Category Archives: World News

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine announcement is cause for cautious celebration

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Interim trial results are encouraging as scientists welcome news

It is not yet the end of the pandemic, but the announcement by Pfizer/BioNTech that their vaccine has been 90% successful in the vital large-scale trials has got even the soberest of scientists excited.

These are interim results and the trial will continue into December to collect more data. The two companies – a tiny German biotech with the big idea and the giant pharma company Pfizer with the means to develop it – have not yet published their detailed data, so it is all on trust. And yet, nobody is suggesting the results have been over-egged. It looks as though the vaccine not only works, but works better than anyone hoped.

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EU draft declaration sets out stricter rules on migrant integration

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Contentious statement includes edict on learning language of new home country

Migrants to Europe must learn the language of their new home countries and encourage their children to integrate in the light of the recent Islamist terror attacks, EU governments plan to say in a declaration drafted by France, Austria and Germany.

The contentious draft statement, due to be made by EU home affairs ministers on Friday, is being championed by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who was accused by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of religious persecution after his recent warning of the dangers of Islamist separatism.

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Hunger fears in north-east Nigeria as roaming elephants trample crops

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Animals have ventured back into areas largely emptied of people by Boko Haram insurgency

A herd of hundreds of elephants that have returned to north-east Nigeria are under threat from jihadist groups and increasingly in conflict with thousands of refugees whose crops they have trampled weeks before harvest.

More than 250 elephants ventured last month from Chad and Cameroon into Kala-Balge, a district in Nigeria’s Borno state.

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Biden is far from perfect – but we should still take a moment to savour his victory | Suzanne Moore

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The left is so used to losing that we have become sore winners. While the US has not been fixed overnight, there is reason to feel hope again

There are many things Joe Biden is not. He is not young. He is not an anti-establishment peacenik. He is not unbeholden to huge, anonymous donors. He is not free of accusations of using male privilege to be gropey with women. He is neither a radical, nor exciting. He is not a brilliant orator. He is not Bernie Sanders. And on it goes: the disappointments pile up thick and fast.

But he is not a loser – and he is not Donald Trump. So let us have a moment, however brief, of celebration.

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‘The fight goes on’: exiled former president Evo Morales returns to Bolivia

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Ex-president greeted with thousands of flag-waving supporters a day after new leftwing president, Luis Arce, sworn in

Thousands of flag-waving supporters have greeted Evo Morales at Bolivia’s southern border, as the country’s exiled former president began a triumphant homecoming that suggests his four-decade political career may be far from over.

“As long as capitalism and imperialism exist, the fight goes on,” Morales, 61, declared as he prepared to cross the international bridge between the Argentinian border town of La Quiaca and Villazón in Bolivia at about 10am local time.

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‘Make America rake again’: Four Seasons Total Landscaping cashes in on Trump fiasco

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Gardening firm, situated between crematorium and sex shop, played comic role in final throes of president’s campaign

As Donald Trump’s rise was accompanied by branded merchandise – steaks, ties, boxers and red Maga hats – so his descent may come to be known by the stickers, shirts and hoodies now being sold by an obscure Pennsylvanian landscaping company that wound up playing a comic and widely celebrated role in the final throes of the president’s re-election campaign.

Related: Keep on digging: Trump team holds press conference at suburban garden centre

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Stacey Abrams: Georgia’s political heroine … and romance author

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Writing under the name Selena Montgomery, Abrams has penned eight romantic thrillers, often while also fighting for voters’ rights

Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.

Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.

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Global report: new Covid lockdown in Hungary as Belgium passes second peak

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Portugal imposes state of emergency; global cases pass 50m; infections in Germany ‘levelling off’

Hungary and Portugal have become the latest countries in Europe to impose tough new restrictions to stem the second wave of the coronavirus, as the first signs of light at the end of the tunnel emerged in France, Germany and Belgium.

As the US pharmaceuticals company Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, said their experimental Covid-19 vaccine appeared safe and more than 90% effective, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced a partial lockdown.

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Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas wanted Doctor Zhivago movie rights

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Director wrote to Boris Pasternak in late 1950s, previously unpublished material reveals

It is one of the greatest British films of all time, directed in 1965 by David Lean with an A-list cast that included Julie Christie, Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. But the epic adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s classic love story set against the Russian revolution, might never have happened if a planned US production had got there first.

James Fenwick, a British film historian, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – had tried in vain to acquire the movie rights earlier, in the late 1950s.

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‘His speech was perfect’: Chinese social media users celebrate Biden win

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While president Xi remains silent, Chinese residents voice cautious optimism for better relations between the two superpowers

While China’s top officials remained conspicuously silent on Joe Biden’s presidential victory over Donald Trump, Chinese residents celebrated and held out cautious optimism for improved US-China ties.

On Monday, Biden’s speech after being declared the projected winner was among the most viewed topics on social media, with the hashtag “Biden national address” viewed more than one billion times on Weibo.

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Italy faces 10,000 Covid deaths in a month with no lockdown – medics

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Doctors urge tougher national action as hospitals struggle to treat coronavirus patients

Doctors in Italy have warned there will be an additional 10,000 Covid-19 deaths in a month in the country unless a national lockdown is imposed.

The government is moving toward placing further restrictions in four more regions considered high risk: Campania, Liguria, Abruzzo and Umbria.

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ICC Uighur genocide complaint backed by parliamentarians around world

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‘Chance should not be squandered’ to bring Chinese government to justice, letter states

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court has been urged by an international alliance of parliamentarians to accept a complaint alleging genocide by China against its Uighur Muslim minority.

The complaint, backed by more than 60 parliamentarians from 16 countries, says the Chinese government may be committing crimes amounting to genocide and other crimes against humanity against the Uighur and other Turkic peoples.

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Concern over French bill that cracks down on photos identifying police

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Journalists call for removal of clause that would ban footage disseminated ‘with intent to harm’ officers

A proposed bill in France that would make it illegal to disseminate photographs or videos identifying police and gendarmes “with intent to harm” is a danger to press freedom, critics have warned.

The measure comes amid growing concern about allegations of police violence in the country. It is outlined in draft global security legislation to be presented to the Assemblée Nationale next week.

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US to send asylum seekers home to Cameroon despite ‘death plane’ warnings

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Move by the Trump administration comes despite reports that other deportees have gone missing since being repatriated

The US is expected to fly Cameroonian asylum seekers back to their home country on Tuesday despite fears that their lives will be at risk and reports that deportees repatriated last month are now missing.

Some of the deportees are activists from the country’s anglophone minority, who face arrest warrants for their political activities from government forces with a well documented record of extrajudicial killings. They and their lawyers refer to Tuesday’s flight as the “death plane”.

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Goodbye Trump, hello Biden: how America is waving goodbye to a shocking, shameful era

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Trump’s brutal policies and spread of misinformation have divided the US. Uniting the country will be Biden’s biggest task

As the result was finally called, the end of his presidency confirmed, Donald Trump teed off on a crisp, autumnal Saturday afternoon at his private golf club in Virginia.

The president was in the midst of a four-day mission to spread baseless misinformation about election integrity in an attempt to subvert US democracy.

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‘Hypocrites and greenwash’: Greta Thunberg blasts leaders over climate crisis

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Exclusive: Leaders are happy to set targets for decades ahead, but flinch when immediate action is needed, she says

Greta Thunberg has blasted politicians as hypocrites and international climate summits as empty words and greenwash. Until humanity admits it has failed to tackle the climate crisis and begins treating it as an emergency like the coronavirus pandemic, society will be unable to stop global heating, she said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Thunberg said leaders were happy to set targets for decades into the future, but flinched when immediate action to cut emissions was needed. She said there was not a politician on the planet promising the climate action required: “If only,” said the teenager, who will turn 18 in January.

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Armed groups target Colombia’s children as reform process slows

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For families in province of Cauca, time is running out as drug gangs and guerrilla groups exploit Covid chaos


Luis Troches was walking home from the shop in late July when armed men stopped him along a dirt road in south-west Colombia. They gave the 14-year-old an ultimatum: he could join their group – dissidents from the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) – or they could take him and his 11-year-old sister by force.

“He came home scared and distant,” said his mother, Luzmery. Both knew that the men, who control their hamlet in the north of Cauca province, would be back for an answer. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to go. What should I do?’”

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The battle to bring Kenya’s warrior children back to school – a photo essay

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Covid closures coincided with an initiation ceremony that has put many on a path out of education and set back years of progress

Photographs by Joost Bastmeijer

Shortly after sunrise, three boys step off their motorcycle, pat the dust off their checkered shuka cloths, and enter their family’s boma – an enclosure built from thorny acacia branches in eastern Samburu.

Now that they are morans, the teenagers are considered adults and are no longer permitted to sleep in their parents’ house. Instead, they go each evening to sleep in a nearby school building and return home in the morning. The school has been shut since the Covid-19 outbreak, and benches have been moved aside to make room for mattresses, and a makeshift kitchen.

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Coronavirus live news: US nears 10m cases as global infections pass 50m

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US currently has 9.62m confirmed Covid cases; pandemic expert says half positive cases not being identified; economic fallout makes prospect of third world war ‘a risk’. Follow the latest updates

New Zealand and the Cook Islands are set to open a ‘travel bubble’ between the two countries, with NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern confirming officials from her government would visit the South Pacific archipelago later this week.

“While I don’t wish to put any time-frames on a potential travel bubble, it is my aim and hope that this can resume as soon as is safely possible, and this on-the-ground visit by officials to the Cook Islands is the next step in that process.

US President-elect Joe Biden’s healthcare advisers have held talks with drugmaker executives on the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program to accelerate development of a possible Covid-19 treatment, a Biden spokesman said on Sunday.

Reuters reports that under the Trump administration, Operation Warp Speed has struck deals with several drugmakers in an effort to help speed up the search for effective treatments for the disease amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

The US Covid-19 death toll stands at over 237,000, with more than 9.9 million cases now reported in the country since the outbreak began, according to a Reuters tally.

“As we previously said in September, because President-Elect Joe Biden is absolutely committed to helping develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible, campaign medical advisers have received briefings from companies working to produce vaccines in order to be informed about the process,” Biden’s spokesman Andrew Bates said in an emailed statement.

Biden’s advisers met with companies that have Covid-19 vaccines or therapies in late-stage clinical trials in September and October, Bloomberg News had reported earlier.
The report added that the meeting was aimed at gathering information about the development, manufacturing and distribution of shots to ward off the novel coronavirus and therapies to treat the sick.

Biden has vowed to “listen to the science”, with his coronavirus plan calling for scaling up testing and contact tracing and promising to appoint a “supply commander” to oversee supply lines of critical equipment.

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‘Super rare’ 100-year-old carrier pigeon message found in France

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Tiny capsule discovered in Ingersheim appears to have been sent by a soldier during the first world war

A couple out for a walk in eastern France have discovered a tiny capsule containing a message despatched by a Prussian soldier over a century ago using a carrier pigeon.

The message from an infantry soldier based at Ingersheim, written in German in a barely legible hand, detailed military manoeuvres apparently during the first world war and was addressed to a superior officer, said Dominique Jardy, curator of the Linge Museum at Orbey in eastern France.

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