Clade I case comes after World Health Organization declares a global public health emergency
Sweden confirmed its first case of the more contagious variant of mpox, a viral infection that spreads through close contact, marking the first time it has been found outside Africa.
The person was infected while in a part of Africa where there was a large outbreak of the disease, Olivia Wigzell, director-general at the Swedish public health agency, told a press conference.
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The president of New York’s Columbia University resigned yesterday, citing the toll taken by a “period of turmoil” after she faced scrutiny for her handling of demonstrations at the institution over the Israel-Hamas war, AFP reports.
British-American economist Minouche Shafik is the fourth president of an Ivy League university to step down in the wake of the bitter divisions and anti-war protests that swept campuses across the US.
Continue reading...US, Qatar, Egypt and Israel meet in Doha in effort to prevent fighting spiralling into region-wide Middle East conflict
A new round of negotiations aimed at brokering a ceasefire in the war in Gaza and preventing the fighting from escalating into a region-wide conflict got under way in Doha, as the death toll in the Palestinian territory reached a grim milestone of 40,000 people, according to local health authorities.
Mediators from the US, Qatar and Egypt met an Israeli delegation in the Qatari capital on Thursday afternoon, with talks expected to continue into the next day. Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, is not directly participating in the talks, meaning expectations of a breakthrough are low.
Continue reading...Military commandant’s office is being established in city, says president as discussions over prisoner exchanges restart
Ukraine’s president has claimed Kyiv’s troops have full control over the Russian town of Sudzha, which had a prewar population of 5,000 people and contains infrastructure pumping Russian gas towards Europe.
Sudzha, roughly six miles (9.6km) inside Russian territory, is the biggest of 80 settlements that Ukraine claims to have taken during the 10 days since its surprise incursion into Russia began.
Continue reading...Brazilian president suggests fresh elections or coalition government as potential solutions to political crisis
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made clear he does not yet accept Nicolás Maduro’s claim to have been re-elected as Venezuela’s president, and has suggested fresh elections or a coalition government as potential solutions to the country’s intensifying political crisis.
Maduro’s claim to have won Venezuela’s 28 July vote – despite compelling evidence that he was heavily beaten – has plunged the South American country into uncertainty and spooked regional governments who fear possible conflict and the consolidation of a dictatorship on their doorstep.
Continue reading...UK foreign secretary will reportedly meet Benjamin Netanyahu amid increasing tensions with Iran
David Lammy is reportedly planning an imminent trip to Israel amid high tensions with Iran, in an attempt to help avert an escalation of war in the Middle East.
The foreign secretary will meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Israel Katz, the foreign minister, along with Stéphane Séjourné, the French foreign minister, Sky News reported.
Continue reading...David Neuberger was part of court panel that dismissed appeal of Jimmy Lai and six other pro-democracy activists
David Neuberger, the former president of the UK’s supreme court, has resigned from his role as chair of a legal advisory board to an international media freedom coalition, citing the “concern expressed” over his role as a judge in Hong Kong.
Lord Neuberger said he had been considering his position as chair of the high-level panel of legal experts that advises the Media Freedom Coalition (MFC), an international NGO, for several months.
Continue reading...Hundreds of students and activists prevent Sheikh Hasina followers from visiting her father’s former house
Hundreds of student protesters and political activists armed with bamboo sticks, iron rods and pipes have assaulted supporters of the ousted Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, and prevented them from reaching the former house of her father, the assassinated independence leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in Dhaka.
The house in the Dhanmondi area of the capital was turned into a museum to showcase narratives and other objects about a military coup on 15 August 1975, when Rahman was killed along with most of his family members. The house, now called Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, was torched by the protesters hours after Hasina’s downfall on 5 August following an uprising during which more than 300 people were killed.
Continue reading...Storm left hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans without power and water in sweltering heat
Hurricane Ernesto barreled toward Bermuda on Thursday after leaving hundreds of thousands of people in Puerto Rico without power or water as sweltering heat enveloped the US territory, raising concerns about people’s health.
A hurricane warning was in effect for Bermuda, with Ernesto expected to pass near or over the island on Saturday.
Continue reading...Police arrest Letzte Generation protesters who cut holes in fences and glued themselves to asphalt
Climate activists have broken into four German airport sites, briefly bringing air traffic to a halt at two of those before police made arrests.
Protesters from Letzte Generation – Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil – gained access on Thursday to airfields in areas near the takeoff and landing strips of Cologne-Bonn, Nuremberg, Berlin Brandenburg and Stuttgart airports at dawn. Air traffic was suspended for a short time at Nuremberg and Cologne-Bonn due to police operations.
Continue reading...Germany’s Bahlsen biscuit empire used workers from Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine from 1940 until 1945
Germany’s Bahlsen biscuit empire has apologised for the “painful” findings of a report showing that it used several times more forced labourers than previously thought during the Nazi period.
The report was commissioned after family heiress Verena Bahlsen caused outrage in 2019 by appearing to play down the hardship suffered by hundreds of people, many of them women from Nazi-occupied Ukraine, forced to work at the family business.
Continue reading...Spokesperson for Volodymyr Zelenskiy denies WSJ claims and again accuses Russia of carrying out the sabotage
The Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up by a small Ukrainian sabotage team in an operation that was initially approved by Volodymyr Zelenskiy and then called off, but which went ahead anyway, according to claims in a report in the Wall Street Journal.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian president has denied the claims.
Continue reading...Dozens are reported as having gone missing since demonstrations began, and some have turned up dead
One mid-morning in June, Emmanuel Kamau prepared to leave his home for work as a bus conductor in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
It was the second week of nationwide protests against proposed tax increases, and demonstrations were expected to disrupt the transport network. But as a casual worker who got jobs on an irregular basis, the 24-year-old decided to take a chance to try to earn some money to put food on the table.
Continue reading...The figure given by the strip’s health officials does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses, excluding those missing or buried in rubble
Dalia Hawas was 24 years old when an Israeli airstrike flattened the apartment building where she lived in February, burying the young mother with her 10-month-old daughter, Mona. They are not listed among Gaza’s war dead, because their bodies were trapped too deep beneath the rubble for rescue teams to reach them.
Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians and the total represents nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or one in every 50 residents.
Continue reading...Protests reflect anger at 31-year-old’s killing, as well as a failure to address the daily struggles faced by many women
At the stroke of midnight, thousands of women holding flaming torches and blowing conch shells began to march through dark streets across the state of West Bengal.
The processions in the early hours of the morning on Thursday 15 August, India’s Independence Day, were part of several days of protest against the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor inside a hospital in the state capital, Kolkata, last week.
Continue reading...Kyiv’s push into Russia has psychological and political advantages, but it knows Putin cannot let it lie
Nine days into Ukraine’s incursion into Russia, and Kyiv is showing increasing confidence. Two soldiers, speaking off the record by a dusty roadside a few miles from the border, said they expected logistics functions to be brought forward “inside Russia” because supply lines were becoming stretched.
Though it is a fragmentary detail – being more specific would endanger life – it demonstrates that as Ukraine’s forces continue to advance into Kursk oblast, Kyiv is gradually becoming more committed to an incursion that may have begun brightly, but the eventual outcome of which remains profoundly uncertain.
Continue reading...Brian Niccol, who was poached from Chipotle, will get package worth four times that of his predecessor
The new chief executive of Starbucks is in line for a sign-on pay package worth up to $113m (£88m), in one of the largest such executive deals in corporate history and which is four times larger than that of his predecessor. .
The American coffee chain poached the boss of Chipotle Mexican Grill, Brian Niccol, naming him as its new chief executive this week in a surprise management shake-up, ousting Laxman Narasimhan from the job after just 17 months.
Continue reading...News follows scrapping of two other Atlantic windfarms and axing of hundreds of jobs as costs surge
The Danish company developing the world’s largest offshore windfarm in the North Sea has been forced to delay a major project off the north-east coast of the US, months after cancelling two nearby developments and cutting hundreds of jobs.
Ørsted has pushed back the start of commercial operations at its 704 megawatt Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut by a year, to 2026.
Continue reading...Meta has system for evaluating the effectiveness of its own moderation for Arabic language content but not Hebrew
Meta is struggling with moderating content related to the Israel-Palestine war, particularly in Hebrew, despite recent changes to internal policies, new documents have revealed.
Internal policy guidelines shared with the Guardian by a former Meta employee who worked on content moderation outline a multilayered process for moderating content related to the conflict. But the documents indicate Meta, which owns the platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, does not have the same processes in place to gauge the accuracy of moderation of Hebrew content and Arabic content.
Continue reading...Justice minister signs extradition order for Megaupload founder 12 years after FBI-ordered raid over filesharing site
Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.
German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review.
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