Category Archives: World News

Boris Johnson says crossing Channel in small boats ‘dangerous and criminal’

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PM hints at law change to make it easier to deport people who make dangerous voyage

Boris Johnson has branded attempts by people to cross the Channel in small boats as a “very bad and stupid and dangerous and criminal thing to do” and hinted at changing the law to make it easier to deport such arrivals.

Meanwhile, a French politician has warned that the UK’s decision to send in the Royal Navy “won’t change anything”, and a former Home Office official has said he was sceptical of the plans.

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Donald Trump denies asking how to add face to Mount Rushmore

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White House reportedly asked South Dakota official about expanding monument

Donald Trump has denied that his team ever approached South Dakota’s governor about adding his face to the iconic monument depicting four presidents at Mount Rushmore. However, he added that it sounded like a good idea.

The New York Times reported a Republican party official source on Saturday stating that a White House aide reached out to Kristi Noem’s office with the question: “What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?”

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Germany’s SPD picks Merkel-like figure to run for top job in 2021

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Social Democrats name pragmatic ex-mayor Olaf Scholz as candidate for chancellor

Germany’s Social Democrats have fired the starting gun in the race to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor by announcing the pragmatist finance minister, Olaf Scholz, as their candidate for the job.

One of the two pillars of 20th-century democracy in Germany, the Social Democratic party (SPD) has seen its support wither away since joining Merkel’s government as a junior coalition partner in 2013. It lies third in the polls behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Greens, on about 14% of the vote.

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Belarus opposition candidate rejects election result after night of protests

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‘I will believe my own eyes,’ says Svetlana Tikhanovskaya after commission says Alexander Lukashenko won landslide

Share your reaction on the Belarus election result

The main opposition candidate in Belarus’s election has rejected the official results that gave President Alexander Lukashenko a landslide victory and her team has vowed to stay in the country to campaign for a change of power.

“I will believe my own eyes – the majority was for us,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya told reporters in the capital, Minsk, on Monday, after widespread reports of vote-tampering in Sunday’s election.

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Beirut blast: judge questions security chiefs as third minister resigns

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Investigation focusing on why chemicals were stored at port for six years despite warnings

A Lebanese judge has begun questioning the heads of the country’s security agencies over last week’s devastating blast in Beirut, as another cabinet minister resigned in protest.

Judge Ghassan El Khoury began by questioning Maj Gen Tony Saliba, the head of state security, according to the state-run National News Agency. It gave no further details, but other generals are scheduled to be questioned.

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Fighting for breath: how the medical oxygen industry is failing African hospitals

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Sub-Saharan hospitals are dependent on costly oxygen from multinational suppliers. As Covid-19 spreads, doctors are being forced to make terrible choices

As Covid-19 spreads throughout Africa, a potentially deadly lack of oxygen is leaving doctors unable to offer essential treatment.

Some experts put considerable blame on two multinational gas suppliers that dominate the market for oxygen cylinders across much of the continent, saying that their high prices and systems make the treatment unaffordable.

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Jacinda Ardern must use her power to push New Zealand to more progressive politics | Morgan Godfery

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The PM promised transformative government, but has so far largely maintained the status quo

Jacinda Ardern was travelling in a taxi in July 2017, two months before the election that would make her prime minister, when arguably the most important message in her nine-year parliamentary career came through. Labour’s poll results were crashing, the message said, and the party leader – the austere Andrew Little – was considering stepping down. Would Ardern, the then deputy leader, consider stepping up?

In the following days calls went back and forth. The party activists (and MPs at risk of losing their seats) were in the pits, and Little told the country’s leading current affairs show resigning had crossed his mind. From that admission, the poll numbers could only fall further. The Greens were at 15% , sucking up votes to Labour’s left while the conservative National party was polling in the mid-to-high 40s, maintaining an iron grip on the centre right.

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Belarus election: Lukashenko’s claim of landslide victory sparks widespread protests

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Riot police deployed in Minsk and about 20 other cities in some of the biggest clashes in the country’s history

Clashes broke out in cities across Belarus on Sunday evening as riot police used rubber bullets, flash grenades, teargas and water cannons to quash protests against the results of the contested presidential election.

Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled for 26 years, claimed he had won a landslide victory in an election marred by accusations of vote-rigging. The election commission claimed Lukashenko was ahead with 82% of the vote in preliminary results on Sunday evening. The opposition, led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, had held some of the country’s largest political rallies since the days of the Soviet Union.

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Coronavirus live news: Greece ‘formally’ in second wave, says expert, as WHO warns Europe to react fast

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World Health Organization says it has received just 10% of funds it needs for Covid fight

India has registered a record 1,007 fatalities in the past 24 hours as new coronavirus infections surged by 62,064 cases, the Associated Press reports.

The health ministry said the total fatalities reached 44,386 on Monday. The number of confirmed cases reported so far are 2,215,074. At least 634,935 patients were still undergoing treatment.

Concern is growing that a resurgence of coronavirus in Europe will lead to a “second wave” of uncoordinated border restrictions that will undermine the open borders on which the European Union is founded.

In a letter to national governments, seen by the Associated Press, the European commission warns that “while we must ensure that the EU is ready for possible resurgences of Covid-19 cases ... we should at the same time avoid a second wave of uncoordinated actions at the internal borders of the EU.”

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Six French aid workers and two locals killed in ambush in Niger wildlife park

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Emmanuel Macron’s office confirms six French volunteers with ACTED relief organisation died in attack on Sunday

Gunmen on motorcycles killed six French aid workers, a Nigerien guide and a driver in a wildlife park in Niger on Sunday, officials said.

The group were attacked in a giraffe reserve 65km (40 miles) from the west African country’s capital, Niamey, the governor of Tillaberi region, Tidjani Ibrahim Katiella, told Reuters. “They were intercepted and killed,” he said.

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Beirut explosion: protests outside parliament call for fall of government

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Clashes broke out between rioters and police as global donors pledged recovery aid

Thousands of protesters pelted Lebanon’s parliamentary precinct with rocks on Sunday, demanding the fall of the government in the wake of the catastrophic blast that destroyed parts of Beirut last week.

The violent rally took place around sunset, as an international donor conference launched to fund the enormous cost of recovery resolved that the country would not be abandoned.

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Beirut blast: Lebanese minister announces resignation – video

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Lebanon’s information minister, Manal Abdel Samad, has quit in the first government resignation since an explosion in the port of Beirut killed more than 150 people and destroyed large parts of the capital. She apologised to the Lebanese public for failing them in her statement

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Beirut explosion: drone footage reveals scale of damage to homes – video

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The destruction caused by last week's explosion in Beirut is visible in drone footage shot in devastated neighbourhoods. The close-up footage shows buildings reduced to rubble and homes rendered uninhabitable. The explosion in the city's port killed at least 154 people, injured 6,000 and damaged large parts of the city. Officials say the blast, which was felt hundreds of miles away, could have caused damages worth as much as  £11.5bn

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Bolivia protesters bring country to standstill over election delays

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Demonstrators allied to Evo Morales say authorities are using Covid-19 to delay vote

Demonstrators in Bolivia have dynamited Andean passes, scattered boulders across highways and dug trenches along rural roads to protest against repeated delays to a rerun of last October’s deeply contentious election, which led to the downfall of the long-serving leftwing president Evo Morales.

As the country’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic mounts, more than 100 roadblocks and marches nationwide – convened on Monday by Bolivia’s main workers’ union and indigenous and campesino movements allied to Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (Mas) – have brought the country to a standstill for six days.

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What we are learning about Covid-19 and kids

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As schools around the world prepare to reopen, new scientific evidence about children and coronavirus is coming to light

Back in April, the French epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet found himself leading an investigation in the town of Crépy-en-Valois, a small community of 15,000 inhabitants just to the north-east of Paris. In February, the town’s middle and high schools had become the centre of a new outbreak of Covid-19.

Fontanet and colleagues from the Pasteur Institute in Paris were tasked with conducting antibody testing across Crépy-en-Valois to understand the extent to which the virus had been circulating. As they surveyed the town, they noted an interesting pattern. While the virus had spread rampantly through the high school, with 38% of students being infected, along with 43% of teachers and 59% of non-teaching staff, the same was not true for the town’s six primary schools. While three primary-age pupils had caught Covid-19 in early February, none of these infections had led to a secondary case. Overall, just 9% of primary age pupils, 7% of teachers and 4% of non-teaching staff had been infected with the virus.

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Coronavirus live news: US nears 5m cases as Australian border closures ramp up

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US approaches horrific milestone; border restrictions tightened in Australian state of New South Wales; Brazil passes 100,000 deaths

Coatsworth is asked about the fatality rate in Australia. He says he hasn’t seen the data in the last week or two but Australia has generally been better than much of the rest of the world.

The reasons include the already high standard of Australian health care and in particular intensive care units and staff.

“But we’re also learning more and more. We’re applying new treatments and [a medication] that’s demonstrating in a recovery trial to decrease mortality. We have at our disposal... and our specialists that are backed up by the Australia New Zealand Intensive Care Society and are discussing the clinical treatment of patient whose are gravely ill with Covid-19 and how you ventilate them is a challenge and the contact of proning which is where you ventilate someone on their tummy, rather than on their back, has proven to be critical. The timing you do that.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, deputy chief medical officer in Australia is giving a national briefing.

Nationally in Australia there are 295 dead from Covid-19, and 658 currently hospitalised with 51 in intensive care.

It is not going to be acceptable for any single country to have the vaccine and Australia is joining with a number of different countries around the world through the initiative to ensure that any vaccine that is developed is available.

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Chain reaction: disaster hastens Lebanon’s moment of reckoning

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A corruption-riddled government has presided over rising poverty for decades. Could the anger released after the catastrophe in Beirut’s docks finally topple it?

The first violent jolt seemed like a neighbourhood accident; a blown generator, or a car crash. Five seconds later, the thundering secondary blast arrived; a crushing surge of energy that instantly sucked the air out of the city, then plunged it back with devastating weight. Giant shards of debris blew through rooms, door frames collapsed and furniture became missiles – all in what seemed like a paralysing slow motion.

A deathly still followed, and then came a cascade of shattered glass from what appeared to be every home, or tower block; hundreds of thousands of panes and pieces falling to earth at once. Many who survived the blast wave did not live beyond the seconds that followed. Days later, giant pools and trails of blood littered pavements and roads, each telling their own tale of life or death in Beirut’s apocalypse. When the glass stopped falling, the screaming started. A yellow pall of dust, smoke and chemicals shrouded the eastern suburbs.

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Beirut: shots, teargas and flames as anti-government protests grow – video report

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Lebanese riot police fired teargas at demonstrators in Beirut on Saturday and shots were heard in growing protests over this week's devastating explosion. Scores of protesters have taken to the streets calling for the government to be punished for their negligence that protesters say led to Tuesday's gigantic explosion that killed 158 people and injured more than 6,000.

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Faith leaders join forces to warn of Uighur ‘genocide’

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Statement signed by Rowan Williams, bishops, imams and rabbis says Chinese Muslim minority faces ‘human tragedy’

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, is among more than 70 faith leaders publicly declaring that the Uighurs are facing “one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust”, and that those responsible for the persecution of the Chinese Muslim minority must be held accountable.

The incarceration of at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims in prison camps, where they are reported to face starvation, torture, murder, sexual violence, slave labour and forced organ extraction, is a potential genocide, say the clerics.

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Nasa to change ‘harmful’ and insensitive’ planet and galaxy nicknames

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Space agency says ‘certain cosmic nicknames are insensitive’ and vows to drop any reference to them

Nasa has signaled it is joining the social justice movement by changing unofficial and potentially contentious names used by the scientific community for distant cosmic objects and systems such as planets, galaxies and nebulae.

In a statement last week, the space agency said that as the “community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful”.

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