Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Satellite imagery from NOAA shows various clusters of fire in the state of Oregon. The Bootleg fire, which has been burning since 6 July, is the largest active blaze in the nation, covering an area larger than the size of New York City. The growing Bootleg fire continued to devour forest in south-central Oregon, after forcing hundreds of residents in the Klamath Falls area to evacuate
President condemns Trump’s ‘big lie’ about a stolen election but fails to mention filibuster in 20-minute Philadelphia speech
Joe Biden has made an impassioned attack on racist voting laws sweeping America, warning that “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real” and demanding of Republicans: “Have you no shame?”
More than three months after the first vaccine was administered, less than 0.6% of the population have received their first dose
Three months since Papua New Guinea launched its Covid vaccine rollout, just 60,000 people – or 0.6% of the population – have received their first dose, with many people hesitant due to misinformation and fears around the vaccine.
Despite a recent surge in cases that has overwhelmed the already rickety health system, just over 2,800 people have received their second dose.
The Utah division of wildlife resources has released video footage showing planes dropping small fish from the air into the lakes below.
The fish – which are usually between 1 and 3 inches (2.5cm-7.5cm) long and include rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, brook trout, tiger trout, splake and Arctic grayling – are specifically raised for fishing. They are dropped into fishless lakes that do not have any natural reproduction, and they are often sterile.
Utah’s DWR says this allows the state to control their numbers and does not affect any native fish populations.
This method of stocking, in which the small fish can survive the high fall because of their size, has been used since the 1950s
The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star has made a superbly low-key film about the ill-fated flirtations a teenager and older woman
Noémie Merlant is the French acting star who two years ago helped make Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire a colossal critical hit at Cannes. Now she provides one of the festival’s incidental pleasures with her engaging if flawed directorial feature debut, presented here as a special screening. She has written it with her co-star, the emerging Romany actor Gimi-Nicolae Novaci, whom she discovered and cast as a nonprofessional in Shakira, the short film she directed in 2019 about gypsy communities in Paris. There is a definite screen chemistry between them here, and at times Mi Iubita (Romany for “my love”) Mon Amour almost comes across like a straight Call Me By Your Name.
Vessels weighing more than 25,000 tonnes barred from lagoon from 1 August
Italy has banned cruise ships from the Venice lagoon in what appears to be a definitive move welcomed by anti-cruise ship campaigners.
“We finally seem to have got there,” said Tommaso Cacciari, the leader of No Grandi Navi (No Big Ships), an activist group that has been protesting against the vessels for more than a decade.
Commission president moves to assuage fears scheme could lead to higher home energy and petrol bills
The European commission has said it wants a fund to prevent fuel poverty, amid warnings from an ally of France’s Emmanuel Macron that a proposed trading scheme to cut emissions from transport and buildings is “political suicide”.
The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, is due to unveil the plans for a trading scheme on Wednesday as part of a sprawling set of proposals to get the European Union on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, including goals to increase use of electric vehicles and phase out petrol-powered cars by 2035.
Activists, protesters and journalists, including a reporter for one of Spain’s leading newspapers, reportedly in custody
Scores of Cuban activists, protesters and journalists, including a reporter for one of Spain’s leading newspapers, have reportedly been detained as Communist party security forces seek to smother Sunday’s historic flare-up of dissent.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director, said at least 140 Cubans were believed to have been detained or had disappeared in the aftermath of Cuba’s largest demonstrations in decades.
A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near.
Plot holes trip up the Iranian director’s drama of a slippery man’s desperate efforts to trick his way out of debtors’ prison
Asghar Farhadi has made a tangled film about the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, in that calmly observant, realist yet information-withholding style with which this director made his name. In way, A Hero is a slice-of-life story, in which the “i”s and the “t”s are not necessarily dotted and crossed like a regular screenplay; it has the unsatisfactory, unclear messiness that real life has. There is plenty of interest here - and yet I have to admit to slight reservations about the melodramatic contrivances, which stretch credulity a little.
A Hero is a film that works because of a clever and subtle performance from Amir Jadidi as Rahim, a divorced father who has just been released from jail on a two-day parole, having been imprisoned for debt. He is a man with a bright yet strange, desperate smile, like one of the poor relations in Dickens. He is looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend, his supportive sister and his beloved son – a gentle, sensitive boy with a speech impediment. Rahim is a man who believes that some sort of charming niceness might still get him get out of a jam. But he has a very specific plan for cancelling his prison sentence. His girlfriend has found a handbag in the street containing what appear to be gold coins: if they could sell them to a gold dealer, might that not raise enough for a deposit to persuade his creditor to forgive the debt?
Anti-government protests have rocked the communist-ruled island, supercharged by shortages, social media and sanctions
Liuba Álvarez leaves her house three times a week at 3.45am to queue outside her local supermarket for basic goods like meat, oil and detergent. Her last queue was “relatively short”: after eight hours she came home with some minced meat in time for lunch. Other days she doesn’t get back until 5pm.
Penelakut Tribe says graves found close to ex-residential school
Kuper Island school run by Catholic church closed in 1975
A First Nations community in western Canada has announced the discovery of at least 160 unmarked graves close to a former residential school – the latest in a series of grim announcements from across the country in recent weeks.
Members of the Penelakut Tribe in south-western British Columbia said in a statement late on Monday that the graves had been discovered near the site of the Kuper Island industrial school on Penelakut Island, nearly 90km north of the provincial capital Victoria.
Guo Gangtang finally reunited with his son, Guo Xinzhen, who was snatched by human traffickers when he was two
A Chinese father has been reunited with his son 24 years after he was abducted by human traffickers in front of their home in Shandong at the age of two in 1997.
Guo Gangtang spent 24 years crisscrossing the country, travelling more than 300,000 miles on a motorbike, with two banners each showing a photo of his son, Guo Xinzhen.
Nomcebo Zikode threatens legal action, claiming she was never paid for the song that became a global hit during the pandemic
While her haunting vocals on the global hit song Jerusalema continue to reverberate around the world, the South African singer Nomcebo Zikode claims she is yet to receive any money for her work.
The singer took to social media on Sunday threatening legal action against Open Mic Productions, the label that recorded Jerusalema in late 2019.
Draft Nice guidelines for England, Wales and Northern Ireland will not solve poorer maternity outcomes for women of colour, say doctors
Proposed guidance that recommends inducing labour at 39 weeks in pregnant women from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds has raised concerns from doctors and midwives and been branded “racist” by activists.
White women with uncomplicated pregnancies should be offered an induction of labour at 41 weeks, according to the draft guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). The institute’s clinical guidelines such as this apply in England, Wales and Northern Ireland but do not cover Scotland.
We, Women is a social impact photography project led by women and gender nonconforming artists across the US, examining issues including immigration, education, climate change, race and motherhood
We, Women: The Power of We is at the Empire Fulton Lawn directly under the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Bridge Park, 13 July-12 September 2021
Dozens of people have been killed and scores more injured in a fire probably caused by an oxygen tank explosion at a coronavirus hospital in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya. One health worker told Reuters that many patients were trapped in the coronavirus ward, with rescue crews struggling to reach them. The hospital fire was a blow to Iraq’s healthcare system, already struggling with an influx of patients and short supplies in the midst of the global health crisis
At 17, Priyanka Bairwa refused her arranged marriage. Instead, she started Rajasthan Rising to help thousands of others and call for free education
Priyanka Bairwa was 15 when her family began to look for a husband for her. The pandemic sped up the process, as schools shut and work dried up. By October 2020, her parents had settled on a suitable boy from their village of Ramathra in the district of Karauli, Rajasthan.
But Bairwa, now 18, wouldn’t hear of it. “During the pandemic, every family in the village was eager to marry off their girls. You’d have to invite less people, there were fewer expenses,” says Bairwa. “But I refused to be caught in a child marriage. There was a major backlash – constant fights. I finally threatened to run away and, fearing I would do something drastic, my family called it off. My mother convinced them to let me study and I joined a college.”
Not enough evidence to show that third vaccine doses are needed, says WHO; Germany to re-evaluate basing restrictions on case numbers; South Korea cases top 1,000 for seventh day
Top officials at the World Health Organization say there’s not enough evidence to show that third doses of coronavirus vaccines are needed, the Associated press reports, as they appealed Monday for the scarce shots to be shared with poor countries who have yet to immunise their people instead of being used by rich countries as boosters.
At a press briefing, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the world’s grotesque vaccine disparity was driven by “greed,” as he called on drugmakers to prioritize supplying their COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries instead of lobbying rich countries to use even more doses. His plea comes just as pharmaceutical companies are seeking authorization for third doses to be used as boosters in some Western countries, including the US.
“We are making conscious choices right now not to protect those in need,” Tedros said, adding the immediate priority must be to vaccinate people who have yet to receive a single dose.
He called on Pfizer and Moderna to “go all out to supply Covax, the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team and low and middle-income countries with very little coverage,” referring to the UN-backed initiative to distribute vaccines globally.
After a 10-week drop in global coronavirus deaths, Tedros said the number of Covid patients dying daily is again beginning to climb and that the extremely infectious delta variant is “driving catastrophic waves of cases.”
Both Pfizer and Moderna have agreed to supply small amounts of their vaccines to Covax, but the vast majority of their doses have been reserved by rich countries.
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
Top officials at the World Health Organization say there’s not enough evidence to show that third doses of coronavirus vaccines are needed and appealed Monday for the scarce shots to be shared with poor countries who have yet to immunise their people instead of being used by rich countries as boosters.
His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiancé, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes
At the centre of Kurt Tong’s elaborate visual narrative Dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story that is also a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from poor beginnings to become part of Hong Kong’s social elite in the 1940s, and a young woman known only as Dongyu, the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese general.
They met, fell in love, but shortly after their engagement, Dongyu was one of several thousand refugees fleeing the Chinese communist army on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old Japanese sea mine. “Their love story should have ended with this terrible tragedy,” says Tong, “but it continued after her death because Franklin agreed to a ‘ghost marriage’, an elaborate traditional ceremony in which he became eternally wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world.”