Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Chinese authorities using a data-driven ‘predictive policing’ network to intern people from Muslim minorities
A rare leak of a prisoner list from a Chinese internment camp shows how a government data programme targets Muslim minorities for detention over transgressions that include simply being young, or speaking to a sibling living abroad.
The database obtained by Human Rights Watch (HRW) sheds new light on how authorities in Xinjiang region use a vast “predictive policing” network, that tracks individuals’ personal networks, their online activity and daily life.
Joe Biden pleads with Americans to wear masks for 100 days after he takes office. 'It's not a political statement, it's a patriotic act,' says the president-elect. At an event announcing nominees for his health team, Biden pledged to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days
Radio equipment stolen from Ilyushin-80 aircraft designed to protect Putin and top officials
Thieves have targeted a Russian “doomsday” plane, the military aircraft that would be used by top officials, including Vladimir Putin, in case of a nuclear war.
The robbery of the Ilyushin-80, a mobile command post specially designed to keep officials alive and in command of the military during a nuclear conflict, took place at an airfield in southern Russia, state media reported.
US official among sources saying soldiers from Eritrea are fighting in operations against Tigray People’s Liberation Front
A US official and other diplomatic sources have backed accusations that Eritrean soldiers are fighting alongside Ethiopian troops to help Abiy Ahmed’s government in the war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), complicating an already dangerous conflict.
The claims made to Reuters, which interviewed several unidentified diplomats in the region and a US official, follow mounting allegations by Tigrayan leaders that Eritrea, long a rival of Ethiopia, had joined with Ethiopian forces against a common enemy despite denials from both nations.
Drugs bust in India sheds light on how adaptable cartels have come to dominate the lucrative trade in the powerful synthetic opioid
Carlos is a Mexican businessman employed by an import-export company that specializes in the trade of tequila and agricultural and chemical products. But in January 2016, he was a long way from his home in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa state.
Two associates accompanied him as he travelled from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Japan, and finally, India.
Protests against new agriculture laws hits transport, shops and markets across the country
Farmers in India have shut down swathes of the country’s transport, shops and markets as they escalated their protests against new agriculture laws with the launch of a national strike.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers blocked all roads into the capital Delhi for most of the day, and across the country demonstrated on railway lines and highways and called for a shutdown of shops, in a effort to pressurise the government into repealing new agriculture laws they say will leave them poverty stricken and at the mercy of corporations.
After walking across deserts and crossing seas on small boats, Noor wants to reveal the plight of women and girls in Yemen
A woman who crossed eight borders, two deserts and one sea to get to the UK to claim asylum has spoken for the first time about her incredible journey.
The 29-year-old, who calls herself Noor, escaped from Yemen when her life was threatened and travelled alone with only smugglers and other desperate migrants for company en route. It is highly unusual for a woman from a country such as Yemen to embark on this kind of journey unaccompanied.
UK prioritising over-80s, frontline healthcare workers and care home staff and residents; France unlikely to end lockdown on 15 December; Brazil to make vaccines free
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC Good Morning Scotland the next doses of the vaccine will arrive next week. He said:
The next scheduled arrival will be next week and the numbers depend on how quickly Pfizer can manufacture it.
It is being manufactured in Belgium and obviously right across the UK the job is to be able to get the vaccinations done as quickly as the manufacturer can create it, so we’ve been all working together really closely, the UK Government, which has been buying the vaccine and getting it delivered into the country, and then the NHS in the four nations of the UK.
We’ve got a broad schedule, there will be several million for the UK as a whole, so several hundred thousand for Scotland over the remainder of this month.
We’ve got that as a broad delivery schedule but obviously the manufacturing process itself is complicated, so we’ve got to get the stuff in the country and then once it’s in the country we can be confident that we’re able to deliver it, and I’m sure the NHS across Scotland and across the whole of the UK is up to the challenge.
We are not proposing to have a sort of immunity certificate that allows you to do different things.
Got a bit of a lump in the throat watching this. Feels like such a milestone moment after a tough year for everyone. The first vaccines in Scotland will be administered today too. https://t.co/KKaEhf19Jo
NHS nurse Mrs Parsons said it was a “huge honour” to be the first in the country to deliver the vaccine to a patient.
She said:
It’s a huge honour to be the first person in the country to deliver a Covid-19 jab to a patient, I’m just glad that I’m able to play a part in this historic day.
The last few months have been tough for all of us working in the NHS, but now it feels like there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Church describes act as ‘political retaliation’ by authorities over support of pro-democracy protestors and comes as eight more arrested
The pastor of a Hong Kong church says HSBC has frozen bank accounts belonging to him, his wife and the church’s charity in what he said was “political retaliation” by authorities for their assistance to young protesters.
It comes as police arrest more opposition figures, and a day after the accounts of former legislator Ted Hui and his family were refrozen under police orders, after they left Hong Kong to live in exile in the UK.
Forth Worth police have still not said why Nelda Price and her husband John, who died weeks later, were restrained in their pajamas
While the police in Fort Worth, Texas, ransacked Nelda Price’s home, an officer directed her to put her hands together – as if she were praying – so he could restrain her with zip ties.
“I told him, ‘I am praying. Because I don’t understand why you’re here, and I don’t know what this is about,’” Nelda told the Guardian.
With Trump no longer a threat, there is a sense of optimism around what the accord could achieve – but only if countries meet their targets
No one who was in the hall that winter evening in a gloomy conference centre on the outskirts of the French capital will ever forget it. Tension had been building throughout the afternoon, as after two weeks of fraught talks the expected resolution was delayed and then delayed yet again. Rumours swirled – had the French got it wrong? Was another climate failure approaching, the latest botched attempt at solving the world’s global heating crisis?
Finally, as the mood in the hall was growing twitchy, the UN security guards cleared the platform and the top officials of the landmark Paris climate talks took to the podium. For two weeks, 196 countries had huddled in countless meetings, wrangling over dense pages of text, scrutinising every semicolon. And they had finally reached agreement. Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister in charge of the gruelling talks, looking exhausted but delighted, reached for his gavel and brought it down with a resounding crack. The Paris agreement was approved at last.
India’s claim to fame is staggering scale of its general elections, with 900 million voters mobilised across 1 million polling stations, to choose from 8,000 candidates across a landmass spanning 2,000 miles north to south and pretty much the same east to west.
But now the country has to go one better. India must vaccinate 1.3bn people against Covid-19 – twice and twice as fast. With more than 9 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and a battered economy, how will the country meet this challenge?
She was a rock’n’roll powerhouse who electrified audiences worldwide. As Tina Turner releases a guide to happiness, she talks to playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) about how she found the strength to overcome illness, abuse and tragedy
The first time I experienced Tina Turner in the flesh, I was a 16-year-old hippy chick doused in patchouli oil. I didn’t just see and hear Ms Turner sing Proud Mary at the Fillmore East in New York City – I felt her in every cell of my teenage body. I was transfixed by the ecstasy of her thunderous hips and legs, the vibrating canopy of her shaking fringe, the irrefutable bidding of her sultry, raw voice.
She was female sexuality fully embodied and unleashed. She catalysed the same in me and in multitudes across the planet, selling more than 200m records in her lifetime. The queen of rock’n’roll seemed as much shaman as singer. I knew instinctively that she had suffered abuse and pain. We survivors have a kind of radar.
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern apologises for police and security failings but says they would not have stopped the attack
New Zealand’s security agencies were “almost exclusively” focused on the threat from Islamist terrorism at the time of the 2019 Christchurch shooting, in which a gunman shot dead 51 Muslim worshippers, an inquiry into the country’s worst peacetime massacre has found.
The landmark Christchurch royal commission report, which was released on Tuesday after 20 months of consultation, also revealed police failed to enforce proper checks on firearm licences.
PM to make trip in 11th-hour effort to break impasse, raising hopes of a deal on trade and security
Boris Johnson will travel to Brussels for a face-to-face summit with the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in an 11th-hour attempt to break the impasse in the Brexit negotiations.
A long-awaited crunch meeting will be held in the “coming days”, the two leaders said in a joint statement following a phone call lasting over an hour, keeping hopes alive of agreement on a trade and security deal. Sources on both sides pointed to Wednesday or Thursday as the most likely dates.
Emily Victoria Moreira dos Santos and Rebeca Beatriz Rodrigues Santos, cousins aged four and seven, were killed on Friday night as they played outside their grandmother’s home in Barro Vermelho, a redbrick favela on Rio’s rundown northern fringe.
The killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was designed to undermine the possibility of a quick US-Iran detente come January 2021
The assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on 27 November, which is likely to have been carried out by Israel, was intended to undermine the possibility of a quick US-Iran detente once the president-elect, Joe Biden, takes office in January. It’s part of a scorched earth campaign by Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump to make it as difficult as possible for Iran to resume negotiations with the Biden administration and return to the 2015 nuclear agreement.
But the brazen killing is also designed to exploit rifts within Iran’s factional political structure: between conservative politicians and hardline factions aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the reformist camp led by the president, Hassan Rouhani. In January, the US assassinated Iran’s most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani, in a drone strike outside Baghdad’s airport. That attack exposed weaknesses in Iran’s security apparatus and the regime was unable to follow through on threats to avenge the targeting of its top officials. Iran did fire missiles at US bases in Iraq in retaliation for Donald Trump ordering – and later boasting about – Suleimani’s killing. But that was a largely symbolic act and Tehran has not targeted a US official of equal stature, as it threatened to. Since Fakhrizadeh’s assassination, hardliners have been calling for tougher action in order to restore some deterrence with Israel and, by extension, the US.
UN Middle East envoy describes killing of 13-year-old as ‘shocking and unacceptable incident’
Israel’s military will investigate allegations its forces shot dead a Palestinian child during a protest last week, a killing that was deplored by the United Nations and the European Union.
Ali Ayman Abu Aliya, said by Palestinian officials to be as young as 13, died after he was hit by a bullet in the abdomen on Friday. He and other Palestinians had been protesting against the construction of a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Shuang bao tai 双胞胎 is the Chinese word for twin. Following on from Land of Ibeji, Sanne de Wilde and Bénédicte Kurzen travel to Mojiang in Yunnan for the second chapter of their project about the mythology of twinhood. The area has an exceptionally high percentage of twins, celebrated in its annual tropic of cancer twin festival
The first chapter of this project was called Land Of Ibeji. West Africa, and specifically Yorubaland, has 10 times more twins than any other region in the world. Ibeji, meaning “double birth” and “the inseparable two” in Yoruba stands for the ultimate harmony between two people. “Shuang bao tai”, 双胞胎 is the Chinese word for twin, which translates as: 双 double 胞 womb 胎 embryo.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, French care home resident Colette Dupas's contact with her daughters has been limited to talking via video call or through a window. Now, thanks to an inflatable tunnel and two plastic sleeves, the 97-year-old has been able to feel their touch. Made from hermetically sealed plastic film, the 'hug bubble' allows care home residents – isolated from the outside world to avoid catching the virus – to hold hands and embrace their visiting relatives through a sleeve. Once visitors leave, care home employees disinfect the plastic sheet, ready for the next encounter