Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Alessandro Bazzoni’s bank account was closed after he faced sanctions in a case of mistaken identity
A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.
Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.
President calls for his country to be put on pathway to membership of western military alliance
Ukraine’s president has called on Nato and key member states to hasten his country’s membership of the western military alliance in response to a growing buildup of Russian forces on his country’s borders.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy spoke to Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, on Tuesday, and urged for Ukraine to be put on a pathway to future membership to halt the long-running conflict in the eastern Donbas region.
Exam once again draws attention to province’s notoriously difficult language requirements to gain permanent residency
Language exams have long struck fear in unprepared students as they nervously stumble over verb conjugation and struggle to get their tenses right.
Yohan Flaman, a long-haul truck driver from Limoges, France, however, was confident that proficiency in his native tongue would be enough to satisfy officials in the Canadian province of Quebec.
The official response to coronavirus at the UK border has been problematic from the start. It was not until February this year that the government introduced mandatory hotel quarantine – some 11 months after coronavirus was first recorded the UK – despite it being used in countries such as New Zealand from the off.
Even now with stricter requirements for arrivals in place, critics say the current border policy is seriously lacking. Reports claiming as many as 8,000 tourists a day are arriving in the UK have significantly fueled those concerns.
As mass vaccination programmes take hold around the world, some countries have begun to get on top of the virus while others have continued to struggle. Two countries that have streaked ahead with immunisations are Israel and Chile, but as Israel edges back to a new normal, Chile has been plunged back into lockdown. Can the UK and other countries repeat Israel’s success and avoid the setbacks of Chile?
Communities call for protection after string of killings linked to rush for land to grow coca, under cover of the pandemic
“We’re looking for you, dead or alive,” is one of the daily threats that Herlín Odicio receives on his mobile phone.
The leader of the indigenous Cacataibo people in Peru’s central Amazon has been forced into hiding for standing up to drug traffickers trying to steal his land. “We’ve reported coca plantations on our land so many times and nothing has been done,” Odicio said.
Germany’s general practitioners are due to start vaccinating people today, although a shortage of supplies means that initially the 35,000 practices involved are only due to get around 20 doses a week each. Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, has promised that many more doses will be available by the end of the month, enabling GPs to become a more significant part of the programme.
Amid concerns that not enough Germans are embracing the vaccine programme, mainly due to scepticism over safety, the GP route is seen as an important way of increasing people’s trust. It won’t immediately make much of an impact on the overall vaccine rate. Confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine has been rocked by the national vaccine commission body STIKO’s decision to initially ban it for use in the over-65s, and later in anyone under 60, over health concerns.
Here’s a little more detail from AFP on the situation in India, where Delhi has imposed an immediate night curfew a day after the nation posted a record coronavirus surge. Financial hub Mumbai is also introducing similar restrictions.
Alarm has grown since India passed more than 100,000 new cases in a single day for the first time on Monday. New Delhi, which is home to 25 million people, and other major cities have all ordered a clampdown on public movement.
Russian opposition figure has fever, cough and has lost weight, according to legal team member who visited him
Alexei Navalny’s lawyer has said confirmed that the opposition leader is “seriously ill” after reports emerged that he had been transferred to a prison sick ward for a respiratory illness and had been tested for coronavirus.
The Kremlin critic said in a note published on Monday that he was coughing and had a temperature of 38.1C (100.6F). Several prisoners from his ward had already been hospitalised for tuberculosis, Navalny wrote. Hours later, the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia reported he had been moved to a sick ward and tested for coronavirus, among other diseases.
Ownership of the Ogopogo legend has renewed discussions over the appropriation of traditions and the challenges Indigenous nations face to reclaim their culture
People living on the shores of Okanagan Lake have long said that dark, curling waves signal the presence of Ogopogo, a monstrous serpent lurking beneath the surface.
A handful claim to have seen the long green body and horse-like head of Canada’s own Loch Ness monster. They tell stories of a creature that once nearly killed a settler when it dragged his horse into the depths. And every few years, new video footage renews excitement that Ogopogo has been found.
A correspondent's live weather report was interrupted by a dog who snatched her microphone and ran off with it. Nadezhda Serezhkina, who works for the Russian-language broadcaster Mir TV, could then be seen running after the dog who still had the colourful microphone in its mouth. The dog, and the damaged microphone, later joined Serezhkina for the end of her live broadcast
Information clampdown to keep investigation into king’s half-brother ‘secret’, says prosecutor general
The prosecutor general in Jordan’s capital, Amman, has banned the publication of any information about an alleged plot said to involve the king’s half-brother, Prince Hamzah, state television said.
“In order to keep the security services’ investigation into Prince Hamzah and the others secret, [it is decided] to ban the publication of anything related to this inquiry at this stage,” the prosecutor Hassan al-Abdallat said.
Celebrities targeted over support for anti-coup protesters
Wanted lists featuring the names and photographs of dozens of prominent figures, from actors to musicians, have been published in Myanmar’s military-controlled media, as the junta escalates its threats against anyone voicing support for anti-coup protesters.
The military has killed 570 people, including at least 43 children, and detained 2,728 since it ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government and seized power on 1 February. A domestic advocacy group that tracks detentions has been unable to confirm the whereabouts of the vast majority of people taken by the military.
Hopes rise of lifting Trump sanctions and bringing Iran and US to compliance in two months
A broad roadmap designed to rescue the Iran nuclear deal undermined by Donald Trump has been agreed in talks in Vienna, with the aim of bringing Iran and the US back into compliance in as little as two months.
Two working groups have been set up to examine the economic sanctions on Iran that the US will need to lift to come back into compliance with UN security council resolutions, and the steps Iran will need to take to bring its nuclear programme in line with the terms set out in the 2015 deal.
After nearly a year shut off from the world, New Zealand is cracking open its borders, with a trans-Tasman travel bubble allowing two-way quarantine-free travel with Australia.
The NZ prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced on Tuesday the bubble would open from 19 April, allowing quarantine-free travel between the two nations. Travellers from New Zealand have been able to enter selected Australian states without quarantining since October but the arrangements did not apply in the other direction.
Researchers at the University of the Philippines Los Baños aim to catch thousands of bats to develop a Japanese-funded simulation model over the next three years that they believe could help avert potential pandemics. They hope the bats will help in predicting the dynamics of a coronavirus outbreak by analysing factors such as climate, temperature and ease of spread
Photographer Prashanth Vishwanathan captured a network of community dairies helping off-grid farmers in Maharashtra keep milk fresh as temperatures rise. All pictures are from Climate Visuals
As global temperatures climb, a lack of refrigeration makes a big impact on people trying to make a living from farming. Especially dairy farms.
There are more than 75 million smallholder dairy farmers in India. Most are in off-grid areas without refrigeration, or reliant on expensive and polluting diesel generators. This locks people out of national supply chains, and farmers have to spend hours transporting milk to markets, or sell at a lower price to middlemen. In Maharashtra, western India, a network of community dairies has been set up, using sustainable refrigeration technology, where people can bring their milk to be tested, chilled, and sold on.
As work continues to deconstruct the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on Barbadoes Street – extensively damaged in the 2011 quake, along with most of the central city – many treasures thought lost have been recovered.
When it comes to mental health, New Zealand’s government has lost sight of what’s important
They call it a last resort, but for people placed in seclusion in New Zealand mental health units it can feel like the beginning of a nightmare. “Seclusion” itself is something of a euphemism, a gentle name for locking someone in a room for an average of 27 hours at a time. It’s meant to be a last resort to stop people from hurting themselves or others, but the practice can itself be traumatising. One woman, recalling her seclusion experience, describes how – even now – she doesn’t like the sound of keys being rattled. It reminds her of being locked up, she says, of feeling hopeless, frightened and alone.
“Being taken into seclusion is absolutely awful, scary and daunting.”
The Minneapolis police chief, Medaria Arradondo, told the Derek Chauvin murder trial on Monday that he “vehemently disagrees” that there was any justification for the former police officer to keep his knee on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
Arradondo said on the sixth day of the trial that Chauvin’s treatment of the 46-year-old Black man breached regulations and showed a disregard “for the sanctity of life”.
The court is just coming back from a short break, but here is a stark detail from the court room.
Coronavirus risks have imposed heavy restrictions on court. Only two media “pool” reporters are allowed into the court room itself. And defendant Derek Chauvin and the family of the late George Floyd were each allocated just one seat to use in the court room.
Here is the most important clip of the day so far. After so much harrowing video footage and lingering stills of then-officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in the first day or two of last week, the jury and public has been spared.
But the prosecution decided it needed to show one of the defining images of the whole Floyd disaster, that picture of Chauvin, hand in pocket, sunglasses on his head, looking directly into a bystander’s phone camera, while Floyd is pinned under him.
Incredibly damning testimony from the Minneapolis police chief:
Derek Chauvin's actions were "not part of policy, not part of our training, and certainly not part of our ethics or values." pic.twitter.com/gS0RpTGGP0