Wooden sarcophagi discovered at site south of Cairo along with funerary temple of Queen Naert
Egypt has announced the discovery of a new trove of treasures at the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, including an ancient funerary temple.
The tourism and antiquities ministry said the “major discoveries” made by a team of archaeologists headed by the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass also included more than 50 sarcophagi.
Continue reading...Opposition figure likely to be taken into custody when he lands following recovery from poisoning
The Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny is expected to return to Moscow on Sunday evening nearly five months after a suspected poisoning by Russia’s FSB spy agency left him fighting for his life.
Navalny’s return is a direct challenge to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, which has sought to keep the opposition leader in exile by indirectly threatening him with prosecution and jail time if he comes back.
Continue reading...Dominic Raab says UK needs to respond to variants from Brazil and South Africa; New South Wales records six new cases
Reaction has been coming today from Russian sources after Brazil’s health regulator said it was seeking further data on Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine before considering its approval for emergency use.
Documents supporting drugmaker Uniao Quimica’s application for emergency use of the vaccine have been returned to the company because they did not meet its minimum criteria, the watchdog said on Saturday.
While people over 75 living at home will be able to get vaccinated from Monday in France, there are concerns in the field that there are not enough doctors, Le Monde reports today.
Jacques Battistoni, president of MG France, a trade union for general practitioners, said: “We expect tensions and a difficult start to the week.”
Continue reading...Assassination of supreme court judges follows months of increased violence in Afghanistan
Gunmen shot dead two Afghan women judges working for the country’s supreme court in an early-morning ambush in Kabul on Sunday, officials said, as a wave of assassinations continued to rattle the nation.
Violence has surged across Afghanistan in recent months despite continuing peace talks between the Taliban and government, especially in Kabul, where a new trend of targeted killings of high-profile figures has sown fear in the city.
Continue reading...The secretary of state has laid political booby traps for Biden in a diplomatic onslaught – with the aim of winning the White House
While all eyes are on Donald Trump and his Capitol Hill mob, a would-be heir and successor is running riot all by himself, storming citadels, wagging the flag and breaking china. No, it’s not Donald Jr, or Ivanka, or Ted Cruz, and certainly not poor, conflicted Mike Pence.
Mike Pompeo may not strike many people as presidential material. But Trump lowered the bar. Make no mistake. America’s snarly, bully-boy secretary of state is focusing not on Joe Biden’s inauguration this week but on how to beat him or any other Democrat in 2024.
Continue reading...The president ‘shut down’ the internet as he won the election. You don’t stay in power for 40 years by taking risks
Days before Uganda’s presidential election – voting took place last Thursday – the incumbent, 76-year-old Yoweri Museveni, ordered that social media be switched off. People found their way around that by using virtual private networks, bouncing back online with memes mocking the idea that anyone would think it possible to bar people from being on social media in this day and age. Then, the evening before elections, the internet in Uganda was totally shut down.
The election that saw Museveni win with nearly 60% was shrouded in darkness. It is strange to move from social media’s infinite flow of information to nothingness. Instead, just silence apart from the news the government wants you to hear. Media houses that dare not to toe the government’s straight line risk being stopped from covering elections or even shut down.
Continue reading...The US is riven with stark inequalities, rising white supremacist terror and large numbers who believe the election was stolen. The new administration faces a truly daunting challenge
In another age, Joe Biden’s promise to heal the nation might have been regarded as the kind of blandishment expected from any new leader taking power after the divisive cut and thrust of an American election.
Related: Biden must find words for a wounded nation in inauguration like no other
Continue reading...Lai Chi-wai spent 10 hours pulling himself up the tower to raise money for spinal cord patients
Lai Chi-wai has become the first in Hong Kong to climb more than 250 metres of a skyscraper while strapped into a wheelchair, as he pulled himself up for more than 10 hours on Saturday to raise money for spinal cord patients.
The 37-year-old climber, who was paralysed from the waist down in a car accident 10 years ago, could not make it to the top of the 300 metre-tall Nina Tower on the Kowloon peninsula.
Continue reading...Peter Turchin, an entomologist-turned-historian, offers insight into the battle between elites
Peter Turchin is not the first entomologist to cross over to human behaviour: during a lecture in 1975, famed biologist E O Wilson had a pitcher of water tipped on him for extrapolating the study of ant social structures to our own.
It’s a reaction that Turchin, an expert-on-pine-beetles-turned-data-scientist and modeller, has yet to experience. But his studies at the University of Connecticut into how human societies evolve have lately gained wider currency; in particular, an analysis that interprets worsening social unrest in the 2020s as an intra-elite battle for wealth and status.
Continue reading...Nathuram Godse rehabilitated from traitor to patriot for many, as Gandi’s vision of secular India eroded by ruling BJP
Last Sunday, in a nondescript building in the India city of Gwalior, 200 miles south of Delhi, a large crowd of men gathered. Most wore bright saffron hats and scarves, a colour evoking Hindu nationalism, and many held strands of flowers as devotional offerings.
They were there to attend the inauguration of the Godse Gyan Shala, a memorial library and “knowledge centre” dedicated to Nathuram Godse, the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi. The devotional yellow and pink flowers were laid around a black and white photograph of Godse, the centrepiece of the room.
Continue reading...Implications for public record and legal proceedings after administration seized or destroyed papers, notes and other information
The public will not see Donald Trump’s White House records for years, but there is growing concern the collection will never be complete – leaving a hole in the history of one of America’s most tumultuous presidencies.
Trump has been cavalier about the law requiring that records be preserved. He has a habit of ripping up documents before tossing them out, forcing White House workers to spend hours taping them back together.
Continue reading...Britain, France and Germany say Tehran has ‘no credible civilian use’ for fuel that it previously pledged not to produce
European powers have voiced deep concern over Iran’s plans to produce uranium metal, warning that Tehran has “no credible civilian use” for the element.
“The production of uranium metal has potentially grave military implications,” the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany said in a joint statement on Saturday.
Continue reading...The supreme court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer have excoriated the Trump administration for carrying out its 13th and final federal execution days before the president leaves office.
Related: Dustin Higgs becomes 13th and final federal prisoner executed under Trump
Continue reading...Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate broker who took a private jet to Washington to join the attack on the US Capitol, pleaded with Donald Trump to pardon her after she was arrested by federal authorities. Ryan said she thought she was following what her president ‘asked us to do’ and that she had been 'displaying my patriotism' in travelling to Washington DC, where she filmed herself entering the Capitol building. 'I'm facing a prison sentence,' she told CBS 11 News at her home in Dallas. 'I do not deserve that'
Members of the Church of Satan are grieving the destruction of a historic “Halloween House” north of New York City that authorities say was set ablaze by an unidentified arsonist.
Related: Hell freezes over: how the Church of Satan got cool
Continue reading...Joe Biden has named the geneticist Eric Lander as his top scientific adviser and will elevate the position to the cabinet for the first time, a move meant to indicate a decisive break from Donald Trump’s treatment of science.
Related: History-maker Kamala Harris will wield real power as vice-president
Continue reading...Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry
Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.
The scientists insisted that such schemes are vital weapons in the battle against global heating and warn that failure to set up ways to trap carbon dioxide and store it underground would make it almost impossible to hold net emissions to below zero by 2050.
Continue reading...At least 49 dead after magnitude 6.2 shock on Sulawesi island, which destroyed roads, bridges and houses
Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 49 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.
Operations were focused on about eight locations in the hardest-hit city of Mamuju, where people were still believed trapped following the magnitude 6.2 quake that struck early on Friday, said Saidar Rahmanjaya, who heads the local search and rescue agency.
Continue reading...New leader of centre-right CDU will run for chancellor in September, or have a big say in who does
Angela Merkel’s continuity candidate, the centrist conservative Armin Laschet, has beaten one of her longest-standing rivals in the contest to lead Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.
In a digitally-held party congress, Laschet beat the conservative hardliner Friedrich Merz by 521 to 466 votes in a run-off vote, following a strong speech that emphasised social cohesion and held up recent scenes from Washington DC as a warning example of divisive leadership.
Continue reading...Opposition candidate urges citizens to reject result of ‘most fraudulent election in country’s history’
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, won a sixth term in office on Saturday, extending his 35-year-rule in one of the country’s most turbulent election campaigns while his main rival Bobi Wine alleged widespread fraud and rejected the result.
Museveni won 59% of the vote, consolidating his grip on power and becoming one of the world’s longest serving leaders. Wine won 35%, according to the electoral commission’s final results from Thursday’s poll.
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