Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Former French president denies accusation that role given to second wife Cécilia Attias was ‘fictitious’
Nicolas Sarkozy has been hit by claims his ex-wife was given a well-paid fictitious job as a part-time parliamentary assistant while he was in government.
Cécilia Attias, the former French president’s second wife, was reportedly employed as an assistant to the woman who stood in for Sarkozy as a centre-right MP in the national assembly when he was promoted to interior minister under president Jacques Chirac in 2002.
President decides against relocating remains of French poet to Parisian memorial
The remains of the famed French poet Arthur Rimbaud will not be moved to the Panthéon mausoleum despite a campaign to honour him as an artist and symbol of gay rights, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has decided.
A petition last year backed by a number of celebrities as well as the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, called for Rimbaud to be reinterred alongside his lover and fellow poet Paul Verlaine at the monument in central Paris.
About 60 cases recorded of workers being hurt recorded at airport, which has been plagued with problems
Baggage handlers at Berlin’s new airport have reported receiving electric shocks from scanners in yet another problem to befall the troubled project, which is widely seen as an engineering catastrophe.
About 60 incidents of electric shocks have been reported since the airport opened its doors on 31 October last year, nine years behind schedule and more than €4bn (£3.6bn) over budget, according to the trade union Verdi. Affected workers have complained of significant pain, dizziness and numbness, and ambulances have been called on four occasions this month.
Andrei Konchalovsky’s account of the day Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on strikers is a rage-filled triumph
Anger burns a hole through the screen in this stark monochrome picture from veteran director Andrei Konchalovsky: a gruelling re-enactment of the hushed-up Novocherkassk massacre in western Russia in 1962, when Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on unarmed striking workers, killing an estimated 80 people. It was a day of spiritual nausea for the Soviet Union, which had only just entered Khrushchev’s new de-Stalinised era of supposed enlightenment – a postwar civilian bloodbath that was the Soviets’ Sharpeville, or Kent State, or Bloody Sunday, or indeed the Corpus Christi massacre in Mexico City that featured in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
Yuliya Vysotskaya – a longtime Konchalovsky player – plays Lyuda, a Communist party official and single mother who lives in a tiny flat in Novocherkassk with her 18-year-old daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova) and grizzled old dad (Sergei Erlish). There are terrible food shortages, yet Lyuda is a loyal and uncomplaining party member who not so secretly pines for the good old days of Josef Stalin, when the Soviet Union was bathed in glorious wartime destiny and when things seemed to be better all round. Now she is having a furtive affair with a cynical and bleary married committee official who doesn’t even seem to like her very much.
Thousands of people, many fleeing persecution and conflict, will risk everything this year, seeking a new life of freedom and opportunity
In 2020, tens of thousands of migrants crossed desert and sea, climbed mountains and walked through forests to reach what has become an increasingly inhospitable Europe. Many of them died, overwhelmed by the waves, or tortured in the detention centres of Libya. More were displaced after the flames of Moria refugee camp in Greece burned everything they had.
As a new year begins, so do the journeys of tens of thousands more people seeking a new life overseas. The Guardian has spoken to experts, charity workers and NGOs about the challenges and risks they face on the main migration routes into Europe.
Pre-prepared disaster plans for handling pandemics, natural disasters and terrorist attacks show London had 3,500 mortuary spaces. But the capital braced for the virus with an additional 12,000 mortuary spaces.
If cemeteries could not cope, bodies would be frozen to await their final committal. There were plans to transport scores of bodies at a time between storage locations in trucks, the official said, a practice that risks misidentifying or even losing the dead:
England’s high street pharmacies will begin rolling out Covid vaccines, as the virus death toll across the UK climbed above 100,000.
Boots and Superdrug branches will be among the six stores across England which will be able to administer the jabs from Thursday while the Government aims to hit its target of vaccinating all people in the four most vulnerable groups by the middle of next month.
Andrews Pharmacy in Macclesfield, Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, north London, Woodside Pharmacy in Telford and Appleton Village pharmacy in Widnes will be in the first group to hand out the injections, alongside Boots in Halifax, and Superdrug in Guildford.
Boris Johnson also told MPs that distribution “will be going to 24/7 as soon as we can” but said supply of doses remained the main barrier.
The Scottish Government published its vaccine delivery plan on Wednesday evening, including details of how many doses it expects to receive for each week until the end of May, prompting a row with London, which has declined to publish its numbers.
The six pharmacies have been picked because they can deliver large volumes of the vaccine and allow for social distancing, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock said it was “fantastic” that jabs would be available on the high street.
“Pharmacies sit at the heart of local communities and will make a big difference to our rollout programme by providing even more local, convenient places for those that are eligible to get their jab,” he said.
By the end of the month more than 200 community chemists will be able to give vaccines, according to NHS England.
The pharmacies join the 200 hospitals, around 800 GP clinics and seven mass vaccination centres where jabs are already being handed out.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged ministers to go further and use England’s 11,500 pharmacies to deliver round-the-clock vaccinations by the end of next month.
The expanded vaccination service in England comes as the daily reported UK death toll reached a new high on Wednesday, with 1,564 fatalities recorded within 28 days of a positive test.
The latest figures meant the grim milestone of more than 100,000 deaths involving coronavirus has now been passed in the UK, according to official data.
Wood pellets are sold as a clean alternative to coal. But is the subsidised bioenergy boom accelerating the climate crisis?
Kalev Järvik stands on a bald patch of land in the heart of Estonia’s Haanja nature reserve and remembers when he could walk straight from one side of the reserve to the other under a canopy of trees.
Järvik has lived in the Haanja uplands in the southern county of Võru for more than 10 years. His closeness to the forest has shaped his life as a carpenter and the fortunes of the surrounding villages, with their handicraft traditions – a substitute for farming on the poor arable land. Upcountry, travel literature promotes the region to city dwellers, promising its ancient woodlands as a place to rest and reinvigorate the mind.
Following Trump’s Twitter ban, Polish government wants to protect posts that do not break nation’s laws
Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump’s social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there.
“Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. “There can be no consent to censorship.”
Export firms point to post-Brexit delays around health certificates, IT systems and missing customs papers
Deliveries of Scottish seafood to the EU from smaller companies have been halted until Monday, 18 January, after post-Brexit problems with health checks, IT systems and customs documents caused a huge backlog.
Scottish fishing has been plunged into crisis, as lorry-loads of live seafood and some fish destined for shops and restaurants in France, Spain and other countries have been rejected because they are taking too long to arrive.
Jordan launched a Covid-19 vaccination campaign on Wednesday, beginning with jabs for healthcare workers, people with chronic illnesses and those over the age of 60.
The kingdom said on Saturday that it had granted an “emergency licence” for the use of China’s Sinopharm vaccine, the second vaccine it approved after the US-German Pfizer-BioNTech.
The coronavirus mutation first found in Britain has now spread to 50 territories, according to the World Health Organization, while a similar South African-identified strain has now been found in 20.
The UN body also noted a third new coronavirus “variant of concern” found in Japan may impact upon immune response and needs further investigation.
Move paves way for high-protein maggot-like insect to be approved for consumption across Europe
Yellow mealworm finger foods, smoothies, biscuits, pasta and burgers could soon be mass produced across Europe after the insect became the first to be found safe for human consumption by the EU food safety agency.
The delicacies may not be advisable for everyone, however. Those with prawn and dustmite allergies are likely to suffer a reaction to the Tenebrio molitor larvae, whether eaten in powder form as part of a recipe or as a crunchy snack, perhaps dipped in chocolate.
Prime minister resigns after party named as suspect in inquiry into property project
Estonia’s prime minister has resigned after police and prosecutors launched an investigation into an alleged corruption scandal involving his left-leaning Centre party related to a property development.
Jüri Ratas, the prime minister since 2016, handed his resignation letter to the president on Wednesday, local media reported, bringing down the centre-right coalition government he heads that also includes a far-right party.
With multi-platinum No 1 albums including topics such as suicide and the psychology of paedophiles, the Congolese-Belgian MC has carved his own lane with total determination
‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”
This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.
Relentless and escalating programme of refugee evictions amounts to a campaign of harassment, say activists
Shortly before sunrise on 9 January, about 40 officers and officials gathered outside Calais police station as temperatures dipped to -3C (26.6F). Shortly after, in a well-drilled procedure, a nine-vehicle convoy started down the road towards the first of five forced evictions of makeshift refugee camps planned for that morning.
When the convoy arrived at the camp, just a few miles from the city centre, masked police in black uniforms chased refugees away from their tents and belongings. Some of the other 150 refugees who had been sheltering at the camp had already packed and fled before authorities arrived. Soon the camp was empty; frost-covered sleeping bags and jackets were all that remained.
Dutch TV news has aired footage of customs officers confiscating ham sandwiches from drivers arriving by ferry from the UK under post-Brexit rules banning personal imports of meat and dairy products into the EU.
Shown on the current affairs programme EenVandaag, officials wearing hi-vis jackets explained to startled car and lorry drivers at the Hook of Holland ferry terminal that since Brexit, “you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe ...” A bemused driver with several sandwiches wrapped in tin foil asked if he could surrender the meat and keep the bread. One customs officer replied: “No, everything will be confiscated. Welcome to Brexit, sir, I’m sorry.”
The ban came into force on New Year’s Day as the Brexit transition period came to an end, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) saying travellers should “use, consume, or dispose of” prohibited items at or before the border
The family of a photojournalist held in Syria must raise a multimillion-dollar ransom after the Danish government refuses to negotiate
Over the last couple of decades, Danish cinema has increasingly proved to have a strong aptitude for emotive, nuanced drama and intelligent engagement, particularly through documentary-making, with conflicts abroad. This inspired-by-a-true-story feature, from journeyman director Niels Arden Oplev (who helmed the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film) skilfully combines those two strands to tell the story of Daniel Rye, a young Danish photographer who was captured by Isis in Syria in 2013.
Filmed in a wiggly, handheld fashion – such a signature of the Dogma 95 years it almost feels like a retro affectation – the plot tracks methodically through Daniel’s story, holding tight on the expressive face of Esben Smed, who rises to the physical challenges of the role. For starters, he has to convincingly pass as Rye when he was young enough to be a contender for the Danish gymnastics team, although presumably a stuntman performed most of the acrobatics we see.
Ireland emerged from a six-week lockdown in early December with the European Union’s lowest coronavirus infection rate.
It eased restrictions in belief it could contain a rise in the virus over Christmas unlike, say, Germany and the UK, countries that had more than four times the level of infection. Then all hell broke loose.
Personal imports of meat and dairy products banned from EU since Brexit transition ended
Dutch TV news has aired footage of customs officers confiscating ham sandwiches from drivers arriving by ferry from the UK under post-Brexit rules banning personal imports of meat and dairy products into the EU.
Officials wearing high-visibility jackets are shown explaining to startled car and lorry drivers at the Hook of Holland ferry terminal that since Brexit, “you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe, like meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, that kind of stuff.”
French president vows to overhaul France-Africa event to help mobilise Africa’s young people
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has pledged to invite young Africans rather than their political leaders to a key France-Africa summit in a video call with the actor Idris Elba.
The Élysée Palace said Elba, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ international fund for agricultural development, had asked to speak to the French leader. The Guardian was the only newspaper invited to attend the discussion at the Élysée, which marked the start of the One Planet biodiversity summit in Paris.
Proposals would allow only Dutch residents to enter city’s 166 marijuana-selling coffee shops
Foreigners face being banned from Amsterdam’s cannabis coffee shops as part of wide-ranging plans to discourage organised crime and cut back on drugs tourism that have drawn mixed reactions from residents and business owners.
Backed by police and prosecutors, the city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, has tabled proposals allowing only Dutch residents to enter its 166 marijuana-selling coffee shops, with the measure likely to come into force sometime next year.