Category Archives: World News

‘We will win’: vast Belarus rally adamant Lukashenko must go

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As many as 100,000 people attend biggest protest in country’s history in defiant and euphoric mood

Looking out across the vast crowd, the protesters could not quite believe it. Was this really Belarus? How had their country changed so quickly?

A week ago in the same spot, riot police had used batons and rubber bullets to terrorise those protesting against Alexander Lukashenko’s rigged election victory. Yet despite thousands of arrests and the shocking violence meted out to so many of them, the mood in the country has turned from despair to resilience to euphoria as the week progressed.

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Refugees crossing Channel tell of beatings by French police

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Asylum seekers give accounts of injuries, as Priti Patel says many refugees feel France is racist

Asylum seekers in the UK and France have described injuries they have received at the hands of French police, as Priti Patel said many were making the perilous journey across the Channel because they believe France is racist.

The home secretary made her comments in a conference call with Conservative MPs concerned about the recent surge in numbers attempting the voyage in small boats.

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Experts and volunteers scramble to save Mauritius’s wildlife after oil spill

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Grounded carrier has split in half and poor conditions make removal of ship’s remaining oil risky

International experts and thousands of local volunteers were making frantic efforts on Sunday to protect Mauritius’s pristine beaches and rich marine wildlife after hundreds of tonnes of oil was dumped into the sea by a Japanese tanker in what some scientists called the country’s worst ecological disaster.

Related: Grounded carrier off Mauritius breaks apart risking ecological disaster

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Debt in developing countries has doubled in less than a decade

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Jubilee Debt Campaign reveals sharp rise in number of countries in distress since 2018

Developing nation debt has more than doubled in the past decade and left more than 50 countries facing a repayment crisis, according to a campaign group.

Data from the Jubilee Debt Campaign shows that even without taking full account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a sharp jump in the number of poor countries in debt distress since 2018.

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Tens of thousands gather in Minsk for biggest protest in Belarus history

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Alexander Lukashenko claims Vladimir Putin has offered him ‘comprehensive help’

Tens of thousands of Belarusians have gathered in Minsk for the biggest protest in the country’s history, as an extraordinary week of rising sentiment comes to a close.

Seven days after the country’s authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, claimed to have secured 80% of the vote in a presidential election, his legitimacy is in tatters and his regime faces its biggest crisis since he came to power 26 years ago. The mood at Sunday’s rally was stoked further by egregious police violence against thousands of protesters earlier in the week.

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Mozambique army surrounds port held by Isis-linked insurgents

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Militants seized the Mocímboa da Praia site, which is near gas projects worth £45bn, last week

Government troops are taking up positions outside a port in the far north of Mozambique which was captured by Islamist extremists last week in the latest escalation of the insurgency in the southern African country.

Hundreds of reinforcements have been rushed into position around the port in the town of Mocímboa da Praia.

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Toronto: strip club employee may have exposed about 550 people to Covid-19

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Potential exposure took place just days after the Brass Rail Tavern, one of the city’s best-known strip clubs, was allowed to re-open

Health officials in the Canadian city of Toronto have warned that as many as 550 people may have been exposed to the coronavirus at a downtown strip club after an employee tested positive for the virus.

The potential exposure took place just days after the Brass Rail Tavern, one of the city’s best-known strip clubs, was allowed to re-open. The employee worked four shifts in early August, the city said in a statement, without detailing the capacity in which the employee worked.

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Lebanon launches Beirut investigation as it awaits verdict over former PM killing

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As quest for answers over massive port blast begins, a tribunal is expected announce findings on death of Rafik Hariri

A military judge in Beirut will, on 17 August, start examining a report into the cataclysmic explosion that levelled parts of the city 12 days ago, and determine who might face charges. A day later, five thousand miles away in The Hague, an international tribunal is due to hand down a verdict into a blast that took place 15 years earlier, killing the country’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri and unleashing a generation of havoc, from which it is yet to recover.

The tales behind the two explosions are the most important events in the modern history of Lebanon. The 2005 assassination of a leader credited by many with leading a broken nation from the rubble of war had remained a searing wound, while the annihilation of much of Beirut on 4 August has left gaping new scars on the country’s psyche.

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End of an era: has coronavirus killed the political convention for good?

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With Democrats and Republicans holding no in-person conventions this year, some have called to ditch them completely – but others say they’re a vital political tool

There won’t be any huge balloon drops at the Democratic or Republican party conventions this year. Presidential candidates will not get the chance to accept their nominations in front of massive, cheering crowds. Political reporters and strategists will not descend on a carefully selected American city to kick off the final stretch of the 2020 presidential election.

And some in Washington say those changes may be for the best.

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Island nations have the edge in keeping Covid away – or most do

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Nations from New Zealand to Cuba closed borders promptly with strict quarantine rules, but the UK won’t admit its ‘serious mistake’

Island nations have an advantage when it comes to stopping travellers importing disease, be it Covid or other infections.

Seas are usually harder to cross than land, and beaches are easier to police. There are no cross-border towns, and fewer ways to sneak over frontiers.

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Coronavirus live news: new French cases surpass 3,000 for second day; Italy hits record cases since May

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Italy closes all discos; Spain takes new measures as infections soar; New Zealand adds 13 infections to total

The UK government has said that in the 24-hour period up to 9am on Sunday, there were a further 1,040 lab-confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Overall, a total of 318,484 cases have been confirmed in the UK.

As of Sunday, 41,366 people have died in the UK within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19. This was up by five from the day before.

Ireland’s health chiefs will meet on Monday to decide if further restrictions are needed to slow a sharp increase in the spread of coronavirus that the government and officials have described as deeply concerning.

Ireland has reopened its economy at a slower pace than most EU countries but that has not prevented a jump in cases over the last two weeks that led to the first localised reimposition of some restrictions last week.

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Female Afghan peace negotiator wounded in assassination bid

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Women’s rights activist Fawzia Koofi, a member of the team negotiating a deal with the Taliban, was shot in the arm

A female member of Afghanistan’s peace negotiating team has been slightly wounded in an assassination attempt, officials say.

Fawzia Koofi, who is also a former parliamentarian, was attacked on Friday afternoon near the capital, Kabul, while returning from a visit to the northern province of Parwan.

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New Zealand has 69 active Covid cases after 13 more diagnosed

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Twelve spread in community while 13th emerged in a quarantined returning traveller, say authorities; PM Ardern due to decide on election

New Zealand on Sunday reported 13 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus for the last 24 hours, as the country’s first outbreak in months continued to grow.

All but one of the new cases were from community transmission and appeared to be linked to a cluster in Auckland where the most recent outbreak started, said Ashley Bloomfield, the New Zealand director general of health. The 13th was a traveller who returned from abroad and was in managed quarantine.

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Donald Trump vows ‘snapback’ over humiliating UN defeat on Iran arms embargo

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President says US will unilaterally reinstate sanctions a day after only two countries voted for prolonging embargo

Donald Trump has vowed to use a contentious provision to unilaterally reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran, following what Iran’s president said was a humiliating defeat for the US in its bid to extend an arms embargo on Tehran.

A day after the UN security council overwhelmingly rejected a US resolution to extend the embargo, Trump said at a news conference at his New Jersey golf club: “We’ll be doing a snapback. You’ll be watching it next week.”

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Calls for nationwide sickout as Arizona school district cancels reopening

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Arizona public school district forced to abandon plans after more than 100 teachers and staff members called in sick

An Arizona public school district was forced to cancel its plans to reopen on Monday after more than 100 teachers and other staff members called in sick.

“We have received an overwhelming response from staff indicating that they do not feel safe returning to classrooms with students,” Gregory Wyman, district superintendent, said in a statement on Friday.

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The plastic we use unthinkingly every day is killing our planet – and slowly but surely killing us | Andrew Paris

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As researchers, we have been shocked to find the most remote depths of the Pacific Ocean polluted by our plastic. And it will outlive us all.

Another bottle. Yet another one. We are 200km from land, in the middle of the South Pacific, and this is the third bottle we’ve found already this morning.

Everywhere is plastic.

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Grounded carrier off Mauritius breaks apart risking ecological disaster

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Battle is on to remove fuel oil from Japanese vessel the MV Wakashio as weather worsens

A Japanese bulk carrier that ran aground on a reef in Mauritius last month threatening a marine ecological disaster around the Indian Ocean island has broken apart, authorities said on Saturday.

The condition of the MV Wakashio was worsening early on Saturday and by early afternoon, it had it split, the Mauritius National Crisis Committee said.

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Why Germany would be especially happy to see the back of Trump | John Kampfner

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The competence embodied in Merkel provokes loathing from the US president

Donald Trump has declared war on Germany. In a manner of speaking. Europe’s most important country, potentially America’s most valuable partner, has in the mind of the president become an adversary. Of all Trump’s many foreign policy disasters, this is perhaps his most significant.

In late July, it was announced that retired army colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, would become the next ambassador to Berlin. Macgregor is a regular contributor to Trump’s favourite channel of information, Fox News. He has variously suggested that the US border guard should shoot people if they tried to enter illegally from Mexico; described eastern Ukrainians as “Russians”; defended Serbia’s actions against a “Muslim drug mafia” in Kosovo; and criticised Germany for giving “millions of unwanted Muslim invaders” welfare benefits rather than providing more funding for its armed services.

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Belarus’s leader pleads for Putin’s help as post-election protests grow

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Alexander Lukashenko tells the Kremlin that unrest could spread to Moscow next if his regime is destabilised

The embattled Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has called on Vladimir Putin to help him quell the growing wave of protest inside the country, which has left his legitimacy in tatters and his regime facing its biggest crisis since he first came to power 26 years ago.

Lukashenko appealed to the Russian president’s visceral fear of revolution at home and suggested that if his regime fell, Putin too was in danger. “This is a threat not just to Belarus … if Belarusians do not hold out, the wave will head over there too,” he said in televised remarks to a meeting of advisers on Saturday, claiming that the protests were organised by shadowy figures from abroad.

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