World news | The Guardian

The home of Alstom and Rolls-Royce has often played second fiddle to others, but the city wants to change all thatDerby isn’t known as a tourist hotspot. Often overshadowed by nearby Nottingham, bypassed on the road to the Peak District, locals here know the hotels are quietest at weekends when visiting business folk leave.That hasn’t stopped its leaders making a tilt to become UK City of Culture 2025. Bidding to reinvigorate civic pride and economic growth after the fallout from Covid-19, the aim here is to showcase the city’s unique industrial heritage as a crucible for the art of manufacturing. Continue reading...

Singer-songwriter adds his own twist to boycott by Joni Mitchell and Neil Young over platform’s promotion of anti-vax podcasts

After a year in power, evidence is growing of regime scorched-earth tactics to terrorise the civilian populationOn the morning of 6 January, Boi Van Thang set out on a motorbike across the mountainous terrain of Chin state in western Myanmar. He would travel to a nearby village, he told his wife, and bring back meat for her and their seven children.He never returned. Three days later his wife, Thida Htwe, received a call. Boi Van Thang’s body had been found. The bodies of eight other men and one boy had also been discovered. Continue reading...

Hoardings erected around ‘martyrs slogan’ painted across bridge at University of Hong KongA Hong Kong university has covered up a painted slogan commemorating China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown, the latest instance of a public 4 June memorial being removed in Chinese-ruled Hong Kong.A Reuters journalist saw about a dozen construction workers erect grey metal hoardings around a “martyrs slogan” painted across the length of the University of Hong Kong’s (HKU) Swire Bridge. Continue reading...

A 17-year-old has been arrested in connection with the incident, which took place after an altercation, police saidA 17-year-old and a man have been stabbed to death in Doncaster after an “altercation” in the town.Emergency services were called to the scene in Silver Street at 2.39am on Saturday to reports that two men and a teenager had been stabbed after an altercation outside a licensed premises, South Yorkshire police said. Continue reading...

Taylor Steel, who was three times over the legal alcohol limit, has been banned from the road for two yearsA drink-driver has been banned from the roads after crashing into a McDonald’s restaurant in West Sussex, causing extensive damage.Taylor Steel was disqualified from driving for two years after the crash at Buck Barn services on the A24 near Horsham on 24 November. Continue reading...

Thousands of monks and disciples accompany coffin of Zen master and peace activist in processionA funeral has been held for the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a week after the renowned Zen master and peace activist died at the age of 95 in Hue, central Vietnam.Thousands of monks and disciples trailed a procession of pallbearers carrying Thich Nhat Hanh’s coffin from Tu Hieu pagoda, where he spent his last days, to the cremation site. Others kneeled and clasped their hands in prayer on the roadside and bowed to the ground as the casket went past. Continue reading...

As support grows for André Ventura, Socialist party has lost ground to centre-right PSD after row over budget with its alliesBetween greeting regulars at the busy Lisbon bakery where she has worked for two decades – and reaching instinctively for their orders as soon as they cross the threshold – Susana Santos offers her thoughts on an imminent, and altogether less welcome, encounter.Like many of her compatriots, she does not relish the idea of Sunday’s snap general election, which arrives amid a stubbornly lingering pandemic and during a time of economic upheaval and political uncertainty. Continue reading...

Redacted version reportedly to be sent to Johnson over weekend amid further calls for it to be released in entiretyThe inquiry into Downing Street parties could be shared with Boris Johnson as soon as this weekend as cross-party demands mount for the report to be published in its entirety after an intervention by Scotland Yard.The timeline for the publication of the long-awaited report by the senior civil servant Sue Gray on alleged lockdown breaches at Downing Street and Whitehall was thrown into question this week when the Metropolitan police announced on Tuesday that a criminal investigation had been launched. Continue reading...

To me, Carlo was the activist who swept me off my feet. Only years later did I discover that nothing he told me had been real – and that he was a spy cop and already marriedIt’s September 2015 and my mum and my sister have come by train from Scotland to visit me at home on the Kent coast, hoping to catch the last of the autumn heat. They live in the rainiest part of the UK, and I’ve moved to the corner with the most sun.I close the kitchen door on my twin daughters playing in the living room, shushing the dogs away. Continue reading...

Hundreds of oil company workers and navy personnel deployed in clean-up of Mae Ramphueng shorelineA beach in eastern Thailand has been declared a disaster area as oil leaking from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Thailand continues to wash ashore and blacken the sand.The leak, from a pipeline owned by Star Petroleum Refining, started late on Tuesday and was brought under control a day later after spilling an estimated 50,000 litres (11,000 gallons) of oil into the ocean about 12 miles (20km) from the country’s industrialised eastern seaboard. Continue reading...

A faith healer in the Dominican Republic falls foul of the US in this arresting, ambiguous dramaHere’s a striking and mysterious debut from the Dominican Republic, where film-maker Nino Martínez Sosa recounts a fascinating true-life story of occupation and resistance from the turn of the last century. Olivorio Mateo was a peasant and faith healer who became known to his disciples as Papa Liborio; he built a self-sufficient community in the mountains. But when US forces occupied in the 1910s, Liborio was branded a bandit, and killed.Not that you’d know any of the historical facts from watching this, which is set squarely in the arthouse endurance-test genre: there is little to no scene-setting or explainers, with the kind of pacing often euphemistically described by critics as “deliberate”. It begins after Liborio vanishes from his village during a hurricane, presumed dead. When he is found alive, he claims to have returned from God with healing powers and takes a band of followers up into the mountains. Continue reading...

Prime minister is said to be feeling well after taking flight with someone who tested positive

Number of infections rises by 19 as Games organisers warn of more cases in coming days

It’s been a year since Britain went alone. We asked EU nationals who returned to the continent after the referendum what they most miss about their former homeEveryone misses something. For some, it’s quite specific: PG Tips, Branston pickle, proper curry. For many, it’s more intangible: the atmosphere of an English pub; that greenness, everywhere; tolerance; and British openness.Then they pause. Actually, many formerly British-resident EU nationals say, what they miss is an idea. Or, to be precise, the idea of Britain they had before 24 June 2016: all of them remember, in painful, pin-sharp detail, how they felt, and what they did, the morning after. Continue reading...

Mitchell calls for her music to be removed from platform too, citing ‘irresponsible people spreading lies’In an act of solidarity between two veteran rock stars with a shared history of espousing progressive causes, Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in removing her music from Spotify in protest at it hosting a popular anti-vax podcast.Mitchell, whose 1971 album Blue is regarded as one of the greatest of all time, is the first high-profile musician to take a stand alongside Young against the streaming behemoth. Continue reading...

He’s been Paddington, Keats, and now a doctor in This Is Going to Hurt. He talks about his off-stage shyness and why he wasn’t delighted by the reveal of Q’s sexuality in No Time to DieBen Wishaw, quite apart from being one of the best British actors we have, is an expert dunker of his biscuits in tea. I’ve seen it: he’s a McVitie’s ninja, with a method all his own. We meet one afternoon in the offices of a London film company and I get the chance to observe his distinctive work first-hand, as digestive after digestive gets taken up by Whishaw, then dipped (sometimes double-handed) into a cuppa that he props on a table in front of him. Each biscuit gets submerged for so long, you suppose there’s no chance of it ever coming out whole. Each biscuit later re-emerges, sodden, milliseconds from ruin, still intact.“I’m no good at interviews,” Wishaw, 41, apologises, right away. Continue reading...

Remains of Roman wall that runs along city’s West Road deserve more recognition, campaigners sayPaula Robinson lives on a neat suburban cul-de-sac of 1930s houses that also contains the remains of a gateway to a mighty Roman fort once occupied by the Asturian cavalry regiment from northern Spain. Around the corner is the Temple of Antenociticus.Last year archaeologists found ancient pottery and deer bones in Robinson’s garden, which is close to one of Newcastle’s busiest roads, West Road. Exciting but not totally surprising as the house is on the site of Condercum, a huge hilltop outpost of Hadrian’s Wall. Continue reading...

NSW records 49 Covid deaths, Victoria 31, Queensland 12 and South Australia five. This blog is now closed

The author of Clinton Cash takes aim at the Bidens, the founder of Project Veritas stakes a claim for legitimacy. The results are murky – but offer a map for political battles to comeThe official investigation of Hunter Biden’s dealings in China and elsewhere rests in the hands of David Weiss, a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Delaware, and the US justice department under Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland. Politically speaking, we now have Red-Handed by Peter Schweizer, who would very much like to help us digest the business past of the 46th president’s troublesome son.Schweizer’s works include Clinton Cash, a compendium of opposition research that helped shape the presidential election in 2016. These days, he is president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank funded by the Mercer family, part of the rightwing ecosystem. Continue reading...

Lily James and Sebastian Stan are spot on as the gorgeous 90s stars so loved up they communicate in grunts – and they make this gratuituous romp such funIt’s a series that is at least partly about Tommy Lee’s penis, so let’s talk about length. Pam & Tommy (Star on Disney+, from Wednesday) is an eight-part series that could have been a movie instead.You realise this about seven minutes in: the first episode, which almost exclusively follows Seth Rogen’s pornographer turned builder Rand Gauthier, takes its time with every single scene. We see Rand nail together a bed while Pamela Anderson and Lee have outrageously loud sex upstairs. We watch him drive home, put his feet up on the sofa, light a cigarette then stub it out. We flashback to his childhood to find out why he doesn’t like pissing his pants. We see him try to charm his boss into helping him hijack a safe from Lee’s unfinished Malibu mansion, and we see that boss umm and ahh and eventually say no. All of this takes ages. All of this could have been cut. We could have had a neat two-and-a-half hour feature film, and it would have been fine. Instead, we have eight hours of streaming to do. Continue reading...

Ship was referred to as ‘Magic Roundabout’ during secret project at an old hangar in Pembroke DockIn a small Welsh town far, far away (perhaps), preparations are in hand to tell the story of how one of the most famous and beloved movie spaceships was secretly built in an old aircraft hangar.A permanent exhibition is to open later this year explaining how the Millennium Falcon that appeared in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back came to be constructed from wood and steel by engineers in Pembroke Dock, in south-west Wales. Continue reading...

Tour operators see rise in bookings as people look for interesting culture and history at lower price than neighbouring destinationsAlbania has been on the radar for intrepid backpackers for some time, but this year tour operators are predicting the south-eastern Balkan country will become a mainstream holiday destination for UK travellers after a surge in bookings this January.Interest in the country has been gradually building over the past decade as it has slowly opened up after a 44-year dictatorship that ended in 1985. Tour operators have seen a notable increase in bookings for 2022 as Albania extends its appeal to people seeking beautiful beaches and landscapes as well as interesting culture and history at a lower price than neighbouring destinations. Continue reading...

Babies born in the first lockdown are now turning two, and have only ever known a world of masks and isolation. What will be the long-term impact?Until the spring of 2020, Rebecca Handford’s then two-year-old daughter Eadie was happily spending three days a week being looked after by her grandparents, enjoying trips out, and going to cafes.But then came the first lockdown, and her world closed in overnight. The family, who live in a small village on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire, felt lucky to have a garden for Eadie to play in – although, as Handford ruefully puts it, while she was trying to work from home “Mr Tumble did a lot of the heavy lifting”. Continue reading...

Businesses warn of the biggest supply chain disruption in ‘living memory’ after flooding cuts major transport links

Top US officials call for diplomacy to address Russian military buildup on the Ukraine border, saying conflict is ‘not inevitable’The US has warned a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be “horrific” for both sides, while calling for a diplomatic solution as tensions over Moscow’s military buildup on the border of the country continued to simmer.Speaking at the Pentagon on Friday, top US officials urged a focus on diplomacy while saying that Russia now had enough troops and equipment in place to threaten the whole of Ukraine. Continue reading...

As Russia approaches war, in Moscow it feels as if the public has barely taken noteChoral music wafted through the nave of the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces as Alexei Rozhkov, a visiting priest, considered the question: was Russia standing on the precipice of a new great conflict in Ukraine?“There won’t be a war – there can’t,” he said quickly, glancing up at the skylights of stained glass depicting Soviet medals and religious symbols on the ceiling. Continue reading...

US rapper previously told Forbes getting vaccinated was ‘the mark of the beast’

Students who speak out against royal family’s role in universities face jail but can also be pressured by pro-monarchy parentsWhen 24-year-old Krai Saidee returned to his alma mater Chiang Mai University on 14 January, nearly two years after his graduation, he came not just to support his friends but to make a political statement.Painted gold, he held up a sign attached to a graduation gown: “You took my dream, and gave me this,” the message read. Continue reading...

UK cases and deaths fall day-on-day; Hong Kong government to compensate pet shops affected by culling of hamsters for Covid reasons

Independent review into ‘serious problem with systemic racism’ needed to safeguard Aboriginal Victorians, critics say

Gusts of up to 80mph forecast for coastal areas of eastern Scotland and north-east EnglandThe Met Office has said there could be power cuts and travel chaos as Storm Malik brushes past the UK over the weekend.Gusts are predicted to reach 80mph in coastal areas as the storm, named by Denmark, hits parts of Scotland and northern England. Continue reading...

Incident is latest calamity as migrants from Dominican Republic and Haiti increasingly try to cross treacherous smuggling routeFederal authorities detained 17 Dominican migrants on Friday after their boat capsized near Puerto Rico’s north-west coast in the pre-dawn hours, with the US Coast Guard searching for an estimated 10 others still missing.Jeffrey Quiñones, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman, told the Associated Press that those detained told officials that a total of 27 people were onboard the boat that struck a rock and turned over near Shacks Beach in Isabela. Continue reading...

Suspects in carefully choreographed 2019 raid on city’s Green Vault appear in court amid tight securityThe trial of six men accused of stealing 18th-century jewels from a German museum has begun in Dresden amid tight security and questions over whether the treasures will ever be recovered.The defendants, who are brothers and cousins aged between 23 and 28, appeared in court in handcuffs and holding large folders in front of their faces. They had slung jackets over their heads to avoid being photographed. Continue reading...

Unusually explicit reference to prospect of war comes as tensions over island’s future continue to riseChina’s ambassador to the US has said the two countries could face a “military conflict” over the future of Taiwan, in an unusually explicit reference to the prospect of war.“The Taiwan issue is the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States,” Qin Gang told the US public broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR), on Friday. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in the military conflict.” Continue reading...

Malachi Thorpe is alleged to have attacked two Orthodox Jewish men as they closed their shop for the nightA teenager accused of hitting a Jewish man with a smashed glass bottle in an antisemitic attack in north London has been remanded in custody.Malachi Thorpe, 18, is alleged to have targeted two people – Israel Grossman and Erwin Ginsberg – as they closed up the shop they work at in Cadoxton Avenue, Haringey, on Wednesday. Continue reading...

The series incorrectly said the trailblazing player Nona Gaprindashvili had ‘never faced men’Netflix will face a $5m defamation lawsuit by a Georgian chess master who alleges she was defamed in the hit series The Queen’s Gambit, after a judge refused to toss the suit on Thursday.Nona Gaprindashvili, the first woman to be named a chess grandmaster, sued the streaming company in federal court in September. Gaprindashvili alleges that a line from The Queen’s Gambit, where a character incorrectly states that she had “never faced men”, is “grossly sexist and belittling”. Gaprindashvili had played against 59 male competitors by 1968, the year the show is set. Continue reading...

After it was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, Samir Mansour’s beloved book store has been rebuilt and restocked, as tens of thousands of books flood in from around the worldTens of thousands of donated books have started to arrive at the new location of a Gaza bookshop that was destroyed by Israeli air strikes last year, and owner Samir Mansour now plans to reopen its doors next month.The two-storey Samir Mansour bookshop, which was reduced to rubble last May, had been founded by the Palestinian Mansour 22 years ago and was a beloved part of the local community. Its destruction during the 11-day conflict, which killed more than 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel, prompted a campaign that raised $250,000 (£187,000) to help rebuild it, plus donations of 150,000 books. The Israeli military has said that the store was not its target, claiming that the building that housed it also contained a Hamas facility for producing weapons and intelligence-gathering. Continue reading...

Isolated Brazilian president accused of ‘utterly reckless’ plan to meet Vladimir Putin in MoscowJair Bolsonaro has sparked disbelief and outrage by insisting he will go ahead with a trip to meet Vladimir Putin in Russia despite the escalating military crisis along the Ukrainian border.Foreign policy experts and rivals questioned the Brazilian presidents’s planned visit after he told supporters he would fly to Moscow in late February to improve trade ties. Continue reading...

Swiss photographer René Robert died from hypothermia after falling and being ignored for nine hoursThe death of an 85-year-old man who reportedly succumbed to hypothermia after falling and spending nine hours sprawled and ignored on a bitterly cold street in central Paris has prompted grief, anger and incredulity in France and beyond.René Robert, a Swiss photographer known for his shots of some of Spain’s most famous flamenco stars, died last week after slipping while on one of his nightly walks around the busy Paris neighbourhood where he lived. Continue reading...

Through my father, Kenneth Oakley, a palaeontologist most famous for helping expose the Piltdown skull hoax, I met all manner of distinguished scientists and other significant figures, but none made as much impression as Richard Leakey, and that was when he was just a kid.Leakey’s parents, Louis and Mary, had been invited to lunch at our home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and a somewhat resistant Richard had been brought along in tow. A couple of years older than me, he ignored me completely, but I could see even then that he had charisma and would go far. Continue reading...

Austin Osayande pleads guilty nearly seven years after footage of him carrying 24-year-old was first releasedA rapist who was caught on CCTV carrying his victim through Leeds city centre before he attacked her has admitted his guilt nearly seven years after the incident took place.West Yorkshire police released the footage in 2015. It showed a smartly dressed man now known to have been Austin Osayande carrying a woman through deserted streets. Continue reading...

Martin Hirsch’s remarks have provoked anger across political spectrum in France

Force says it has asked for report to make minimal reference to Downing Street events it is investigating

Kaja Kallas criticises Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and says gas pipeline to Germany should be scrappedEurope needs to end its reliance on Russian energy and Germany should accept that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was never just a commercial project, the Estonian prime minister has said in an interview conducted against the backdrop of soaring tensions over Ukraine.Kaja Kallas also said she detected a wider debate within Germany about its approach to Russia after Angela Merkel’s departure, and questioned Berlin’s ban on transferring Estonian weapons to Ukraine. The ban favours Russian aggression, Kallas said, since the weapons were intended for Ukraine’s self-defence. Continue reading...

Suggestion true number of deaths in England and Wales could be as low as 17,000 is factually incorrect, says ONS

Family of Agnieszka T say they want to ‘save other women in Poland from a similar fate’, as case met with anger over restrictive termination laws

The death toll from tropical Storm Ana, which struck three southern African countries, has risen to 77 as emergency teams work to repair damaged infrastructure and help tens of thousands of people. Ana made landfall in Madagascar on Monday before tracking across Mozambique and Malawi during the week, bringing high winds and torrential rain