Angelo Gafa says all those who masterminded killing of Maltese journalist now apprehended or charged
Every person involved in the 2017 murder of the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has been apprehended, Malta’s national police chief has declared.
Commissioner Angelo Gafa was speaking before a court hearing on Wednesday evening at which two new suspects were arraigned.
Continue reading...Why there may be more to the announcement of Covid-inspired cuts than meets the eye
Here comes another bank that has decided, apparently definitively, that working practices will not return to their pre-pandemic norms. Lloyds Banking Group says it plans to shed 20% of its office space. Earlier this week, HSBC said it would get rid of 40%.
These figures are so dramatic that they invite suspicion. Have managements really come to the firm view that working from home is so popular that employees’ demands for flexibility must be granted? Or did these banks have too much office space in the first place and now wish to save a few quid?
Continue reading...Greek tourism minister says he hopes to ‘dovetail’ with Boris Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown
Greece is in “technical” talks with the UK over allowing Britons carrying a vaccine passport to travel to its tourist hotspots from May despite concerns in Brussels and other EU capitals.
Haris Theoharis, the country’s tourism minister, said he hoped to “dovetail” with Boris Johnson’s roadmap for allowing Britons to travel but refused to be drawn on whether Greece would break with Brussels to establish the scheme.
Continue reading...Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador, puts PM’s handling of pandemic alongside Donald Trump’s
Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says in a new book.
She also claims some Brexiters are consumed with hatred for Germany and gripped by a myth that they liberated Europe on their own, describing Brexit as a triumph of emotion over reason, won by a campaign full of lies in which negative attitudes to migration were exploited by figures such as Johnson and Michael Gove.
Continue reading...Scène de rue à Montmartre has been part of same French family’s private collection for more than a century
A major Paris work by Vincent van Gogh that has been part of the same French family’s private collection for more than a century is to go on public display for the first time since it was painted in the spring of 1887.
Scène de rue à Montmartre is part of a very rare series depicting the celebrated Moulin de la Galette, on the hilltop overlooking the capital, painted during the two years the Dutch artist spent sharing an apartment with his brother Theo on rue Lepic.
Continue reading...Eyad al-Gharib found guilty of aiding and abetting a crime against humanity
A court in Germany has found a former Syrian regime official guilty of being an accomplice to crimes against humanity, in a historic first victory for efforts worldwide to bring legal accountability for atrocities committed in Syria’s long war.
Eyad al-Gharib, a 44-year-old former colonel in the Syrian intelligence service, carried out orders in one of Bashar al-Assad’s notorious prisons.
Continue reading...Temporary decision by Green mayor of Lyon to take meat off menu met by protests
A decision by the Green mayor of Lyon, seen by many as the country’s culinary capital, to temporarily take meat off the menu in school canteens during the coronavirus pandemic has sparked a major political row in France.
Government ministers have accused the mayor, Grégory Doucet, of “ideological” and “elitist” behaviour after the measure, which is also being studied by several other cities including Paris, came into force in Lyon’s schools on Monday.
Continue reading...After Italy’s government loosened Covid-19 restrictions in much of the country – including Lazio, the region that contains Rome and Vatican City – newly reopened museums are offering local visitors the opportunity to enjoy artworks undisturbed by the usual crowds of international tourists
Continue reading...Expected shortfall of 90m doses could hit the EU’s ability to meet its target of vaccinating 70% of adults by summer
AstraZeneca has told the European Union it expects to deliver less than half the Covid-19 vaccines it was contracted to supply in the second quarter, an EU official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Contacted by Reuters, AstraZeneca did not deny what the official said, but a statement late in the day said the company was striving to increase productivity to deliver the promised 180m doses.
Continue reading...In letter to Tehran, human rights advocate outlines six-month investigation into disaster
Many high level Iranian officials should be charged for the shooting down of a Ukrainian commercial airliner in January 2020, a UN human rights expert has said, describing the killing of the 176 people aboard as a “profound and serious indictment” of the country’s civil and military authorities.
Agnès Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, delivered a 45-page letter to the Iranian government which was made public on Tuesday, outlining her findings from a six-month investigation into the disaster, and complaining about the lack of Iranian cooperation, which has left many of her questions unanswered.
Continue reading...Monument in north Africa commemorates the fascist leader’s earlier role in the Rif war of the 1920s
The last public statue in Spain of the former dictator Francisco Franco has been removed from the city gates of Melilla, a Spanish enclave and autonomous city on the north-west African coast.
Without much fanfare, a group of workmen took down the statue on Tuesday, using a mechanical digger and heavy drills to chip away at the brick platform on which the statue stood, before lifting it off by a chain around its neck and carting it away in bubblewrap on a pickup truck.
Continue reading...French star is being investigated over an incident with a female actor at his Paris home in 2018
The French actor Gérard Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault, allegedly committed in 2018 against an actor in her 20s, a judicial source told AFP on Tuesday.
An initial investigation into the rape accusations against Depardieu, 72, was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence but reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges filed in December, the source said.
Continue reading...Spectacular eruptions of red lava from Mount Etna, on the Italian island of Sicily, continued overnight from Monday into Tuesday, illuminating the night sky. The volcano’s lava fountains soared to 1,500 metres, according to the Etna Observatory at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology
Continue reading...Test developed in France is as accurate as PCR test and does not require lab processing
French researchers have developed a coronavirus test that they say delivers results three times faster than rapid lateral flow antigen tests with – according to initial trial data – almost the same accuracy as more reliable, but slower, PCR tests.
The electrochemical test, which uses nanobodies taken from the camelid group of animals, returns a result within 10 minutes and, in an early test of 300 samples, proved 90% as accurate as a PCR test for both positive and negative results. It is being developed by scientists at Lille and Marseille universities and from the French national scientific research centre CNRS.
Continue reading...Linguist who compiled list of words says they help tell story of life during pandemic
From coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to Coronafrisur (corona hairstyle), a German project is documenting the huge number of new words coined in the last year as the language races to keep up with lives radically changed by the pandemic.
The list, compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, an organisation that documents German language in the past and present, already comprises more than 1,200 new German words – many more than the 200 seen in an average year.
Continue reading...Europe’s most active volcano produces one of most striking eruptions in decades
Mount Etna’s spectacular eruptions reached a peak on Monday when the volcano’s lava fountains soared to 1,500 metres – a display described by one expert as “one of the most striking in the last few decades”.
Europe’s most active volcano has been on explosive form in recent weeks, spewing incandescent magma and a copious shower of ash, reaching as far as Catania.
Continue reading...Universities say they have received inadequate guidance on red tape and costs for academic years abroad
Thousands of UK students hoping to spend the year abroad are caught in limbo after facing major disruption to their travel plans due to post-Brexit red tape and costs, in respect of which universities say they received inadequate guidance from the government.
Coordinators of academic years abroad who spoke to the Guardian said there had been limited information from the Foreign Office ahead of Brexit on the onerous requirements that the shift in their status would incur in EU countries.
Continue reading...Millions of Soviet citizens were sent to vast network of prison camps under Stalin. Now their descendants seek recompense
Alisa Meissner is paying to this day for the Soviet Union’s decision to exile her whole family from Moscow for their German heritage.
She still lives in a town just 30 miles from the gulag village where her family were sent in the 1940s after the outbreak of the second world war. And despite the rehabilitation of her exiled family, the denunciation of Joseph Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union, she has never been able to leave.
Continue reading...Spanish authorities have rescued several people who had been hiding in recycling containers in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the tip of Morocco, where each year thousands of migrants attempt to reach the Spanish mainland from northern Africa. Footage released by Spain’s Guardia Civil shows individuals partially buried in a container of glass bottles and another inside a bag of toxic ash
Continue reading...Luca Attanasio and two others killed in attempted kidnapping north of Goma in eastern DRC
Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two other people have been killed in an attack on a United Nations convoy in the restive east of the central African country.
The convoy from the World Food Programme (WFP) was attacked at about 10.30am local time (0830 GMT) during an attempted kidnapping near the town of Kanyamahoro, about 10 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, a spokesperson for Virunga national park said.
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