A North Carolina man who claimed to have a bomb in a pickup truck near the US Capitol surrendered to law enforcement after an hours-long standoff on Thursday that prompted a large police response and the evacuations of government buildings in the area.
Related: Investigators seek clues after California family found dead on hiking trail
Continue reading...Report launched with youth activists including Greta Thunberg paints ‘unimaginably dire’ picture
Almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution, according to a report from Unicef. The UN agency’s head called the situation “unimaginably dire”.
Nearly every child around the world was at risk from at least one of these impacts today, including heatwaves, floods, cyclones, disease, drought, and air pollution, the report said. But 1 billion children live in 33 countries facing three or four impacts simultaneously. The countries include India, Nigeria and the Philippines, and much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Continue reading...Death toll from the assault near northern town of Gorgadji leaves 59 civilians dead, along with six militiamen and 15 military police
Burkina Faso’s president has declared three days of national mourning after suspected jihadists killed 80 people, including 59 civilians, in an attack in the north of the country.
The attack was the latest bloodshed in an area with high levels of Islamist violence.
Continue reading...Despite the loss of income, some people say they enjoyed the peace of border closures while the environment had a chance to recover
For nearly a year and a half after the onset of the pandemic, the Cook Islands didn’t see a single tourist.
In early 2020 the south Pacific country was forced to close its borders to keep Covid-19 out. In doing so it shut the doors on an industry that contributes two-thirds of the remote island country’s GDP.
Continue reading...The woman, who was trying to make the trip from Africa, was found lying next to two bodies and ‘in a bad state’, officials say
About 40 migrants are feared dead after rescuers recovered a lone woman clinging to an overturned dinghy that had been carrying dozens of people trying to reach the Canary Islands.
A rescue helicopter carrying the survivor – a 30-year-old woman who appeared exhausted and shaken – landed at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria airport on Tuesday, after a cargo ship found her 135 miles off the coast.
Continue reading...Chiba made his name with the 1970s Street Fighter trilogy, before Quentin Tarantino’s admiration brought him fame in the west
Sonny Chiba, the Japanese martial arts movie star who found late-career renown in Hollywood after outspoken admiration from Quentin Tarantino, has died aged 82 from a Covid-related illness. Variety reported that it had received confirmation of the news from Chiba’s agent.
With an acting career beginning in the 1960s with a string of roles in Japanese martial arts films and TV shows, Chiba became widely known in the west after being name-checked in True Romance, the 1993 thriller written by Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. By then, Chiba had become a star in Japan, appearing in titles such as the 1970s Street Fighter trilogy (and its spin-off, Sister Street Fighter), Bullet Train and Champion of Death.
Continue reading...Largest increases among those in their 30s and under 18 as US urges world leaders not to attend UN meeting in person
Hospitalizations of people under the age of 50 with Covid-19 are now at the highest levels seen in the US since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest government data shows.
The largest increases in hospitalizations was among those in their 30s and the under-18s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The previous peak in coronavirus patients under 50 needing to be hospitalized was in January this year.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Russian opposition leader likely to infuriate Kremlin with letter dictated from behind bars
The jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has written from behind bars to urge western politicians to take meaningful action against global corruption and to impose personal sanctions against oligarchs “in the entourage of Vladimir Putin”.
Writing in the Guardian before the first anniversary of his poisoning on 20 August last year, Navalny lambasts western leaders for not doing more to tackle what he admits is a “tricky issue”. He says his own survival after being exposed to novichok was only down to incompetence and corruption inside Russia’s FSB spy agency.
Continue reading...Ayten Amin’s Souad is a razor-sharp portrayal of sisterhood and sexual awakening that is rarely represented on screen
When the Egyptian director Ayten Amin was 10 years old, a classmate’s sister killed herself. The news gripped the school. But, in a society where suicide is a sin, no one talked about it; instead, they mourned the girl as though she had died mysteriously, or in an accident. “When I was shooting my first film, it suddenly hit me,” Amin says over a video call from her home in Cairo. “How did my classmate feel back then? How did she grow up knowing what happened, but with no one talking about it?”
In her new film, Souad, Amin explores precisely this: the hidden lives of teenage girls in Egypt. It follows the title character (played by Bassant Ahmed) and Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh), sisters of 19 and 13 living in Zagazig, a small city 40 miles north of Cairo in the Nile delta. To her family and friends, Souad is as religious as she is studious – but she lives a different life online. She has virtual relationships with men and becomes enthralled by the glamorous-seeming Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem), an influencer from the fashionable Mediterranean city of Alexandria. Their relationship begins to sour when Souad stands up Ahmed for a real-life date; it gets steadily worse as a cycle of sexts and arguments sets in. Then tragedy strikes.
Continue reading...The executive’s case has sent China’s relations with the US and Canada plummeting with accusations of political arrests and ‘hostage diplomacy’
Until she was detained at Vancouver airport in December 2018, Meng Wanzhou was not a household name. But the 49-year-old Huawei executive has now become the face of a high-stakes trilateral dispute between China, Canada and the US.
Related: Meng Wanzhou extradition case wraps up but verdict will take months
Continue reading...Evidence about efficacy of additional dose of vaccine is unclear as some raise moral argument
Many rich countries are considering offering people an additional coronavirus vaccine dose. But are these booster shots necessary?
Continue reading...A few days ago the capital was full of women going about their business. Now, the few that remain walk fast and full of fear
Four days after the quick and unexpected invasion of Kabul by the Taliban, the streets of the Afghan capital are almost entirely devoid of women.
The few women who are on the streets are wearing the traditional blue burqa, Islamic garb that, while customary in Afghanistan, was not used as widely in Kabul until now. Many women are dressed in the long black clothes commonly worn in the Middle East and Arab nations.
Continue reading...From Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca to wildlife tourism in Nepal, we find out how the crisis has affected people in four travel hotspots – and whether or not they want the tourists to return
In March last year, it was predicted that the global travel shutdown would cause international arrivals to plummet by 20 to 30% by the end of 2020.
Six weeks later, the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) revised their warning: international arrivals could fall by up to 80% – equating to a billion fewer tourists and the worst crisis in the history of the industry.
Continue reading...Biden’s hasty withdrawal removed leverage in talks with Taliban, says first female vice-president of Afghan parliament Fawzia Koofi
Joe Biden delaying the exit of American forces from Afghanistan by just a month could have made a significant difference to the outcome of continuing peace talks with the Taliban leadership, according to one of the negotiators.
Fawzia Koofi, an Afghan politician and women’s rights activist, said the chaotic withdrawal undermined all leverage that the US and the Afghan government had had with the Taliban at the talks in Qatar.
Continue reading...Hundreds of people on the runway, women and children screaming, and gunshots lighting up the sky: Afghan journalist Ramin Rahman spoke to the Guardian about his chaotic escape from Hamid Karzai international airport the day the Taliban took Kabul.
Rahman, 27, left Kabul fearing for his life. As 'a progressive, outspoken journalist with tattoos' – he is basically the antithesis of what the Taliban stand for.
He described several hours of uncertainty and panic, running with hundreds of others towards US aircraft, and the agonising wait before the plane took off from Afghanistan
Continue reading...As Covid continues to curb visits to see our iconic wildlife, now is the time to move away from western-led funding models
That African governments have failed to mobilise funds to conserve their vast protected areas is not in doubt. Countries were just about managing to pay basic salaries to rangers who barely had enough to put fuel in their patrol vehicles. Covid has exacerbated this already dire situation, with the loss of income from foreign tourism.
The continent has more than 8,500 protected areas, described by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as government-led national parks, areas jointly governed by state agencies, communities, privately owned wildlife reserves, and public-private partnerships between governments, companies and NGOs. Included too, are what the IUCN calls “indigenous peoples and communities conserved territories and areas”.
Continue reading...Critical care beds are reaching capacity in Japan while New Zealand is racing to contain a cluster in Auckland that has grown to 21
An update on the British man sentenced to six weeks in prison in Singapore for refusing to wear a mask:
Benjamin Glynn, 40, was released today and will be deported, the country’s prison department said.
This is an interesting story by Edward Helmore about an Australian psychologist living in Canada who penned a book on pandemics just before Covid-19 hit.
Stephen Taylor’s book, The Psychology of Pandemics, was rejected by his publisher because “no one’s going to want to read it”.
Related: ‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology – then Covid hit
Continue reading...Actor said to be given exemption to film Amazon TV series, as territory braces for tougher travel rules
As Hong Kong braces for more draconian Covid-19 travel restrictions from Friday, the Australian actor Nicole Kidman has received an exemption from the government to skip quarantine, media reported.
The exemption was given to allow her to film an Amazon television series called The Expats, the news website HK01 reported, a move that contrasts sharply with the mandatory hotel quarantine of up to three weeks that residents must undergo after entering the Chinese-ruled territory.
Continue reading...Posters in Ribadesella warn visitors unhappy about reality of rural life they ‘may not be in the right place’
Some called in to complain about braying donkeys. Other tourists dialled up officials in the northern Spanish village of Ribadesella, population 5,700, to notify them of the mess left behind by wandering cows.
“Last week we had a lady who called us three or four times over a rooster that was waking her up at 5am,” said Ramón Canal, Ribadesella’s mayor. “She told us that we had to do something.”
Continue reading...A parcel of land owned by the international airport is home to the largest population of the San Francisco garter snake
Across from the San Francisco international airport, and past the bustling highway that hugs it, lies what appears to be an empty lot. But the 180-acre, airport-owned parcel of land, which sits beyond the tarmac, tucked against residential homes, isn’t quite empty. It’s home to roughly 1,300 snakes.
With brightly painted bands of blue, orange-red and black that line their slender bodies, the garter snakes, which can grow up to 3ft long, are considered among the most beautiful in the world. They are also among the most threatened.
Continue reading...