by Photographs by John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images on (#5G657)
The village of Fadiouth lies on an island of clam shells, with a footbridge connecting it to mainland Senegal. Senegal as a whole in majority Muslim, but on the island of Fadiouth the population is around 90% Christian Continue reading...
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the end of a snap lockdown in response to the Brisbane Covid outbreak, but some coronavirus restrictions were expanded to the entire state in time for the Easter public holiday long weekend. Here’s what you need to know
Decades of persecution has left the Shia minority with little space left in its graveyards but prime minister Imran Khan is in no hurry to listenAhmed Shah had always dreamed of bigger things. Though just 17, the high school pupil had taken a job in the coalmines of Balochistan, Pakistan’s south-western province, one of the harshest, most dangerous working environments in the world. Shah was determined to earn enough to educate himself, so he could escape the tough life of the Hazara Shia community, the most persecuted minority in Pakistan.Related: In Pakistan, tolerant Islamic voices are being silenced | William Dalrymple Continue reading...
Has your daily walk become an endless trudge to nowhere? These podcasts, chosen by comedians, podcasters, Guardian writers and readers, are guaranteed to bring a smile to your face
Back with a political reworking of Can You Feel It, brothers Tito, Marlon and Jackie talk about their legendarily tough father, their memories of Michael and why they always hope for another massive hitCan You Feel It is one of the great disco songs. Now the Jacksons are determined to remind us that it is also one of the great political songs, with its call for “all the colours of the world” to unite and tell the “marching men who are killing their brothers” that we all share the same blood.Forty years after first charting, Can You Feel It has been reworked to include clips from speeches by Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, part of a project to expand the band’s six albums for Epic with remixes and bonus tracks. It makes perfect sense to have MLK and Obama guesting on the song, Tito Jackson says today: “They are the two best rappers in the world.” Tito and Jackie, the oldest brother, laugh. They are Zooming from Las Vegas, where they both live. Both are youthful and run off high-energy batteries. Tito, whose three sons make up the group 3T, is wearing his customary bowler hat – he says it’s the first thing he puts on when he gets up, and the last thing he takes off at night. Jackie, who has been married three times and has four children, is smartly dressed and smiley. It’s hard to believe they are approaching 70. Continue reading...
Easing of measures announced as Queensland celebrates an Easter tourism surgeA mask mandate and other snap coronavirus restrictions will be lifted across northern New South Wales after the fourth day of no community transmission.About 200,000 residents in the region have been required to wear masks in most indoor public areas and limit house gatherings to no more than 30 since Wednesday. Continue reading...
India has the world’s third-highest number of cases after the US and BrazilIndia recorded 103,558 new Covid cases on Monday, its biggest ever one-day figure, data from the health ministry showed – taking the national total to 12.59 million cases.
Women are challenging largely male political class as fears grow ‘dinosaurs’ of Libyan politics will try to cling on to powerLibyan civil activists led by an increasingly assertive group of women are demanding their country’s largely male political class stick to their commitment to hold parliamentary and presidential elections on 24 December, the 70th anniversary of Libya’s independence.The interim government of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, which was made possible by a ceasefire sealed in October, was sworn in on 15 March. Continue reading...
In mandatory Covid isolation, art director David Marriott is making the most of his design skills – and lifting morale at the same timeTen days into his fortnight of mandatory quarantine in a Brisbane hotel, David Marriott sits in his room caressing the mane of his horse, Russell, as he looks out on the overcast city.A used poke bowl sits on Marriott’s head, in the style of a cowboy hat. He’s also wearing a vest and chaps – attire he fashioned out of the brown paper bags that carried the meals dropped at his door. Continue reading...
Former deputy PM’s comments come after Andrew Laming forced to have training following complaints about his behaviour towards womenThe Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has cast doubt on government-ordered empathy training, saying you can’t “redesign people’s brains” to learn an “innate” skill.The former deputy prime minister has also questioned whether parliament’s hostile environment is conducive to empathetic behaviour, saying it is a more “difficult” workplace than that of the corporate world. Continue reading...
Maintenance worker issues tearful apology as investigations continue into what caused vehicle to slide down embankmentA maintenance worker whose runaway truck sparked Taiwan’s worst rail disaster in recent decades made a tearful apology on Sunday as investigators said the train driver had little time to react to the collision.At least 50 people were killed and more than 200 were injured in Friday’s crash, which sent a packed eight-carriage train hurtling into the sides of a narrow tunnel near the eastern coastal city of Hualien. Continue reading...
Christa Avery and Matthew O’Kane are on their way home home after being released without chargeAn Australian couple have been freed from house arrest in Myanmar and allowed to leave the country without charge, one of the two business consultants said on Sunday.Christa Avery and her husband, Matthew O’Kane, were refused permission to leave Myanmar last month when they were about to board a flight home. Continue reading...
BMW is understood to have been involved in a collision with another car in Brownhills, West MidlandsA two-week-old baby boy has died after his pram was hit by a car on the pavement.West Midlands police said they believed a BMW had been in a collision with another car in Brownhills area before hitting the pram at about 4pm on Easter Sunday. Continue reading...
by Peter Walker Political correspondent on (#5G5YP)
Party says rules should be widened to include ‘in-house’ roles such as that carried out by David CameronThe law must be changed to prevent the type of lobbying undertaken by David Cameron on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill, Labour has argued, after more details emerged about the extent of Greensill’s influence inside Cameron’s government.Only external lobbyists who deal with the government are required to be on a formal industry register, and not so-called “in-house” lobbyists like Cameron, who took an advocacy role for Greensill Capital after leaving Downing Street. Continue reading...
Abiy Ahmed had previously declared operations against insurgents a rapid and decisive successEthiopian military forces are now fighting a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war in the northern Tigray region, prime minister Abiy Ahmed has admitted.His comments mark a sharp break with previous insistence that military operations launched in November had been a rapid and decisive success. Continue reading...
The mood in the South Australian city one of cautious optimism – ‘for the first time in many years, the steelworks is in the black’Whyalla is a manufacturing town, a place of hi-vis vests, of old-school manufacturing grunt. A city where, from some angles, the steelworks dominate the skyline.There’s a new and spectacular circular jetty that everyone wants you to see, and big plans to develop the foreshore, which slopes to a glittering sea. Continue reading...
Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate changeOur cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool down. Instead, we could have buildings that are intimately connected to the living systems that have evolved with us, that celebrate the human-nature connection that is central to our wellbeing.As more of us in Australia live in urban areas and our cities grow, bringing nature into our cities is a key part of establishing and rebuilding that connection. As well as bringing beauty into urban environments, we know that people are healthier when they are connected to nature. Research also shows that crime rates decrease in areas with street trees and that property values increase. Continue reading...
West Midlands police confirm animals put down after attacking Lucille DownerTwo dogs have been “humanely destroyed” after killing an 85-year-old woman in a sustained garden attack.Lucille Downer received multiple injuries in the incident on Friday afternoon in Rowley Regis and was pronounced dead shortly after the arrival of emergency services. Her family said they would “miss her dearly”. Continue reading...
Opponents of military rule hand out eggs bearing protest messages as death toll from turmoil reaches 557Opponents of military rule in Myanmar inscribed messages of protest on Easter eggs on Sunday while thousands of others were back on the streets denouncing February’s coup and facing off with the security forces, who shot and killed at least three men.In the latest in a series of impromptu shows of defiance, messages including “Spring revolution”, “We must win” and “Get out MAH” – referring to the junta’s leader, Gen Min Aung Hlaing – were written on eggs. Continue reading...
Ten years after the indignados took to the streets, the fortunes of their political heirs are flaggingSpain’s regional elections in May 2011 were a lively affair, to say the least. As post-crash austerity led to soaring unemployment and abject poverty for millions, the indignados movement was born, filling Madrid and other cities with protesters night after night. It was out of this ferment of discontent and anti-capitalist idealism that the Podemos party was born, quickly rivalling and briefly threatening to surpass the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party as the country’s main leftwing force.Ten years on, political drama is on the cards again, as Madrid goes to the polls on 4 May. The conservative regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has called a snap election to consolidate her majority, after threatening manoeuvres from a junior coalition partner. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, has stepped down from his role as a deputy prime minister in Spain’s socialist-led government to take her on. The Madrid region has been run by the right since 1995, so Mr Iglesias has his work cut out. He has suggested his candidacy is motivated by a need to head off a possible extreme-right administration in the capital, which could include the far-right Vox party. But there are almost certainly other considerations at work as well. Continue reading...
Mercury expected to drop to -7C in some parts of the country overnight, with snow showers possibleTemperatures are expected to plummet to -7C (19.4F) in some parts of the UK overnight as Arctic winds bring an end to the good weather.The drastic change will see forecast highs of 17C in southern England on Easter Sunday drop to just 2C on Monday morning. Continue reading...
by Martin Chulov and Michael Safi in Beirut on (#5G5NK)
Deputy PM says authorities intercepted communications between prince and foreign partiesA senior Jordanian official has claimed authorities foiled a “malicious plot” at the “zero hour”, as a new round of arrests reached the closest aide to Prince Hamzah, the royal alleged to have unsuccessfully conspired to oust his half-brother, King Abdullah, in a weekend coup.The foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Sunday that the country’s intelligence services had intercepted a plot as it was about to be carried out. He offered scant details but said Hamzah had liaised with a foreign government to destabilise the kingdom. Continue reading...
Polish poet and leading voice of its Generation of ’68, who wrote ‘to understand the world’The poet Adam Zagajewski, who has died aged 75, was one of the leading voices of Poland’s Nowa Fala (new wave), also known as the Generation of ’68 – a loose group of poets who opposed the corruption of language imposed by communism and promoted the simplicity and honesty of their native tongue. Like many of his generation, informed by the horrors of the second world war, Zagajewski became focused on poetry’s ethical obligations in understanding and presenting the world to the reader “after Auschwitz”.In 1974, together with the poet and critic Julian Kornhauser, Zagajewski published a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays on Polish literature, The Unrepresented World, that demanded “non-naive realism” (Kornhauser’s term) in fiction: realism understood not as a literary movement but rather as an obligation to describe social reality in communist Poland, which put them in conflict with the authorities. Along with this mission to provide “the basic source of information about the world and its people”, Zagajewski also pondered on the concept of liberty, as in his poem Freedom, translated by Antony Graham: Continue reading...
Evidence Joel implores public to remain vigilant as search for Oxford Brookes student continuesThe mother of the missing student Richard Okorogheye spoke of the “hell” of still waiting for news two weeks after he disappeared, with each passing day becoming harder to bear.Okorogheye, 19, who has sickle cell disease, has not made contact with his family since leaving home in Ladbroke Grove, west London, at about 8.30pm on Monday, 22 March. Continue reading...
Former owner of Adidas and his wife attacked during raid in Combs-la-Ville near ParisThe former French minister and scandal-ridden tycoon Bernard Tapie, once the owner of Adidas, was attacked along with his wife during a night-time burglary of their home, police have said.The couple were asleep when four men broke into the house in Combs-la-Ville near Paris around 12.30am local time on Sunday, beat them and tied them up with electrical cords before making off with stolen goods. Continue reading...
Farmed salmon can end up deformed, blind, riddled with sea lice and driven to eat each other. Eco art activists Cooking Sections are highlighting their plight – and getting Tate to change its menusA few months back, a book arrived in the post – tiny, not much larger than a bank card. Though the cover was grey, its pages were a riot of pinks, from deepest persimmon to pale rose. Printed on them were dense, technical essays referencing everything from fish farming to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The title was Salmon: A Red Herring.Fish is an unexpected topic for an art book – but then the duo who created this little volume, Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, aren’t really going for the coffee-table market. Operating under the name Cooking Sections, the pair have a thing for food. Their art is about what we eat and its impact on the Earth. Continue reading...
Area around Fuendetodos will recreate artists’ Black Paintings venue as it marks his 275th birthdayTwo hundred years after he covered the walls of his house near Madrid with febrile visions of Saturn devouring his son, a witches’ sabbath and a slowly drowning dog, Francisco de Goya has been summoned home to help reverse the fortunes of the poor, remote and underpopulated Spanish region where he was born in 1746.The painter, printmaker and fascinated, appalled chronicler of war, cruelty and reason’s frequent slumbers, studied in Italy and painted for the court in Madrid before dying in Bordeaux in 1828. But he was born on the other side of the Pyrenees in Fuendetodos, a small town 27 miles (44km) south of Zaragoza in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragon. Continue reading...
Canada’s most populous province has been warning of rapidly spreading coronavirus variants, as cases and ICU admissions surgedLisa Salamon-Switzman, an emergency room doctor in Toronto, had already worked through two deadly surges of the coronavirus pandemic when a new batch of patients recently began arriving that left her unsettled because of their low oxygen levels – and their age.“They’re younger than what we saw earlier and they don’t really understand how sick they are,” she said of patients who are in their 40s and 50s. “And now it’s become this huge, huge wave.” Continue reading...
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5G5GB)
Exclusive: call for coordinated effort by African and western countries to stop crisis spiralling out of controlThe growing Islamist insurgency in north Mozambique can only be halted with a coordinated military and development effort involving African and western countries or it risks spiralling further out of control, experts have warned.They argue that the raid on the port town of Palma last month by the Islamic State-affiliated local al-Shabaab group, which left dozens killed and thousands displaced, marks a watershed moment in the escalating four-year conflict. Continue reading...
Police broke up a Good Friday service at a Polish church in London after officers said it was violating English coronavirus regulations. People were worshipping at Christ the King church in the south of the capital when police arrived following reports of queues outside the building. The service was being streamed live on social media and footage showed officers addressing those in attendance, telling them the gathering was unlawful. The church defended the service, arguing regulations had been met
The half-brother of Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Saturday that he had been placed under house arrest and accused the country’s leadership of corruption and incompetence. Prince Hamzah bin Hussein said in a video statement that the country’s military chief had visited him and told he was not allowed to go out, meet other people or communicate with them. He said his security detail had been removed and his phone and internet service cut
Former NSW State of Origin representative had to be restrained after becoming aggressive, police saidWomen’s rugby league star Nita Maynard has been charged after allegedly assaulting two security guards at a Sydney hotel.The former NSW State of Origin representative was arrested after being asked to leave Cronulla’s Northies hotel on Friday night. Continue reading...
Internal report reveals risk to migrant rough sleepers in crackdownThe Home Office has admitted that a new immigration rule to criminalise and deport migrant rough sleepers may discriminate against ethnic minorities, including Asian women who have survived domestic violence.An internal document outlines the department’s analysis of how the new power – which prompted widespread outrage when it came into force four months ago – would also indirectly affect at-risk groups, including people with disabilities. Continue reading...
Attacks on gay people continue unchecked as activists step up their 25-year battle to win LGBT rightsDaniela Lourdes Falanga has had her fair share of battles. The first was to survive a brutal upbringing as the firstborn son of a mafia boss in Naples. Falanga, 43, had been expected to follow in the footsteps of her father, currently serving a life sentence, into the powerful Camorra organised crime syndicate. Instead, she found the courage to break ranks, and in 2019 was elected the first trans woman president of a branch of Arcigay, Italy’s largest LGBT activist group.“I was not the boy who could adapt to that family, and it brought me so much suffering,” Falanga, who leads Arcigay in Naples, told the Observer. “And so, aged 17, I rebelled. When I transitioned, I did so for freedom and happiness. This is where my activism for trans people was born – I wanted people to understand that we are the same as everyone else and not monsters.” Continue reading...
Inexperienced owners who acquired dogs during lockdown are blamed for rise in livestock deathsFarmers are warning that attacks on livestock by dogs are reaching “epidemic proportions” as they brace themselves for a surge in dog attacks heading into peak lambing season.An increase in dog ownership during the pandemic, especially among inexperienced dog owners, saw the cost of dog attacks on livestock rise 10% last year to £1.3m, according to research published by NFU Mutual. Continue reading...
As bandmate of musician Torabi, ex-snooker champ Davis is these days more about modular synths than big breaks. Now the odd couple of psychedelia have written a memoir
by Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent on (#5G5DY)
Two new subscription services are aiming to restore serendipity to our cultural habitsAre you reading this by pure chance? Or are you on the lookout for articles about the value of serendipity and random encounters?In an age of online shopping, commercial algorithms and streamed entertainment, most of us are rarely confronted by things that have not been digitally matched to our previous interests or prejudices. Few will have avoided the suggestion “if you’ve enjoyed X, then you’ll like Y and Z” as they browse the internet looking for books, films or music. Continue reading...
Police also targeted on second night of trouble in country, as first minister urges young people to avoid disorderDisturbances broke out in Newtownabbey on the second night of trouble in Northern Ireland.Three cars were hijacked and set on fire in the loyalist O’Neill Road and Doagh Road area. A large crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the unrest late on Saturday night. Continue reading...
A new survey of UK and Netherlands firms shows two-thirds think our departure from the single market has had a negative effectIt is now three months since Boris Johnson declared that his Brexit deal would be unalloyed good news for UK businesses and consumers alike. But the true picture is graphically illustrated by a new survey of 125 UK and Dutch firms that do business between the two old and close trading nations.Whether it be trade in chocolate bars, electric bicycles or malt whisky distilled in Scotland, the reality for exporters, importers and customers infuriated by orders being delayed is mostly negative. Continue reading...
A Greek bakery founded by Christians and now run by Muslims keeps the seasonal spirit aliveFehmi Yıldıran remembers how, growing up in the Anatolian town of Bolu, every spring he and the other children used to boil eggs and dye them red using onion skins. He didn’t find out what the tradition was about until 1952, when he turned 14 and packed his bags for Istanbul with dreams of becoming a chef.On arriving in the metropolis, Yıldıran found himself captivated by life in the glamorous Christian neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, where Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Turks lived cheek by jowl. He was eventually taken under the wing of Yorgo Fotiadis, a Greek pastry maker, as his apprentice. Continue reading...
Sexual exploitation rose by a quarter and criminal exploitation by 42% in 2020, analysis of helpline data showsReports of sexual and criminal exploitation have risen alarmingly during the pandemic, according to new data measuring the scale of modern slavery and trafficking in the UK.Cases of sexual exploitation, which includes people held captive in brothels and coerced into prostitution, rose by a quarter in 2020 compared with the previous year. Nearly a quarter of cases involved children. Continue reading...
Destroyer resting nearly 6.5km below sea level still has gun turrets and torpedo racks in placeA US navy destroyer sunk during the second world war and lying nearly 6,500 metres below sea level off the Philippines has been reached in the world’s deepest shipwreck dive, an American exploration team said.A crewed submersible filmed, photographed and surveyed the wreckage of the USS Johnston off Samar Island during two eight-hour dives completed late last month, Texas-based undersea technology company Caladan Oceanic said. Continue reading...
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