Category Archives: World News

The great project: how Covid changed science for ever

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The emergence of a novel coronavirus prompted a wave of global collaboration that has led to vaccines, treatments and the promise of new discoveries

For scientists, 5 January was a turning point in the fight against the coronavirus. That day, a team led by Prof Yong-Zhen Zhang at Fudan University in Shanghai sequenced the genetic code of the virus behind Wuhan’s month-long pneumonia outbreak. The process took about 40 hours. Having analysed the code, Zhang reported back to the Ministry of Health. The pathogen was a novel coronavirus similar to Sars, the deadly virus that sparked an epidemic in 2003. People should take precautions, he warned.

The Chinese government had imposed an embargo on information about the outbreak and Zhang and his co-workers were under pressure not to publish the code. The blackout couldn’t hold. On 8 January, news broke about the nature of the pathogen and was confirmed a day later by Chinese authorities. To sit on the code now seemed ridiculous.

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Israel’s justice minister vows to sign Malka Leifer extradition order to Australia ‘without delay’

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Avi Nissenkorn’s pledge comes after the supreme court rejected an appeal by the alleged child sex abuser against her extradition

Israel’s supreme court has rejected an appeal by alleged child sex abuser Malka Leifer to block her extradition to Australia, effectively ending a years-long judicial saga that has tested relations between the two countries.

The extraction request will now be decided by Israel’s justice minister, Avi Nissenkorn, who announced on Tuesday he would comply.

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Boko Haram claims responsibility for kidnapping hundreds of boys in Nigeria

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Doubts over Islamist extremists’ involvement in abduction of more than 300 students last week

The leader of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria six years ago, has claimed responsibility for the mass abduction of students in north-western Katsina state last week.

In an audio tape released on Tuesday, Abubakar Shekau said: “Our brothers were behind the abduction in Katsina.”

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Japan’s ‘Twitter killer’ sentenced to death

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Takahiro Shiraishi, 30, admitted killing nine people he befriended online after they expressed suicidal thoughts

A court in Japan has sentenced to death a man dubbed the “Twitter killer” for the murders in 2017 of nine people whom he befriended online after they had expressed suicidal thoughts.

Takahiro Shiraishi, 30, admitted strangling and dismembering his victims, eight of whom were women, over the course of three months. The youngest was 15 and the oldest 26.

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Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers ask judge to free her on $28m bail

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Bail package would include armed guards to ensure her safety and to make sure she does not flee New York

Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell are urging a judge to free her to await trial under a $28.5m (£21.4m) bail package that would include armed guards to ensure she remains safe and does not flee her New York City residence.

The bail arguments on behalf of the British former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, first filed under seal last Tuesday, were publicly released late on Monday in Manhattan federal court with redactions that were approved by Judge Alison J Nathan.

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Day off denied: how Covid confined Hong Kong’s domestic ‘helpers’

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Many migrant women have been cooped up in employers’ homes for months, unable to take time off or travel to families

On Sundays Hong Kong’s migrant domestic workers traditionally gather in their thousands in the city’s public spaces to enjoy their day off.

Congregating in shopping malls and parks or at bus stations, they take mats to sit on and crowd around rice cookers, sharing meals. “Mini villages pop up everywhere,” says Karen Grépin, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong.

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Xinjiang: more than half a million forced to pick cotton, report suggests

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Forced labour much more widespread than initially thought in China region that supplies a fifth of the world’s cotton

More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought, new research has suggested.

The Xinjiang region produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and 84% of China’s, but according to a new report released on Tuesday by the Center for Global Policy there is significant evidence that it is “tainted” by human rights abuses, including suspected forced labour of Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minority people.

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‘We could have lost her’: Zimbabwe’s children go hungry as crisis deepens

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As food shortages worsen due to drought and the economic insecurity of lockdown, one in three children are malnourished

Baby Grace lies quietly in the clinical ward under the watchful gaze of her mother, Rose Mapeka. Her parched skin, which hangs off her tiny body, and the milkiness of her eyes, show only too clearly that the 18-month-old is undernourished.

Grace is lucky to be alive. Health workers in Kuwadzana, a high-density suburb in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, identified her as needing immediate hospital treatment for malnutrition during their home visits to the city’s nursing mothers.

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Scientists plan mission to biggest iceberg as it drifts towards island

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Team will study effects on environment of A-68A, which is heading for South Georgia

Scientists are preparing for an urgent mission to the world’s biggest iceberg, which is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The A-68A iceberg, which is larger than Luxembourg, broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 and has been drifting towards the island ever since.

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Human progress at stake in post-Covid choices, says UN report

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Warning of future dogged by crises if recovery entrenches environmental problems and inequalities

Unless leaders make the right choices on recovering from the pandemic to avoid entrenching environmental problems and social inequalities, the world faces a future of lurching from crisis to crisis, reversing gains made in recent decades in health, education, social freedom and combating poverty, the UN has warned.

The unprecedented impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the environmental crises the world is facing, threaten to wind back human progress and development, leaving societies around the world vulnerable and more unequal, according to a new report from the UN development programme (UNDP).

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Two men beheaded in videos from Nagorno-Karabakh war identified

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Exclusive: Ethnic Armenian men refused to leave their villages before Azerbaijani forces arrived, locals say

Two elderly men who were beheaded by Azerbaijani forces in videos widely shared on messaging apps have been identified, confirming two of the bloodiest atrocities of the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The ethnic Armenian men were non-combatants, people in their respective villages said. Both were beheaded by men in the uniforms of the Azerbaijani armed forces. The short, gruesome videos of the killings are among the worst of a torrent of footage portraying abuse, torture and murder that has continued to emerge more than a month after a Russian-brokered ceasefire came into force.

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Canadian man found guilty of manslaughter in death of Indigenous woman

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Brayden Bushby hurled metal trailer hitch that hit Barbara Kentner, who later died of complications resulting from trauma

A man who hurled a metal trailer hitch at an Indigenous woman walking along a snowy street in Thunder Bay has been found guilty of manslaughter, in a case widely seen as a grim reminder of the Canadian city’s deadly legacy of racism.

In her ruling Monday afternoon, Justice Helen Pierce found that the actions of Brayden Bushby led to the death of Barbara Kentner, 34, on 29 January 2017.

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Covid-19 vaccine: first US doses given to frontline workers – live

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The US has for the first time formally blamed Iran for the presumed death of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing more than a decade ago.

As world affairs editor Julian Borger reported for the Guardian in March, when Levinson’s family said they believed he was dead:

Levinson disappeared 13 years ago on Iran’s Kish island. The US initially claimed he was there on his own initiative, but in 2013 the Associated Press revealed he had been sent on a mission there by CIA analysts who had no authority to run espionage operations. Levinson was a specialist on Russian organised crime and had not had much previous involvement in Iran.

Tehran denied knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts until November last year, when it acknowledged that there was an ongoing case involving him before its revolutionary court.

Related: Iran says it will comply with nuclear deal if Biden lifts all sanctions

Here’s where the day stands so far:

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Google suffers global outage with Gmail, YouTube and majority of services affected

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Error was due to lack of storage space in authentication tools causing system to crash

Google has suffered a worldwide outage, with failures reported across the company’s services, including Gmail, Google Calendar and YouTube. Beginning at about 11.50am GMT, the outages appeared to have affected the vast majority of Google’s services, apart from search, which operated largely unaffected.

Despite the universal nature of the outages, the company’s automated systems reported no problems for any services for the first 30 minutes, across both consumer-facing and its cloud tools for developers. At 12.25pm, the company published an update, saying “We’re aware of a problem … affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access [Google services].”

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Orion hack exposed vast number of targets – impact may not be known for a while

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Analysis: eavesdropping on high-value targets is labour intensive so hackers may not have made most of access

If there is one silver lining to the months-long global cyber-espionage campaign discovered when a prominent cybersecurity firm learned it had been breached, it might be that the sheer numbers of potentially compromised entities offers them some protection.

By compromising one piece of security software – a security tool called Orion developed by the Texan company SolarWinds – the attackers gained access to an extraordinary array of potential targets in the US alone: more than 425 of the Fortune 500 list of top companies; all of the top 10 telecommunications companies; all five branches of the military; and all of the top five accounting firms.

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Prince Andrew refuses to deny he stayed in Jeffrey Epstein mansion

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Duke’s spokeswoman declines to comment on report contradicting his claim in Newsnight interview

Prince Andrew’s spokeswoman has refused to comment on a report that he stayed in the New York mansion of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in April 2001, despite the duke denying doing so in his infamous Newsnight interview.

The refusal to repeat the denial comes after the Daily Mail uncovered a fax that said the prince had stayed at a “private address in New York” on 11 April and its sources confirmed this was Epstein’s £60m home in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

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Russian FSB hit squad poisoned Alexei Navalny, report says

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Telecoms and travel data shows activist was shadowed on multiple trips before his poisoning in August, Bellingcat reports

An undercover hit squad working for Russia’s FSB spy agency poisoned the opposition activist Alexei Navalny in August, after shadowing him on multiple previous trips, the investigative website Bellingcat has claimed.

Citing “voluminous” telecoms and travel data, Bellingcat reported that the squad had secretly tracked Navalny since 2017. The operation apparently began after he announced plans to stand against Vladimir Putin in presidential elections.

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Georgia Republican senator had ‘no idea’ she posed with neo-Nazi

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Kelly Loeffler spokesman disavows photo of her posing with white supremacist Chester Doles at campaign event

The campaign of the Georgia Republican senator Kelly Loeffler is disavowing a photo circulating on social media of her posing with a longtime white supremacist at a recent campaign event, with less than a month to go until the runoff elections that will determine the balance of the US Senate.

Loeffler did not know who Chester Doles was when she took a picture with him, her campaign spokesman, Stephen Lawson, said on Sunday. The picture was taken on Friday at a campaign event in Dawsonville, Georgia.

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Suspected Russian hackers spied on US federal agencies

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FBI to investigate after treasury and commerce departments believed to have been targeted

Suspected Russian hackers have carried out the biggest cyber-raid against the US for more than five years, US officials have said, targeting key government networks including the Treasury and commerce departments.

The hackers were able to monitor internal email traffic and may have compromised other government bodies, in what is being described as a highly sophisticated state-level attack. The situation is so grave it led on Saturday to a national security council meeting at the White House.

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