolis, opposite the Roman theatre where the world-renowned opera singer made her debut.
Continue reading...The regime in Tehran says discussions will resume ‘soon’, but Israel has already ‘greatly accelerated’ plans for military action
Coordinated warnings last week from the US, Israel and the EU that “time is short” to revive an agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear activities raise a disturbing question: what will opposing governments do if, as seems likely, Tehran’s hardline regime continues to drag its feet while accumulating the wherewithal to build a nuclear weapon?
Israel’s leaders, as usual, are not mincing words. “Every day that passes, every delay in the negotiations, brings Iran closer to a nuclear bomb. If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act. We must make clear that the civilised world won’t allow it,” said foreign minister Yair Lapid.
Continue reading...Although travelers’ hissy fits are nothing new, incidences of bad behavior have spiked amid the tense landscape of Covid-19
Alexander Clark had only just boarded the Los Angeles-bound United airliner when the man seated behind him became incensed. As Clark tells it, a flight attendant had repeatedly asked the passenger to alternately stop talking on his phone or don a face mask when, after the fourth ask, the passenger snapped.
“I will find your name, date of birth, and address! I will know your social security number before I get off this plane!” yelled the passenger, who appeared to be in his 30s. He leapt to his feet mid-shout, spittle arcing from his maskless mouth, and stomped over to the male flight attendant.
Continue reading...Energy firm and director Alexander Temerko have given £1.1m between them to Conservatives
French mayors and residents along the Normandy coast are campaigning to block a project for a cross-Channel electricity cable backed by a Ukrainian-born businessman who has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative party.
Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s business secretary, is due to decide this week on whether to give the go-ahead to a £1.2bn project for the 148-mile cable between Normandy and Hampshire. The firm says the link, which will run through Portsmouth, could supply up to 5% of Britain’s electricity needs.
Continue reading...Five children were among group of 16 US citizens and one Canadian abducted by gang members after orphanage visit
A group of 17 missionaries, including five children, have been kidnapped by an armed criminal gang in Haiti.
The group – 16 Americans and one Canadian citizen – were on their way home from building an orphanage, according to a statement from the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, which supports 9,000 children in Haitian schools and sent out a message asking supporters to pray for its members.
Continue reading...With just months to go before presidential polls, the centre-right Les Républicains, under pressure from both flanks, are scrambling for a suitable candidate
Six months before a presidential election and France’s mainstream right finds itself squeezed – between the hammer and the anvil as they say here – without a candidate and facing an existential threat from either side.
On one flank are the far-right Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, a polarising television pundit who wants to talk about immigration, identity and Islam – the three i’s – and ban “non-French” names such as Mohamed.
Continue reading...Alex Saab, an ally of president Nicolás Maduro, was extradited to face money laundering charges after a 16-month legal battle
Venezuela’s government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.
Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government’s delegation, said his team wouldn’t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.
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