Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Luca Attanasio and two others killed in attempted kidnapping north of Goma in eastern DRC
Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two other people have been killed in an attack on a United Nations convoy in the restive east of the central African country.
The convoy from the World Food Programme (WFP) was attacked at about 10.30am local time (0830 GMT) during an attempted kidnapping near the town of Kanyamahoro, about 10 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, a spokesperson for Virunga national park said.
Protesters compare date – 22.2.2021 – to 8 August 1988, when military cracked down on pro-democracy rallies
Protesters across Myanmar have held a general strike, taking to the streets across the country and shutting many businesses, in one of the largest nationwide shows of opposition to the military since it seized power three weeks ago.
Crowds assembled in Yangon, Naypyidaw, Mandalay and elsewhere on Monday, despite an apparent threat from the junta that it would again use deadly violence against demonstrators.
Longtail Aviation cargo plane scatters small metal parts over Meerssen, injuring woman
Dutch authorities are investigating after a Boeing 747-400 cargo plane dropped engine parts shortly after takeoff from Maastricht airport.
The Longtail Aviation Flight 5504 cargo plane scattered mostly small metal parts over the southern Dutch town of Meerssen on Saturday, causing damage and injuring a woman.
The film-maker and wife Soon-Yi Previn claim film is ‘hatchet job riddled with falsehoods’ on abuse allegations
Woody Allen has rebutted renewed allegations, in the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow, that he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan in 1992, calling the series “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that film-makers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had “spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
Donald Trump will reportedly tell the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this week he is the man to drain the Washington swamp – as Republicans’ “presumptive 2024 nominee”.
Yasmin Fedda’s powerful documentary lays bare the human cost of the Assad regime and salutes those who continue to fight
Director Yasmin Fedda, who is from a Kuwaiti and Syrian background and lectures in film at Queen Mary University of London, has created a powerful and urgent documentary tribute to those who have been “forcibly disappeared” by the Assad regime in Syria, estimated to be around 150,000 since 2011.
Fedda focuses on two people: dissident writer and computer programmer Bassel Khartabil, who was abducted in October 2015 in Damascus, and Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, the hugely popular and admired Christian priest who was taken in July 2013 in Raqqa. She uses existing video of these two, from various family members and organisations, along with her own footage showing the campaigns of the loved ones left behind with their burden of anguish and their need to battle on and bring these crimes to the world’s attention.
Speculation grows China seeking to block opposition candidates and overhaul judiciary
A top Chinese official has outlined plans to ensure only “patriots” run Hong Kong, as Beijing seeks to neuter any remaining democratic opposition and take a more direct role in how the business hub is run.
The landmark speech by Xia Baolong, the head of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, came two weeks before the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp legislature and as speculation grew that further measures were being planned to sew up control of the city.
Civil war has drastically cut support services for women already at high risk of violence while displacing others who are now vulnerable to armed groups
Rima* was married the year civil war erupted in Yemen. She was 15 and for much of the time over the next five years, her husband kept her chained to a wall in their home in central Yemen. “He didn’t treat me as a wife, he treated me as a slave,” says the 21-year-old.
An aunt eventually took pity on Rima, taking her to a psychosocial support centre in the town of Turba, 90 miles (145km) north-west of Aden. According to a doctor there, Rima now suffers from a neurological disorder brought on by the constant beatings.
Fleeing to Kyrgyzstan in the 1960s, communities established mosques and villages but the local leaders, or dzhigit-beshchis, are a dying breed
Dzhigit-beshchi is the name Uighur people in Kyrgyzstan give to the leader they elect for their mahallah – or community. Usually it’s a respected person, mostly an elderly man.
Pushed out of China during the repressions of the 1960s, tens of thousands of Uighurs went to the former Soviet Union when these ageing leaders were just young men. Sticking closely to relatives and acquaintances who had come to Soviet cities and villages in previous waves, they built mosques and mahallahs, each with its own dzhigit-beshchi.
The virus has been used as a pretext in many countries to crush dissent, criminalise freedoms and silence reporting
António Guterres is secretary general of the United Nations
From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic almost one year ago, it was clear that our world faced far more than a public health emergency. The biggest international crisis in generations quickly morphed into an economic and social crisis. One year on, another stark fact is tragically evident: our world is facing a pandemic of human rights abuses.
Covid-19 has deepened preexisting divides, vulnerabilities and inequalities, and opened up new fractures, including faultlines in human rights. The pandemic has revealed the interconnectedness of our human family – and of the full spectrum of human rights: civil, cultural, economic, political and social. When any one of these rights is under attack, others are at risk.
Many parts of central Christchurch are unrecognisable now
Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel was born and raised in the city she now represents. But she finds it hard to describe how it has changed since the earthquake.
“I don’t know whether it’s a post-disaster thing,” Dalziel says. “But for me, it’s sometimes hard to remember what was there before.”
The Italian government on Monday extended a ban on non-essential travel between the country’s 20 regions until 27 March as it looks to slow the spread of highly contagious coronavirus variants.
Reuters reports:
The ban on travel between regions was introduced just before Christmas and had been due to expire on 25 February, but officials fear a relaxation of restrictions could lead to a new surge in cases, driven by the so-called “British” variant.
In its first decisions on Covid-19, prime minister Mario Draghi’s new cabinet also extended restrictions on visiting family and friends, with no more than two adults allowed into another person’s home at the same time.
Chile is streaking ahead of the rest of Latin America in its campaign to vaccinate its population against coronavirus, which the Andean country’s leaders hope can help not only beat back the virus but also unite the nation.
Reuters reports:
As of 18 February the copper-producing country had given over 2.5m doses of vaccine, enough for around one shot for 12 in every hundred people, according to Our World in Data. It could fully vaccinate 10% of its population with two doses per person in just over 20 days at its current rate, Reuters data show.
That puts it in the top 10 globally of larger countries and compares to 172 days for Brazil and over 1,000 days for Mexico, which has faced delays in its inoculation program.
Engine failure of a United Airlines Boeing prompts airlines in US and Japan to ground dozens of 777s
Boeing 777s have been grounded in the US and Japan after the US Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency airworthiness directive following a catastrophic engine failure on one of the planes in Denver on Saturday.
United Airlines said it was grounding all 24 of its Boeing 777s in active duty after one of its Boeing 777-200s had to make an emergency landing at the weekend, scattering engine debris across the ground.
Inscription on painting that has been subject of debate has been reattributed to the artist himself
It is an image that has intrigued the art world for more than a century and become synonymous with existential angst, and recently inspired its own emoji, but now some graffiti has added a new layer to the story of Edvard Munch’s most iconic painting, The Scream.
A tiny pencil inscription in the top left corner of one of the four versions of the painting, which reads, “Can only have been painted by a madman”, has been the subject of debate over who wrote it – it was originally thought to be by Munch, but was later attributed to a vandal – but new analysis by experts at the National Museum of Norway suggests it is indeed in the hand of the artist.
Cambridge University team say their findings could be used to spot people at risk from radicalisation
Our brains hold clues for the ideologies we choose to live by, according to research, which has suggested that people who espouse extremist attitudes tend to perform poorly on complex mental tasks.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge sought to evaluate whether cognitive disposition – differences in how information is perceived and processed – sculpt ideological world-views such as political, nationalistic and dogmatic beliefs, beyond the impact of traditional demographic factors like age, race and gender.
A minute’s silence is to be observed at 12.51pm, exactly 10 years after the quake struck the New Zealand city
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is to lead tributes for the 185 people who lost their lives 10 years ago in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
First responders and community members will read each of their names at a memorial service held on Monday in the heart of the city at the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial.
Agreement paves way for diplomatic talks between Tehran and the US over sanctions
The UN’s nuclear inspectorate has struck a three-month deal with Iran giving it sufficient continued access to verify nuclear activity in the country, opening the space for wider political and diplomatic talks between Tehran and the US.
Iran will go ahead with its threat to withdraw this week from the additional protocol, the agreement that gives inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) intrusive powers.
Police and demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with thousands taking to the streets across Spain to protest against the jailing of a controversial rapper for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his music and on Twitter.
Angry demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday after police detained Pablo Hasél, 32, and took him to jail to start serving a nine-month sentence in a highly contentious free speech case