Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
In latest twist in extraordinary election saga, clerk of the house has locked the doors, preventing parliament from convening
In dramatic scenes in the Pacific country of Samoa, the government has refused to convene parliament and allow a transition of power, locking the prime minister-elect and her supporters out of the parliament building.
Samoa’s parliament was due to convene on Monday to swear in a new government, more than a month after a knife-edge election, which has been followed by legal challenges, the calling of a second vote, and intense constitutional manoeuvring.
It is not clear who carried out last week’s attack on Waikato hospital, which downed computers and phone lines
A major New Zealand hospital faces a second week of disruption as it struggles to fix its computer system following a massive cyber attack.
The attack on Waikato district health board (DHB), which began on Tuesday, has been described by its chief executive, Kevin Snee, as “probably the biggest cyber-attack in New Zealand’s history”.
People’s Defence Force says at least 20 officers died and police station seized in fighting on Sunday
Dozens of Myanmar security force members have been killed in fighting, rebel fighters have claimed, as Aung San Suu Kyi appeared in person at a court hearing for the first time since her government was overthrown by the military in February’s coup.
In one battle on Sunday, the People’s Defence Force (PDF) – a civilian anti-junta movement that fights back against security forces with homemade weapons – said at least 20 police had died and a police station had been seized in the town of Moebyel in Shan state in the country’s eastern fringe.
Fourteen people, including a child, have died when a cable car linking Italy’s Lake Maggiore with a nearby mountain in the Alps plunged to the ground. The cable car fell from the Stresa-Alpine-Mottarone line near Lake Maggiore in Stresa, smashing into the wooded area which does not have road access as it approached the station nearly a mile above the lake
Global faith leaders and senior health and humanitarian figures are calling on countries to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid vaccines, warning that the world is “at a turning point”.
The signatories of an international declaration include Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization; Henrietta Fore, executive director of Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency; Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross; Filippo Grandi, United Nations high commissioner for refugees; Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the global Anglican church; Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar; and Christian and Jewish leaders.
More than 500 homes have been destroyed by the lava that has poured into villages, officials and survivors say
At least 15 people died when torrents of lava poured into villages after dark in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, destroying more than 500 homes, officials and survivors said on Sunday.
The eruption of Mount Nyiragongo on Saturday night sent about 5,000 people fleeing from the city of Goma across the nearby border into Rwanda, while another 25,000 others sought refuge to the north-west in Sake, the UN children’s agency said on Sunday.
Iran has provided no information about cause of explosion in Isfahan that injured at least nine workers
A complex that houses a factory that makes Iranian drones has suffered a major explosion days after Israel had claimed that Iran was providing drones to Hamas in Gaza.
The blast at the weekend injured at least nine workers at the petrochemical factory in Isfahan. The Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (Hesa), which produces a variety of aircraft and drones for Iranian and pro-Iranian forces, is located in the complex owned by Sepahan Nargostar Chemical Industries.
Casualties reported after cable car with 15 passengers collapsed near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy
Italy was in shock on Sunday after a cable car crashed to the ground in a northern Italian beauty spot, killing 14 people including a nine-year-old child.
The cable car is believed to have been carrying 15 people on the 20-minute ridebetween the resort town of Stresa and the Mottarone mountain in the Piedmont region when it plummeted into the woods near Lake Maggiore shortly after midday.
US secretary of state also reaffirms Biden administration supports a two-state solution
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has pledged the Biden administration will deal with “the grave humanitarian situation in Gaza” and will seek “equal measures of security” for Israelis and Palestinians as a ceasefire after 11 days of conflict held throughout the weekend.
More than 240 people in Gaza, including at least 66 children, and a dozen in Israel were killed during the violence, marking the first major diplomatic crisis for the Biden administration.
After 450,000 Covid deaths, president parades through Rio in effort to reenergnise far right
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has led a raucous column of motorcycle enthusiasts through the streets of Rio in an attempt to reenergise his flagging far-right movement as public anger grows over his handling of the country’s Covid outbreak.
Thousands of flag-waving Bolsonaristas gathered outside the Olympic Park in west Rio on Sunday morning for the two-wheeled show of support before roaring east towards the southern beach districts and city centre, with Bolsonaro near the front.
Thousands of residents abandoned their homes as the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was thrown into panic when a nearby volcano erupted. Lava from Mount Nyiragongo destroyed homes on the edge of Goma, which has a population of about 1 million people, but appeared to be slowing by midday on Sunday, giving hope that further damage could be avoided
After being abducted on assignment in Afghanistan, journalist Mellissa Fung shares an intense bond with the teenage girls who were held captive by Boko Haram
The journalist and filmmaker Mellissa Fung is showing me her wound – or to be precise, the scar where her wound once was. It’s from the struggle with one of the Afghan rebels who, 12 years ago, kidnapped Fung near Kabul and held her in a pit in the ground for a month, a place she refers to simply, and rather chillingly as, “the hole”.
“In combat training they teach you not to fight back, but I played ice hockey as a kid so I couldn’t help it,” Fung says. “The guy had a knife so I learned my lesson.”
Vancouver has experienced a 717% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, reflecting a legacy of discrimination in a country seen as welcoming of newcomers
Steven Ngo had stopped at a traffic light in a residential neighbourhood in the eastern part of Vancouver when passengers in another car tossed garbage at him, shouting racial slurs as they sped off.
The lawyer, a lifelong resident of the city, was stunned – but not surprised.
Confusion is reigning after airlines swiftly increased the number of planes travelling to “amber list” holiday destinations from the UK, before the prime minister contradicted ministers over whether trips to such places were permitted. They are not, in fact, allowed, Boris Johnson said.
But if we always believed what the PM said, well, we would be rather foolish. The ins and outs of the guidance are quite nuanced.
A coronavirus outbreak on Mount Everest has infected at least 100 climbers and support staff, a mountaineering guide said, giving the first comprehensive estimate amid official Nepalese denials that the disease has spread to the world’s highest peak.
Lukas Furtenbach of Austria, who last week halted his Everest expedition due to virus fears, said one of his foreign guides and six Nepali Sherpa guides had tested positive.
I think with all the confirmed cases we know now confirmed from (rescue) pilots, from insurance, from doctors, from expedition leaders, I have the positive tests so we can prove this … We have at least 100 people minimum positive for Covid in base camp, and then the numbers might be something like 150 or 200.”
Each side in this bitter conflict needs to recognise the other’s fears and aspirations
‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” runs a Palestinian slogan. Originally a call for a secular state in historic Palestine between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, it soon became a sectarian slogan, deeply inflected by antisemitism. In the hands of Hamas, it is a call for the driving out of all Jews from the region; at best, a demand for ethnic cleansing, at worst for genocide.
The founding charter of Likud, Israel’s leading centre-right party, and the party of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, echoes the same words but from the opposite perspective: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. It has continually blocked any workable two-state solution.
Joe Biden’s administration increases pressure on government of prime minister Abiy Ahmed to end human rights abuses
Senior Ethiopian officials may face restrictions on their travel to the US, as Washington increases pressure on the government of prime minister Abiy Ahmed amid growing global concern about atrocities and famine caused by conflict in the northern region of Tigray.
Though visa restrictions are likely to target only a small number of individuals, the move signals President Joe Biden’s administration is shifting to a more direct strategy to force Ahmed to end continuing human rights abuses in Tigray and allow free flow of much-needed humanitarian aid.
The seaside town of Anapa hopes foreign travel ban will bring holidaymakers back
It is not yet peak season on Anapa’s Black Sea coast so there is still space to spread out on its sandy beach, the pride of a resort town that may be one of the best chances many Russians get to visit the seaside this year.
Wander through the streets beyond the waterfront and you’ll find a sprawl of knick-knack shops, amusement and water parks, shashlik stands and carnival games that make up what is, this year, Russia’s resort of last resort.
Hibbing, the birthplace of the musician, is paying tribute with a year of special events
Bob Dylan’sdebut 1962 single began: “I got mixed-up confusion; man, it’s a-killin’ me”. It hasn’t yet – he turns 80 on Monday, and the pre-eminent custodian of American roots music, with its storytelling and protest traditions, is set to be celebrated by a public avalanche of events, programmes and tributes.
The occasion will be marked in his birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota – where, inspired by the sounds of country and blues music drifting up from the south on AM radio, he wrote in his high-school yearbook that his ambition was to join Little Richard. St Louis county, in which Hibbing sits, has issued a proclamationdeclaring a “Year of Dylan Celebration”.
The sham election this week is designed to give the president a veneer of legitimacy at home and abroad
The last time Syria held presidential elections, in 2014, there was no question over whether President Bashar al-Assad would win – but with opposition forces in control of the country’s cities, as well as the suburbs of Damascus, his future was still far from certain.
Seven years later, after the regime’s Russian and Iranian allies intervened and turned the tide of the war, most of Syria is now back under Assad’s grip. On Wednesday, his citizens will return to the polling booths for a sham democratic display designed to give the president a veneer of legitimacy both at home and abroad.
The comparison rankles supporters of Israel but the growing Palestinian Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement draws on the struggle to isolate racist South Africa
Ask an older generation of white South Africans when they first felt the bite of anti-apartheid sanctions, and some point to the moment in 1968 when their prime minister, BJ Vorster, banned a tour by the England cricket team because it included a mixed-race player, Basil D’Oliveira.
After that, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison 22 years later. The D’Oliveira affair, as it became known, proved a watershed in drumming up popular support for the sporting boycott that eventually saw the country excluded from most international competition including rugby, the great passion of the white Afrikaners who were the base of the ruling Nationalist party and who bitterly resented being cast out.