Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken up the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual ranking of most liveable cities, propelling Auckland to top spot in place of Vienna, which crashed out of the top 10 altogether as the island nations of New Zealand, Australia and Japan fared best.
The Austrian capital had led the list since 2018 and for years ran neck and neck with Melbourne at the top of the survey of 140 urban centres. New Zealand’s elimination of Covid-19 within its borders, through lockdown measures helped by its geographic isolation, gave its cities a big boost.
Beijing says bill seeks to exaggerate ‘so-called China threat’ and is ‘full of cold war thinking’
China has denounced a US Senate bill worth about $250bn (£175n) that aims to boost American technology and manufacturing prowess as an example of the US hyping up “the so-called China threat”, and accused Washington of attempting to hinder its development.
The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the Innovation and Competition Act, in a rare show of unity in a chamber often filled with political division between Democrats and Republicans.
The island’s Indigenous people are in a race against time to save their native tongues before they are lost forever
In a modest conference room near the edge of Taiwan’s Sun Moon Lake, Panu Kapamumu holds up an unwieldy A3 booklet. The home-printed document contains every known word of Thao, the language of his Indigenous tribe. Kapamumu runs his finger down the list, reading out a selection of Thao words, meanings and translations. He reads slowly and purposefully, a man in his sixties but still just a student of his mother tongue.
The last decent rain on Banaba was more than a year ago.
Without rain, people on the isolated central Pacific island, which is part of the country of Kiribati, have been forced to rely on a desalination plant for all their water for drinking, bathing and growing crops.
Friend of 15-month-old’s family reveals details of Channel smuggling trade that led to their deaths
The authorities in Norway did not have much to go on when they found the body on the shore on New Year’s Day. But the baby boy was wearing a jacket – navy blue with white stitching.
And that helped them solve the mystery of what had happened to 15-month-old Artin Iran Nezhad, who had last been seen weeks before and hundreds of miles away.
ProPublica investigation shows how little US super-rich, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, reportedly paid between 2014 and 2018
The 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018, according to an investigation by ProPublica, despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period.
In July 1995, Subašić was outside a UN compound, a disused battery factory near Srebrenica, appealing for protection from Dutch peacekeepers along with thousands of other terrified Bosnian Muslims.
Conservative backbencher Steve Baker has urged the UK government to press ahead with lifting England’s remaining Covid restrictions on 21 June despite a sharp rise in cases.
He claimed that by that date, all over-50s and vulnerable younger adults should have been given the opportunity to receive two doses of Covid vaccine.
These groups represent about 99% of Covid deaths and about 80% of hospitalisations. As of today, according to announcements made by the government, these groups should all have been offered a chance to have had a second dose. It would be helpful for the government to clarify that this has been achieved.
If this brilliant milestone isn’t enough to convince ministers that we need to lift all remaining restrictions – especially social distancing requirements – on 21 June, nothing will ever get us out of this.
The Dutch government has promised an independent investigation into a supposedly not-for-profit €100m deal to buy facemasks from China last year that ended up making three young entrepreneurs about €20m richer.
The investigative website Follow the Money revealed that Sywert van Lienden, 30, a former civil servant turned TV pundit and activist, who co-wrote the manifesto of the Christian Democrat (CDA) party (part of the ruling coalition), netted €9.2m.
The global economy is set for the fastest recovery from recession for more than 80 years, but poor nations are at risk of falling further behind wealthy countries amid slow progress with the Covid-19 vaccine, the World Bank has said.
In its half-yearly outlook report, the Washington-based institution said the world economy was forecast to grow at 5.6% this year, in a sharp upgrade from previous estimates it made in January for growth of 4.1%.
The US risks being superseded by China as the prime global power within decades. For Washington, the idea is appalling
Joe Biden crosses the Atlantic this week on a tide of goodwill. After four years of Donald Trump, European leaders are grateful for the mere fact of a US president who believes in democracy and understands diplomacy.
Trump had no concept of historical alliance, strategic partnership or mutual interest. He saw multilateral institutions as conspiracies against US power, which he could not distinguish from his own ego. He heard European talk of a rules-based international order as the contemptible bleating of weakling nations.
Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has been taking some criticism for her blunt speech in Guatemala to Central American migrants to “do not come” to US, is now getting some backlash from Republicans for an NBC interview she did on this same trip.
Reminder: Joe Biden tasked Harris in March with efforts to stem migration at the US-Mexican border. On her first foreign trip, NBC’s Lester Holt asked if she had any plans to visit the border.
“We have to deal with what's happening at the border.”@VP Kamala Harris spoke exclusively with @LesterHoltNBC on her first trip overseas, how the administration is addressing the immigration crisis, and if she plans to visit the southern border herself. pic.twitter.com/sA4We7peeR
Vice-President Kamala Harris is in Mexico now, meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
President Lopez Obrador shows Vice President Harris a Diego Rivera mural at the national palace. Asked if he will do more about border enforcement, Lopez Obrador said “We will touch on that subject but always addressing the fundamental root causes” pic.twitter.com/URiJdWaUM9
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls comments ‘disappointing’ after vice-president says migrants will not find solace at US border
The progressive New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized Vice-President Kamala Harris for saying undocumented migrants from Guatemala should not come to the US.
On her first foreign trip as vice-president, Harris visited Guatemala on Monday. At a press conference with Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, the former California senator spoke about investigating corruption and human trafficking in Central America and described a future where Guatemalans could find “hope at home”.
Privacy protection is latest effort by the company to cut down tracking of users by advertisers and other third parties
Apple’s new privacy feature designed to obscure a user’s web browsing from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China, Saudi Arabia or Belarus, the company has said.
It was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference on Monday, the latest in a years-long effort by the company to cut down on the tracking of its users by advertisers and other third parties.
Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb commander nicknamed the “butcher of Bosnia”, will spend the rest of his life in prison after a UN court dismissed his final appeal against convictions for genocide and crimes against humanity, in a judgment hailed as “historic” by the White House.
Unlike previous appearances at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the 78-year-old showed little emotion as an hour-long reading of the judgment finally put an end to attempts to quash the charges against him.
Afzaal family killed on Sunday in attack in London, Ontario
Trudeau: incident was ‘terrorist attack, motivated by hatred’
Relatives of the four Canadian Muslims killed in what police describe as “a hate attack” have described them as a “model family” and called on the country to stand against hate and Islamophobia.
The victims – three generations of the same family who migrated from Pakistan 14 years ago – died on Sunday after a 20-year-old man drove his pickup truck at them in what the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, described as a “terrorist attack, motivated by hatred”.
The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol was “planned in plain sight” but intelligence failures left police officers exposed to a violent mob of Trump supporters, a Senate investigation has found.
A member of the public slaps the French president during a visit in southern France. Footage shows Macron walking up to a group of people in Tain-l'Hermitage, outside the city of Valence. As he begins to interact with the crowd, a man slaps him, reportedly shouting, 'Down with Macronia,' before security staff intervene
Two arrested after man shouted ‘down with Macronism’ before assaulting French president
Emmanuel Macron was slapped in the face by a man during a walkabout in southern France.
The president’s security detail immediately pulled the man to the ground and moved Macron away from the crowd, though the president appeared unhurt and determined to continue meeting the public.
Analysis: Armin Laschet’s campaign to succeed Angela Merkel is copying her strategy of skirting around hard political choices
Angela Merkel’s method of winning elections has earned its own phrase among German political scientists: “asymmetric demobilisation”, the art of running a campaign that skirts around hot-button issues in order to present voters with a choice between personalities rather than policies.
Three and a half months before Germany goes to the polls, Merkel’s aspiring successor Armin Laschet seems to have taken her strategy to heart. With a campaign that has so far failed to tackle the country’s hard choices on carbon emissions, digitisation, eurozone integration and military spending, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its candidate for chancellor may get away with it too.