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Spiritual guide Domingo Choc Che was tortured and burned by neighbors who accused him of witchcraft – and advocates say Christian churches are stoking prejudiceIn meetings, Domingo Choc Che was quiet and reflective, speaking up only once others had said their piece. But he would come alive when he entered the jungles of Guatemala’s northern Petén department, sharing his knowledge of traditional medicines with anyone who wanted to learn.“He was more at ease with plants,” said Mónica Berger, a sociologist and anthropologist at the University of the Valley of Guatemala who worked closely with Choc Che, a member of the indigenous Maya Q’eqchi community. Continue reading...

Saad Aljabri says Mohammed bin Salman boasted he could kill former ruler King AbdullahA former senior Saudi intelligence officer has claimed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a “psychopath with no empathy” who once boasted that he could kill the kingdom’s ruler at the time, King Abdullah, and replace him with his own father.In an interview on US television, Saad Aljabri, who fled Saudi Arabia in May 2017 and is living in exile in Canada, also said he had been warned by an associate in 2018, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that a Saudi hit team was heading to Canada to assassinate him. Continue reading...

Human rights watchdog cites staff safety among reasons over decision to leave city for first time in 40 yearsAmnesty International will close its Hong Kong offices by the end of the year, citing concerns for staff safety trying to operate under the national security law.The decision, announced on Monday, will leave the city without the human rights organisation’s presence for the first time in 40 years. Continue reading...

Authorities warn Covid cases likely to rise after cases were detected in 11 provinces

A tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime, the LSE professor’s memoir is one of the nonfiction titles of the yearIn 1990 Lea Ypi was asked to write a school essay. The theme was a former prime minister who had brought disgrace to her socialist homeland, Albania. This man – a traitor, according to Ypi’s teacher Nora – had handed over the nation in 1939 to the Italian fascists. A few months later an aerial bomb fell on his head.Eleven years old, and the daughter of intellectuals, Ypi was reluctant to do the school assignment. The reason? She shared a surname with this hated quisling. And unlike her classmates, whose grandfathers had fought during the war as partisans, Ypi’s family lacked anti-fascist credentials. The only candidate was a remote uncle. This was a source of confusion and shame. Continue reading...

Vaccines and new antiviral drugs cause for optimism as deaths and cases fall but Americans urged to be careful amid variant threatThe number of new Covid cases and deaths in the United States has been in a steady decline since early September, prompting many infectious disease experts to conclude that the worst impacts of the pandemic in America are probably in the past.But in the same breath, those experts also caution that it’s not yet safe to abandon safeguards against the virus. That’s because parts of the US population and much of the world remain unvaccinated, which could allow for outbreaks and dangerous new variants of the virus to emerge. Continue reading...

In the first in a series on Africa’s most populous state, we look at the effects of widening violence, poverty, crime and corruption as elections approach

The bust-up with Harvey Weinstein, Irvine Welsh’s verdict on the script (‘too effete’), the problem with the excrement scene … the cast and crew relive the making of the classic 1996 film Continue reading...

I felt the world had begun to look through me, as if I was made of air. When I decided to give up my plan for the future I immediately felt releasedI was 22 and set on a certain path. A postgraduate student, I was doing a master’s at a gender centre, and writing a dissertation about a group of French feminist philosophers. It felt like exciting, important work. Prof Mary Evans – an inspiring gender studies scholar – was overseeing the course and she encouraged me to apply for a PhD. My future, it seemed, was set in stone.Then I started to feel panicky at the library, where I was spending long hours on my own. I felt both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at once, which made no sense – so I just pushed those feelings away. Then they started to creep up on me in other public places. I remember being in a cafe with a friend and becoming choked by the noise around me. I rushed out into the street, sucking at the air – only to feel panicked about being alone. Continue reading...

The serial killer show is back after an eight-year hiatus. Its star discusses psychopathy, nostalgia and his time on Six Feet UnderMichael C Hall’s face is weirdly immutable – he looks no different now, at 50, from a decade or more ago, when he would loom down from giant posters as Dexter, the footloose serial killer. In fact, he looks pretty much the same as he did in Six Feet Under, playing David Fisher, right at the start of the century – he has one of those very structured faces, its features and angles carved so surely that there’s nowhere for them to disintegrate into.Which is fortunate, since, in a highly unusual move, Showtime has brought Dexter back to life after an eight-year hiatus, and what looked like an extinction event, back in 2013. Dexter: New Blood has more complexity and less puckishness, certainly, than the first two series. He’ll talk about that in a minute, but first, he says: “I have to just respond to this text very briefly. My wife and I, our dog is sick and she wants to make sure she’s OK.” He’s now married to Morgan Macgregor, a journalist on the Los Angeles Review of Books, after an elopement and brief marriage to his Dexter co-star Jennifer Carpenter in 2008. His first marriage was to the fabulous Broadway hoofer Amy Spanger in the early 00s. Continue reading...

City has become a politically hypersensitive environment since introduction of national security law last yearHong Kong marathon runners were ordered to cover up “political” slogans and tattoos before being allowed to compete at the first major sporting event on the island in almost two years.According to local media reports, runners reported being told to cover up or remove slogans, including idioms like “add oil” – a phrase which was widely heard during the 2019 protests but is also a ubiquitous term of encouragement. Continue reading...

Prop maker Maggie Goll says she raised complaints about Dave Halls in TV series Into the Dark but that issue is ‘in no way one person’s fault’A crew member disclosed that she had raised safety concerns in the past about the assistant director whom authorities say unwittingly handed actor Alec Baldwin the prop gun that killed a cinematographer on a film set in New Mexico last week.Maggie Goll, a prop maker and licensed pyrotechnician, said she filed an internal complaint with the executive producers of Hulu’s Into the Dark TV series in 2019 over concerns about assistant director Dave Halls’ conduct on set. Continue reading...

Princess’s union to Kei Komuro has attracted public and media attention for all the wrong reasonsIt is perhaps fitting that the weather forecast is for cloud and drizzle in Tokyo on Tuesday, when Princess Mako – the eldest niece of Japan’s emperor – will marry her college sweetheart in a subdued ritual marred by years of criticism of their relationship.Despite the imperial backdrop – and a public craving for distraction after 18 months of the coronavirus pandemic – their nuptials will involve lots of paperwork and rather less festivity. Continue reading...

Money earmarked by chancellor in budget will have particular focus on electric vehicles and life sciencesThe government is to launch a £1.4bn fund to attract more overseas investment into the UK economy, particularly in sectors such as life sciences and electric vehicle production.In his budget announcement on Wednesday, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will also announce plans to lure highly skilled foreign workers and amend regulations to make it easier for international companies to relocate to the UK. Continue reading...

Dan Norris to take out pro-mask adverts in local papers and send posters to public-facing businesses

Electoral roll to be set out this week alongside opening of nominations for president despite internal opposition and fears of bloodshedLibya has moved closer to high-risk elections after the electoral officer said he would set out the electoral roll this week, open nominations for the post of president in November and distribute voting cards in weeks.Facing stiff internal resistance to holding elections, he insisted the presidential election would be held in two stages, with a presidential run-off and elections to a parliament being held together afterwards. Continue reading...

Chancellor concedes only 20% of transport funding boost is new and other commitments in £26bn spending plans are recycledLabour has accused Rishi Sunak of presiding over a “smoke and mirrors” budget after he conceded that just 20% of his biggest single spending commitment unveiled before the speech is made up of new money.The Treasury has committed to almost £26bn of spending in a rush of announcements before Wednesday’s budget and spending review. It is expected to contain no tax cuts and the chancellor has sought to reassure anxious Tory MPs that he is a fiscal Thatcherite at heart. Continue reading...

Singer, whose new album = is out on Friday, says he is cancelling in-person commitments

Campaigners call for action after analysis finds only third of jabs pledged to poorer countries this year have so far been delivered

This is the story of how Australia’s behaviour across decades has made it a climate change outcast. In the first episode we hear how Australia managed to increase its emissions under a climate deal that was supposed to cut them

Richard Ratcliffe seeks to persuade Foreign Office to do more to secure wife’s release from prison in IranThe husband of the jailed British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has gone on hunger strike for a second time in an attempt to persuade the UK foreign secretary to do more to bring his wife back from detention in Iran. His hunger strike is to take place outside the Foreign Office in London.Richard Ratcliffe took the radical step in desperation after the Iranian authorities said earlier this month that Nazanin had lost her appeal against a second prison sentence. She will return to jail for another year, and then subject to a travel ban for a further year after that. Continue reading...

As global heating sees a surge in wildfires, we hear from those tackling the blazes, who face injury, death and trauma, often without proper equipment or support

The chancellor has refused to commit to wearing a mask inside a crowded House of Commons, as a leading government scientific adviser said ministers were mistaken to believe that vaccinations alone would keep Covid levels under control

Weapons seized after call from far-right party for members to prevent migrants from entering countryGerman police say they have stopped more than 50 far-right vigilantes armed with pepper spray, a bayonet, a machete and batons who were trying to patrol the Polish border to stop migrants entering the country.The vigilantes were following a call by the Third Way, a far-right party with suspected links to neo-Nazi groups, for its members to stop illegal crossings near the town of Guben. Continue reading...

Scott Morrison will be relieved the Nationals have limped across the line on net zero by 2050, but the detail of what was negotiated with Barnaby Joyce is yet to be seen

Agreement is conditional on cabinet submission reflecting negotiations between Scott Morrison and Joyce, who refused to reveal if he supported the target

Nationals MPs meet to discuss net zero by 2050 target; Daniel Andrews says freedom of movement to resume across Victoria from 6pm Friday as state records 1,935 new cases, 11 deaths; NSW records 296 new cases and four deaths; ACT records nine new cases – follow all today’s news

The director talks about his love of British film and 1960s London – and the ‘quarantine movie club’ of little-known gems recommended to him by Scorsese

Unvaccinated Victorians to be banned from bookshops to football games until at least 2023, while similar restrictions in NSW to lift in December

Michael Segalov always presumed fatherhood was not for him. Then his beloved grandmother died and he found himself thinking about having kids. But that meant learning about new and radical approaches to being a parentIt wasn’t the first time my nephew had called my mum “Grandma”. This was, if anything, a staple of the fairly limited vocabulary this three-year-old possessed. Mum, my sister and I had been strewn out on the grass, exhausted. Unperturbed, he announced he wanted escorting to the swings. A few years earlier, it had felt strange to hear Mum being called by her new moniker. But it became normal in no time… At least, until now.Before that day, I’d thought little of procreation. That was for proper grownups, adulthood’s far-off frontier. Firmly in my late 20s, that’s very much a privilege of my gender: there’d been no overbearing societal pressure or talk of an ever-ticking biological clock. Being gay, meanwhile, put my present and past partners in the same position. And neither they nor I could ever find ourselves pregnant, however relaxed about precautions, or hard we might try. Continue reading...

Mike Pence and Marco Rubio are among presidential alternatives examined by a writer with knowledge and accessDonald Trump is a defeated one-term president who cost the Republican party both houses of Congress. Yet three-quarters of Republicans want him to again run in 2024, polling that has other aspirants keeping their heads well down.Joe Biden is politically vulnerable, his job approval underwater, his coalition fraying. He could meet the same fate as Trump – sans residual enthusiasm. Continue reading...

Final part of Wolf Hall, now on the West End stage, is under fire from English Heritage for its ‘Tudor bias’ in charting historyThe staging of the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has, arguably, been the flagship theatrical event as the West End re-opens after lockdown. One critic described The Mirror and the Light, which chronicles the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, as the completion of a “magnificent hat-trick”.But Dr Michael Carter, the senior properties historian at English Heritage, will not be buying a ticket. Carter, whose role means he is responsible for curating the stories of the ruined monasteries, abbeys and priories of England, is not exactly a Mantel-sceptic. But he is desperate for another set of stories to be told about the events with which she deals. Continue reading...

The MP’s death has had an impact on a community that is already marginalised and fighting against negative perceptionsDeep in the sprawling Andover estate in Finsbury Park, north London, talk turns to an identity crisis holding back teenage and twentysomething British Somalis.Born in London, 23-year-old Najma Sharif laments how some view her as not British enough, as others in her community believe she is not sufficiently Somalian. In her parents’ birthplace she is dismissed as diaspora; at home a mere ’Mali. Continue reading...

Government sources say talks with EU ‘constructive’ but ‘we are still far apart on big issues’The UK government has described talks with the EU over the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol as “constructive” but insisted it was not about to cave in on its demands that the role of the European court of justice be scrapped.Government sources dampened hopes of a breakthrough, saying the two sides were still “far apart on the big issues”. Continue reading...

One of world’s biggest oil exporters more than doubles its annual target to reduce carbon emissionsOne of the world’s largest oil producers, Saudi Arabia, has announced it aims to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060 to curb manmade climate change.Alongside the pledge made on Saturday the Saudis made no mention of reducing investment in oil and gas or moving away from the production of fossil fuels. Riyadh is forecast to make $150bn (£109bn) in oil revenues this year alone. Continue reading...

Australia’s low death rate from the rare syndrome linked to the AstraZeneca shot is in no small part due to a ‘huge collaborative effort’. Evening news editor Julian Drape recommends a good news story that happened in the midst of the challenging vaccine rolloutYou can read the original article here: ‘Just in time’: how Australian doctors drastically reduced deaths from vaccine-linked blood clots

In the charity’s storeroom sit the cremated remains of seven former visitors – unclaimed, contested or forgotten. This is the story of three of them

The location of HMAS AE1 is a closely held secret but some worry the first world war wreckage will be found by thievesScavengers, trophy hunters and “metal pirates” are looting the treasures under the seas – and there are fears Australia’s first submarine could be next.The location of HMAS AE1’s wreck is a secret closely held by a small group of people, including relatives of the 35 men who were on board when the Royal Australian Navy vessel sank at the outbreak of the first world war. Continue reading...

In this extract from a new book, the co-authors look to lessons of the past to examine the best way forward in land management after the fires of Black SummerIn Aboriginal thought, Country is a term which embraces everything spiritual and material. In our book Country: Future Fire, Future Farming, we illustrate its range and power by showing how Australia’s first peoples managed plants and animals, and how they managed and used fire.We demonstrate the impressive and extensive skills and knowledge the First Australians, “the people of 1788” used to manage land. Together – Bill writing about fire, and Bruce about plants and animals – we show how much those who invaded after 1788 ignored and degraded those skills. Continue reading...

From virtual puppy school to home bubble-tea subscriptions, lockdowns in Australia have created unlikely winners, but victory as an outlier is sometimes bittersweetIt’s no secret that on the work front, the Covid narrative has predominantly been a negative one, with two-thirds of Australian businesses reporting a hit to revenue in 2020 and underemployment hitting a historic high of 13.8%, impacting 1.8 million people.Despite this, lockdowns have brought growth to certain sectors, with Australians spending big in areas such as beauty, hobbies and home furnishings. This increased desire for little luxuries is sometimes called the lipstick index. So what does it feel like to be an outlier in a downturn? We asked four business owners to share their experiences. Continue reading...

Trade minister Dan Tehan sees ‘real opportunities’ to help Taiwan, as he hopes relationship with China has not become permanently adversarialThe Australian government says it wants to help Taiwan decarbonise its economy, flagging this as the next area of cooperation with the democratically ruled island, amid ongoing tensions with China.The trade minister, Dan Tehan, said he saw “real opportunities” to deepen energy ties with Taiwan, while arguing there was bipartisan recognition in Australia of “the greater assertiveness that we’re seeing from China”. Continue reading...

Film director injured on set says he is ‘gutted’ by death of cinematographer Halyna HutchinsThe movie director injured after Alec Baldwin shot what he was told was a “cold”, or safe, gun said on Saturday he was “gutted” by the on-set death of a cinematographer.Joel Souza, who was hit in the shoulder when Baldwin discharged the prop gun, which turned out to contain live rounds, broke his silence as the investigation entered its third day, with questions remaining over how the mistake killed Halyna Hutchins. Continue reading...

Supporters of Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party are massing before rally in Islamabad to demand release of their leaderThousands of supporters of a banned radical Islamist party have departed from the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, clashing with police for a second day, a party spokesman and witnesses said on Saturday.The group formed on Friday with the goal of reaching the capital, Islamabad, to pressure the government to release Saad Rizvi, the head of the Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party. Continue reading...

The long-distance runner was buried in her home town in Kenyan highlands after being found stabbed to deathMore than 1,000 mourners gathered for the funeral of long-distance Olympic runner Agnes Tirop, a rising star in Kenya’s highly competitive athletics scene.Tirop was found stabbed to death in her home in the Great Rift Valley town of Iten on 13 October. Her funeral was held on the day she would have turned 26. Continue reading...

Italy’s far-right former interior minister goes on trial for refusing to let Spanish rescue ship dock in SicilyThe Italian far-right leader, Matteo Salvini, has criticised the approval of a Hollywood star as a witness in his trial on kidnapping charges for blocking the arrival of a migrant rescue ship.As the trial began on Saturday, the Palermo judge Roberto Murgia said all witnesses submitted by the parties would be allowed to testify, including the actor Richard Gere, who went on board the NGO ship Open Arms in August 2019 in a show of solidarity with the 147 stranded migrants. The next hearing has been set for 17 December. Continue reading...

Putin blames low vaccination rates as the country records 1,075 deaths in a day

Patricia Lockwood, Anuk Arudpragasam, Richard Powers and more on how they made the 2021 shortlist‘I did not see a character, but rather a horizon’ Continue reading...

A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Russia to Yemen

Supporters of JC say 30 years after the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission there is still ‘no equality’

They feel the same about the Tories, but not about Brexit – can two strangers find common ground over dinner?• Click here if you’d like to dine across the divideDavid, 73, StockportOccupation Semi-retired musician and former music college principal Continue reading...