Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
A worker at the biggest global producer of medical rubber gloves has died after contracting Covid-19, in the first known Covid-related death of an employee at the Malaysian company since the virus began to spread through its factories and dormitories.
Top Glove’s profits have surged during the pandemic, but the company has faced repeated criticism over its treatment of migrant workers, including claims that it has failed to protect them from the coronavirus.
Mines laid by Boko Haram and other groups leave millions at risk, particularly in Borno state where insurgency most acute
More than 100 people were killed or injured by landmines across north-east Nigeria in the first three months of this year, according to a new report.
Mines laid during the conflict between Boko Haram, other armed groups and the Nigerian army left 408 people dead and 644 injured between January 2016 and August this year, says the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a landmine clearance charity. Since March 2018, the country has recorded an average of five landmine casualties a week. Actual numbers are thought to be higher due to underreporting. The first 15 weeks of this year saw one casualty a day.
From December 2019, when an unknown virus was found in China, to the release of vaccines for Covid-19 – here are the points where momentum shifted
From December 2019, when an unknown virus was found in China, to the release of vaccines for Covid-19, it has been an extraordinary year. Here’s how the momentum shifted
Our foreign correspondents reflect on the practical and cultural importance of fluency in a country’s native tongue
During the worst of the coronavirus outbreak in China, people described to us deeply personal and traumatic experiences – losing their parents, suffering the death of a child, being harassed and intimidated for trying to speak out. Having these conversations in Mandarin was important not just for capturing nuance and detail but for a sense of empathy.
Despite promises in opposition to end enforced abduction by the security forces, under Imran Khan’s government numbers have increased
The abductors moved with an ease and stealth that suggested they had done this before. As Qayyum* and his family slept, 12 masked and uniformed soldiers used a ladder to scale the gate of the house, in an affluent neighbourhood of the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan. The family woke as they burst in but the officers silenced them with an order: don’t scream or we will beat you. One demanded Qayyum’s national identity card.
“Bring your phone and laptop,” barked an officer. A bag was shoved over Qayyum’s head and he was dragged outside and thrown into the back of a car.
Her $60m annual Las Vegas residency was off the cards this year, but the singer still has lots to say about animal rights, Trump’s ‘toxic’ politics, cosmetic surgery and the men in her life
The Goddess of Pop is in town. And what an entrance she makes. Two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster. She looks the ultimate in revolutionary chic – Cher Guevara. She is not in London to promote a record (100m sold and counting) or a film (she won the best actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck); she is here to talk about rescuing the world’s loneliest elephant from a zoo in Pakistan and flying him to a sanctuary in Cambodia. Cherilyn Sarkisian, aged 74, has never been predictable.
We meet in a London hotel, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where she has been eulogising elephants. She is masked, I am masked, and we sit at opposite ends of the room. It’s such a strange world we’re living in, I say – how are you coping? And she is straight off into a turbo-charged rant. “How am I taking it? There are no words that describe it. And in my country the president doesn’t believe it has anything to do with him. He doesn’t think he has any responsibility to help us.”
Turkish president has said Turkey will impose a five-day full lockdown beginning on 31 December, as official data showed new daily coronavirus deaths hit a record 229.
Recep Tayip Erdoğan, speaking after a cabinet meeting, said the stay-home order would begin at 9pm on New Year’s Eve and run to 4 January.
The extraordinary shock of people power gave way to a bitter backlash. So where to now?
A decade ago this week, a young fruit seller called Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight outside the provincial headquarters of his home town in Tunisia, in protest against local police officials who had seized his cart and produce.
Accounts of the 26-year-old’s shocking act rippled through his homeland, where hundreds of thousands of people who had also been humiliated by an atrophied state and its officials now found the courage to raise their voices.
Trans-Tasman bubble will allow Australians and New Zealanders to cross the ditch without quarantining
New Zealand’s cabinet has agreed to establish a quarantine-free travel bubble with Australia in the first quarter of 2021, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said.
The Australian health minister Greg Hunt enthusiastically greeted the in-principle announcement, saying it was the “first step” in normalising international travel and anticipated the Australian government was “absolutely” likely to grant the necessary approvals.
Gunman died in hospital after shooting at Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
A man has been shot dead by police after opening fire from the steps of New York City’s Cathedral Church of St John the Divine just after an outdoor choir performance.
New York police department spokesman, Sergeant Edward Riley, said the gunman had fired on police, but no officers or bystanders were believed to have been injured in the late-afternoon violence on Manhattan’s upper west side.
President accused of ignoring China-produced Covid vaccine because of political expediency
Jair Bolsonaro is facing a furious backlash over what critics are calling his “homicidally negligent” failure to prepare a coherent coronavirus vaccination programme as Brazil’s death toll again soars.
More than 181,000 Brazilians have died from the disease the president calls “a little flu”, with Latin America’s biggest economy now careering into a painful second wave.
Support services in Poland and abroad say numbers increasing even before legislation is tightened
Polish women are increasingly being forced to travel abroad to seek abortions even though a court ruling to tighten the country’s already strict laws has not yet coming into force, activists have said.
The constitutional court ruled in October that abortion was illegal even in cases where there were severe foetal abnormalities. Around 1,000 abortions a year – almost all of the country’s legal abortion procedures – are carried out for this reason.
Some students ran for safety as police exchanged fire with bandits ‘armed with AK-47 rifles’
Hundreds of Nigerian students are missing after gunmen attacked a secondary school in the country’s north-western Katsina state, police have confirmed.
The Government Science secondary school in Kankara was attacked on Friday night by a large group of bandits who shot “with AK-47 rifles”, a state police spokesman said.
In his Sky interview Johnson warned that no deal is still more likely. And he suggested that his suggestion to talk to other EU leaders has been rejected by the EU. He said:
The UK certainly won’t be walking away from the talks. I think people will expect us to go the extra mile. I repeated my offer, which is if it’s necessary to talk to other capitals, then I’m very happy to do that. The commission is very determined to keep the negotiations on the way that they be done between us and the commission and that’s, fine.
But I’m going to repeat the most likely thing now is of course that we have to get ready for WTO terms, Australia terms. And don’t forget, everybody, we’ve made huge preparations for this we’ve been at this for four and a half years ... perhaps more intensively in the last couple of years than previously. But anyway, we’ve got ready. And anybody who needs to know what to do get on to gov.uk/transition, see what needs to be done and get ready for January 1st and. Either way, whatever happens, the UK will do very, very well.
Boris Johnson has warned that the two sides are “very far apart on some key things.”
In quite a downbeat interview with Sky News he said:
I’ve just talked to Ursula Von der Leyen and updated the cabinet about the contents of that call. On Wednesday the hope was that we were going to be able to finish things off today, if there was a deal to be done.
As things stand, and this is basically what Urusal and I agreed. I’m afraid we’re still very far apart on some key things. But where there’s life, there’s hope we’re going to keep talking to see what we can do.
Here are some striking images of Dr. Luigi Cavanna visiting his patients in their homes in small towns and rural areas in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy.
He checks his patients’ oxygen levels, uses ultrasound to scan their lungs and tests them and their relatives for coronavirus.
Residents in Jersey care homes are receiving Covid vaccinations a day earlier than expected, the island’s government has announced.
Officials said the government made the call to start on Sunday rather than Monday “in view of the positive Covid cases in care homes”, which have seen a recent 400% surge, from four on Thursday to 19 by Saturday.
Trucks hauling trailers loaded with suitcase–sized containers of Covid-19 vaccine rolled out of Pfizer’s manufacturing facility in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Sunday – launching the largest and most complex vaccine distribution project in the US.
However, public confidence in the vaccine risked being eroded after President Donald Trump – who has had Covid – said he was “not scheduled to take the vaccine” but would do so “at the appropriate time”.
Germany will close most shops from Wednesday until 10 January as it tightens coronavirus restrictions and tries to rein in the spread of the disease, the country’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has said.
Schools will also be shut during the period, and employers will be asked to close operations or have employees work from home. The sale of fireworks will be banned ahead of New Year’s Eve.
British negotiators stay on in Brussels but PM says two sides still ‘very far apart’ on key issues
Britain and the EU enter the final stretch of the Brexit negotiations with renewed hope of a deal being struck within days after Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen agreed to “go the extra mile” and ordered the resumption of talks in Brussels.
As the prime minister played down expectations following a telephone conversation with the European commission president, EU embassies in Brussels were briefed that “progress has been made” and that “the next days will be important”. UK negotiators are expected to stay in Brussels until at least Tuesday.
President Museveni promised much when he took power but, 34 years on, violence and poverty are rife
To survive as an opposition politician in Uganda, you have to hit the campaign trail wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet. You must be ready for war. Ugandan musician turned opposition politician Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, discovered this when he decided to challenge incumbent Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s 34-year stranglehold on power at elections scheduled for 14 January. On the first day Kyagulanyi stepped out to campaign, he wore his vest over red overalls that made him look like a prisoner.
“I do not dress like this because I want to. I dress like this because there are people after my life. They think that by killing me, they will have it better. They do not know that if I die, it will only get worse,” he told the crowd outside his house.
Fleeing Ethiopia and Somalia, refugees made their way across the world’s busiest migration route, only to be left in the hands of smugglers in a lawless land
Saudi Arabia was Tigrit’s dream: a place where she could find work as a cleaner or maid, and send money back to her husband and young daughter in Ethiopia. Now, like hundreds of thousands of East Africans who have left home and travelled across the Red Sea in search of a better life, she finds herself stranded in Yemen instead.
“We’re stuck. I don’t have food or money for phone credit to call home. I don’t have anything,” she said, sitting on the floor in a building site with no electricity or running water on the edge of the desert.