World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk

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World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk


Coronavirus kills young Wuhan doctor as hundreds infected in China's prisons

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 11:21 PM PST

Officials and state justice chief fired as at least 500 cases confirmed in prisons in three provinces

A 29-year-old doctor in Wuhan has become the latest victim of the coronavirus as China reported infections in prisons in three provinces, as well as clusters in Beijing.

Wuhan health authorities said Peng Yinhua, who worked in respiratory and critical care at Jiangxia district's First People's Hospital, had contracted the infection while working on the "front line".

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Iran's leaders warn low turnout in election will boost Trump

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 09:00 PM PST

Voters set to shun Friday's parliamentary poll in sign of protest or indifference

Iran's senior leaders flooded the media with eve-of-poll warnings that abstentions in Friday's parliamentary elections – either through indifference or as a protest – will only encourage Donald Trump to step up economic sanctions against Tehran.

The one-week period of officially sanctioned campaigning for a seat in the next five year parliament ended on Wednesday night, 24 hours before voting started amid the first serious outbreak of coronavirus in Iran.

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Germany shooting: chants of 'Nazis out' at vigils after gunman kills nine

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 08:58 PM PST

President denounces 'brutal act of terror' and calls for nation to unite as thousands attend gatherings across the country

Thousands of people have taken part in vigils across Germany after a gunman with apparent far-right beliefs killed nine people at a shisha bar and a cafe in the city of Hanau.

The suspect, a 43-year-old German identified as Tobias Rathjen, was found dead at his home after the rampage along with his 72-year-old mother in what appeared to be a murder-suicide.

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Donald Trump jabs at Parasite's Oscar win because film is 'from South Korea'

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 01:19 AM PST

President says US has trade problems with South Korea and wonders if 'we can get Gone With the Wind back'

Donald Trump has taken a jab at the Oscars for awarding this year's best picture honor to Parasite, because the film is South Korean.

"How bad were the Academy Awards this year?" Trump asked a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The crowd responded with loud boos.

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Democrats prepare to vote in Nevada amid controversy over Trump, Stone and Russia – live coverage

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:18 AM PST

  • Bernie Sanders way ahead in Nevada polling ahead of Saturday vote
  • US intelligence officials 'warned members of Congress' about Russian 2020 interference
  • Trump ally Roger Stone sentenced to three years
  • Help us cover the critical issues of 2020. Consider making a contribution

Good morning.

It was an eventful evening yesterday in US politics. Here's what you might have missed:

Related: US intelligence warned House members Russia is working to get Trump re-elected – reports

Related: Roger Stone sentenced to 40 months in prison despite request for new trial

Related: Roger Stone is a friend of Trump – does that mean he's above the law?

Related: 'This is not just Roger being Roger': Stone gets 40 months – and a scolding from the judge

Related: Bloomberg debate video sparks new concern over social media disinformation

Related: 'She was a warrior': Warren supporters ebullient in Las Vegas after debate

Related: Donald Trump jabs at Parasite's Oscar win because film is 'from South Korea'

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Gett: Israeli taxi app sued for service used to avoid Arab drivers

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:55 AM PST

Gett Jerusalem representative recorded allegedly saying option is for people who only want Jewish drivers

Human-rights lawyers in Jerusalem have sued Gett, an Israeli taxi-hailing app, for providing a service they allege was designed to give customers the option to practically guarantee they would not get an Arab driver.

A global firm that also works with black cabs in the UK, Gett offers users in the holy city the choice to request a taxi that is not driven on the Sabbath, the weekly Jewish day of rest, and some Jewish holidays.

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Priti Patel gets 'storm' warning over senior civil servant clashes

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:15 AM PST

David Normington, who served under five home secretaries, says timetable for new immigration system will be 'tight'

A former chief civil servant at the Home Office has warned that the department is in the grip of a number of "tropical storms" amid reports of clashes between Priti Patel and her chief mandarin.

Sir David Normington, a former permanent secretary who served under five ministers at the Home Office, also warned that the government's timetable for a new immigration system would be "tight".

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German court says Tesla can clear trees to build car factory

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:06 AM PST

Environmental group had challenged original ruling that carmaker could fell pines

A German court has ruled that clearing of trees from the site of Tesla's first electric car factory in Europe can go ahead, days after it issued an injunction temporarily halting the preparatory work.

The top administrative court in the Berlin-Brandenburg region ruled on Thursday that authorities had been within their rights to clear the way for work to start.

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‘It's a Mexican problem’: Amlo accused of tone-deaf response to femicide crisis

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:00 AM PST

Mexican president offered vague plans for 'moral regeneration' after string of gruesome killings of women and girls

Mexico's president has cast himself as the victim of feminist activists, amid an outburst of fury at the alarming violence targeting the country's women and girls – and the seeming impunity that accompanies each crime.

A string of especially gruesome killings of women and girls has prompted widespread protests, especially in the capital. In one incident last week, masked women splashed blood-red paint on the doors of the national palace and sprayed the walls with graffiti.

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Revealed: quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 12:00 AM PST

Draft of Brown study says findings suggest 'substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages'

The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.

The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.

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Paris launches emergency bed bugs hotline

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 04:12 PM PST

New campaign includes advice on how to prevent and treat an infestation, and a number to call for expert help

The French government launched a campaign Thursday, complete with an emergency number, to combat an influx of unwelcome visitors that have left Parisians in despair: bedbugs that have settled in homes and hotels to feed, uninvited, on human blood.

After disappearing from France in the 1950s, the insects have made a resurgence, according to the ministry of housing, which cited international travel and growing resistance to insecticide as the main causes.

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Céline Sciamma: 'In France, they don’t find the film hot. They think it lacks flesh, it’s not erotic'

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 10:00 PM PST

Her new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the year's most erotic film: a meditation on passion, art and feminism. But the film-maker says her native country just doesn't get it

Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire should carry a health warning: "This film may cause uncontrollable swooning." Everywhere the French director's period lesbian romance has been screened – 40 film festivals in total, from Cannes to Aspen and Zurich – it has produced a dizzied, infatuated reaction of the sort not usually associated with a subtitled drama about enlightenment- era portrait artists. All over the globe, Sciamma has seen the passion her film generates, "a tension with the audience – there's electricity. That's the thing when you make a love story. You get a lot of love."

Well, with one exception. "In France, they don't find the film hot," says Sciamma matter-of-factly. "'[They think] it lacks flesh, it's not erotic. It seems like there are some things that they can't receive."

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London mosque stabbing: eyewitness describes '30 seconds of mayhem' – video

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 01:32 AM PST

An eyewitness has described the stabbing at London Central Mosque on Thursday as '30 seconds of mayhem'. 

The mosque's muazzin, who calls others to prayer, was stabbed in the neck in front of hundreds of onlookers, before his alleged attacker was wrestled to the ground by worshippers.

The Metropolitan police, who have arrested a 29-year-old man on suspicion of attempted murder, said they were not treating the incident as terror-related

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Togo has long been mired in political crisis – and elections won't change that

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 01:00 AM PST

As the country goes to the polls, the ruling Gnassingbé dynasty has a stranglehold on power that looks unshakeable

A familiar quote in Togo comes from the president, Faure Gnassingbé, who once said: "My father told me to never leave power."

He has heeded that advice. The first African country where a coup d'etat occurred after independence and where the elected head of state was assassinated, Togo stands to be the last country in Africa to see the lights of a democratic alternation.

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$45m in 90 days: How Bloomberg bought your Facebook feed

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 03:00 AM PST

Part one of a Guardian investigation reveals the strategy and strange decisions driving the campaign's unprecedented ad blitz

Mike Bloomberg's unorthodox presidential campaign has many asking if a billionaire can buy the presidency. He can certainly buy Americans' Facebook feeds, a Guardian analysis shows.

In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads – more than all his opponents combined.

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How Trump's immigration policies hurt people's lives – in pictures

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 03:00 AM PST

Exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center, the first in a year-long series, aims to document the current president's overturning of decades of American immigration policy and law, and its profound effects on American society and the lives of immigrants

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China car sales tumble by 92% as coronavirus weighs on industry

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 02:21 AM PST

CPCA says 'barely anybody' has looked to make purchase in first half of February

Car sales in China have collapsed by 92% as the coronavirus shutdown wreaks havoc on the automotive industry.

The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) said "barely anybody" had looked to buy vehicles in the first half of February. Most dealerships have remained closed as a precaution.

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Tasmanian anti-logging protesters banned from forests over 'unsafe behaviour'

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 10:58 PM PST

WorkSafe Tasmania has threatened protesters with fines of up $500,000, but Bob Brown says activists won't stop

Anti-logging activists from the Bob Brown Foundation have been banned from protesting in Tasmanian forests by the state's workplace safety regulator over "unsafe behaviour", and threatened with fines as high as $500,000.

But the veteran conservationist said protesters would not be deterred and has flagged legal action against the restrictions.

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Stella Nyanzi marks release from jail in Uganda with Yoweri Museveni warning

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 11:00 PM PST

Writer and activist who was imprisoned for insulting Ugandan president calls on him to go as 18-month sentence is revoked

The feminist academic and writer Stella Nyanzi has been released from prison after her 18-month sentence for insulting Uganda's president was quashed.

Nyanzi collapsed as she left court in Kampala on Thursday, and scuffles broke out between her supporters and prison wardens, who fired live rounds into the air to disperse the crowd.

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‘A step away from hell’: the young male refugees selling sex to survive

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 11:00 PM PST

Photographer Heba Khamis spent a year and a half documenting the lives of 'black birds': the male Afghan and Iranian sex workers in Berlin's Tiergarten

  • All photographs by Heba Khamis

The allure of romance is never far away in Berlin's Tiergarten park, a vast 520-acre expanse home to manicured lawns, dense forest, a picturesque boating lake and the city zoo. As families lay out picnics and millennials fire up barbecues, those seeking something more illicit head to the park's wooded north, where young male Afghan and Iranian refugees can be found selling sex to the hundreds of buyers who pass through Tiergarten each day.

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A million children left behind as Venezuela crisis tears families apart

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 12:00 AM PST

As the country battles economic collapse, parents have been forced to migrate, leaving their offspring in the care of family, neighbours or sometimes alone

It has been four months since Isabel Carrasco skipped her crumbling country, entrusting her daughters to a neighbour to join modern South America's largest ever exodus.

Carrasco's destination was Guyana, although the woman now raising her children isn't sure which part.

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Roger Stone is a friend of Trump – does that mean he's above the law?

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 01:00 AM PST

Stone, sentenced to 40 months for lying to Congress, is an ally of the president – and in the US in 2020 that carries a lot of weight

Any other convict, in Roger Stone's place, might find cause for despair.

Sentenced by judge Amy Berman Jackson to 40 months in federal prison on Thursday, Stone, 67, the piratical politico, was also on the receiving end of a stern rebuke for making threatening social media posts during the trial and for generally acting as if the rules did not apply to him.

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Hanau attack part of pattern of white supremacist violence flowing from US

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 10:51 PM PST

Experts in global extremism say gunman's comments on his website paralleled several recent conspiracies popular with American far-right

The mass shootings targeting two bars in the German town of Hanau appear to be the latest in a series of global attacks motivated by white nationalist ideology, experts said.

The 43-year-old German man identified by authorities as the gunman also appeared to be obsessed with America, and with American conspiracy theories, according to online video and documents German police are investigating in connection with the attack.

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Local and global factors fuelling far-right violence in Germany

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 12:08 PM PST

Migration, lax security and foreign attacks contributing to Hanau-like terrorism

The deadly terrorist shooting in the German town of Hanau represents the latest in a string of far-right attacks and plots in what has long been considered one of Europe's most stable countries.

The murderous actions of the gunman, identified in the German media as Tobias Rathjen, came only days after a dozen German men were arrested for allegedly plotting armed attacks on mosques around the country.

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Debate shows Bernie Sanders could win most votes but be denied nomination

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 08:19 AM PST

The Vermont senator was alone in saying he would back whoever won a plurality of delegates – with others open to superdelegates tipping the balance for another candidate at the convention

Amid the Mike Bloomberg pile-on and the Pete Buttigieg-Amy Klobuchar squabbling, there was a key point that slipped by almost unnoticed during Wednesday's tumultuous Democratic debate – one that could potentially prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee.

Towards the end, each of the six candidates was asked if – at the Democratic national convention this summer in Milwaukee – they would support the person who has won the most delegates – even if that person hasn't achieved a majority.

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On the ground in Idlib: 'This is the last call to people with humanity to help' – video

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 01:17 AM PST

The UN has estimated that 170,000 of the 900,000 civilians forced from their homes in a recent wave of displacement in north-west Syria are living out in the open. Laith, an activist who is part of the White Helmets volunteer group, has called for the international community to 'stand with [those] who left their homes and be with them in the camps'. The massive displacement follows an escalation of Russian-supported offensives by the Assad regime to the destroy the last rebel bastions in Idlib and Aleppo provinces 

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Roger Stone has 'very good chance of exoneration', says Trump – video

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 01:39 PM PST

Donald Trump said his longtime ally Roger Stone had a 'very good chance of exoneration', addressing the case for the first time since his former associate was sentenced at a Las Vegas event on Thursday 20 February. Trump also said the jury foreman in Stone's case was 'totally tainted' and an an 'anti-Trump activist'. After he issued a series of commutations and pardons earlier this week, speculation that Trump will pardon Stone has intensified

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Germany attack: gunman acted on rightwing, racist motives, says Merkel – video

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 05:43 AM PST

Chancellor says the circumstances of the attacks in Hanau need to be fully investigated but the shootings have exposed the 'poison' of racism in German society. She pledges to stand up against those who 'seek to divide the country'. Nine people were killed when a gunman opened fire at two shisha bars. He then killed his mother and himself at home, police say

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German shisha bar attacks: what we know so far – video report

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 04:02 AM PST

A man has killed nine people after opening fire at two shisha bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt. He then shot himself and his 72-year-old mother at home, according to police. Investigators believe a racist motive was behind the attack and some of those killed had Turkish backgrounds

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Footage shows aftermath of deadly shisha bar attacks in Germany – video

Posted: 20 Feb 2020 01:07 AM PST

Several people have been killed and others seriously injured after two shootings at shisha bars in the western German city of Hanau, police say. At least nine people died in the attacks that took place on Wednesday night. The suspect and one other person were also found dead after police launched a huge hunt for the perpetrator

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