Category Archives: World News

China birthrate slumps as experts blame changing attitudes

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One-child policy fallout and rejection of marriage said to be among reasons for drop of about 15% in 2020

Fallout from decades of its one-child policy and changing social attitudes about family and marriage are driving a plummeting birthrate in China, experts have said, after preliminary figures this week showed a drop of about 15% in 2020.

Demographers and social commentators have said the reasons for the low birthrates include the high costs of housing and education, and growing rejection of marriage among young women. In 2019 the marriage rate hit a 14-year low.

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Can Addis Ababa stop its architectural gems being hidden under high-rises?

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While Ethiopia’s ancient sites are valued, urban heritage is an afterthought in a city forced to expand ever upwards

Only rubble remains of the former home of Dejazmatch Asfaw Kebede, a member of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Built in the early 1900s, and inspired by Indian as well as Ethiopian architecture, the building was demolished in early January without the knowledge of Addis Ababa’s conservation agency, the Culture and Tourism Bureau.

Demolition and reconstruction are now the most common sights along Addis Ababa’s unrecognisably altered skeleton skyline. The collateral damage is the city’s heritage.

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Tokyo governor to boycott Olympics meeting over sexism row

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Yuriko Koike says attending meeting with under-fire Games chief would not send positive message

The governor of Tokyo has said she will not attend a key meeting of Olympic officials next week, as the row over sexist comments made by the head of the 2020 Games’ organising committee intensifies.

Yuriko Koike, who became the city’s first female governor in 2016, said she saw no merit in attending the meeting between the committee head, Yoshiro Mori, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, and Japan’s Olympics minister, Seiko Hashimoto.

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Astronomers’ hopes raised by glimpse of possible new planet

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Bright speck in space near Alpha Centauri A may be evidence of asteroids or dust – or a technical glitch

Astronomers have glimpsed what may be a previously unknown planet circling one of the closest stars to Earth.

Researchers spotted the bright dot near Alpha Centauri A, one of a pair of stars that swing around each other so tightly they appear as one in the southern constellation of Centaurus. The stars form what is called a binary system 4.37 light years away, a mere stone’s throw in cosmic terms.

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Lawyers protesting against police in Tunisia allegedly attacked by officers

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The three men are said to be recovering from assaults after security forces are accused of targeting activists during unrest

Three lawyers are said to be recovering after being assaulted by police in the wake of protests in the Tunisian capital on Saturday.

According to the Tunisian Bar Association, Yassine Azaza and Rahhal Jallali were attacked by officers while they were making their way home after the demonstrations in Tunis. A third lawyer, Abdennaceur Aouini, was photographed surrounded by police officers in the city’s main street.

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Donald Trump ‘frustrated with lawyers’ as he watches impeachment trial on TV

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Former president spent past three weeks at Mar-a-Lago resort and shunned golf course on Tuesday for trial coverage

As the historic second impeachment trial of Donald Trump got under way on Tuesday afternoon, the subject at the center of the case was more than a thousand miles away, muzzled by a social media ban and reduced to watching events unfold on TV.

Trump, who is charged with “incitement of insurrection” after his supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January, has spent the past three weeks holed up at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, with his schedule seemingly restricted to playing multiple rounds of golf. The one-term president has been at his resort, close to the golf club, since he left Washington DC at 8am on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

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UK failing to protect human rights defenders abroad, says Amnesty

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New report finds lawyers, journalists and health workers at risk during pandemic have struggled to get help from embassies

The UK government has failed in its pledge to help those on the frontline of the global fight for human rights during the pandemic, according to a new report.

Amnesty International said health workers, lawyers, journalists and rights activists from around the world who were living under constant threat during the Covid-19 pandemic struggled to get support or funding from British embassies.

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Family of girl, 12, forced to marry abductor condemn Pakistan authorities

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Criticism follows release of 29-year-old who kept girl chained in cattle pen, in latest case highlighting abuses of religious minorities

The family of a 12-year-old girl in Pakistan who was chained up in a cattle pen for more than six months, after allegedly being kidnapped and forced to marry her abductor, have attacked the authorities for refusing to act.

The case is among those now being examined by a government inquiry into the forced conversions of religious minority women and girls, after police released the man, saying they believed the girl had married him of her own free will.

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Myanmar protesters return to streets in huge numbers amid police defections

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Protests swell across country, with dozens of police officers choosing to join protesters in call for reversal of coup

Protesters have turned out in huge numbers across Myanmar, a day after police instigated the most violent scenes yet in demonstrations against a military coup that removed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

An estimated 100,000 people gathered in the commercial capital Yangon on Wednesday, according to witnesses, with many more marching across the country.

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‘Trump’s guilt is obvious’, impeachment managers say in new legal brief – live

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The election arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has brought out its final report on the US presidential election, concluding that it was well organised under the circumstances and there was no significant fraud.

The report also found that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and refusal to accept defeat undermined public faith in democratic institutions, and warned the US has long-term problems with providing equal voting rights for all.

Related: 'Jim Crow relic': Senate filibuster stands in way of Democratic voting rights push

Here’s where the day stands so far:

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Europe’s oldest person survives Covid and set to celebrate 117th birthday

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French nun Sister Andrée tested positive in her retirement home in Toulon but had no symptoms

A French nun who is Europe’s oldest person has recovered from Covid-19 after it swept through a nursing home in the south of France, and will celebrate her 117th birthday this week.

Sister Andrée, born Lucile Randon in 1904, tested positive for the coronavirus last month at the Sainte-Catherine Labouré home near Toulon where 81 of the 88 residents contracted the virus – 10 of whom died.

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Cemetery workers in Calabria ‘removed bodies’ to make way for new corpses

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Police arrest three men accused of demanding money from mourning relatives for spaces in Tropea graves

Italian police have arrested three cemetery workers in Calabria accused of illegally removing bodies from tombs to make way for new corpses, as the country struggles with a shortage of burial space.

According to military police investigators, the suspects allegedly demanded money from mourning relatives to get the deceased a place in the local cemetery in Tropea, a seaside resort town near Vibo Valentia.

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Man, 100, charged in Germany over 3,518 Nazi concentration camp murders

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Man is alleged to have been Nazi SS guard at Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945

German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served during the second world war as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin.

The man is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the investigation of the centenarian for the Neuruppin prosecutors’ office.

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Civil and human rights groups urge Biden to end federal death penalty

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Coalition is calling on president to commute sentences of all 49 federal death row inmates

A coalition of leading US civil and human rights groups is calling on Joe Biden immediately to commute the sentences of all 49 federal death row inmates and reinstate a moratorium on executions carried out by the US government.

Related: Virginia all but certain to become first southern state to abolish death penalty

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Spain’s Iberian pork producers see red over traffic-light labelling

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Nutri-Score system fails to take account of health benefits of meats like jamón ibérico, say farmers

Spain’s Iberian pork producers are hoping their famous meats will follow in the wake of olive oil and be excused from a new traffic-light food labelling scheme, arguing it fails to take account of what they claim are the health benefits of jamón ibérico.

Spain is in the process of implementing the Nutri-Score system, which grades foods from a green A to a red E on packaging. The voluntary scheme has been billed as a way to help EU countries advance towards bloc-wide food labelling by the end of 2022 as part of the European commission’s “fair, healthy and environmentally friendly” Farm-to-Fork strategy.

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Fears for Polish Holocaust research as historians ordered to apologise

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Court tells professors to apologise to 81-year-old woman who claims they defamed her late uncle

A court has ordered two prominent historians to apologise to an elderly woman who claimed they had defamed her late uncle over his wartime actions, in a case seen as critical to independent Holocaust research in Poland.

Prof Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Prof Barbara Engelking of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research were accused of defaming Edward Malinowski by suggesting in a book that he gave up Jews to Nazi Germans.

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WHO investigation into Covid-19 origins offers no quick answers

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Analysis: start of long process by Wuhan team junks Trump allies’ claim that coronavirus escaped from a laboratory

The press conference given by the World Health Organization’s investigative team in Wuhan is unlikely to silence the most conspiratorial of the conspiracy theorists who took their lead from the fever dreams of the former Trump administration.

Indeed, the first and very partial findings in what was always going to be a long and drawn-out process have not told us much we did not already know about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

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WHO says theory that Covid spread from lab ‘extremely unlikely’ – video

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The head of the World Health Organization-led team looking into how Covid-19 originated said on Tuesday its investigation had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed the picture of the outbreak.

Virus expert Peter Ben Embarek said the origin of the coronavirus pointed to a natural reservoir in bats. He said the hypothesis that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan was extremely unlikely and would not be part of any further study for his team

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IOC condemns remarks about women by Tokyo chief as volunteers quit

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Head of organising committee in Japan, Yoshiro Mori, under pressure to step down as anger grows

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has condemned derogatory remarks about women by the head of the Tokyo 2020 Games organising committee, Yoshiro Mori, as “absolutely inappropriate”.

The unusually strong intervention came after Mori complained last week that meetings tended to drag on because “competitive” women in attendance “talked too much”.

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