‘I don’t know where to go’: uncertain fate of the women in Kabul’s shelters

Women in refuges have been sent home to their abusers or to prison since the Taliban takeover. Those in the few shelters still open fear what lies ahead

Zari was seven years old when her parents died, forcing her to move in with her uncle. But when he died four years later, his two widows beat Zari and forced her to work long hours weaving carpets. During her teenage years, Zari tried to kill herself.

After her suicide attempt, Zari, now 28, moved into a shelter for abused women. For the past eight years she has held on to the belief that things would get better. She made friends and learned to sew clothes, eventually teaching others to do the same.

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WHO ‘should pay reparations to victims of sexual abuse by staff’

Exclusive: UN agency must respond to the ‘real needs’ of the women and girls, says Julienne Lusenge, co-chair of the independent inquiry into the scandal

Survivors of sexual abuse by World Health Organization aid workers during the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak in 2018 should receive “substantive” reparations, the co-chair of an independent inquiry into the scandal has said.

Julienne Lusenge, a prominent Congolese human rights activist, said it was “essential” that the UN’s global health body drew up a workable plan for reparations to respond to the “real needs” of women and girls who became victims of abuse.

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Congress passes stopgap bill to avert government shutdown – live

Bill passed by Senate and House will extend funding until 3 December as Democrats continue to wrangle over Biden’s economic agenda

House speaker Nancy Pelosi left her press conference by urging reporters to “think positively” about the negotiations over the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package.

And yet, as Pelosi was making her comments, House majority leader Steny Hoyer said he was not confident that the infrastructure bill would pass today, as Democratic leadership had previously hoped.

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Canary Islands lava peninsula in the Atlantic doubles in size

Volcano on La Palma has been steadily spewing molten rock into the sea, enlarging the size of the island

Lava from the volcano in Spain’s Canary Islands that began cascading into the ocean two days ago has already covered an area bigger than 25 football pitches.

By late Thursday, the newly wrought peninsula on La Palma had doubled in size to 20 hectares (50 acres) since the morning, according to the Volcanic Institute of the Canaries (Involcan).

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UK joins calls on Mali to end alleged deal with Russian mercenaries

Mali’s military leaders under pressure to pull back from suspected agreement with Wagner Group

The UK has joined a mounting international campaign of pressure on Mali’s military leaders to step back from a suspected deal with a Russian mercenary company, amid fears that the agreement will further complicate insecurity in the region.

Mali’s leaders, battling a jihadist insurgency – and amid a fragile political transition following multiple coups – have been coy on details of a reported deal with the Wagner Group.

Yet Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, conceded last week that talks with Mali had occurred. “They have turned to a private military company from Russia,” he said at the UN general assembly last Saturday. “France wants to significantly draw down its military component which was present there.”

The developments have sparked international concerns, anger in France, and mixed reactions within Mali amid the worsening violence suffered in the country.

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The US government avoided a shutdown – but what happens next?

Congress passed a bill to fund the government into December. But questions remain over the debt ceiling and Biden’s agenda

The US government went into Thursday embroiled in a game of three-dimensional chess with time running out and trillions of dollars at stake.

The first dimension was a must-do: fund the government by midnight to avoid it shutting down. In a typical shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees stop getting paid and many stop working; some services are suspended and numerous national attractions and national parks temporarily close.

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‘You can’t sue your way to the moon’: Elon Musk intensifies Bezos space feud

SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa, took a jab at Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for suing when it lost out on deal

Elon Musk intensified the feud over lawsuits and rocket sizes with space rival Jeff Bezos this week, kicking off the latest round in the billionaire battle over humanity’s return to the moon.

The SpaceX founder, who in April won a contract from Nasa to build the next-generation spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972, took a jab at Bezos for suing the US government when his company lost out on the deal.

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Macron in visa cuts row as Algeria summons French envoy

President accused of chasing rightwing votes by making sudden, tough gestures on immigration

The Algerian foreign ministry has summoned the French ambassador for talks in “formal protest” against France’s decision to sharply reduce the number of visas granted to Algerian nationals, as opposition parties in Paris accused Emmanuel Macron of using the row to court rightwing voters.

The French government announced this week that it would substantially cut the number of visas granted to people from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, three north African countries which were all part of France’s former colonial empire and where many people have strong family ties in France.

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‘Strategy of terror’: 116 dead as Ecuador prisons become battlegrounds for gangs

Struggle between cartels to control smuggling routes leads to third – and deadliest – prison riot this year

A bitter struggle between rival Mexican cartels to control cocaine trafficking routes in Ecuador has erupted in a day of bloodshed inside a high-security prison which left 116 inmates dead. Many of the victims were butchered with chainsaws or beheaded with machetes.

As security forces battled to retake the Litoral penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil on Wednesday, scores of bodies were found dumped in bathrooms and corridors, piled and burned in courtyards, or even stuffed into air ducts.

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Shakira says two wild boars attacked her in Barcelona park

Singer held up her dirty and torn bag as evidence on Instagram: ‘They’ve destroyed everything’

Shakira said two wild boars attacked her in a Barcelona park and destroyed her bag.

In an Instagram story post, the singer held up her dirty and torn bag as evidence, which she said boars tried to carry off into the woods.

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China owed $385bn – including ‘hidden debt’ from poorer nations, says report

AidData finds 42 low-to-middle income countries with ‘belt and road’ exposure exceeding 10% of GDP

Researchers have identified debts of at least $385bn (£286bn) owed by 165 countries to China for “Belt and road initiative” (BRI) projects, with loans systematically underreported to international bodies such as the World Bank.

The four-year study by US-based research lab AidData said the debt burdens were kept off the public balance sheets through the use of special purpose and semi-private loans, and were “substantially larger than research institutions, credit rating agencies, or intergovernmental organisations with surveillance responsibilities previously understood”.

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The climate crisis is destroying the human rights of those least responsible for it | Patrick Verkooijen and AK Abdul Momen

The UN must urgently appoint a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights to galvanise action on the biggest threat to fundamental freedoms

Climate breakdown is making a mockery of human rights.

Start with the most fundamental right of all: the right to life, liberty and security. Two million people have died as a result of a five-fold increase in weather-related disasters in our lifetimes. And given that 90% of these deaths have occurred in developing countries, which have contributed the least to global heating, the climate crisis is also making a mockery of the notion that we are all born equal – as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and numerous national constitutions assert.

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UK reports 36,480 new cases – as it happened

Thanks for following along – this blog is now closed. You can catch up with the latest coronavirus coverage here.

Technology allowing Australians to travel overseas with an internationally recognised vaccine certificate will be ready within weeks, as the government prepares to announce a plan for the country’s borders to finally reopen.

In evidence to the Senate’s Covid committee on Thursday, the chief executive of Services Australia, Rebecca Skinner, said the department had developed a visible digital seal for vaccine status that would be ready by the end of October. She said:

Our plan is to have all of the technology in place so that it is a settled and tested situation before the policy decisions need to be made.

We don’t want to be in a situation where policy decisions can’t be taken because the technology isn’t ready.

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‘Someone lied’: French foreign minister accuses Australia of submarine betrayal in latest broadside

Jean-Yves Le Drian says Australia reassured France everything was fine right up to the day the Aukus pact was announced

France has accused Australia of lying shortly before Canberra cancelled a major submarine contract, with the French foreign minister declaring “someone lied”.

With no sign of any imminent easing of tensions between the two countries, Jean-Yves Le Drian told a parliamentary hearing that Australia had never expressed doubts about the €56bn (A$90bn) submarine contract or the strategic Indo-Pacific pact before breaking the contract.

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‘I’ll never go back’: Uganda’s schools at risk as teachers find new work during Covid

Many private schools may not reopen after staff laid off during lockdown say they will not return to the profession

The last message Mary Namitala received from the private school in which she taught was in March last year, the day all schools in Uganda were ordered close due to Covid-19. The message read: “No more payments until when schools open.”

“My husband and I decided to leave our rented house in town and shifted to the village, to our unfinished house. We could not afford to continue paying rent,” says Namitala, from her home in Bombo in central Uganda, about 20 miles north of the capital Kampala.

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‘Roar, roar, roar!’ Japan rolls out rock music against bear attacks

Authorities hope rock’n’roll song will help people of Iwate prefecture stay safe as number of bear sightings rises

Can rock’n’roll keep people safe from bear attacks? One Japanese region is hoping so, and has commissioned a cautionary anthem warning residents about the threat of its ursine inhabitants.

Bears are common across Japan and regularly spark frantic hunts when they venture into towns, where they have attacked and even killed residents.

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‘The sharks are hiding’: locals claim deep-sea mining off Papua New Guinea has stirred up trouble

‘Shark calling’, an ancient custom of hunters singing to sharks then catching them by hand, is under threat and locals blame deep-sea disturbances

More in this series
• Race to the bottom: the disastrous, blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea
• ‘False choice’ – is deep sea mining required for an electric vehicle revolution?
• Covid tests and superbug killers: how the deep sea is key to fighting pandemics

To catch a shark in the waters off Papua New Guinea, first the men sing.

They sing the names of their ancestors and their respects to the shark. They shake a coconut rattle into the sea, luring the animals from the deep, and then catch them by hand.

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In its latest cut-and-paste child welfare report, New Zealand fails Māori again | Aaron Smale

The Māori who have been screwed by the system are once again being silenced and ignored

Sorry means you don’t do it again. So goes a phrase used by Aboriginal protesters in Australia in recent years.

The phrase references the national apology in 2008 by prime minister Kevin Rudd to Aboriginal peoples for the Stolen Generations, the thousands of children who were taken from their families.

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‘We have to fight for these conditions’: why Danish meat plant workers are Europe’s best paid

Denmark has secured decent pay and conditions within the sector. Will other EU countries finally follow suit?

Read more: ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry

In meat plants, there’s a golden rule: the production line never stops. For 28 years, Frank Vestergaard has worked in Denmark’s meat processing industry. When he started, he says, workers were expected to slaughter 80 pigs an hour on the line; today, that number has rocketed to 432 animals.

He starts work at 6am and deals with animal carcasses. The pigs are first put to sleep with gas, then the workers slit their throats to let the blood drain out. Vestergaard’s job is to remove any injuries from the carcasses, such as broken bones, which the vets on the line identify. If the gallbladder is accidentally punctured, for example, a yellow fluid can seep on to the meat, and Vestergaard has to remove it.

“We have six seconds per pig for one operation, and then there is a new pig. We do the same over and over again. That is how we earn our money.”

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Stephanie Grisham book sheds light on Trump’s bizarre brushes with world leaders

Memoir reveals Trump once discussed strength of kangaroos in meeting with UK PM – one of the few European leaders he liked

Boris Johnson once devoted a considerable part of a meeting with Donald Trump to discussing how strong kangaroos are, as the British prime minister struck up a robust relationship with a fellow “pudgy white guy with crazy hair”.

In contrast, the then US president considered his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, “a wuss”.

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