Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Silsila Alikhil, 26, was badly beaten and held for over five hours in Islamabad, according to diplomatic sources
The daughter of Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan was abducted in the middle of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, held for several hours and brutally attacked, officials in both countries said on Saturday.
No one has been arrested in connection with Friday’s assault on Silsila Alikhil, 26. The Afghan foreign ministry issued a statement demanding a quick investigation, saying she was “severely tortured”.
We should be suspicious of the role of the Chinese Communist party in the harvesting of genetic data from unborn babies, argues William Matthews
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree. While the harvesting of genetic data by any company is frightening and fraught with ethical issues, it should be obvious that this is a false equivalence. It is undoubtedly worse if genetic data is gathered by a company which must also comply with the rule of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its military-industrial complex, a regime which harvests and aggregates data on its citizens on a massive scale and uses it directly to implement the most repressive system of social control on earth in Xinjiang.
The Cameroonians, who had ‘no idea’ they had jumped into the demilitarised area, have been trapped for almost two months
A few months after Grace Ngo flew into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus from her native Cameroon, she decided to head “for the west”. Smugglers pointed the student in the direction of the Venetian walls that cut through the heart of Nicosia, Europe’s last divided capital.
A little before midnight on 24 May,Ngo leapt from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot republic into what she hoped would be the war-divided island’s internationally recognised Greek south.
This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.
Hauser & Wirth is known for its galleries in Zurich, Monaco, Hong Kong, New York, LA and Bruton.
For all the lizards, the loquats and the lantana, Menorca’s newest art gallery, which lies amid the blue waters and lolling yachts of Mahón harbour, carries the faintest whiff of a corner of Somerset.
Illa del Rei, a 40,000-sq-metre island a short boat ride from the Menorcan capital, Mahón, has a long and unique history. As well as being the site of a sixth-century Christian basilica and a staging post for Alfonso III’s conquest of Menorca 700 years later, the island is home to a decommissioned naval hospital founded by the Royal Navy in 1711 when Menorca was in British hands.
Joe Biden says social media platforms such as Facebook “are killing people” for allowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines to be posted on its platform, as the administration continued criticising the company.
“They’re killing people. ... Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people,” the US president told reporters at the White House on Friday, when asked about disinformation and what his message was to social media platforms such as Facebook.
Polls show New Zealanders accept that life will be different in future and they still feel their country is headed in the right direction
As countries look for a post-pandemic pathway back to “normal”, New Zealand is making no promises – and its population seems startlingly happy with that.
Around the world, some governments are hitting full throttle with rhetoric about a “return to normal” and the freedoms of a pre-pandemic world. New Zealand’s approach has been cautious by contrast. The government has made no assurances of a return to normal anytime soon, announced no multi-step “pathway out”, and put forward no timeline for re-opening borders even to vaccinated travellers.
Authorities are still struggling to understand the motives and masterminds behind the first killing of a Haitian president since 1915
Giovanna Romero remembers her husband, Mauricio, as a caring father who called home every night when he was out of the country on work. He did so as usual on the night of 6 July – from where, exactly, she isn’t sure – to remind her and their children he loved them and tell them to take care.
“I’ll call again soon,” the retired Colombian soldier promised – a pledge he would be unable to keep.
A group of talented teens push the boundaries of their religious society by putting on a concert in Nabil Ayouch’s earnest film
Franco-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has made a likable, high-energy youth movie that could almost be called the Moroccan answer to Fame and which features that time-honoured plot device: putting on a concert.
Using nonprofessionals playing docu-fictionalised versions of themselves, Ayouch has created a drama revolving around an arts centre for young people that he himself helped to set up in the tough district of Sidi Moumen, called by someone here the Bronx of Casablanca. The school includes a special programme called the Positive School of Hip-Hop. A crowd of smart, talented teens join the class and we watch as they find out the challenges, limits and opportunities of learning self-expression through western-style rap in a Muslim society.
Campaigners criticise European Commission strategy that allows continued burning of trees for fuel
The EU executive has been accused of “sacrificing forests” after it published proposals that would allow trees to continue to be burned for fuel.
The charges of “accelerating climate breakdown” through wood-burning were made on Friday as the European Commission unveiled its forest strategy, which includes a goal to plant 3bn trees across the EU by 2030.
Some pay smugglers to take them to Istanbul as withdrawal of US troops rekindles fears of civil war
Twenty-eight days into their journey out of Afghanistan, a woman and her five children are sitting in the shade near a bus station in Tatvan, a town on the shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey.
She is waiting for a smuggler, who was paid in advance, to take the family to Istanbul. Tired and dirty, the younger children are playing in the dust and laughing; the youngest boy wants a piggyback. The smuggler is two days late.
Once a bastion of Covid success, now two of the country’s largest cities are under tight restrictions amid mishandled vaccine program and growing Delta outbreak
At a press conference on Thursday morning, one day after a lockdown was extended by two weeks in Sydney and a few hours before a fifth lockdown would be declared in Melbourne, the premier of New South Wales grew flustered. “One question at a time. I will get to all of them,” Gladys Berejiklian said. “It is not nice being shouted at.”
Australians have a lot of questions. After managing the pandemic better than almost any country in the world, they are now watching the world open up while their own borders remain strictly closed.Meanwhile,just 10% of adults have been fully vaccinated and an outbreak of the Delta variant is slowly spreading.
At least 110 people have died in devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium. Search and rescue operations are continuing with hundreds still unaccounted for
Russia on Friday reported 799 coronavirus-related deaths, the most in a single day since the pandemic began and the fourth day in a row it has set a record.
Reuters notes that the Russian coronavirus task force confirmed 25,704 new Covid infections in the last 24 hours.
Shaun Keasey is the general manager of Gorgeous nightclub in Dudley, in England’s West Midlands. He has been on Sky News explaining the precautions staff will be taking when they reopen on 19 July and they are … not much, to be honest.
He told Sky News:
We were expecting this huge freedom celebration. It’s not quite turning out that way though, with cases rising, but we’ve got to make the best of it. We’re a bit nervous, but we can’t wait to open the doors of the club, which will happen at one second past midnight from Sunday going into Monday.
No, we won’t be insisting on that. The majority of our customers are younger people. They haven’t yet had the opportunity to have two jabs. If anyone wants to wear a mask, they’re free to wear it. There will still be hand sanitisation points to make sure that we encourage the best personal hygiene, but we just want to get on with business now. We will still have our entry procedures where you show your age, and the door staff will be looking for people who potentially don’t look well. But other than that, you know, we’re a nightclub, we’re not a medical facility.
"We just want to get on with business."
Gorgeous Nightclub owner Shaun Keasey tells Sky News he is "a bit nervous" but "can't wait to open the doors one second past midnight from Sunday into Monday".
Additional emojis will complete Unicode’s drive to offer more variety and gender-neutral options
A pregnant man, a multiracial handshake and a face that cannot bear to watch are some of the emojis that will hit devices over the next year, according to a draft list published by the Unicode Consortium, which approves icons for use.
Every day, before 7am, volunteers gather in front of a house in Yogyakarta. Wearing masks and maintaining distance, they measure and cut panels of wood, smoothing the edges with sandpaper. For the past 11 days, the front yard has been turned into an emergency casket-making workshop. The coffins are painted white, and lined inside with plastic.
The volunteers are lecturers, security guards, artists and police officers who set aside their time to help the community, which is being ravaged by Covid. They work until nightfall.
Search for missing continues, with Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg also affected
The death toll from catastrophic floods in western Germany and Belgium has risen to more than 170, as emergency services continued their search for hundreds still missing.
The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said he was “stunned” by the devastation caused by the flooding and pledged support to the families of those killed and to cities and towns facing significant damage. It is Germany’s worst natural disaster in more than half a century.
The fourth searing heatwave in five weeks is set to strike the west of the United States and Canada this weekend, aggravating wildfires that are already ravaging an area larger than Rhode Island as drought and record-breaking temperatures tied to the climate crisis pummel the region.
The impending heatwave comes as 12 states are already battling 71 active wildfires. The combined area of the blazes is about 1,553 sq miles (4,021 sq km), according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
At least 58 people have died and dozens more were missing in Germany on Thursday as swollen rivers caused by record rainfall across western Europe swept through towns and villages. Many of the victims died around the wine-growing region of Ahrweiler, in Rhineland-Palatinate state, police said, and dozens were still unaccounted for, after the Ahr river that flows into the Rhine broke its banks and brought down half a dozen houses