Category Archives: World News

Experts say China’s low-level cyberwar is becoming severe threat

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Activity more overt and reckless despite US, British and other political efforts to bring it to a halt

Chinese state-sponsored hacking is at record levels, western experts say, accusing Beijing of engaging in a form of low-level warfare that is escalating despite US, British and other political efforts to bring it to a halt.

There are accusations too that the clandestine activity, which has a focus on stealing intellectual property, has become more overt and more reckless, although Beijing consistently denies sponsoring hacking and accuses critics of hypocrisy.

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16 million in Yemen ‘marching towards starvation’ as food rations run low – UN

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Aid worker describes ‘horrific’ scenes in one hospital where starving and malnourished children ‘look like skeletons’

At least 5 million people in Yemen are on the brink of famine and a further 16 million are “marching toward starvation”, as the country’s humanitarian crisis spirals out of control.

The situation in Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war, has been described as “rapidly deteriorating” by experts.

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Covid live: daily deaths in Russia at record-equalling high; life expectancy falls for UK men due to pandemic

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Russia reports 820 Covid-linked deaths; coronavirus causes male life expectancy in the UK to drop for the first time since records began

That’s it from me for today. Handing over now to my colleague Nicola Slawson. Thanks for reading!

Coronavirus has caused male life expectancy in the UK to drop for the first time since records began.

A boy born between 2018 and 2020 is expected to live until he is 79 years old – a drop from 79.2 years for 2015-2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Life expectancy has increased in the UK over the last 40 years, albeit at a slower pace in the last decade.

However, the coronavirus pandemic led to a greater number of deaths than normal in 2020.

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New Zealand is no ‘off-grid’ safe haven from the apocalypse | Max Harris

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From 19th-century colonists to today’s super wealthy, New Zealand has been wrongly depicted as a ‘blank slate’

New Zealand has become the prime destination for the world’s wealthy elite. Their relocation could be to do with the country’s famous scenery and quality of life but it could also be that the pandemic has renewed people’s interest in New Zealand as supposedly the best place in the world to survive global societal collapse.

It’s true, as a recent study observes, that New Zealand is a set of isolated islands with renewable energy resources and a temperate climate. However, there is also a long history, intertwined with the country’s colonisation, of New Zealand being seen as a blank slate or empty land, open for the taking. That false image served to justify colonial settlement in the past. It’s now being used again to prepare the ground for further settlement by the super-wealthy.

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US public health workers leaving ‘in droves’ amid pandemic burnout

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Many workers feel stonewalled by elected officials and scapegoated for the high US Covid death toll

Alexandra was working in the public health emergencies unit in a major north-eastern American city when the first wave of the pandemic hit. Although her job was in public health policy research, and not treating Coovid-19 patients on the frontlines of the healthcare system, she recalls the spring of 2020 as a blur of 24-hour shifts.

Related: ‘We’re trying to survive’: workers face cuts as US public sector lags in recovery

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UK warns Hong Kong security law critics of extradition risk posed by China

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Activist Bill Browder warns of global reach of controversial law after being contacted by Foreign Office

Britain has warned some Hong Kong critics in the UK about travelling abroad, according to high-profile human rights advocate Bill Browder, highlighting concerns about the cross-border reach of the Chinese region’s national security law.

Browder, a well-known lobbyist for the use of sanctions against foreign governments involved in human rights abuses, said he was contacted by the UK Foreign Office earlier this month after he was named in a Hong Kong court during a foreign collusion case.

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Rolling news: giant moon model escapes from festival in China – video

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A giant 'moon' rolled to freedom in Henan province after it escaped festival celebrations. It was not the first time a large inflatable satellite went rogue: in 2016 another model moon was blown into the streets of Fuzhou in south-east China during Typhoon Meranti. The moon festival is celebrated in many east Asian countries and coincides with the full harvest moon in September

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Small farmers have the answer to feeding the world. Why isn’t the UN listening? | Elizabeth Mpofu and Henk Hobbelink

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We’re among the thousands boycotting the UN food summit – it’s been hijacked by corporate interests while the voices of small-scale farmers go unheard

Thursday’s UN food summit proposes to help solve the world’s nutrition crisis, with 800 million people going hungry and 1.9 billion labelled obese, by better aligning food systems with development goals. But it won’t achieve any of this. The summit was hijacked early on by powerful corporate interests – but people are resisting.

Hundreds of social movements and civil society groups across the world representing small-scale and subsistence food producers, consumers and environmentalists are protesting about the summit for being undemocratic, non-transparent and focused only on strengthening only one food system: that backed by the big corporations. Civil society bodies active at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for instance, are running a massive grassroots boycott of the summit, and there is a website and several actions dedicated to it. Grain, a small nonprofit group campaigning for biodiversity-based food systems, shut down its website and social media in protest on Thursday and many other organisations are holding their own protests around the world. An online alternative forum in July, running in parallel with the pre-summit meeting in Rome, attracted about 9,000 participants. This week, even more are expected.

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Myanmar junta abducting children of people targeted for arrest, says UN expert

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Special rapporteur says children as young as 20 weeks old are being seized by military in bid to force suspects to hand themselves in

Myanmar’s military junta is systematically abducting the relatives of people it is seeking to arrest, including children as young as 20 weeks old, according the UN special rapporteur for the country.

Tom Andrews told the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday that conditions in the country have continued to deteriorate and that “current efforts by the international community to stop the downward spiral of events in Myanmar are simply not working”.

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England’s Covid travel rules spark outrage around the world

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Refusal to recognise vaccines given across Latin America, Africa and south Asia has been denounced as ‘discriminatory’

England’s Covid travel rules and refusal to recognise vaccines administered across huge swaths of the world have sparked outrage and bewilderment across Latin America, Africa and south Asia, with critics denouncing what they called an illogical and discriminatory policy.

The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, described England’s rules, unveiled last Friday, as “a new simplified system for international travel”. “The purpose is to make it easier for people to travel,” Shapps said.

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More than 100 countries face spending cuts as Covid worsens debt crisis, report warns

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As pandemic widens inequalities, many developing countries spend more on debt than health, study says

More than 100 countries face cuts to public spending on health, education and social protection as the Covid-19 pandemic compounds already high levels of debt, a new report says.

The International Monetary Fund believes that 35 to 40 countries are “debt distressed” – defined as when a country is experiencing difficulties in servicing its debt, such as when there are arrears or debt restructuring.

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On thin ice: how The Alpinist captured the terrifying climbs of Marc-André Leclerc

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Climbing solo without ropes, the Canadian adventurer would scale stratospheric walls of ice that could crack and fall with one wrong move. We meet the makers of a gripping, heartbreaking new film

An insect-like creature is climbing a wall. The wall is made of ice – not regular, firm ice, but ice with spikes and cracks and gaps in behind. The creature has extended arms like a mantis, with sharply angled ends that hook into the ice, as well as spikes on its feet to kick in. Still, it doesn’t look very secure: the ice creaks and bits break off and fall. The creature feels around for somewhere else to stick its hooks and spikes, then continues upwards – intently, methodically, almost mechanically. It is both beautiful and absolutely terrifying.

When the camera pans out, it’s even more terrifying, because of the sheer size of this frozen wall. It is vast and vertiginous, the creature a tiny dot creeping upwards, a gnat in a sweeping sub-zero landscape. Except that this gnat has no wings: if it falls, it falls. Nor does it have a rope, because it’s not a gnat or even an insect, but a man – a Canadian by the name of Marc-André Leclerc, climbing solo in the Rockies with crampons and a pair of ice-axes.

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Boris Johnson tells UN that Cop26 must be ‘turning point for humanity’

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UK PM says it is time for the world to ‘grow up’ and ‘listen to scientists’ in speech to general assembly

Cop26 must be a “turning point for humanity” in just 40 days’ time, Boris Johnson has urged in a call to arms to fellow global leaders ahead of the climate summit in Glasgow.

Addressing the UN general assembly in New York on Wednesday evening, Johnson warned it was time for humanity to “grow up”.

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The delay of New Zealand’s emissions reduction plan is embarrassing – we need action now | Adam Currie

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Every time we postpone change we make it harder to transition to the low-carbon economy we need to help prevent global heating

Last week, New Zealand’s government announced a five-month delay to the emissions reduction plan (ERP) – its key programme for combatting climate change. This is gutting – climate decisions by many organisations and institutions have been delayed since 2017; first to wait for the Zero Carbon Act, then the advice of the Climate Change Commission, and now the ERP, which won’t be announced until the budget in May.

The postponement even requires an embarrassing legislative change to the Zero Carbon Act to get around the December 2021 deadline for the plan, which is currently enshrined in law. Every day of delay makes the transition we will have to make to a low-carbon Aotearoa – and the ability to make it fair for affected communities – more and more difficult.

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Tunisia’s president to ignore parts of the constitution and rule by decree

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Kais Saied says he is preparing to change the political system, prompting opposition from rivals

Tunisia’s president Kais Saied has declared that he will rule by decree and ignore parts of the constitution as he prepares to change the political system, prompting immediate opposition from rivals.

Saied has held nearly total power since 25 July when he sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and assumed executive authority, citing a national emergency in a move his foes called a coup.

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Is China stepping up its ambition to supplant US as top superpower?

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Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?

It may have been an inelegantly, even ineptly, executed pivot, gratuitously alienating key allies, but by leaving Afghanistan and forming the Australian, US and UK security pact in the Indo-Pacific, Joe Biden has at least cleared the decks to focus on his great foreign policy challenge – the systemic rivalry with China.

Yet the concern now is how quickly this rivalry could escalate, especially in Taiwan. The linchpin of the US alliance system in south-east Asia, Taiwan is the biggest island in the “first island chain”, the group of islands that keeps China blocked in. It is China’s next target, and as the former British prime minister Theresa May pointed out, no one quite knows if the west is prepared to fight to save Taiwan or whether the new tripartite pact in some way places a new obligation on the UK to come to the country’s defence.

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Genetics reveal how humans island-hopped to settle remote Pacific

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Study using DNA analysis reveals not only are statues on these distant islands connected, but inhabitants too

Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west, and so did the people who created them, a study has found.

Over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and Raivavae – archipelagos that are thousands of miles apart but all home to similar ancient statues.

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‘Donnez-moi un break’: Johnson says France needs to ‘get a grip’ over submarine deal – video

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Boris Johnson has said French officials need to 'prenez un grip' amid continued anger at the US and UK's recent submarine deal with Australia. France recalled its ambassadors from both countries in response to Sunday's announcement. On Wednesday the prime minister said: 'It is not exclusive. It is not trying to shoulder anybody out. It is not adversarial towards China, for instance. It is there to intensify links and friendship between three countries'

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UN food summit will be ‘elitist’ and ‘pro-corporate’, says special rapporteur

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Michael Fakhri says Thursday’s meeting will not be promised ‘people’s summit’ on tackling world’s nutrition crisis

The UN global food summit is “elitist and regressive” and has failed in its goal of being a “people’s summit”, according to the special rapporteur on food rights.

As world leaders prepare to attend the virtual event on Thursday, which aims to examine ways to transform global food systems to be more sustainable, Michael Fakhri said it risked leaving behind the very people critical for its success. In an interview with the Guardian, Fakhri said neither the worsening impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the right to food, nor fundamental questions of inequality, accountability and governance were being properly addressed by the meeting.

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