Marc Feren Claude Biart was betrayed by failing to hide his distinctive tattoos in the clip
A mafia fugitive has been caught in the Caribbean after appearing on YouTube cooking videos in which he hid his face but inadvertently showed his distinctive tattoos.
Marc Feren Claude Biart, 53, led a quiet life in Boca Chica, in the Dominican Republic, with the local Italian expat community considering him a “foreigner”, police said in a statement on Monday.
Continue reading...Chancellor complains her government does not yet have power to impose national lockdown
Angela Merkel has threatened to centralise Germany’s pandemic response as several of the country’s federal states refuse to implement an emergency brake mechanism on easing restrictions in spite of rapidly rising infection rates.
Related: Heroes to zeros: how German perfectionism wrecked its Covid vaccine drive
Continue reading...Billionaire Petr Kellner among five killed including guests, pilot and guides, with one survivor
Petr Kellner, the Czech Republic’s richest man, was one of five people killed when their helicopter crashed on a skiing trip in Alaska.
The 56-year-old was among the passengers and pilot killed on Saturday in the crash near Knik glacier north-east of Anchorage, Alaska state troopers said. One survivor was taken to hospital, they said, adding the group had been on a heliski tour.
Continue reading...Servier accused of covering up potentially fatal side-effects of the Mediator diabetes drug
A French court has fined one of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical firms €2.7m (£2.3m) after finding it guilty of deception and manslaughter over a pill linked to the deaths of up to 2,000 people.
In one of the biggest medical scandals in France, the privately owned laboratory Servier was accused of covering up the potentially fatal side-effects of the widely prescribed drug Mediator.
Continue reading...After bottles were recovered in top shape from a first world war shipwreck, winemakers have started to exploit the sea’s cool, dark environment
Slipping into the chilly waters of the Baltic sea, the divers descended more than 60 metres to where the masts of the Jönköping lay strewn across the seabed. They glided past the wounds left when the Swedish schooner was sunk by a German U-boat in 1916 to home in on the rare treasure they had come for: thousands of bottles of 1907 Heidsieck champagne.
Related: Champagne found at sea turns out to be world's oldest vintage
Continue reading...Dutch Green Business, which plants trees for carbon capture, says ex-Ukip leader will ‘facilitate introductions’
He has criticised Greta Thunberg for “alarmism” and wind power as “economic insanity” – but Nigel Farage appears to have made a U-turn on climate change, after signing up as a lobbyist for a Dutch green finance firm, in his first commercial role outside frontline politics.
Dutch Green Business Group, which is listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange, said it had appointed Farage to its new advisory board. The eurosceptic and former Ukip leader will “facilitate introductions to politicians and business leaders in the UK and around the world” while also acting as a spokesman for the company, it said in a press release.
Continue reading...European commission president accused of focusing too much on UK and domestic German image
Forging unity within the European Union is rarely easy for a president of the European commission but Ursula von der Leyen managed at least to bring together two strange bedfellows in recent days.
When Jean-Claude Juncker, her predecessor in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, took aim at the EU’s error-strewn vaccine strategy last week, it prompted a tweet of appreciation from Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to Boris Johnson and key architect of Brexit.
Continue reading...Performance at Palau Sant Jordi concert hall in Barcelona on Saturday night recalls pre-pandemic times
If one overlooked the white face masks dotting the tightly packed crowd of music lovers, it was almost like pre-pandemic times in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi concert hall Saturday night.
Five thousand rock fans enjoyed a real-as-can-be concert after passing a same-day coronavirus screening to test its effectiveness in preventing outbreaks of the virus at large cultural events.
Continue reading...Archaeologists have discovered foundations of the previously unknown structure in the city’s Letná park
The colossal monument to Joseph Stalin that towered over Prague at the height of the cold war stood as a frightening reminder of the Soviet dictator’s tyranny and communism’s seemingly unshakeable grip on the former Czechoslovakia.
Nearly 60 years after its demolition, the brooding 15.5-metre (51ft) shrine retains a hold on the popular imagination, with locals referring to the now popular meeting point where it once stood as “Stalin’s”.
Continue reading...Beacon hospital chief is believed to have sent his children to St Gerard’s school, where staff received jabs
The Irish health minister has moved to suspend coronavirus vaccines from being given at a private hospital in Dublin after it used spare doses to vaccinate teachers at a fee-paying school.
Stephen Donnelly said it was “completely unacceptable” and has asked the Health Service Executive (HSE) to suspend vaccinations at the Beacon hospital, with the exception of already scheduled appointments.
Continue reading...Coverage on recent struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cardiff Bay to Thailand
Continue reading...Activists seek ban on flying horses to Japan with thousands sent every year from Canada and France
Tens of thousands of horses are being subjected to long-haul flights, confined in crates with no food or water, to meet demand for horsemeat in Japan.
Since 2013, about 40,000 live horses have been flown to Japan from airports in western Canada. Under Canadian regulations, the journey can stretch up to 28 hours, during which the animals are allowed to go without food, water or rest.
Continue reading...Beijing wants to silence critics of its treatment of Uighurs. But the impact will be broader
China’s response to criticisms of horrifying human rights violations in Xinjiang is clear and calculated. Its aims are threefold. First, the sanctions imposed upon individuals and institutions in the EU and UK are direct retaliation for those imposed upon China over its treatment of Uighurs. That does not mean they are like-for-like: the EU and UK measures targeted officials responsible for human rights abuses, while these target non-state actors – elected politicians, thinktanks, lawyers and academics – simply for criticising those abuses.
Second, they seek more broadly to deter any criticism over Xinjiang, where Beijing denies any rights violations. Third, they appear to be intended to send a message to the EU, UK and others not to fall in line with the harsher US approach towards China generally. Beijing sees human rights concerns as a pretext for defending western hegemony, pointing to historic and current abuses committed by its critics. But mostly it believes it no longer needs to tolerate challenges.
Continue reading...Report says France did not do enough to halt the 1994 killings but found no evidence of complicity
France bears the burden of “heavy and damning responsibilities” in the Rwandan genocide but was not complicit in the slaughter, according to the findings of an official commission set up by Emmanuel Macron.
As many as 800,000 people, mainly from Rwanda’s minority Tutsi ethnic population, were massacred in a wave of killings in 1994. The report released on Friday confirmed long and persistent accusations that France did not do enough to halt the killings, but said there was no evidence of complicity in the massacres.
Continue reading...Concerns for animals’ welfare if Ever Given blockage crisis is protracted
At least 20 of the boats delayed due to a stricken container ship in the Suez canal are carrying livestock, according to marine tracking data, raising concerns about the welfare of the animals if the logjam becomes protracted.
The 220,000-ton Ever Given is causing the longest closure of the Suez canal in decades with more than 200 ships estimated to be unable to pass, and incoming vessels diverting around southern Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
Continue reading...EU will not be blackmailed over Oxford/AstraZeneca doses, says foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian
The war of words with the EU over vaccines has escalated as France’s foreign minister claimed Britain will struggle to source second Covid jabs but that Brussels would not be “blackmailed” into exporting doses to solve the problem.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, a close political ally of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, claimed that the UK’s success had been built on driving forward with first jabs without having secured the second doses necessary for full vaccination.
Continue reading...Sighting in Primorye region said to show success of fight against poachers and steps to boost species population
Russian conservationists have hailed a rare sighting of an Amur leopard mother with three cubs in the far-eastern region of Primorye as proof of the efficiency of the country’s efforts to boost the population of the endangered species.
Scientists in a Russian national park in Primorye on the border with China obtained the images using a remote camera trap. The video footage shows the feline family standing on top of a hill in the Land of the Leopard national park.
Continue reading...Raw-milk product normally sold only to restaurants or visitors to Cîteaux Abbey is marketed online
A French monastery in the heart of Burgundy has launched an emergency online sale to get rid of thousands of its artisanal cheeses, which are languishing in its cellars as Covid-19 keeps buyers away.
The Cîteaux Abbey, just south of Dijon, birthplace of the Cistercian Catholic order, usually sells its raw-milk, semi-soft discs only to restaurants or visitors to its on-site shop. But a drop in demand since the coronavirus crisis erupted last year has left the abbey’s 19 Trappist monks with 4,000 cheeses too many, a 2.8-tonne problem.
Continue reading...A powerful battery of drones, thermal cameras and heartbeat detectors are being deployed to exclude asylum seekers
Khaled has been playing “the game” for a year now. A former law student, he left Afghanistan in 2018, driven by precarious economic circumstances and fear for his security, as the Taliban were increasingly targeting Kabul.
But when he reached Europe, he realised the chances at winning the game were stacked against him. Getting to Europe’s borders was easy compared with actually crossing into the EU, he says, and there were more than physical obstacles preventing him from getting to Germany, where his uncle and girlfriend live.
Continue reading...British overseas territory is positioning itself as real-time case study in relaxing restrictions
This month Gibraltar’s health minister snapped a photo from her first dinner out in months, showing two glasses of red wine sitting prominently on the table and a face mask cast off in the background. “Operation freedom begins,” tweeted Samantha Sacramento alongside the photo.
Operation Freedom, the name given to Gibraltar’s vaccination programme, is now closing in on its target: in the coming days the British overseas territory will become one of the first places in the world where every willing resident over the age of 16 has been fully vaccinated.
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