Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Vladislav Ivanov says he regretted his decision to join Produce Camp 2021 but fans refused to vote him out
The reality TV ordeal of a Russian who joined a Chinese boy band show by accident – and made it to the final despite urging fans to vote him off – has finally ended after nearly three months.
Vladislav Ivanov, a 27-year-old from Vladivostok, was kicked out of the Produce Camp 2021 on Saturday after viewers ignored his pleas to leave and backed him all the way to the final.
Groups that have been fighting military for decades have voiced support for anti-coup protesters
A prominent ethnic armed group in Myanmar says it has captured a military base near the Thai border, as clashes escalated days after the junta chief committed to immediately end violence in the country.
The junta has launched brutal crackdowns against civilians in an attempt to suppress the opposition it faces from the public. Some of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, which have spent decades fighting the military for greater autonomy, have voiced support for anti-coup protesters.
Fatima Khalil school has given some children the first taste of education – and love – in their lives
Laughter and excited chatter burst out of the colourfully painted classrooms. In a quiet garden schoolhouse amid the jam-packed Afghan capital, Kabul, pupils run around, study and play in the country’s first official school for children with disabilities.
It’s a far cry from what most of these children have previously experienced. For many, it’s the first time in their lives they feel loved and accepted.
Chemicals and plastics, not just overfishing, threaten aquatic food chain with ‘disaster’, report warns
Increasing chemical and plastic pollution are “significant” contributors to the decline of fish and other aquatic organisms, yet their impact is being missed by regulators, according to a report by environmentalists.
The report, Aquatic Pollutants in Oceans and Fisheries, by the International Pollutants Elimination Network and the National Toxics Network, draws together scientific research on how pollution is adversely affecting the aquatic food chain. It catalogues the “serious impacts” of “invisible killers” such as persistent organic pollutants and excessive nutrients on the immunity, fertility, development and survivaL of aquatic animals.
In last year, 23 Texas towns have declared themselves ‘sanctuary cities for the unborn’, making the procedural punishable, and in April, a Nebraska village became the 24th
Over the last year of the pandemic, 23 tiny towns in Texas have approved local laws declaring themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn”, passing ordinances to make the procedure punishable by a $2,000 fine.
In April, the tiny village of Hayes Center, Nebraska, became the 24th, and the first outside Texas.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said India’s deadly Covid-19 second wave was caused by a “perfect storm” of mass gatherings, low vaccination rates and more contagious variants.
Speaking on Tuesday, WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević warned against blaming mutations of the virus as the sole cause of the tsunami of cases that have engulfed India in recent weeks, pushing the country’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse, and said that complacent behaviour had also played a role.
Witnesses will be asked to respond to claims the ’Ndrangheta has laundered billions of euros in City of London
In a high-security, 1,000-capacity courtroom converted from a call centre, Italy’s largest mafia trial in three decades is under way in Lamezia Terme, Calabria. About 900 witnesses are set to testify against more than 350 defendants, including politicians and officials charged with being members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s most powerful criminal group.
Several of the defendants will be asked to respond to charges of money laundering over establishing companies in the UK with the alleged purpose of simulating legitimate economic activity.
From Quito to Kathmandu, millions will be endangered by cuts affecting planning for floods, earthquakes and fires, experts say
UK aid cuts to a programme working to reduce the disaster risk to poor communities around the world could endanger millions of lives and slam shut a brief window of opportunity to build safer cities for centuries to come, experts have warned.
Professor John McCloskey, from Edinburgh University, said the 70% cut to this year’s budget for the Tomorrow’s Cities project was an act of “vandalism” that had wrecked the past two years of collaboration with scientists, NGOs, authorities and communities in Ecuador’s capital Quito, Nairobi, Kathmandu and Istanbul.
Human Rights Watch calls on international criminal court to investigate ‘systematic discrimination’ against Palestinians
Human Rights Watch has accused Israeli officials of committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution, claiming the government enforces an overarching policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”.
In a report released on Tuesday, the New York-based advocacy group became the first major international rights body to level such allegations. It said that after decades of warnings that an entrenched hold over Palestinian life could lead to apartheid, it had found that the “threshold” had been crossed.
A coronavirus “vaccination persuasion” initiative targeting elderly people who have declined invitations to get vaccinated is gearing up to be rolled out across Turkey after proving a resounding success in a district in the country’s south-east.
Since February, doctors and healthcare workers in the mainly Kurdish city of Adıyaman, or Semsûr, have been calling people in age groups already eligible for the vaccine to ask why they have not come to clinics for appointments.
Patients in New Delhi stood in long queues outside hospitals while others waited with oxygen masks in ambulances as India's new coronavirus infections hit a record high for a fifth consecutive day on Monday. Infections in the last 24 hours rose to 352,991, with overcrowded hospitals in Delhi and elsewhere turning away patients after running out of supplies of medical oxygen and beds
Sources say new CDC guidance relates to outdoor mask-wearing
Democratic president promises ‘new normal’ by Fourth of July
The Supreme Court accepted what will be a closely watched gun rights case today –it could have a major impact on gun rights across the country.
Here’s more from the AP:
The case marks the court’s first foray into gun rights since Justice Amy Coney Barrett came on board in October, making a 6-3 conservative majority.
The justices said Monday they will review a lower-court ruling that upheld New York’s restrictive gun permit law. The court’s decision to take on the case follows mass shootings in recent weeks in Indiana, Georgia, Colorado and California and comes amid congressional efforts to tighten gun laws.
"The outlook does not look good for gun safety laws at the Supreme Court...the Court could issue a radical Second Amendment ruling that jeopardizes future progress as well as lifesaving gun laws already on the books." @GiffordsCourage says in a statement.
Republican Alaska lawmaker Lora Reinbold is banned from Alaska Airlines flights, after she has repeatedly refused to wear a mask. Masks can help protect other people from exposure to Covid-19 and other illnesses, if worn properly.
The ban is a major problem for the lawmaker, because Alaska Airlines operates the only flight to and from the capital, Juneau. Instead, she had to make a 14-hour trek to get to work
We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” airlines spokesman Tim Thompson told the Anchorage Daily News.
“This suspension is effective immediately, pending further review. Federal law requires all guests to wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times during travel, including throughout the flight, during boarding and deplaning, and while traveling through an airport,” he said.
Trevor Lindley on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s commitment to equal treatment of all ranks in memorials
John Batey is wrong to say “The British army buries its dead in separate sections of ‘officers and men’” (Letters, 23 April). Early in the formation of the then Imperial War Graves Commission, Fabian Ware, founder of the commission, stated that “no distinction should be made between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials”.
In January 1918, the commission said the “governing consideration” in its decision on the uniformity of military graves was that “those who have given their lives are members of one family … and that, in death, all, from General to Private, of whatever race or creed, should receive equal honour under a memorial which should be the common symbol of their comradeship and of the cause for which they died”. Trevor Lindley Weymouth, Dorset
UN-led meeting in Geneva aims to re-energise efforts to end dispute four years after talks collapsed
Leaders from either side of Cyprus’s ethnic divide have flown to Geneva for a UN-led summit aimed at exploring whether the time is ripe to resume the peace process four years after the collapse of talks to reunify the island.
The foreign ministers of Greece, Turkey and Britain – Cyprus’s three guarantor powers – will join Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot teams in the hope of re-energising efforts to end the west’s longest-running dispute.
Kakoli Bhattacharya, an Indian journalist who was a researcher, translator, news assistant and friend to Guardian correspondents for more than a decade, has died from Covid-19 in Delhi.
She died on 23 April after being admitted to hospital earlier in the week during a catastrophic second wave of the virus in India that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since it took off in March.
India is reportedly running out of Covid-19 vaccines just as a virulent second wave continues to devastate the country, threatening the government’s plans to ramp up the vaccination programme by the weekend in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
From Saturday, everyone in India over the age of 18 will be eligible for a vaccine, a decision made by the government as the virus has brought India’s healthcare system to its knees, with more than new 352,000 cases on Monday and over 2,800 more deaths.
Rich countries urged to stump up to help developing nations cut greenhouse gas emissions
Boris Johnson must push rich countries meeting in Cornwall in June to come up with tens of billions of dollars more in aid for poor countries to deal with climate breakdown, or face the failure of vital UN climate talks to be hosted by the UK in Glasgow in November, according to leading climate experts.
The UK holds the presidency this year both of the annual meeting of the G7 group of the world’s economic superpowers, and of the Cop26 climate summit.
The EU is at an advanced stage of talks with the US over mutually recognising vaccine passports to boost transatlantic tourism this summer, but Brussels is yet to open discussions with the British government.
A spokesperson for the European commission said that while discussions had been held with US officials and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, there were “no contacts at present with the UK”.
A father uses his obsession with the movies to help his daughter when she is unjustly suspected of murder
It turns out that cinephilia is a productive use of time after all. When his computer is searched, Li Weijie, protagonist of this perky Chinese thriller, has watched 838 films in a year – and he uses his superior knowledge of the seventh art to get his family out of a pickle. Chinese but living in northern Thailand, he scrapes by as an internet technician, but his daughter finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation after she accidentally kills the son of a police chief who was trying to blackmail her with smartphone-filmed rape footage.
A remake of the 2013 Malayalam film Drishyam, this big Chinese hit ultimately doffs the cap to Korean cinema: it is Jeong Keun-seob’s 2013 film Montage that inspires Li when he has to provide his family with an alibi.